"[CBS journalist Tony] Dokoupil met for an hour with members of the CBS News standards and practices team and the in-house Race and Culture Unit..."

"... which advises on 'context, tone and intention' of news programming. The conversation focused on Mr. Dokoupil’s tone of voice, phrasing and body language during his interview with [Ta-NeHisi] Coates.... Executives who discussed the interview on Monday’s call had asked staff members to keep their remarks confidential. But their comments were reported within hours by Puck, and The Free Press, the news and opinion site run by Bari Weiss, published audio recordings of the meeting.... Jan Crawford, the chief legal correspondent at CBS News, spoke up later on the call to say she did not understand why Mr. Dokoupil’s questions had not met editorial standards. 'When someone comes on our air with a one-sided account of a very complex situation, as Coates himself acknowledges that he has, it’s my understanding that as journalists we are obligated to challenge that worldview so that our viewers can have that access to the truth or a fuller account,' Ms. Crawford said. 'To me, that is what Tony did.' Ms. Crawford said she was confused as to how CBS correspondents should proceed. 'What is the objective standard for the rest of us when we are doing our own interviews?' she asked."

From "CBS Rebukes Anchor Over Tense Interview With Ta-Nehisi Coates/Executives said the interview, conducted by the morning show anchor Tony Dokoupil, had fallen short of network editorial standards" (NYT). You can see video of Dokoupil questioning Coates here.

6 highlights from Chris Wallace's great interview with Justice Scalia.

From the transcript of this morning's Fox News Sunday (and video).

1. Obamacare. Since Scalia is on the show to promote his new book, Wallace duly begins with a quote from the book: "A statute should be interpreted in a way that avoids placing its constitutionality in doubt." Now, doesn't that undercut Scalia's criticism of Chief Justice Roberts's decision in the Obamacare case? Roberts found that what was called a "penalty" (for failure to acquire health insurance) was actually a tax, and reading the statute that way avoided the constitutional problem. Scalia responded that his principle of interpretation only allows the judge "to find a meaning that the language will bear":

You don't interpret a penalty to be a pig. It can't be a pig. And what my dissent said in the... Affordable Care Act was simply that there is no way to regard this penalty as a tax. It simply doesn't bear that meaning. You cannot give -- in order to save the constitutionality, you cannot give the text a meaning it will not bear.

How does one know what the language will bear and will not bear? Yes, it's not a pig, but why isn't it a tax? There wasn't any pursuit of that line of inquiry, but later in the interview, Wallace came back to the case, that time to ask about the new reports that said Roberts changed his mind in the middle of working on the Obamacare opinion. Wallace introduced the topic by asking if Scalia himself had ever changed his mind after voting in conference. Scalia said:

Someone on the conservative side of the Supreme Court "wants us to know that they’re pissed off, and they want us to know why."

Orin Kerr deduces.

But why were they so pissed that they immediately leaked? You'd think these characters would have more self-control. I'd like to suggest that it was controlled. These smart guys think fast. They made a cold calculation. There's an effect they seek — they had a political strategy — and it's simply most effective if it's put in motion at the point when everyone's involved in trying understand what happened. That's my speculation. The speculation that they are not hotheads. Which would require changing Kerr's first "know" — in the quote in my post title — to "think."

Here's what Kerr says:

If you leak to [journalist Jan] Crawford with the spin that Roberts’ decision was illegitimate, and then the mandate opponents pick up that theme and run with it, perhaps that view will gain some traction in the legal world and will help out another challenge in the future. Or perhaps there’s a smoking gun that explains what Roberts was thinking that hasn’t been made public yet. Or perhaps the health care cases just made people act strangely. It’s hard to know.

Are Justices "people"? They live in such a ridiculous environment that it's hard to know what counts as strange. It's a strange way of life.

(And yet we trust them! Presumably, we trust them because they're following some process we regard as legal, even though we don't really believe they do, and we're reduced to complaining about how they don't or positing theories that legitimate something else that we think they might do but that we can't articulate in a form that actual people — people people — can swallow.)

Mitt Romney says "The Supreme Court has the final word. And their final word is that Obamacare is a tax."

Interviewed by Jan Crawford, Romney takes the clear, straightforward separation-of-powers position. The judiciary has the work of saying what the law is:

So it is a tax and it's constitutional. That's -- that's the final word. That's what it is. Now, I agreed with the dissent. I would have taken a different course. But the dissent wasn't the majority. The majority has ruled. And their rule is final.

