WASHINGTON – AMID the coverage of the Christie controversy and the latest budget deal, it was easy to miss the news about last week’s oral arguments before the Supreme Court in the case of National Labor Relations Board v. Noel Canning. And yet the Canning case represents the biggest threat to presidential power in decades, and the stakes in the decision are extremely high.

The case grew from a challenge by the Noel Canning Corporation to President Obama’s recess appointment of several nominees to the N.L.R.B., along with the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Recess appointments are not unusual, but in this case, the Senate was away but still convening pro forma sessions – just five minutes or so at a time – because the House had not given permission to adjourn.

The challenge began narrowly, centered on the question of whether a president or the Senate gets to decide when the legislative body is in recess. But it was broadened dramatically last year by a panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which ruled that virtually all recess appointments violated the direct language of the Constitution: Only those vacancies occurring during the recess between […]

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Four years ago this week, the Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission that the First Amendment prevents the government from restricting independent campaign spending by corporations. The ruling unleashed a deluge of campaign spending that made 2012 by far the most expensive election cycle in history, with nearly $1.3 billion spent independently from candidates’ official campaigns.

We’ve all heard about the super-PACs and dark money nonprofit groups that have funneled millions from corporate and mega-rich donors into presidential and Congressional races, but now new research shows that outside spending has had a big impact on judicial races as well, raising concerns about state judges’ ability to remain impartial in a political world where hefty chunks of campaign cash can make or break elections.

Thirty-eight states hold elections for seats on their supreme courts, including both direct elections and up-or-down votes to retain judges initially appointed by governors or other state officials. In the post-Citizens United election season of 2012, many state judicial races looked a lot like the brutal campaigns waged for Congressional and presidential candidates, with super-PACs paying for vicious attack ads and special interests raising millions of dollars of campaign funds.

Writing in dissent of the Citizens […]

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If you dream of one day pulling yourself up by your bootstraps to become the next Bill Gates, there are some places in America where it’s somewhat easier to do that than others, a new study reveals.

Cities in the South and the Rust Belt have extremely low levels of economic mobility — a wonky term that essentially measures one’s ability to go from being poor to rich — according to a study from economists at Harvard University and the University of California-Berkeley.

To put that into more concrete terms: Someone born in the bottom fifth of the income ladder in Atlanta, Georgia, where economic mobility is low, has a 4.5 percent chance of reaching the top fifth of the income ladder, the study found. Meanwhile in Washington, D.C., a city with high economic mobility, the chance of moving up the income ladder is about 11 percent.

In the map below, red indicates low economic mobility while pale yellow represents places with higher economic mobility:

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So what is it that stifles economic mobility? The researchers found that areas with higher levels of segregation, income inequality and more single parents tend to have worse prospects for mobility. In addition, regions with fewer social networks and […]