The House of Representatives yesterday passed a Republican debt-ceiling proposal providing that if either chamber of Congress hasn't passed a budget resolution for the upcoming fiscal year by April 15, the congressional payroll office must withhold the paychecks for the members of that body.

In other words, they wouldn't get paid until they act or until the current session of Congress ends in 2015.

But is that provision constitutional?

The 27th Amendment, added to the Constitution in 1992, is intended to prevent members of Congress from giving themselves a raise. But it doesn't merely say that any raise can't take effect until the next Congress. It says members cannot vary their own pay.

Here's the entire text of the amendment: "No law, varying the compensation for the services of the senators and representatives, shall take effect, until an election of representatives shall have intervened."

The debt limit bill, said House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp, "was carefully crafted to comply with the requirements of the 27th Amendment."

"The amount that members are paid will not be reduced nor will it be raised," Camp said during Wednesday's House debate. "There is no requirement in the 27th Amendment which states that members have to be paid weekly, biweekly, monthly, or bimonthly, or what have you, only that the pay that they receive will not vary."

Not so, said Rep. Robert Brady, a Pennsylvania Democrat, who believes putting the money in escrow, as the House bill provides, doesn't solve the issue. "If you aren't getting a paycheck in a month and you're going to wait for 18 months, that's varying. So it could be -- and, in my opinion, it is -- a constitutional problem," he said.

Who's right? Does holding the checks, but ultimately giving members their money, avoid a constitutional defect?

Professor Michael Froomkin of the University of Miami School of Law doesn't believe it's constitutional.

"I don't think this is even a close question: In my view, the escrow provision clearly does not [avoid the constitutional defect]," Froomkin said.

"The prohibition on varying the compensation seems pretty clear to me. It means no changes in amount and no changes in time of payment, because there is a time value to money. Anyone who gets a salary would think it a very material change in the terms if the money were escrowed for more than a year and a half instead of being made available to pay the mortgage," he added.

The opposite view came in a statement released by the House Ways and Means Committee, written by conservative lawyers David Rivkin and Lee Casey. "It is creative, it is fiscally responsible, and it is attentive to the text and structure of the Constitution," they said.

Some consideration was given to putting the deferred paychecks into an interest-bearing account, but Republicans rejected that idea, concluding that it would increase members' pay in clear violation of the 27th Amendment.

The Supreme Court has never interpreted the amendment, and no member of Congress has yet come forward to suggest suing over the escrow provision. Given the Supreme Court’s narrow view of who has legal authority to sue, it’s likely only a member of Congress who had a paycheck withheld would have the proper standing to challenge it.

Even though Pennsylvania officials offered no evidence that in-person voter fraud has tainted past elections -- or is likely to occur this fall -- a state court judge ruled Wednesday that challengers of a new photo ID requirement failed to meet the legal requirement to get it put on hold.

Lawyers for the challengers say they will immediately appeal, hoping to get enforcement of the law stopped before the presidential election on Nov. 6.

"I am not convinced any qualified elector need be disenfranchised" by the law, said Commonwealth Court Judge Robert Simpson, a Republican, in denying a request for a court order to stop enforcement of Pennsylvania's Act 18, passed by the legislature in March. It requires voters to present a photo ID at the polling place in order to vote.

Several voting rights groups, including the League of Women Voters and the NAACP, joined with a group of state residents to claim that the law would force thousands of people to say home on election day because they lack the kinds of ID cards required by the new law.

At most, Judge Simpson said, the percentage of registered voters in the state without a qualifying photo ID "is somewhat more than 1% and significantly less than 9%." 

But he said that with the availability of absentee voting, the right of a person without photo ID to cast a provisional ballot, and the opportunities for those with special hardships to seek individual help from the courts, he was not convinced that any of those who filed the lawsuits or the witnesses they called will be prevented from voting.

The judge also said the challengers failed to meet the legal test required to mount what's known as a facial challenge to a law -- a claim that the law on its face is unconstitutional.  "They do not acknowledge the extremely rigorous legal standard for facial challenges requiring a demonstration that there are no set of circumstances under which the statute may be valid."

Similar efforts to stop voter ID laws in other states have been unsuccessful in federal court, which is one reason why the challengers in Pennsylvania decided to sue in state court by claiming that the law there violated the state constitution.

While opponents of the law are hoping they can prevail on appeal in the state courts, one election law expert believes today's ruling will ultimately survive.

