The Justice Department is asking a federal court to stop enforcement of parts of South Carolina's new immigration law, bringing to three the number of states the Obama administration is suing over immigration crackdowns.

The government earlier this year challenged Alabama's new law. And we're waiting to see if the Supreme Court takes up the challenge to the Arizona law.

The Justice Department action, filed Monday in federal court in Charleston, is directed at parts of the new South Carolina law that, for example:

-require police to determine immigration status during any lawful stop, detention, investigation, or arrest by the where there is "reasonable suspicion" that an individual is unlawfully present,

-allow state residents to sue any local government agency that moves to limit enforcement of state immigration laws,

-and create a new state crime of "allowing oneself to be transported" for the purpose of harboring someone here illegally or concealing a person's immigration status.

"By pursuing retribution and ignoring every other objective embodied in the federal immigration system (including the federal government's prioritization of the removal of criminal aliens)," the Justice Department said, the South Carolina law "conflicts with and otherwise stands as an obstacle to Congress's demand for sufficient flexibility in the enforcement of federal immigration law to accommodate the competing interests of immigration control, national security and public safety, humanitarian concerns, and foreign relations."

The U.S. Supreme Court could decide as early as two weeks from now whether to take up the titanic legal battle over President Obama's health care law.

The court revealed today that the first of the challenges to reach the Supreme Court will come before the justices on Nov. 10th, during one of their regular weekly conferences where they decide, in private, which cases to hear. Legal experts are nearly unanimous in believing that the court will agree to hear the health-care issue during its current term, but there's no deadline for the justices to act on whether to do so. If the court agrees in November to take up the health care issue, it would probably be argued in March, with a decision by late June. 

If the court agrees on Nov. 10th to take any or all of the cases, we could hear that day, or we might hear the following Monday when court orders are typically announced. But contentious cases are often discussed several times before the court gets around to taking a vote on whether to grant them, so it could take a few weeks before we know.

The five cases ready for the justices to consider ask the court to decide these questions:

- Did Congress exceed its powers in requiring that virtually all Americans buy health insurance, and, if it did, must the entire health care law fall or can parts of it survive?

- Can a challenge to the insurance requirement be brought now, before the law goes into effect in 2014?

- Do new Medicaid requirements in the law impose excessive burdens on the states?

Is it legal for the federal government to kill a U.S. citizen overseas, someone who has never been charged or convicted of a crime? Civil liberties groups are condemning the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, but many legal scholars say it is fully justified.

No U.S. court has ever weighed in on the question, because judges consider these sorts of issues exclusively matters for the president. 

Anwar al-Awlaki's father, Nasser, with the help of the ACLU, sued President Obama, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and CIA Director Leon Panetta a year ago, when it became clear that the U.S. was targeting al-Awlaki. But Judge John Bates threw the case out, ruling that federal courts were in no position to evaluate whether someone was a terrorist whose activities threatened national security and against whom deadly force could be justified.

The ACLU lawyer who handled the case, Jameel Jaffer, said Friday the killing of al-Awlaki was a violation of both U.S. and international law.

"The government's authority to use lethal force against its own citizens should be limited to circumstances in which the threat to life is concrete, specific and imminent," Jaffer said. "It is a mistake to invest the president, any president, with the unreviewable power to kill any American whom he deems to present a threat to the country."

But Kenneth Anderson, an international law scholar at American University's Washington College of Law, said U.S. citizens, who take up arms with an enemy force, have been considered legitimate targets through two world wars, even if they are outside what is traditionally considered the battlefield.

"Where hostiles go, there is the possibility of hostilities," Anderson said. "The U.S. has never accepted the proposition that if you leave the active battlefield, suddenly you are no longer targetable."

Robert Chesney, an expert on international law at the University of Texas School of law, concluded in a recently written law review article that al-Awlaki could be legally killed "if he is in fact an operational leader within AQAP, as this role would render him a functional combatant in an organized armed group."

Further making it likely the U.S. Supreme Court will take up the health-care case this term, the Justice Department says it will urge the court to take an appeal of the challenge brought by Florida and 26 other states.

"The Department has consistently and successfully defended this law in several court of appeals, and only the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled it unconstitutional. We believe the question is appropriate for review by the Supreme Court," the Justice Department says in a statement. 

"Throughout history, there have been similar challenges to other landmark legislation such as the Social Security Act, the Civil Rights Act, and the Voting Rights Act, and all of those challenges failed. We believe the challenges to Affordable Care Act -- like the one in the 11th Circuit -- will also ultimately fail and that the Supreme Court will uphold the law," it says.

White House adviser Stephanie Cutter writes a lengthy blog post on the White House website, defending the decision, entitled, "Obama Administration Asks Supreme Court to Hear Health Care Lawsuit."

