Lyle Denniston reports:
A gay rights group, renewing its challenge to the military’s “don’t ask/don’t tell” policy against gays in the services, asked the Supreme Court on Friday afternoon to block that ban as the test case over its constitutionality moves on in lower federal courts. Specifically, the Log Cabin Republicans urged the Court to lift the stay issued last Monday by the Ninth Circuit that allowed the ban to stay in effect during the appeal. The application is docketed as 10A465; it can be found here.
Read more on SCOTUSBlog.
By the end of the day, Justice Kennedy, who had received the filing, had asked the federal government for a response to the plea, to be filed by 5 p.m. next Wednesday.
Mark Thompson, writing in Time, thinks that this court is unlikely to second-guess the military, but Ed O’Keefe, writing in the Washington Post, notes that Justice Kennedy, who received the Log Cabin Republicans’ filing, can either rule on the case on his own or refer it to the entire court.
I’d like to hear some constitutional scholars comment more on whether Kennedy is likely to refer this to the whole court or not.