"The decision is almost certain to stand," said professor Rick Hasen of the UC Irvine School of Law, author of "The Voting Wars."

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court, he said, is divided 3-3 between Democrats and Republicans, who are likely to support today's ruling.

But even if they did split along party lines, Hasen said, "a 3-3 tie leaves the lower court opinion in place. I don't expect there would be any fuller ruling on the merits in this case before November, or that any such ruling would lead to a different result."

The Justice Department has filed the letter it was directed to write by a panel of appeals court judges in Texas about the authority of federal courts to strike down acts of Congress. The letter states well-settled law about the issue, but in doing so, it manages to make many of the points the Obama administration has stressed in litigation over the health-care case.

During oral argument Tuesday over a lawsuit challenging a part of the health law, Judge Jerry Smith of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in Texas sought the following: "A letter stating what is the position of the attorney general and the Department of Justice in regard to the recent statements by the president, stating specifically and in detail, in reference to those statements, what the authority is of the federal courts in this regard in terms of judicial review."

The letter in response, signed by Attorney General Eric Holder, says, "The longstanding, historical position of the United States regarding judicial review of the constitutionality of federal legislation has not changed."

"The power of courts to review the constitutionality of legislation is beyond dispute," he says, citing cases from Marbury v. Madison in 1803 up to the present day. 

But, Holder notes, acts of congress are presumed to be constitutional.

"It falls to the party seeking to overturn a federal law to show that is is clearly constitutional," he writes. What's more, "The Supreme Court has often acknowledged the appropriatness of reliance on the political branches' policy choices and judgments."

"The President's remarks," Holder concludes," were fully consistent with the principles described herein."

Facing reporters for the first time since President Obama warned that the Supreme Court’s potential overturning the health care law would be an “unprecedented” step, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney yesterday sought to put the president’s words in context, saying the president was not suggesting the court has never overturned such a law regulating interstate commerce.

For the most part, bloggers agreed that Day 2 of the Supreme Court's oral arguments over the federal health-care law represented -- at the very least -- a setback for the Obama administration.

SCOTUS Blog's Lyle Denniston, a reporter who has covered the Supreme Court for 50 years, wrote:

“If Justice Anthony M. Kennedy can locate a limiting principle in the federal government’s defense of the new individual health insurance mandate, or can think of one on his own, the mandate may well survive. If he does, he may take Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., and a majority along with him. But if he does not, the mandate is gone.  That is where Tuesday’s argument wound up — with Kennedy, after first displaying a very deep skepticism, leaving the impression that he might yet be the mandate’s savior.

Left-leaning Steve Benen, a writer for the Rachel Maddow blog, says “court watchers look to these arguments for hints, but there are no guarantees that justices who appeared to be leaning in one direction or another will necessarily rule that way.” He notes that a few reporters, who heard the Supreme Court hearing, agreed on some points:

“* The mandate has at least four votes (Ginsburg, Breyer*, Sotomayor, and Kagan).
* Solicitor General Don Verrilli, who argued the case for the government, was not at the top of his game today, and the word "choke" is being bandied about quite a bit.
* Paul Clement, the former Solicitor General who argued against the health care, was excellent.
* The two votes to watch are Roberts and Kennedy. Scalia, Thomas, and Alito do not appear to be in play, despite all of Scalia's previous opinions on Commerce Clause jurisprudence.
* The liberal justices were far more effective than Verrilli in making compelling arguments in defense of the law.”

Adam Serwer, a reporter at Mother Jones, called the second day of orals hearings a “disaster.

“Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. should be grateful to the Supreme Court for refusing to allow cameras in the courtroom, because his defense of Obamacare on Tuesday may go down as one of the most spectacular flameouts in the history of the court.

Stepping up to the podium, Verrilli stammered as he began his argument. He coughed, he cleared his throat, he took a drink of water. And that was before he even finished the first part of his argument. Sounding less like a world-class lawyer and more like a teenager giving an oral presentation for the first time, Verrilli delivered a rambling, apprehensive legal defense of liberalism's biggest domestic accomplishment since the 1960s—and one that may well have doubled as its eulogy...

If the law is upheld, it will be in spite of Verrilli's performance, not because of it.”

Right-leaning Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post sums it up: “To put it bluntly, it was a rotten day for Obamacare, but more importantly, also for the left, which tends to assume that legislation it likes must be constitutional.

