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The Struggle for the Constitution
Simon & Schuster
May 2013
On Sale: May 7, 2013
400 pages
ISBN: 1451627513
EAN: 9781451627510
Kindle: B008J4NC0O
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
The Roberts Court, seven years old, sits at the center of a constitutional maelstrom. Through four landmark decisions, Marcia Coyle, one of the most prestigious experts on the Supreme Court, reveals the fault lines in the conservative-dominated Court led by Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. Seven minutes after President Obama put his signature to a landmark national health care insurance program, a lawyer in the office of Florida GOP attorney general Bill McCollum hit a computer key, sparking a legal challenge to the new law that would eventually reach the nationβs highest court. Health care is only the most visible and recent front in a battle over the meaning and scope of the U.S. Constitution. The battleground is the United States Supreme Court, and one of the most skilled, insightful, and trenchant of its observers takes us close up to watch it in action. Marcia Coyleβs brilliant inside account of the High Court captures four landmark decisionsβconcerning health care, money in elections, guns at home, and race in schools. Coyle examines how those cases beganβthe personalities and conflicts that catapulted them onto the national sceneβand how they ultimately exposed the great divides among the justices, such as the originalists versus the pragmatists on guns and the Second Amendment, and corporate speech versus human speech in the controversial Citizens United campaign case. Most dramatically, her analysis shows how dedicated conservative lawyers and groups are strategizing to find cases and crafting them to bring up the judicial road to the Supreme Court with an eye on a receptive conservative majority. The Roberts Court offers a ringside seat at the struggle to lay down the law of the land.
 Media BuzzPBS News Hour - June 28, 2013
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