The Supreme Court is not is session today, but somewhere a candle may burn on a birthday cake.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. turns 56 today.

The case in which Justice Elena Kagan asked her first oral argument question as a Supreme Court justice yielded the first opinion written by the Court’s newest associate justice.

Today Kagan announced the opinion she authored in the case Ransom v. FIA Card Services, in which the Court held 8-1 that a debtor in bankruptcy cannot deduct “vehicle ownership expenses” against his projected disposable income when he already owns his car fully and makes no car payments.

The case involved a bankruptcy filer who sought to deduct a total of $28,000 in car ownership costs, above the additional deduction available for car operation costs, like gas and maintenance. A creditor objected to his proffered plan.

“Today we hold that was a valid objection,” Kagan said in her statement this morning from the bench. “A person who does not have any car ownership expenses can’t take the deduction for ownership.”

The Court also held today in Mayo Foundation for Medical Ed. and Research v. U. S., that medical residents who earn stipends – as well as the hospitals they work for – must pay federal income taxes on the wages the residents receive. In an opinion authored by Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., the Court gave deference to the Treasury Department’s classification of medical residents as full-time employees rather than students who work part-time, and are often exempt from such taxes.

“We defer to the agency’s determination that medical residents are workers who study, not students who work,” Roberts said in announcing the ruling in Court this morning.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. opened the Supreme Court session a little before 10 a.m. today so that oral arguments in the first case could conclude in time for the Court to join a national moment of silence for the victims of Saturday’s attempt on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’ life which killed six people, including District Court Judge John Roll.

At the beginning of the session, Roberts invited the members of the audience to join the Court’s 11 a.m. observance “to honor the innocent victims.”

The moment of silence was marked at the Court at the same time President Barack Obama led a national silent observance at the White House and lawmakers likewise commemorated at the Capitol.

“I speak for the members of this Court in extending our condolences to the families of the victims,” Roberts said.

The new 112^th Congress kicks off its session today, and lawmakers – including new House Speaker John Boehner – will be sworn in. But it was Boehner’s staffers who got a Supreme treat yesterday.

All federal employees must take a constitutional oath. But yesterday Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. administered that oath to members of Boehner’s congressional staff during a closed-door ceremony in the congressman’s office.

The move was unusual – most staffers simply sign an oath without any pomp or circumstance, reports The New York Times‘ The Caucus blog. But the move isn’t unprecedented.

Supreme Court spokeswoman Kathy Arberg told the Times that Roberts has presided over a number of oath ceremonies, including those for the architect of the Capitol, board members at the Legal Services Corporation and the new ambassador to Australia.

Roberts has lot of experience administering oaths – remember that he did it twice for President Barack Obama.

In his memoir, “Decision Points,” former President George W. Bush seems clearly proud of his Supreme Court legacy – the appointments of Chief Justice John G. Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito. But he’s also still sour over the failed nomination of White House counsel Harriet Miers, blaming Washington conservative elitists for dooming her bid because she wasn’t a “fancy” Ivy Leaguer.

Bush also reveals how close he came to nominating two different people to fill the vacancies that emerged during his administration: Judges Priscilla Owen and Mike Luttig.

Roberts was initially nominated to replace Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who had announced her retirement. But after Chief Justice William Rehnquist died about six weeks later, Bush nominated Roberts for the chief justice position and renewed his search for a replacement for O’Connor. Be famously selected White House counsel Harriet Miers.

Miers’ tumultuous bid for the Supreme Court ended three weeks later after reports of growing criticism of her lack of judicial experience. But Bush blames conservatives, including Ann Coulter, for torpedoing Miers’ bid because the Southern Methodist University alum was more hoi polloi than Harvard.

