It was the hottest ticket inside the Beltway--the Supreme Court's hearings on the federal health care law. Kaiser Health News reporter Phil Galewitz was determined to get in, but didn't have a press pass (and no member of Congress gave him one, either). Instead--just by standing in line--he got in.
There were two sets of arguments today. For the earlier arguments, Galewitz only snagged a "three-minute pass" then parlayed it into a full six minutes. But for the second hearing about the Medicaid expansion, he got a special "gray" ticket for the full, one-hour session.
Galewitz picks up his story from there--and it turns out the Justices can be funny:
After making my way through a magnetometer, then up about 25 marble steps — with a brief a stop at a 25-cent locker to store all my electronics and other bags — and through another metal detector, I was ready to enter the chamber. My seat was in the rear, about 15 rows from the front, but afforded a full view of all nine justices.
Justice Elena Kagan took the offensive from the start, focusing her attention on Paul Clement, the 26 states’ plaintiff attorney, who argued that the Medicaid expansion was coercive to states and, thus, unconstitutional. “There’s no matching funds requirement, there are no extraneous conditions attached to it, it’s just a boatload of federal money for you to take and spend on poor people’s healthcare,” Kagan said. “It doesn’t sound coercive to me, I have to tell you.”