Crawford moves in with the challenge Romney will always have to deal with: You did the same thing in Massachusetts. If this was a tax, then that was a tax. And we expect him always to answer in about the same way: There's a difference between doing something at the federal level and doing it at the state level.

As a lawprof, I see the consistent separation-of-powers theme.

Ann Romney feels like all Obama's doing is saying "Let's kill this guy" — "this guy," meaning Romney.

"And I feel like that's not really a very good campaign policy."

"I feel like Mitt's got the answers to turn this country around," she continued. "He's the one that's got to bring back hope for this country, which is what they ran on last time. But the truth is, this is the one that has the hope for the - for America."

I was going to say: That's all very well put; Ann's a fine communicator; but she shouldn't have said "kill"; it's not the right way to talk in the context of presidential politics.

But then I saw:

In August, some Democratic strategists let leak to the press that Obama's top aides were looking at a massive character takedown of Romney in light of a deterring economy; "kill Romney" was a phrase used by one. "That was their memo that came out from their campaign," Ann Romney said. "And it's like, 'not when I'm next to him you better not."

Perfect! She got our attention by saying "kill," but it was their word, spoken a year ago. Who remembered? We remember now.

ADDED: "Remember all that 'civility' bullshit from last year?"

A second look at Jan Crawford's "Roberts switched views to uphold health care law."

Reading this article last night, I guessed that one of Crawford's sources was Justice Kennedy and that Chief Justice Roberts shifted his position in the process of writing about the question of severability (that is, whether to strike down the whole law if the individual mandate is unconstitutional). I reread the article today, and I want to highlight and stress 4 points.

1. Crawford never says that Roberts committed to a decision on severability. At the conference after the oral arguments, she says, Roberts voted with the conservative group that the commerce power did not support the mandate, but Roberts was "less clear" on severability. He assigned himself the opinion, and he followed through on the commerce power.

2. One of the sources describes Roberts as becoming "wobbly" by May and failing to adequately explain what he was doing. Once it emerged that Roberts would rely on the taxing power, there was "fair amount of give-and-take with Kennedy and other justices," that one justice described as "arm-twisting." (At least they weren't neck-wringing! (A Wisconsin joke.))

3. I see vanity as a motivation to talk to Crawford:

The two sources say suggestions that parts of the dissent were originally Roberts' actual majority decision for the court are inaccurate, and that the dissent was a true joint effort.

The fact that the joint dissent doesn't mention Roberts' majority was not a sign of sloppiness, the sources said, but instead was a signal the conservatives no longer wished to engage in debate with him.

They didn't like Roberts getting credit for their work, and they didn't like getting called sloppy. It was a strange situation: Court observers were airing suspicions that Roberts had turned, which was (apparently, at least partly) true, but they were using evidence that was (apparently) not true, and that wounded the pride of the dissenting Justices who wanted it to be known that they really did write their own opinion and that they hadn't made careless mistakes. They want respect, it seems. And they don't like Roberts getting all the credit... or perhaps any of the credit.

4. The source(s) want it known that Kennedy, more generally, deserves a great deal of credit for his work over the years on the Court. Here, again, I see vanity, as Crawford — seeming like a mouthpiece — says:

Kennedy has long frustrated conservatives, because he occasionally joins with liberals to provide the key swing vote in cases involving social issues. They openly mock his writing style as grandiose and his jurisprudence as squishy - in other words, changeable and too moderate.

That's not entirely fair to Kennedy....

Kennedy mocked as squishy? But Roberts went wobbly! I'm seeing a pattern to these protestations. I'm seeing a psychodrama here, with Kennedy feeling rivalry toward the Chief, who structured the decision in a way that would tend to draw admiration from many of the media folk who shower affection on Kennedy when he does the things they like. Kennedy — or somebody — seems to have wanted it to be known that it's Roberts' judicial demeanor and craftsmanship that deserves mockery.

Sources tell Jan Crawford that Chief Justice Roberts really did switch sides.

The CBS reporter heard from "two sources with specific knowledge of the deliberations."

Chief Justice John Roberts initially sided with the Supreme Court's four conservative justices to strike down the heart of President Obama's health care reform law, the Affordable Care Act, but later changed his position and formed an alliance with liberals to uphold the bulk of the law...

Roberts then withstood a month-long, desperate campaign to bring him back to his original position, the sources said. Ironically, Justice Anthony Kennedy - believed by many conservatives to be the justice most likely to defect and vote for the law - led the effort to try to bring Roberts back to the fold....