"There has been no shortage of lawsuits regarding the Affordable Care Act," Cutter writes. "Of course, whenever our nation is undertaking fundamental reform, legal challenges like this are nothing new. Just as challenges to the Social Security Act, the Civil Rights Act, and the Voting Rights Act all failed, challenges to health reform are failing as well. ... We know the Affordable Care Act is constitutional.  We are confident the Supreme Court will agree."

A move by the Justice Department -- due today -- may determine whether the Supreme Court takes up the titanic legal battle over the Obama health care bill this term or waits another year.

The government must say by today what it will do in response to a decision in August by a federal appeals court. Issuing a ruling in a lawsuit brought by Florida and 25 other states who challenged the law, a three-judge panel said Congress exceeded its powers in requiring that virtually all Americans buy health insurance.

Under federal rules, the Obama administration must give notice today if it wants the full appeals court to re-hear the Florida case. The Justice Department could opt to bypass the appeals court and go directly to the U.S. Supreme Court.

If the administration chooses today to bypass the appeals court in the Florida case, there's a good chance the Supreme Court would agree sometime during this coming term to hear the health-care challenges. But if the government seeks review by the full appeals court, then it's almost certain we'll have to wait another year -- which would mean that a decision on the Obama health-care law would be coming during the 2012 election year.
 
Two other courts of appeal have ruled on challenges to the law. One ruled that a legal challenge brought in Virginia was filed prematurely. The court said the financial penalty the law would impose on those who fail to buy insurance is actually a tax. A federal law, the Anti-Injunction Act, bars lawsuits seeking to challenge a tax provision before it goes into effect, the court said. 

A separate federal appeals court upheld the health-care law. The challengers in that case have already asked the Supreme Court to take up the issue.

Opening up a new front in its legal battles with the Obama administration, the state of Arizona on Thursday challenged the federal Voting Rights Act, prompting a swift response from Attorney General Eric Holder.

"The Voting Rights Act plays a vital role in our society by ensuring that every American has the right to vote and to have that vote counted,” Holder said. “The Department of Justice will vigorously defend the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act in this case, as it has done successfully in the past.”

Arizona is challenging the law's requirement that the state seek Justice Department approval for any changes in how elections are conducted. Many states are subject to the law's pre-clearance requirement, generally to remedy past restrictions that discouraged minority voting.

"Arizona is still penalized for archaic violations that were corrected with the implementation of bilingual ballots prior to the 1974 elections," said the state's Attorney General Tom Horne.  He noted that in 1974, Arizona became the second state to elect a Hispanic governor.

The Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional, Horne said, "because it suspends all changes to state election law, however innocuous, until pre-clearance is given by the federal government."

The state objects to the requirement that it seek federal approval to dissolve school districts that have no students and annex them to adjoining districts. Such a change would eliminate elected school board positions from the dissolved districts.

"A statute as innocuous as this has to go through an approval process with the Justice Department,” reads the state’s lawsuit, filed Thursday in federal court in Washington, DC. “Such laws cannot be justified by any power delegated to the federal government by the Constitution.”

Vowing to fight the challenge, Holder said the provisions challenged in this case, including the pre-clearance requirement, "were reauthorized by Congress in 2006 with overwhelming and bipartisan support,” he said. “The Justice Department will continue to enforce the Voting Rights Act, including each of the provisions challenged today.”

In his first public comment on last week's federal court ruling that declared the centerpiece of the health care law unconstitutional, President Obama today defended the law as good public policy but sidestepped, or chose to ignore, the legal issues at the core of the decision.

"It should not be controversial, but it has become controversial," the president said at a stop in Cannon Falls, MN.

"You've got a governor who's running for president right now who instituted the exact same thing in Massachusetts. This used to be a Republican idea, by the way, this whole idea of the individual mandate, and suddenly, it's like they got amnesia," he said, in a reference to Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor.

But in invalidating the requirement that virtually all Americans buy health insurance, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals explicitly noted that the Constitution gives states much broader powers than the federal government to regulate health care.

The health care industry "falls within the sphere of traditional state regulation," last Friday's ruling said.

"A state's role in safeguarding the health of its citizens is a quintessential component of its sovereign powers. The Supreme Court has declared that the 'structure and limitations of federalism ... allow the States great latitude under their police powers to legislate as to the protection of the lives, limbs, health, comfort, and quiet of all persons,'" the court said, quoting from a 2006 US Supreme Court decision on the limits of Congressional power.

Obama also said the individual insurance mandate is essential to the other features of his health-care reform plan.

"You can't not have health insurance, then go to the emergency room, and each of us, who've done the responsible thing and have health insurance, suddenly we now have to pay the premiums for you. That's not fair," he said.

It may not be fair, but that doesn't make the individual mandate constitutional, last week's appeals court ruling said.

