Who has it right? Kagan or Alito?

 The issue -- Can Congress regulate the Supreme Court.  Alito says no.  Kagan says yes.  Here's the intro from the NY Times, which covers the debate:

As a young lawyer in the Reagan White House, John G. Roberts Jr. was tartly dismissive of the Supreme Court’s long summer break, which stretches from the end of June to the first Monday in October.

“Only Supreme Court justices and schoolchildren,” he wrote in 1983, “are expected to and do take the entire summer off.”

On the other hand, the young lawyer wrote, there is an upside to the break: “We know that the Constitution is safe for the summer.”

These days, members of the court find time to quarrel about the Constitution even in the warm months. The primary antagonists lately have been Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Elena Kagan.

From the body:

The question is timely, of course, as news reports have raised ethical questions about, among other things, luxury travel provided to Justices Alito and Clarence Thomas. Those reports have led to proposed legislation to impose new ethics rules on the court.

Justice Alito, in an interview published in The Wall Street Journal last month, appeared to object, saying that “Congress did not create the Supreme Court.”

He added: “I know this is a controversial view, but I’m willing to say it. No provision in the Constitution gives them the authority to regulate the Supreme Court — period.”

A few days later, at a judicial conference in Portland, Ore., Justice Kagan took the opposite view, though she cautioned that The Journal had not reproduced the question that had prompted Justice Alito’s answer. She indicated, graciously, that he could not have meant what he seemed to say.

“Of course Congress can regulate various aspects of what the Supreme Court does,” she said, ticking off a list of ways in which lawmakers can act. Congress sets the court’s budget. It can increase or shrink the size of the court, and it has over the years done both. It can make changes to the court’s jurisdiction.

Indeed, the Constitution provides that the court has appellate jurisdiction “with such exceptions, and under such regulations as the Congress shall make.”

All of this is unsurprising, Justice Kagan said.

“It just can’t be that the court is the only institution that somehow is not subject to any checks and balances from anybody else,” she said, adding, “I mean, we are not imperial.”

Meantime, if you prefer debates about typography, this NLJ article is for you.  It goes through the various fonts, margins, and line spacing for the different Circuits.  The 7th earns praise.  Not so much for the 11th.