Oral Arguments

So Washington is crazy with the Affordable Care Act at the Supreme Court. Today is Day 2 of oral arguments. Wish I could have gone, but I was not prepared to line up beginning last Friday morning. On the upside, professional line-standers (yes, that's a real thing) are making a killing. (Oh, it would be so ironic if someone got sick from standing in line in the rain and had to charge it to their health insurance company at the hospital.) I'm taking a nerd poll on how this case comes out. I say they uphold the law 6-3 with Scalia, Thomas, and Alito dissenting and a narrower holding than liberals would like. But what I was really hoping would happen was Thomas breaking his vow of silence from the bench and making that the story. I wonder how many of my professors were at the arguments today? A bunch, is my non-technical guess.

Instead of being at oral arguments at the Court, yesterday I attended Ron's oral argument at Jessup internationals. He was actually awesome. And not just because I'm his friend and was rooting for him. He had no notes and busted out the equivalent of an oral string cite, with about eight cases he just pulled out from memory. He might as well have walked over and slapped his opponent in the face while singing "Ball so hard..." His partner also did really well, and in fairness so did his opponents. But I have a feeling his team won that round.
Then today I had an oral argument of my own, volunteering to defend (gasp) Congress for my Separation of Powers class. Gun so hard... But my professor was happy that I had volunteered, and it was sort of neat acquainting myself with the issues involved. It was essentially a mock negotiation between Congress and the Executive branch over subpoenaed documents. The negotiation is based on the real-life fact pattern of Congressional oversight of the Clinton Justice Department's handling of campaign finance violations in the 1996 election. As my professor introduced the facts, "Some of you may remember this, and some of you may have been playing with Transformers."
I think it went pretty well. It was kind of fun arguing for Congress. Part of my argument essentially was "You really should just hand over the documents we want. I'll remind you we have the power to appropriate funds. I'm not saying we will deny your appropriations. But I'm also not not saying that." Being a member of Congress is sort of like being a mafia boss from what I gather. The major difference being you have no extra obligations on the day of your daughter's wedding. Oh, and Congressmen get a great pension. But really, it illustrated just how broad Congress's powers are and how many tools they have - both political and legal - to get what they want. Of course, the proper test in a situation of a congressional subpoena vs. a claim of executive privilege is a balancing of each branch's interests; often the result comes from your inherent trust or mistrust of one branch. So people who grew up with Watergate might prefer Congress; people who grew up with McCarthyism might prefer the Executive. And people who grew up with President Bush and the current Congress might prefer anarchy.