"On Saturday night, May 23rd, a shooter once again sought to murder the President, his family, and his staff at the historic White House complex."

"We submit this urgent filing to update the Court on a second attempted assassination on the President within a single month. Last night, shortly after 6:00 p.m., an armed assassin approached a White House security checkpoint near 17th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, professionally pulled a high caliber gun from a bag, and opened fire in the exact direction of the White House. Brave Secret Service officers returned fire. The gunman was killed...."

From the Notice of Supplemental Authority in Support of the Government’s Motion for an Indicative Ruling Dissolving the Court’s Injunction, filed yesterday in National Trust for Historic Preservation v. National Park Service, the case about the White House ballroom, posted by Trump at Truth Social this morning.

"I cannot join the Court’s creation of a bespoke standing rule for candidates. Elections are important, but so are many things in life."

Writes Amy Coney Barrett, joined by Elena Kagan, in Bost v. Illinois State Board of Elections, a case issued this morning.

Elections are important, but so are many things in life. We have always held candidates to the same standards as any other litigant.

"In short, change needs to happen through the established channels of litigation in, and obedience to, the courts."

That's a vision of judicial supremacy seen in the NYT Editorial Board's "Trump Dares the Courts to Stop Him" (which I think was originally titled, using yesterday's phrase du jour, "Trump's Constitutional Crisis").

Did I rip that sentence out of context? Yes, but I gave you a gift link, so you can put it back.

The role of the judiciary is not to determine the meaning of every provision of law that is opined upon by someone in another branch of government, but only to say what the law is when that is needed to resolve a real dispute between adverse parties and only if the court has jurisdiction. The President is independently obliged to follow the law and must figure out what it is as he goes along. The courts don't answer questions of law as they happen to arise as the President does his work. This is basic separation of powers.

I note that the judge in the "Fork in the Road" case just found that the plaintiffs lacked standing and dissolved the temporary restraining order. He gave no advice on the legality of Trump's "fork" offer, because he lacked the power to do so. 

As the NYT tells us — in "Trump’s Federal Resignation Program Moves Ahead After Court Win/With a judge’s assent, the Trump administration moved to take next steps in the program and close it to new entrants" — Trump has now closed the offer.

"Perhaps no previous politician has taken up the mantle of Dad in quite the way Tim Walz has."

"From late summer’s Vice-Presidential pageant of Democratic middle-aged American white men, Walz emerged as an avatar of football-coaching, social-studies-teaching, father-figure affability, and this appeal helped carry him past arguably more strategic choices to a spot on the Harris ticket.... Walz embodies a model of nontoxic masculinity the Harris campaign has hoped to represent with such outreach as the 'White Dudes for Harris' fund-raising Zoom. 'Weird'—Walz’s inspired epithet for magaleadership—was delivered in a tone of goshdarnit perplexity, and with it, he laid claim to the role of norm-setting paterfamilias. The other guys were the basement-dwelling nephews and conspiracy-theorizing uncles.... The idea of fatherhood that Vance and his pronatalist ilk present is at once maximally literal and maximally abstract: it is a matter of gametes and hormones on one hand and social order on the other. In contrast, Walz’s rendition of fatherhood conveys an identity rooted in particularity—the reality of particular children, particular parents, a particular shared life...."

I'm reading "Tim Walz and J. D. Vance’s Battle of the Dads/Duelling visions of fatherhood will define the Vice-Presidential debate" by Mollie Fischer (in The New Yorker).

Abstract versus particular... dad.

I don't know if that's a fair representation of either man (or the theater surrounding them), but it makes me think about the way human beings can reason from the abstract or the particular. For example, in a legal case, one could begin with an abstraction like fairness or equality, listen to arguments by ideologues, and then decide what will be done, in the future, when particular cases arise, or one might wait for a concrete controversy between adversaries with a real stake in the outcome and then work from the particular to a rule that can be stated in the abstract.

Do you like things in context or out of context — abstract or concrete — when you're doing your own thinking? When you're stuck relying on the decisions of others?

"Writing for the majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said companies such as Facebook and YouTube have long-standing content-moderation policies that place warning labels on certain posts and delete others."

