A federal judge in DC swiftly approved the foreclosure fraud settlement yesterday. Actually four of the consent orders with the five largest mortgage servicers were approved Wednesday, but we only learned publicly of the approval of all five settlements yesterday.

Some investor groups had talked about challenging the terms of the settlement, but this approval happened so quickly, and without even so much as a hearing, that they had no time to react. This is the very definition of a rubber stamp.

A federal appeals court judge on the Fifth Circuit pretty much freaked out yesterday during a trial with a member of the Justice Department, pouncing on President Obama’s comments about the Supreme Court’s health care case and badgering counsel on whether judicial review exists. The judge is displaying more ego than sense.

The Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United decision left open the ability of Congress to pass disclosure rules regarding campaign contributions. Now a ruling in a Federal Election Commission case would force some level of disclosure of those who fund campaign ads.

I don’t care what you think about the health care law, a structure of government with a judicial review that feels free to parse legislation line by line and make what amount to ideological pronouncements on what can go forward and what cannot sounds a death rattle for progressive governance over time.

The conservative majority on the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 today that police have the discretion to strip search people arrested even for minor offenses. I’m just not feeling the bow to judicial restraint here. The Court explicitly ruled that you can get strip-searched if jailed for failure to pay a speeding ticket. That was the underlying case here (and it was actually a false arrest, as the man did pay the ticket). What happens if you’re arrested for protesting in front of the Supreme Court, or the White House?

Giving post-mortems on the question of health care at the Supreme Court is premature, and as law professor David Cole writes, you can find as much evidence for upholding Obamacare in the text of the arguments as you can evidence for tossing it out.

However, as a political spectacle, with the eyes of the nation upon them, it was clear to see that we have a large contingent, perhaps a majority, of committed judicial activists on the Court.

I never got around to summarizing the arguments from the fourth and last health care question at the Supreme Court, looking at whether or not the Medicaid expansion in the bill is unconstitutional. If the Court found this, it would unravel decades of federal-state partnerships in social policy and would create far more chaos than striking down just the mandate. Plus, more than half of the coverage expansion in Obamacare comes from this expansion of Medicaid, so it matters at a practical level as well.

If the arguments are any guide, then, the choice would be, in the event of the mandate being found unconstitutional, between tossing the regulations with the mandate, or tossing the whole law. The mandate won’t come out alone, if form holds and everyone to the right of Kennedy agrees.

As part of the foreclosure fraud settlement, Lynn Szymoniak won an $18 million judgment for her work in helping expose document fraud. However, she has to wait at least a couple months for the formal blessing of the settlement by a US district court judge to reap her reward. Meanwhile, she is still in foreclosure proceedings with Deutsche Bank. And they seem to be going out of their way to humiliate her.

On the third and final day of the Supreme Court hearings on Obamacare, the Justices will hear arguments on two separate issues. One concerns severability. If one portion of the law is found unconstitutional, such as the mandate, does that require the Court to strike down related provisions, or even the entire law?