Jan Crawford interviews Justice Scalia at the Federalist Society annual dinner.

David Lat reports:

Crawford asked Scalia if he ever found himself in a situation where he was torn between his personal conscience and his professional duty as a justice. He said no. After Crawford expressed a hint of incredulity — you’ve never encountered such a situation, in your many years on the bench? — Scalia quipped, “Maybe I have a lax conscience.” The resulting laughter cleared the air nicely.

Conversation turned to whether the Supreme Court’s opinions offer adequate guidance to the lower courts and litigants — a topic recently raised in this fascinating New York Times article by Adam Liptak, which Crawford explicitly referenced. Scalia appeared to agree with the general thrust of the piece.

“You can write a fuzzy decision that gets nine votes,” Scalia said, “or a very clear decision that gets five votes.”

On the subject of putting Supreme Court oral arguments on video, Scalia said he disapproved. He thought it would mainly lead to out-of-context clips. He thought he'd look great in those clips though: "I could ham it up with the best of them on television... I’d do very well." Lat calls that boasting, but I see modesty. Best of them implies that he doesn't think he is the best oral-argument entertainer. But he is!

On the subject of attending the President's State of the Union Address, he said: “It is a juvenile spectacle, and I resent being called upon to give it dignity…. It’s really not appropriate for the justices to be there.”

On the subject of hiring clerks from Harvard and Yale law schools:

"The best minds are going to the best law schools. They might not learn anything while they’re there [laughter], but they don’t get any dumber."

I should reprise that Vonnegut quote from my 10:20 post. What if you had to argue that they do get dumber? I'll bet you could.

Lat says:

Note how Scalia did not use politically correct terminology. The PC approach calls for referring to the “highest ranked” law schools rather than the “best” law schools.

I must chide Lat for not seeing the political incorrectness of saying "the best minds." Or has Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" made "best minds" seem like a standard phrase? "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked...." That's not innocuous. "Best minds" should prick up our attention and make us feel that something is not right.

Surely, the applicants that Harvard and Yale smile upon are not really our "best minds." Perhaps they are the "best minds" that are applying to law school in any given year, but I don't think even that is true. You have to do too many things right, too diligently, too early in life to hit the law school application sweet spot and get into the most selective schools. The best minds will have resisted acquiring the conventional indicia of career promise.

Come to think of it, Lat is also wrong to say that "highest ranked" is the preferred terminology for law schools. In academia, "highest ranked" implies highest ranked by U.S. News, and it is the proper thing to loathe U.S. News. It lacks the nuance to perceive the subtle qualities that make our favorite law schools so damned special.

Seriously... I think Scalia, being a good writer and speaker, simply believes that short, simple words are... best.

Jan Crawford bluntly describes Justice Stevens's seeming decline.

Stevens, who is about to turn 90, read a strongly worded dissent in the courtroom today:

[I]t was striking to see him appear to stumble over words as he read it, to mispronounce words like “corruption” and “allegation,” to seem to lose his place in his summary, to often hit the microphone with his hand or his papers.

... [I]t was so different from the John Paul Stevens we’ve come to know.

It's sad when aging shows, just as it's inspiring when an older person is especially vigorous. But no one can go one forever.

I wonder what a Supreme Court confirmation will be like in the new political environment, with the elections approaching in the fall.

Jan Crawford Greenburg looks at the possible Supreme Court openings.

People keep assuming the elderly Stevens and Ginsburg will leave. And then there's the notion of "the eccentric David Souter, who's only 69, but who complains to friends that he hates Washington and just wants to flee home to New Hampshire, where he can wrap himself in scratchy blankets and sit by the fire reading books in his unheated cabin." Greenburg is skeptical:

Stevens is showing no signs of slowing down. He's as active as ever from the bench, peppering lawyers with astute questions. His colleagues say that in private, he's also as sharp as ever.

Same for Ginsburg, a cancer survivor who stirred retirement talk a couple terms ago when she fell asleep a time or two during an oral argument. When people see her for the first time, they exclaim how she's so petite and frail in her appearance. But she's always been petite and frail in her appearance.

She's focused and engaged during the arguments, asking questions and, as she did yesterday, giving assists to struggling lawyers who are withering under cross-examinations from more conservative justices....

And Souter, according to some of his colleagues, loves the work and may just be complaining to friends that it's Washington he finds tiresome, as part of his "I'm an eccentric New Englander" persona.

Yes, the pattern for the Justices has been to hang on as long as they can.