The Supreme Court’s unusual moment in the spotlight

Calculating who will write the final decision of the Supreme Court’s term is a game that usually interests only a small band of lawyers, professors, reporters and politicos who obsess over the justices’ every footnote.

But this year, the likelihood that Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. is preparing the court’s judgment on President Obama’s health-care overhaul is worthy of headlines and a whirl of Internet spin.

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How will the health-care ruling affect me?

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President Obama’s path to achieve his vision of health care overhaul has been a rocky one. As we await the Supreme Court’s decision on the law, we look back on how we got here.

Roberts’s questions at oral arguments are being consulted, his decisions in past cases are being reviewed, and the analysis is underway about whether he is preparing a life preserver or a stake for the Affordable Care Act.

The first Monday in October and the last week of June, the bookends for each session, are always moments in the spotlight for the Supreme Court. But this is no ordinary time.

The court has rarely occupied so prominent a place in the public consciousness as now: deciding the constitutionality of a health-care plan that would touch every American, ruling on the president’s bitterly fought signature domestic achievement, issuing an opinion that will immediately affect election-year politics.

“More people have paid attention to this case than any other case in recent memory, probably with the exception of Bush v. Gore,” Paul D. Clement, who argued the case on behalf of the law’s challengers, told reporters last week.

But that ruling, which decided the 2000 presidential election, was an anomaly, an emergency that no doubt sealed the court’s reputation for many but was unlike its usual practice of briefing and argument and contemplation and opinion-writing.

Health care, Clement said, “is a case where everybody from ordinary citizens to reporters who are not used to covering the court are getting an education in how the court works.”

The main way it works, of course, is in secrecy, beyond public view and in a place unlike much of official Washington.

Television cameras are not allowed. The lucky spectators admitted to the courtroom are told to check their BlackBerrys at the door. Reporters are discouraged from using noisy cellphones, even in the press room. Ornate metal gates block the marble stairways that lead to the justices’ chambers.

Unlike many other institutions in this city, the court sticks to a sharp timetable — the decision will be delivered Thursday morning, shortly after 10 a.m. And unlike in the rest of leak-happy Washington, discretion is demanded above all else. The health-care case was probably decided soon after the court’s historic three days of hearings in March. But even now, only a few dozen court employees — half of whom are probably unhappy with the decision — know the outcome.

Clement, who was solicitor general under President George W. Bush, said people unfamiliar with the court, especially political reporters, cannot believe that the result has not been disclosed.

“The thing I’ve found most amusing is their complete inability to believe there will not be leaks,” Clement said. “They are so used to covering the other two branches of government that they just assume leaks are absolutely inevitable.”