"The challengers, Barrett wrote, did not demonstrate that the companies’ actions to remove posts were traceable to the government. Barrett said a lower court got it wrong when it 'glossed over complexities in the evidence' by attributing to the Biden administration every company decision to remove or moderate content. 'While the record reflects that the Government defendants played a role in at least some of the platforms’ moderation choices, the evidence indicates that the platforms had independent incentives to moderate content and often exercised their own judgment,' she wrote."

From "Supreme Court allows White House contacts with social media firmsIn a 6-3 ruling, the majority said the challengers did not have legal grounds — or standing — to bring the case against the Biden administration" (WaPo).

ADDED: Here's the NYT piece, by Adam Liptak.

"Supreme Court Upholds Broad Access to Abortion Pill/The justices unanimously rejected a bid to sharply curtail access to a widely available abortion pill, finding that the plaintiffs did not have standing to sue."

The NYT reports.

I made that a free-access link.

In a unanimous decision, written by Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, the court held that the plaintiffs lacked standing to challenge the F.D.A.’s actions....

When the court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, it indicated that it was getting out of the abortion business, leaving the issue to the elected branches. The abortion pill decision vindicated that promise, at least for now....

When the case was argued, Justice Alito said he was troubled that it seemed no one had standing to challenge the F.D.A.’s action. Justice Kavanaugh wrote that not every dispute was for judges to decide: “Some issues may be left to the political and democratic processes.”

The student loan case is out: "The court agrees with the states that the HEROES Act does not authorize the debt forgiveness plan."

I'm quoting SCOTUSblog.

Here's the opinion: Biden v. Nebraska.

Another 6-3 conservative liberal split. The Chief Justice writes the main opinion, there's a Barrett concurrence, and Justice Kagan dissents, joined by Sotomayor and Jackson.

Excerpt from the majority opinion:

"The Supreme Court will hear oral argument on Tuesday in a dispute over the Biden administration’s authority to set immigration policy."

Writes Amy Howe, at SCOTUSblog. 

[T]here are over 11 million noncitizens currently in the United States who could be subject to deportation, but that the Department of Homeland Security does not have the resources to apprehend and deport all of them.... Texas and Louisiana went to federal court in Texas to challenge the Biden administration’s policy, arguing that federal law requires the government to detain and deport many more noncitizens than those identified by [Secretary of Homeland Security] Mayorkas as high prioriti[ies]....

The district court vacated the policy, and the Supreme Court agreed to take the case without waiting for the Court of Appeals.

How far into the NYT article "Biden to Cancel $10,000 in Student Debt" must we read before we see anything about the President's power to do such a thing?

Here's the article, "Biden to Cancel $10,000 in Student Debt; Low-Income Students Are Eligible for More/The debt forgiveness comes after months of deliberations in the White House over fairness and fears that the plan could make inflation worse ahead of the midterm elections."

I suspect that less than 1% of Americans, if surveyed now, could correctly answer the question: What legal basis did President Biden cite for his power to cancel student debt? I don't know the answer, and I'm not even sure he did cite any basis for this giant arrogation of power. I don't think he said: The President has the power to do anything he can get away with. Or: We'll find out when the people go to the polls in November. Or: The joke's on you because no one has standing to challenge it.

I just want to see how far I need to go into this NYT article before I find anything in the general area of an answer to my question.

Paragraphs 1-3: Nothing. There is this interesting quote from Biden: "All of this means people can start finally to climb out from under that mountain of debt." If you're under a mountain of debt, does $10,000 change your life? He didn't say it would, only that you could "start" getting out from under it. 

A physician in Texas has violated the new abortion law and he wants his action to be public knowledge.

Alan Braid explains why in The Washington Post:

Newly graduated from the University of Texas medical school, I began my obstetrics and gynecology residency at a San Antonio hospital on July 1, 1972.... At the hospital that year, I saw three teenagers die from illegal abortions. One I will never forget. When she came into the ER, her vaginal cavity was packed with rags. She died a few days later from massive organ failure, caused by a septic infection....

"Court tosses suit by Republican states challenging Affordable Care Act."

"The justices ruled 7-2 that Texas and 17 other states lacked standing to argue that the individual mandate to purchase health insurance is unconstitutional" — SCOTUSblog reports.  

Here's the opinion.

BREYER, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which ROBERTS, C. J., and THOMAS, SOTOMAYOR, KAGAN, KAVANAUGH, and BARRETT, JJ., joined. THOMAS, J., filed a concurring opinion. ALITO, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which GORSUCH, J., joined.