“In perhaps the most telling moment, Kennedy said that allowing Congress to compel purchase of health care “changes the relationship between the individual and the government in a very fundamental way.” That, in a nutshell, is the challengers’ argument.”

The first legal challenge to President Obama's controversial recess appointments flopped today, when a federal judge tossed it out on procedural grounds.

A business group, the National Association of Manufacturers, tried to slip the challenge into an existing lawsuit contesting decisions by the National Labor Relations Board.

It was an apt place to challenge the move, the group said, because the the president made three recess appointments to the NLRB during a Senate break. 

The White House said the appointments were within a president's executive power. But many Republicans claimed they was unconstitutional, because the Senate was called briefly into session each day during the recess.

On Friday, Judge Amy Berman Jackson said the legal challenge came too late in a place where it didn't belong. The group "attempted to shoehorn a challenge" in to a pending case about an entirely different issue involving the validity of a recent NLRB rule.

"The court declines this invitation to take up a political dispute that is not before it," she wrote in a brief decision.

This won't be the last word, however. Other groups have said they will go to court to challenge the most recent appointments.

An order from the U.S. Supreme Court raises the very distinct possibility that it will hear the contentious issue of affirmative action in the heat of the presidential campaign this fall.

The court agreed to take up a challenge to a policy at the University of Texas that allows a student's race to be taken into account in deciding on freshman admissions.  The Supreme Court, in 2003, said race could be used as a factor -- in order to achieve a more diverse student body.

But the court has changed since then. Sandra Day O'Connor, who approved of the concept, has been replaced by the generally more conservative Samuel Alito.

With the court once again wading into this issue, affirmative action in school admissions may be in trouble. The court could hear this case in October or the first week of November.

Raising the stakes for defenders of affirmative action is this development: Justice Elena Kagan has taken herself off the case, because she worked on the issue while serving in the Obama Justice Department. That takes a potential vote in favor of affirmative action off the court.

The Supreme Court has confirmed that Justice Stephen Breyer, his wife and several family friends were the victims of a knife-wielding robber at the Breyer vacation home on the island of Nevis in the Caribbean.

A court official says that around 9:00 pm ET Thursday night, Justice Breyer, his wife and house guests were robbed by one suspect, wearing a mask and wielding a knife, who got away with about $1,000 in cash.

No one was hurt in the incident.

Previously filed financial disclosure forms as well as articles and tourist websites acknowledge that Justice Breyer is a regular vacationer to the island and has owned a home there for quite some time.

The Nevis police department is investigating and says there are no suspects or arrests at this time.

Local news reports as well as the police acknowledge other robberies and break-ins in the area around the same time.

It is the third time in recent memory that a Supreme Court justice has been the victim of a crime.

Back in 2004, Justice David Souter suffered minor injuries when he was mugged by a group of young men while jogging.

And in 1996, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had her purse snatched near the Kennedy Center while walking with her husband and daughter. She was not hurt in the incident.

A federal appeals court has rejected Rick Perry's request for an emergency order to put his name on the primary election ballot in Virginia.

Following the reasoning of the federal judge who rejected Perry's request last week, a three-judge panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond said Perry "had every opportunity to challenge the various Virginia ballot requirements at a time when the challenge would not have created the disruption that this last-minute lawsuit has."

The Supreme Court, today's ruling says, has repeatedly urged that judges not "upend the orderly progression of state electoral processes at the eleventh hour."

Allowing Perry to pursue his complaint now, about the process for gathering signatures on petitions to qualify for the ballot "would not be fair to the states or to other candidates who did comply with the prescribed process in a timely manner, and it would throw the presidential nominating process into added turmoil," the court said.

"I am pleased with the Fourth Circuit ruling and that Virginia's orderly election process will be able to move forward," said Virginia’s attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, who defended the state’s balloting system in court.

NBC's Carrie Dann has the response from Perry campaign spokesman Ray Sullivan:

"We are proud to fight for the rights of Virginia voters to be able to make a meaningful decision and cast their ballots for the candidate of their choice. This appellate ruling only affirms the trial court's assertion that the state's process of printing ballots should not be disrupted. An orderly ballot access process is important, but of little significance if viable candidates are unconstitutionally kept off the ballot. The trial judge's holding that the statute is unconstitutional is not disturbed. Gov. Perry is weighing options for appeal."

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder today leveled the Obama administration's strongest criticism yet at new voting laws that, for example, require photo ID's at the polls, limit early voting, and restrict periods for registration.

