Good morning and welcome to the live blog! We are about to get orders.
Looks like SCOTUS grants three cases for next term.
Ack, so I was accidentally typing on a live blog from 2014. Trust me that I was brilliant. There are three grants.
First is Allen v. Cooper, involving Congress's authority to repeal states' sovereign immunity from lawsuits alleging copyright infringement. Fun fact: it arises from the discovery of Blackbeard's flagship off the North Carolina coast.
Second is Retirement Plan Committee v. Jander, involving the pleading standard for ERISA cases alleging the breach of a duty of prudence.
Third is Holguin-Hernandez v. US, in which the justices agreed to decide whether a criminal defendant must formally object to his sentence when it is pronounced in order to preserve the right to appeal its reasonableness.
The justices do not appear to have acted on Klein v. Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries -- the case of the Oregon couple who declined to make a custom cake for a same-sex wedding.
The justices asked the federal government to weigh in on the motion for review of the River Master's final determination in Texas v. New Mexico, an original action that I can only assume has something to do with water rights.
To follow up on a merits question from last week. Last week Justice Thomas joined the court's four liberals in the Home Depot case, and someone had asked how often this happens. The answer is that it appears to happen every two years or so: In May 2017, he joined them in a NC racial gerrymandering case (Cooper v. Harris), which was 5-3 because Justice Scalia had passed away and Justice Gorsuch didn't participate; and in June 2015 he joined them in Walker v. Texas Division, holding that the state could refuse to issue specialty license plates with a Confederate battle flag.
Five-minute buzzer just sounded. Two boxes today. For the new and new-ish, the number of boxes is a rough approximation of the number of opinions we might expect.
Okay, going in to wait for opinions. Back soon.
We have the first opinion, from Justice Gorsuch. It is Azar v. Allina Health Services.
The D.C. Circuit is affirmed. The vote is 7-1, because Kavanaugh did not participate. Breyer dissents.
The case is about the Medicare statute, which guarantees the right to notice and comment before the government makes substantive changes to policies governing Medicare benefits. The court today holds that the policy at issue (which reduced payments to hospitals serving low-income patients) must be vacated because the government has not identified a lawful excuse for neglecting those obligations.
Justice Breyer has the next opinion, in the bankruptcy case Taggart v. Lorenzen. It is unanimous.
The NInth Circuit's decision is vacated and remanded.
The court holds that a court may hold a creditor in civil contempt for violating a discharge order if there is no fair ground of doubt as to whether the order barred the creditor's conduct.
This opinion BARELY makes it on to the 11th page. It was argued on April 24 -- Justice Breyer was quite the speed demon with this one.
For the new and new-ish here, the justices announce their opinions in order of reverse seniority. So we won't hear from Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, Kagan, Sotomayor, or Alito today.
We could hear again from Breyer, Ginsburg, Thomas or the Chief.
We have the next opinion -- but not the final opinion of the day -- from Justice Ginsburg. It is Fort Bend County v. Texas.
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