Looking at that, I'm most interested in why Justice Thomas concurred: 

"The dissent suggests that Congress cannot fend for itself... [but] Congress can tailor its sanctions to the gravity of the Executive Branch’s offense."

"A congressional inquiry may begin and end with a polite request for information. Or a chamber of Congress may escalate by, say, issuing a formal subpoena, threatening to withhold appropriations, or passing articles of impeachment. By the same token, the Executive Branch’s interest in reaching a mutually agreeable compromise should grow as Congress turns up the heat.... This political process also offers an array of possible resolutions in interbranch disputes—a diverse set of compromises and accommodations. For instance, the Executive Branch might agree to waive executive privilege if the Legislative Branch narrows its document request. Or if the dispute concerns an official’s testimony, the Executive Branch might agree to allow an official to answer written interrogatories or to testify in private.... The dissent’s approach would eliminate this dynamic system of escalating political sanctions and flexible settlements. When a lawsuit is the end-game of any interbranch dispute, the response to an overbroad subpoena isn’t 'Let’s talk' but 'We’ll see you in court.' And the resolution of such a dispute isn’t a negotiated compromise—one that leaves everyone a little dissatisfied—but a rigid judicial judgment.."

From D.C. Circuit the majority opinion (PDF) in the case of the House Judiciary Committee against former White House Counsel Don McGahn. President Trump claimed an absolute privilege to bar McGahn from testifying, and the Committee attempted to use the court to enforce its subpoena. You remember that during the impeachment trial, Trump's lawyers argued that it was wrong to accuse him of obstruction of Congress when the House had not gone to the courts to get an authoritative answer to the question whether he really did have the executive privilege he claimed. Now, at least according to this 3-judge panel, we can see that the judiciary would not resolve the dispute because the House committee does not have the standing that would make this a real "case or controversy" within the meaning of the "judicial power" defined in Article III of the Constitution.

We didn't get any sort of answer to the question what is the scope of executive privilege. The court is defining its own role, and even though a lot of people, during the impeachment proceedings, seemed to think that it's exactly the court's role to say what the law is and let us know how much executive privilege the President has and whether his resistance to Congress was a lofty protection of the power of the Executive Branch or a scurrilous thwarting of the power of the Legislative Branch, the court stopped at the threshold question of the power of the Judicial Branch.

No standing. That's a constitutional decision and it is — as the 2 circuit court judges said — not susceptible to a balancing test about how much we want or could benefit from an answer to the question. The part I quoted above works to say... and that's okay. The court follows a strict standing analysis because it's constitutional law and because it's better this way. It's better because it will be resolved through political back and forth. Interestingly enough, the tools of that political process include impeachment:

[A] chamber of Congress may escalate by, say, issuing a formal subpoena, threatening to withhold appropriations, or passing articles of impeachment.  

Trump wins the emoluments case.

Good.

Here's the NYT report:

A three-judge panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., found that the state of Maryland and the District of Columbia had no legal standing to sue Mr. Trump. The judges roundly rejected the premise of the case, which claimed that the Trump International Hotel, located blocks from the White House, is unfairly siphoning off business from hotels owned by the local jurisdictions. The lawsuit, which alleges violations of the Constitution’s anti-corruption or “emoluments” clauses, was about to enter the evidence-gathering phase....

“Even if government officials were patronizing the hotel to curry the President’s favor, there is no reason to conclude that they would cease doing so were the president enjoined from receiving income from the hotel,” the 36-page opinion said. “The hotel would still be publicly associated with the president, would still bear his name and would still financially benefit members of his family.”...

“Neither [emoluments] clause expressly confers any rights on any person, nor does either clause specify any remedy for a violation,” they wrote....

Trump's tweeted response to the decision:

Word just out that I won a big part of the Deep State and Democrat induced Witch Hunt. Unanimous decision in my favor from The United States Court of Appeals For The Fourth Circuit on the ridiculous Emoluments Case. I don’t make money, but lose a fortune for the honor of..... serving and doing a great job as your President (including accepting Zero salary!).