“It seemed to me that there was another argument against Harriet, one that went largely unspoken: How could I name someone who did not run in elite legal circles?” Bush wrote, according to the Dallas Morning News. “Harriet had not gone to an Ivy League law school. Her personal style compounded the doubts. She is not glib. She is not fancy. She thinks hard before she speaks – a trait so rare in Washington that it is mistaken for intellectual slowness. As one conservative critic (Coulter) condescendingly put it, ‘However nice, helpful, prompt and tidy she is, Harriet Miers isn’t qualified to play a Supreme Court justice on “The West Wing,” let alone to be a real one.’”

Bush said his biggest regret was putting his friend Miers through the experience at all.

“While I know Harriet would have made a fine justice, I didn’t think enough about how the selection would be perceived by others,” Mr. Bush writes. “I put my friend in an impossible situation. If I had to do it over again, I would not have thrown Harriet to the wolves of Washington.”

Bush also revealed that he also seriously considered nominating Owen instead of Miers, but feared that Democrats may filibuster Owens’ bid, CBS News’ Jan Crawford reports.

Wanting an easier confirmation, he turned to Miers instead.

After Miers’ withdrawal, Bush nominated Alito. During a visit by Alito and his family to the White House after his confirmation, Bush said to him: “Sam, you ought to thank Harriet Miers for making this possible.” Alito responded: “Mr. President, you’re exactly right.”

Bush also reveals that Vice President Dick Cheney and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales didn’t initially back Roberts. Instead they preferred Luttig.

He also was keenly aware of his father’s disappointment in his pawn Supreme Court pick: Justice David Souter. Souter had “evolved into a different kind of judge than he expected,” Bush wrote.

Rep. Peter DeFazio is still hopping mad over the Supreme Court’s decision last term in Citizens United v. FEC – so mad, that the Oregon Democrat is floating the idea of trying to take Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr.’s job away.

Fazio told the Huffington Post that the 5-4 opinion lifting certain campaign spending caps on corporations amounted to judicial activism. By joining the majority, DeFazio reasoned, Roberts reneged on his pledge during his 2005 confirmation hearings not to make new law from the bench.

“I mean, the Supreme Court has done a tremendous disservice to the United States of America,” DeFazio said. “They have done more to undermine our democracy with their Citizens United decision than all of the Republican operatives in the world in this campaign. They’ve opened the floodgates, and personally, I’m investigating articles of impeachment against Justice Roberts for perjuring during his Senate hearings, where he said he wouldn’t be a judicial activist, and he wouldn’t overturn precedents.”

During his confirmation hearings, Roberts famously said: “Judges are like umpires. Umpires don’t make the rules; they apply them.”

Don’t expect articles of impeachment to be coming any time soon, however. The only Supreme Court justice to face an impeachment trial in Congress was Justice Samuel Chase – in 1804. And Chase won.

“I think it’s probably an understatement to say it’s extremely unlikely the House of Representatives will do anything about this,” said University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Law professor Michael J. Gerhardt. “Impeachment resolutions are introduced all the time, but very little comes of most of them, because most lack any merit and most just have no political support behind them.”

Do you read the disclosures that pop up on your screen before clicking on certain websites? How about the finely-printed warnings that accompany medications?

Yeah, neither does Chief Justice John Roberts, Jr.

“You open the thing and a folder falls out,” Roberts said a forum this week at Canisius College in his native Buffalo, the Washington Post reports. “The smallest type you can imagine and you unfold it like a map.”

Roberts acknowledged the reason that those hard-to-read disclosures we all ignore exist in the first place: lawyers.

“It is a problem, because the legal system obviously is to blame for that,” Roberts said, noting that such warnings make consumers less likely to read warnings, not more.

The solution?

“What the answer is, I don’t know,” Roberts said.

At the event Roberts weighed in on the issue of whether justice should attend the president’s State of the Union address. Some justices – including Roberts himself – have expressed discomfort about being present at an event with such a political atmosphere. Others, such as Justice Stephen Breyer, believe it is important for justices to be there.

“Some of my colleagues made the decision that they don’t want to go, period, and I think that’s something that’s up to each individual member of the court,” Roberts said.

