Supreme Court Will Release Same-Day Audio Of Health Care Arguments

The Supreme Court will make available same-day audio of upcoming oral arguments later this month, arguments that could determine the fate of the health care overhaul. In a three-paragraph announcement, the Court said it is making the same-day audio available because of the "extraordinary public interest" in the health care cases. The legal challenges to the law are to be argued for six hours over a three-day period at the end of March. The Court will not allow C-SPAN to televise the hearings. Ordinarily, the audio would not be available until the end of the argument week. Chief Justice John Roberts began the Friday postings online in 2010 in an effort to make audio regularly available. Prior to that, audio was only rarely, if ever available. Although the court began recording its public sessions in 1955, it did not make the recordings available to the general public until 1993. Even then, no audio was released until the end of each Supreme Court term, as much as a year after it took place. The first time audio was made available on a same-day basis was for the arguments in Bush v. Gore, the case that decided the presidential election in 2000. After that, same-day audio was made available only episodically and rarely, when the Court acceded to media requests.