2005—Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr. stoically endures the endless opening statements of Senate Judiciary Committee members as his confirmation hearing begins. Roberts manages to keep a straight face throughout, including when hard-left Senator Charles Schumer, who (along with Teddy Kennedy and Dick Durbin) voted against Roberts in committee on his D.C. Circuit nomination, tells Roberts what he must do to win Schumer’s vote and presents himself as arbiter of the legal “mainstream.”
2012—In a 112-page opinion (in Hedges v. Obama), federal district judge Katherine B. Forrest permanently enjoins the United States from enforcing a provision of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act that she reads as broadly expanding the class of persons whom the president may detain as enemy combatants and as violating the First Amendment rights of the plaintiff journalists and activists who allege that they fear being detained.
Three weeks later, a liberal panel of the Second Circuit, calling into question Forrest’s analysis, will conclude that the public interest requires a stay of the injunction pending appeal. In July 2013, another liberal panel of the Second Circuit will vacate Forrest’s injunction on the ground that the plaintiffs lack standing to challenge the provision: The plaintiffs who are American citizens lack standing because the provision expressly has no bearing on them, and the non-citizen plaintiffs lack standing because “they have not established a basis for concluding that enforcement against them is even remotely likely.”