ADDED: To explain my reaction, "Good," here's what I wrote when I first heard about this litigation, in January 2017:

Quite apart from the substantive merits of the claim, it's hard to see how there are plaintiffs with standing to sue. How does the money paid in rent and hotel bills to the Trump organization cause concrete and particularized injury to anyone? You could say we are all injured by the possibility that commercial activities could influence the President's decisions, but that's the sort of generalized grievance that isn't enough.

But the filing of the lawsuit brings attention to the legal argument, which bolsters the political argument that the risk of influence is bad and should be eliminated. And in the end, almost certainly, the matter will be resolved in the political sphere and not the courts.

"One House of its bicameral legislature cannot alone continue the litigation against the will of its partners in the legislative process."

Writes Justice Ginsburg for the majority this morning in Virginia House of Delegates v. Bethune-Hill, a racial gerrymandering case that the court below decided against the state of Virginia.

The majority consists of the refreshing assemblage of Ginsburg, Thomas, Sotomayor, Kagan, and Gorsuch. Alito writes a dissenting opinion joined by Roberts, Breyer, and Kavanaugh.

After the 3-judge district court decided the case against the Virginia State Board of Elections, the state Attorney General said that the state would not appeal. (The appeal would be directly to the Supreme Court under the jurisdiction statute.) "Virginia has thus chosen to speak as a sovereign entity with a single voice," and the House of Delegates had no standing to continue the litigation. That's the majority's take.

The dissent stresses the 3-part "injury-in-fact" test for standing, finds that the House has the needed "concrete and particularized injury," and declares it "revealing that the Court never asserts that the effect of the court-ordered plan at issue would not cause the House 'concrete' harm." You can articulate an injury the House faces, and Alito does:

"The plaintiffs argue that their legal injury is not limited to the injury that they have suffered as individual voters, but extends also to the statewide harm to their interest 'in their collective representation in the legislature'..."

"... and in influencing the legislature’s overall 'composition and policymaking.'... But our cases to date have not found that this presents an individual and personal injury of the kind required for Article III stand­ing. On the facts of this case, the plaintiffs may not rely on 'the kind of undifferentiated, generalized grievance about the conduct of government that we have refused to countenance in the past.'... A citizen’s interest in the overall composition of the legisla­ture is embodied in his right to vote for his representative. And the citizen’s abstract interest in policies adopted by the legislature on the facts here is a nonjusticiable 'gen­eral interest common to all members of the public.'... [Professor] Whitford’s testimony does not support any claim of packing or cracking of him­self as a voter [in his district in Madison, Wisconsin].... His testimony points merely to his hope of achiev­ing a Democratic majority in the legislature—what the plaintiffs describe here as their shared interest in the composition of 'the legislature as a whole.'  Under our cases to date, that is a collective political interest, not an individual legal interest...."

From the Supreme Court's opinion today in Gill v. Whitford, finding no standing to challenge the alleged partisan gerrymandering here in Wisconsin.

You may remember that there was much talk of something called the "efficiency gap," a new way to calculate and give definition to the asserted constitutional wrong. (I blogged about it here, here, and here. ) The Court said:

"You are one of the white people sweetie"/"No. I am Not."

That "No. I am Not" comes from the recording artist Halsey (née Ashley Nicolette Frangipane), who came up for widespread criticism/mockery last week when she tweeted, "I’ve been traveling for years now and it’s been so frustrating that the hotel toiletry industry entirely alienates people of color. I can’t use this perfumed watered down white people shampoo. Neither can 50% of ur customers. Annoying."

Looking at pictures of Halsey, you might assume she's white. (The previous post is about a performer who is white, but is mistakenly seen as black.) But Halsey has a black father and a white mother and identifies herself as black, WaPo reports.

“I’m white-passing. I’ve accepted that about myself and have never tried to control anything about black culture that’s not mine,” Halsey said in August 2017 to Playboy. “I look like a white girl, but I don’t feel like one. I’m a black woman.”

Now, some people think the shampoo question is trivial, whether it's raised by a black person or a white person, but the complaint seems different if you think someone is raising it on behalf of other people who are not talking about it themselves.... doesn't it?

Why do we expect people to raise their own complaints? It reminds me of the standing doctrine in law, which restricts courts from hearing lawsuits brought by people who are not personally injured by the problem they want the court to solve. Some of the idea there is that if the people who are directly affected are not complaining, maybe it's not a real problem, and some of the idea is that the people who are directly affected might talk about the problem in a different and more useful way.