Under the Obama administration's theory, the court said, "There is no reason why Congress could not similarly compel Americans to insure against any number of unforeseeable but serious risks. High costs and cost-shifting in premiums are simply not limited to hospital care, but occur when individuals are disabled, cannot work, experience an accident, need nursing care, die, and myriad other insurance-related contingencies."

The only other federal appeals court to consider the constitutionality of the health-care law came to the opposite conclusion. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the individual mandate in late June.

The losing sides in both cases could ask the full appeals courts to take up the question, or they could go directly to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Now in some non-campaign news.. The AP reports that the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that part of the federal health-care law -- the individual mandate -- is unconstitutional.

A divided three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday struck down the so-called individual mandate, siding with 26 states that had sued to block the law.

But the decision didn't go as far as a lower court that had invalidated the entire overhaul as unconstitutional... An appeals court and three federal judges have upheld the law, and two have invalidated it. Experts say the debate ultimately will be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Handing out the final decisions of the current term, the Supreme Court issued two -- one of which is related to politics.

It invalidated, by a 5-4 vote, a 1998 Arizona law that gave a financial boost to publicly funded candidates if their privately funded opponents spent more money.

Under the law, candidates who declined to accept campaign contributions could participate in the public financing system, which gave them a lump-sum grant for the campaign. But if an opponent, who was not publicly funded outspent the amount of the state grant, the publicly funded candidate received more money from the state to bring the candidates into rough spending parity.

The system was challenged on First Amendment grounds by several privately funded candidates, who claimed that they reined in their spending to avoid triggering the matching funds for their publicly funded opponents. The law, they argued, acted as a restraint on their campaigns and thus violated their free-speech rights.

From NBC's Pete Williams
A unanimous US Supreme Court today ruled that former attorney general John Ashcroft cannot be sued by a American-born Muslim man who claimed that he was improperly detained in the early days of the war on terror. The ruling is a blow to civil liberties groups who challenged a controversial post-9/11 policy.

The lawsuit was brought by Abdullah al-Kidd, who was arrested by the FBI as he sought to board a flight to Saudi Arabia in March 2003 for what he claimed was a study-abroad trip.

The government said he was needed to testify at a trial in Idaho of a man accused of helping al Qaeda run a computer-based recruiting network. Al-Kidd was held for 16 days as a material witness, but he was never called to testify at the trial.

Al-Kidd claimed his arrest amounted to unconstitutional preventive detention, and he said then-attorney general Ashcroft's approval of the practice amounted to a kind of "round up the usual suspects" policy forbidden by the Constitution. Lower courts said Ashcroft could be sued, but the Supreme Court today threw the case out.

The court held there was no constitutional violation, and even if there was, Ashcroft would be protected by the immunity public officials enjoy from lawsuits over their official acts.

A first for President Obama's term in office: Republicans derailed his nominee for the federal bench.
 
The president's choice for 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, Goodwin Liu, was blocked by the Senate after failing to reach the needed 60 votes to invoke cloture and proceed to a vote on the nomination itself.

Liu is a 39-year-old professor of law at University of California at Berkeley, and Republicans call him an ideologue who they believe would become a judicial activist if confirmed for the bench. Democrats pointed out the Liu received a wide range of endorsements. Liu had testified against the nominations of Supreme Court Justices Roberts and Alito.

Even GOP Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham -- who had been part of the so-called Gang of 14 that negotiated a deal to prevent judicial filibusters and defer to a president's choice except in "extraordinary cases" -- voted against Liu.

Alaska GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski broke with her party to support Liu's nomination. 

Democrats needed seven Republicans to join them.

From NBC's Pete Williams
In a victory for the Obama administration, a federal appeals court panel has lifted an injunction on the use of federal money to pay for research using embryonic stem cells.

Since 1996, Congress has banned the use of federal funds for research in which embryos were destroyed. President Obama acted to expand the use of stem cells by permitting the federal government to support research only on the stem cells themselves -- not the actual gathering of the cells from embryos, a policy which the administration said was entirely consistent with the law. But last year, a federal judge in Washington ruled that because embryos must be destroyed to get those cells, the congressional limitation bans using federal money on anything done with the cells later.

Today, by a 2-1 vote, the appeals court threw that injunction out, finding that the congressional research limitation is ambiguous. The federal government, it said, "seems reasonably to have concluded" that although the congressional ban blocks funding for the destructive act of deriving a stem cell from an embryo, it does not prohibit funding a research project in which such a cell will be used.

The government allows research using only stem cells derived from embryos that were created by in vitro fertilization for reproductive purposes and would otherwise be destroyed.

Last year's injunction threatened about 200 research projects that relied on federal money already granted. Because these grants were renewed every year, many of the researchers said they'd have to stop when the money ran out.

The National Institutes of Health is expected to comment on today's ruling later in the day.