Are the justices of the Supreme Court drunk on fame? Have they become “celebrities in robes?” Do they need a cure for their “unnecessary and unhealthy flamboyance?”

That is what two George Mason University School of Law professors believe. And they have a cure, they say.

In a paper set to be published in the George Washington Law Review, Profs. Craig S. Lerner and Nelson Lund lament the fact that the justices write self-indulgent opinions and dissents while on the job, then hobnob with celebrities like J.Lo and mambo in public (you listening, Justice Sotomayor?) or serve as Grand Marshall of Manhattan’s Columbus Day Parade and then light a cigarette for Sarah Jessica Parker (hear that, Justice Scalia?).

To put a stop to all this attention seeking, the professors propose, among other things, that the Court issue unsigned opinions.

“Truly unpretentious judicial servants should have no need to put their personal stamp on the law, and the practice of doing so has contributed to unnecessary and unhealthy flamboyance in the Court’s work,” the professors write. That would mean no more crime novel-themed opinions. (Sorry Mr. Chief Justice!)

Other suggestions the professors have for keeping a check on the bigness of the justices’ britches include barring law clerks from drafting opinions and requiring justices to ride the circuits on the lower courts.

HT: ABA Journal

Despite President Barack Obama’s public rapping of a Supreme Court ruling during the State of the Union address, and subsequent comments from Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. questioning why justices should even attend the politicized “pep rally,” yesterday Roberts said he and Obama get along well.

During an address at the Indiana University School of Law-Indianapolis, Roberts said when he and Obama see each other at official events they are friendly – although both realize they are limited in terms of conversation subjects. Presidents, “whether it’s President Bush or President Obama, recognize that they can’t talk to me about much, and I can’t talk to them about much,” Roberts said, according to the Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog. The usually safe topic of conversation? Fatherhood, Roberts said.

Speaking about his relationship with one of his colleagues, Roberts, who grew up in Indiana said: “I’ve always felt . . . a special affinity for Justice [John Paul] Stevens, who comes from Chicago…[P]eople from the Midwest have a certain openness about them.”

And while he disputed the notion that lawsuits are ruining the world, Roberts did say that “the federal courts are becoming more and more incapable of serving as forums for resolving disputes.”

Last week, during oral arguments at the Supreme Court, Deputy Solicitor General Neal K. Katyal urged the justices to find that the National Labor Relations Board had authority to act and issue opinions with only two members – as it had for more than two years.

The fact that the Senate had held up the confirmation of President Obama’s three nominees to the board – and had in fact blocked one of the candidates, union attorney Craig Becker, with a failed cloture vote – “underscores the general contentious nature of the appointment process with respect to this set of issues,” Katyal told the justices.

“And the recess appointment power doesn’t work why?” asked Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr.

Over the weekend Obama showed that the power does indeed work. With the Senate in recess for more than three days, Obama made 15 recess appointments to administration posts – including Becker to the NLRB.

Late last week Republican senators as well as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce urged Obama not the use the recess appointment power for Becker. They argued that Becker represented a campaign promise made by Obama to unions during the election, and that Becker would essentially push to authorize “card check” unionizations in worplaces after legislation that would have done so lost steam in Congress. Much more on the Becker brouhaha here from Lawyers USA.

Meanwhile oral arguments continue today at the Supreme Court. The justices will hear arguments in cases involving double jeopardy and securities law.

In other news:

Predicting Stevens’ replacement: Since no one else is waiting for Justice John Paul Stevens to actually retire before opining about who might replace him, we won’t either. (Lawyers USA)

Gun law ok’d: A a federal court has upheld the gun regulations enacted in the District of Columbia after the Supreme Court’s ruling in D.C. v. Heller. (The BLT Blog)

Money talk: What’s the impact of the latest federal court ruling rejecting a constitutional challenge by the Republican Party to some federal limits on donations to political parties? SCOTUSblog explains. (SCOTUSblog)