Reading the Supreme Court Tea Leaves

The NY Times discusses the recent ruling on a Christian student group and what it says or doesn't say about how the Court might rule on gay marriage:

Lawyers for couples challenging California’s ban on same-sex marriage wasted no time in offering the judge hearing their case a translation of Justice Ginsburg’s sentence.

“The Supreme Court definitively held that sexual orientation is not merely behavioral, but rather, that gay and lesbian individuals are an identifiable class,” Theodore J. Boutrous Jr. wrote the next day to Chief Judge Vaughn R. Walker of the Federal District Court in San Francisco.

The Gun (and Money) Show

The NY Times editorial page on yesterday's Supreme Court decision on guns:

About 10,000 Americans died by handgun violence, according to federal statistics, in the four months that the Supreme Court debated which clause of the Constitution it would use to subvert Chicago’s entirely sensible ban on handgun ownership. The arguments that led to Monday’s decision undermining Chicago’s law were infuriatingly abstract, but the results will be all too real and bloody.

And on the other side, from the Orange County Register:

We also believe the nation's founders would find Justice Stevens wrong in his contention that the ruling creates "a new liberty right." Those former colonists had just come through a bloody Revolutionary War sparked when British troops were sent to Lexington and Concord, Mass., to confiscate Americans' firearms.

"The strongest reason for people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government," Thomas Jefferson wrote. "The beauty of the Second Amendment," Mr. Jefferson also noted, "is that it will not be needed until they try to take it."

For some perspective, this from opensecrets.org:

The National Rifle Association itself spent $515,000 lobbying the federal government during the first three months of 2010.

Gun control groups generally give far less in campaign contributions than their pro-gun opponents. Since the beginning of the 2010 election cycle, gun rights groups have dominated the gun control groups in campaign contributions, giving 135 times more in contributions -- about $684,000.

And for some more perspective:
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Lots of Theater, Little Substance

Andrew Cohen from Politics Daily on the rote morality play that the Kagan confirmation hearings are destined to be:

Of the many ways to look at the case of U.S. Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, the most neutral may be to see next week's confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee as merely the latest chapter in a rote morality play that began in 2005 and that may not end for a few more years.

Cohen then hands Kagan her script:

She has to be patient. She has to be thoughtful. She has to be expressive without being adversarial. She has to seem to say a lot without really saying anything at all. In other words, she must do what you should be able to do with the sort of resume she has -- and what all sitting judges are able to do when they are questioned publicly about their legal views. She must talk and sound and look and act like a judge. It's not just going to be the constitutional standards she references, in other words, it is going to be the way she sounds when she references them.

Apparently, some Republicans are planning their own "rote morality play" with this - from Politico:

Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, on Monday evening warned that Republicans may boycott the start of Elena Kagan's Supreme Court hearings if senators do not get to review scores of documents from the solicitor general's past.

President, first lady catch performance of 'Thurgood' at Kennedy Center

By Associated Press

June 11, 2010 | 5:08 p.m.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama and the first lady are watching a sold-out play about a former Supreme Court justice at the Kennedy Center.

The president and Michelle Obama were seen in the president's box at the Kennedy Center, where they are taking in a performance of "Thurgood," a play about Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.

Marshall was the first black justice on the court. He is being played by actor Laurence Fishburne in the one-man show.

As a reminder, Obama's Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan clerked for Thurgood Marshall. Just last week, CBS News found legal memos from her time as Justice Thurgood Marshall’s law clerk that show her sympathetic to abortion and desegregation, and having sympathies towards alternative marriages.