From Rick Hasen , based on oral argument in the anti-Hillary ad case, Citizens United v. FEC, at the Supreme Court today: “Chief Justice Roberts and Jutice Alito’s questions were uniformly hostile toward the government.” Since Scalia, Thomas, and Kennedy have already voted to overturn the key precedent that allowed the states, and Congress, to ban independent funding of campaign ads during the weeks before an election, that’s five votes for overturning this part of McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform. And as we know from an interesting new paper by Lee Epstein, William Landes, and Richard Posner, you can infer a lot about how the justices will vote from their questioning patterns at oral argument.
