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In reply to the discussion: Report: Sources say Roberts switched vote in healthcare case [View all]cal04
(41,505 posts)Supreme Court Springs A Leak; Leaks To Conservative Pundits May Have Started More Than A Month Ago
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/07/01/509359/supreme-court-springs-a-leak-leaks-to-conservative-pundits-may-have-started-more-than-a-month-ago/
(snip)
Crawford sites two unnamed sources, and there are a very limited universe of people who could have revealed this information to her. Only the justices and their personal staff would have access to this knowledge, and it is highly unlikely that a clerk or secretary would be willing to risk their entire career by revealing the Courts confidential deliberations to the press. Crawford, moreover, is a very well connected conservative reporter who has, at times, worked closely with the Federalist Society to drive conservative legal narratives. Nothing is certain, but it is likely that one or both of Crawfords sources is a conservative justice.
Moreover, as Linda Greenhouse points out, it is possible that the Court started springing leaks more than a month before Roberts handed down his opinion
Around Memorial Day, a number of conservative columnists and bloggers suddenly began accusing the liberal media of putting the squeeze to Justice Roberts, as George Will expressed the thought in his Washington Post column. They are waging an embarrassingly obvious campaign, hoping he will buckle beneath the pressure of their disapproval and declare Obamacare constitutional, Mr. Will wrote. Although the court has been famously leakproof, Mr. Will and some of the others are well connected at the court, and I wondered at the time whether they had picked up signals that the chief justice, thought reliable after the oral argument two months earlier, was now wavering, and whether their message was really intended for him.
(or maybe this is just not true. I guess we'll have to wait and see if some kind of statement comes out to what is being reported)