But filing a lawsuit is different from starting a conversation. Plaintiffs control a lot of what happens in a lawsuit that might affect a lot of people who are left on the outside. But someone who, like Halsey, introduces a new topic for public debate has no equivalent control. We can all talk about it, bat it around, and develop arguments, including arguments about whether it's even a topic worth talking about. Some of these arguments will be about whether the person who started the conversation is worthy, and those arguments might make somebody like me want to criticize arguments that are not about the topic but about the person who raised the topic: Should white people refrain from complaining about things that hurt black people? And how much do we want to get involved in figuring out the race of a person who's raising an issue?

As to whether the hotel shampoo problem is trivial, here are some more Halsey tweets:

The point is that mass production of those products as the standard is part of a greater problem of disenfranchisement. If white ppl can enjoy the luxury/convenience, there should be an option for everyone to. Its an “insignificant” example of a bigger problem. That’s all!...

When u make white products the standard, it makes white the “normal”. I was only trying to provoke some thought about the way these things impact our perception. That’s all....

It’s not just hotels. I stayed in a psychiatric hospital as a teenager and they didn’t have hair products for any patients who were POC. It’s hard enough being in there as it is, but then ur gonna too feel ugly and dry n frizzy too? Nah. Anyways. Y’all still missing the point lol....

It’s about being made to feel unincluded. Which is, obviously, a far greater problem than shampoo. I never wanna talk about soap ever again lol. 

ADDED: Is ever having listened to a Halsey song a necessarily element to having an opinion about her shampoo talk?

"Nothing in the text or the history of the Emoluments Clauses suggests that the Framers intended these provisions to protect anyone from competition."

"The prohibitions contained in these Clauses arose from the Framers' concern with protecting the new government from corruption and undue influence. Indeed, at the time of the Founding, the new republic was conscious of the European custom of bestowing gifts and money on foreign officials.... The Framers were not only concerned with foreign corruption, but they were also wary of undue influence from within.... [T]here can be no doubt that the intended purpose of the Foreign Emoluments Clause was to prevent official corruption and foreign influence, while the Domestic Emoluments Clause was meant to ensure presidential independence. Therefore, the Hospitality Plaintiffs' theory that the Clauses protect them from increased competition in the market for government business must be rejected, especially when (1) the Clauses offer no protection from increased competition in the market for non-government business and (2) with Congressional consent, the Constitution allows federal officials to accept foreign gifts and emoluments, regardless of its effect on competition.... There is simply no basis to conclude that the Hospitality Plaintiffs' alleged competitive injury falls within the zone of interests that the Emoluments Clauses sought to protect."

Wrote the federal district judge George Daniels (PDF), dismissing the lawsuit against President Trump. I haven't written much about this case, having said what I had to say when I first read about it, just before it was filed, last January:

Quite apart from the substantive merits of the claim, it's hard to see how there are plaintiffs with standing to sue. How does the money paid in rent and hotel bills to the Trump organization cause concrete and particularized injury to anyone? You could say we are all injured by the possibility that commercial activities could influence the President's decisions, but that's the sort of generalized grievance that isn't enough.

But the filing of the lawsuit brings attention to the legal argument, which bolsters the political argument that the risk of influence is bad and should be eliminated. And in the end, almost certainly, the matter will be resolved in the political sphere and not the courts.

"Judge Robart’s brisk ruling contained almost no reasoning. By contrast, Judge Nathaniel M. Gorton, of the Federal District Court in Boston..."

"... issued a 21-page decision on Friday refusing to block the program and discussing the legal arguments in detail. Judge Gorton also sketched out the broader picture. 'The rich immigrant history of the United States has long been a source of strength and pride in this country,' Judge Gorton wrote. 'Conversely, the public interest in safety and security in this ever-more dangerous world is strong as well.' The balance, he wrote, tipped in favor of Mr. Trump."

Writes Adam Liptak in the NYT, creating the impression that Judge Robart's decision simply represents a different tip in the balance between the value of immigration and the value of public safety. You know these judges, they're all about balancing, and a decision could go in either direction, depending on how the weights feel in the hand holding the scales of justice.

But Judge Robart took action and Judge Gorton refrained from taking action. It is Judge Robart who needs to identify a legal basis for interfering with another branch of government. How is it that Gorton gave us a 21-page opinion explaining the doing of nothing and Judge Robart interfered with the actions of the executive branch without putting legal reasons in writing?