In a speech prepared for delivery at the LBJ Library at the University of Texas in Austin, Holder quoted Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), a longtime civil rights leader, who said recently that voting rights are under attack by "a deliberate and systematic attempt to prevent millions of elderly voters, young voters, students, and minority and low-income voters from exercising their constitutional right to engage in the democratic process." 

What Lewis was talking about, Holder said, was concerns about "some of the state-level voting law changes we’ve seen this legislative season."

The Justice Department is now reviewing some of those new laws. "We will examine the facts, and we will apply the law," Holder said.

"If a state passes a new voting law and meets its burden of showing that the law is not discriminatory, we will follow the law and approve the change. And where a state can’t meet this burden, we will object as part of our obligation" under the Voting Rights Act, he said.

That law, Holder said, is being challenged in at least five lawsuits. And the U.S. Supreme Court recently expressed the view that the time may be ending when close review by the Justice Department is required for changes in voting procedures in states with a history of racial discriminating at the polls. Perhaps, some members of the court said, that requirement of the Voting Rights Act is no longer necessary.

"I wish this were the case. The reality is that in jurisdictions across the country, both overt and subtle forms of discrimination remain all too common," Holder said.

He called the recent effort at congressional and legislative redistricting in Texas "precisely the kind of discrimination" that the Voting Rights Act was intended to block. The Supreme Court has agreed to review the state's newly drawn districts and a lower federal court's substitution of a different plan. 

New census data showed Texas gaining more than four million new residents, most of them Latinos, allowing the state four new seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. But Texas, Holder said, "proposed adding zero additional seats in which Hispanics would have the electoral opportunity envisioned by the Voting Rights Act.

"As concerns about the protection of this right and the integrity of our election systems become an increasingly prominent part of our national dialogue, we must consider some important questions. It is time to ask: What kind of nation and what kind of people do we want to be? Are we willing to allow this era, our era, to be remembered as the age when our nation’s proud tradition of expanding the franchise ended? Are we willing to allow this time, our time, to be recorded in history as the age when the long-held belief that, in this country, every citizen has the chance and the right to help shape their government, became a relic of our past, instead of a guidepost for our future?

The Justice Department has sent a letter to dozens of local law enforcement agencies in Alabama that receive federal money, warning them that they risk losing that funding if they're not careful in how they enforce Alabama's tough new immigration law.

The Obama administration has already sued the state, claiming the law is unconstitutional. Now it's keeping the pressure on by addressing how the law is carried out.

In an unusual letter, the assistant attorney general for civil rights writes to 156 Alabama sheriff's offices and police departments, telling them that the federal government is monitoring how they enforce the part of the law that requires checking the immigration status of people who are stopped for questioning.

It is critical, says Thomas Perez, that local law agencies "ensure that your enforcement of this law does not result in unlawful stopping, questioning, searching, detaining, or arresting" in violation of the Constitution "or targeting of racial and ethnic minorities."

Other states have passed similar laws, but they've been blocked by federal courts. The part of Alabama's law that requires checking immigration status, however, was allowed to go into effect by a federal judge.

Taking up its most important case in more than a decade, the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear the legal challenges to the Obama health-care law.

The White House welcomes the court's decision, NBC's Shawna Thomas reports.

"We are pleased the Court has agreed to hear this case," said White House spokesman Dan Pfeiffer in a Tweet. "We know the ACA [Affordable Care Act] is constitutional and are confident the Supreme Court will agree."

In a longer statement put out by the White House, Pfeiffer said, "Earlier this year, the Obama Administration asked the Supreme Court to consider legal challenges to the health reform law and we are pleased the Court has agreed to hear this case. Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, one million more young Americans have health insurance, women are getting mammograms and preventive services without paying an extra penny out of their own pocket and insurance companies have to spend more of your premiums on health care instead of advertising and bonuses. We know the Affordable Care Act is constitutional and are confident the Supreme Court will agree."

The Supreme Court is setting aside a remarkable five-and-a-half hours for oral argument on the health care cases. It has yet to set a date for these historic arguments, though they will likely come in late February or early March.

The time breakdown is as follows:

- 2 hours on the "individual mandate," the requirement that virtually all Americans buy health insurance

- 1.5 hours on whether, if the mandate is unconstitutional, the rest of the law still stands, or whether it must fall as well

- 1 hour on the law's new Medicaid requirements on the states

- 1 hour on whether the courts can hear challenges to the law now, or whether they must wait until the mandate actually takes effect in 2014.