I can see from the lawyers' brief — to which Liptak links in his search for a reason — that arguments were based on equal protection, due process, and the Establishment Clause. So which one was the basis for Robart's muscular exercise of judicial power?

For some reason, Liptak chose only to discuss the Establishment Clause. Does he think it's the strongest on the 3 arguments? I don't. Maybe he thinks it's best because it expresses the political debate around what many people are calling the "Muslim ban." Liptak quotes this from the plaintiffs' brief:

"President Trump and his advisers have made clear that the very purpose of this order is to tilt the scales in favor of Christian refugees at the expense of Muslims,” they wrote in their brief to Judge Robart.

And Liptak quotes this response from Trump's lawyers:

“The more searching inquiry envisioned by the states would create substantial separation-of-powers problems, by permitting probing of the president’s subjective motive in issuing the order,” the brief said.

Liptak questions this argument, made in the 9th Circuit by the plaintiffs' lawyer:

“The focus of our claim,” he said, “is on people who have been here and have, overnight, lost the right to travel, lost the right to visit their families, lost the right to go perform research, lost the right to go speak at conferences around the world. And also people who had lived here for a long time and happened to be overseas at the time of this order, which came with no warning whatsoever, and suddenly lost the right to return to the United States.”

That's very well put as a policy argument, and I certainly think the President should be responsive to it. As a legal argument, it expresses ideas that would be best classified as due process. If this is the basis for the judge's decision, however, I would think that the remedy would need to focus on the legal residents who happened to be out of the country — not newcomers.

And that problem of the breadth of the judge's order is a standing problem. Standing doctrine not only requires that the plaintiff have a concrete and particularized injury caused by what the defendant is doing. The plaintiff can only demand a remedy that is designed to relieve that injury — not other injuries that may also exist.

An elite group of lawyers and lawprofs is suing President Trump for violating the Emoluments Clause.

The lawsuit will be filed on Monday, the NYT reports.

“No one would have thought when the Constitution was written that paying your hotel bill was an emolument,” Sheri A. Dillon, a partner at Morgan Lewis, said at a news conference this month...

“If you think other countries are not going to try to leverage relationships with Trump’s companies to influence trade or military policy, that is naïve,” [said  Zephyr Teachout, a Fordham University law professor and former congressional candidate who has been studying and writing about the Emoluments Clause for nearly a decade].

Quite apart from the substantive merits of the claim, it's hard to see how there are plaintiffs with standing to sue. How does the money paid in rent and hotel bills to the Trump organization cause concrete and particularized injury to anyone? You could say we are all injured by the possibility that commercial activities could influence the President's decisions, but that's the sort of generalized grievance that isn't enough.

But the filing of the lawsuit brings attention to the legal argument, which bolsters the political argument that the risk of influence is bad and should be eliminated. And in the end, almost certainly, the matter will be resolved in the political sphere and not the courts.

The Supreme Court affirms United States v. Texas — Obama and immigration — by an evenly divided 4-4 decision.

SCOTUSblog reports: "This means that the enforcement of the Obama admnistration's [sic] 2014 deferred-action policy remains blocked by a nationwide injunction."

There's nothing from the Supreme Court to read, just: "The judgment is affirmed by an equally divided Court."

Here's my blog post from the oral argument last April. The question was about standing, whether the states have a good-enough injury to make it a real "case" within the meaning of Article III of the Constitution.

The government lost below, so a 4-4 split would leave in place an injunction barring the policy. There had been some speculation that Justice Roberts might give a 5th vote to the pro-government side using a standing doctrine ground, but he said something that made that seem unlikely:

... Mr. Verrilli asserted that the state of Texas should not be allowed to challenge the president’s actions by claiming it would cost the state money to give driver’s licenses to the millions of immigrants affected by the federal policy. Mr. Verrilli argued that Texas could simply change its law to deny driver’s licenses to the immigrants.

“You would sue them instantly,” Chief Justice Roberts said as he repeatedly questioned the government’s arguments.

So the outcome today is what the argument made me think would happen.

ADDED: It's very good, I think, to have this policy frozen in place as we go through the election where immigration is a big issue. 

AND: Here's Adam Liptak's coverage in The NYT, with the background on Obama's plan, Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents.