For political wonks, June is not the month to celebrate grads, dads, and brides, but instead the biggest SCOTUS month of the year. SCOTUS (for the un-wonky) stands for "Supreme Court Of The United States." June marks the end of the Supreme Court's yearly session, and it is when all the biggest decisions get handed down.

This year, there are many important decisions we'll be hearing about all month long, but the biggest two (or the two with the biggest political overtones, at any rate) will likely be held back until the very end of the month. They are Obergefell v. Hodges and King v. Burwell. The first will settle once and for all the question of marriage equality for same-sex couples, and the second will determine whether millions of Americans will lose their health insurance subsidies or not.

Now, guessing which way the court will rule is always a risky proposition. Some even call it a fool's game. Nevertheless, I'm going to go out on a limb today in a burst of (perhaps) foolish optimism, and predict that both decisions will actually be good news. We've already seen a flurry of "sky is going to fall" stories (especially over King) from liberals in the media, and my guess is that this trend is only going to increase, the closer we get to the end of the month. So I thought one article from a more optimistic perspective might be appreciated -- even if my guesses turn out to be utterly wrong, in the end. That, of course, is always the risk you run when going out on a limb during SCOTUS season. Time will tell whether I'm right or wrong, but for now, here's my take on these two cases, seen mostly through the lens of politics.

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We really wanted to use a different subtitle for today's column, one we are actually astonished that more news organizations didn't go with, given Rick Perry's announcement of his second run for the White House. That headline, of course, would have been: "Oops, He Did It Again!" Now, we do realize that the Britney Spears album is actually 15 years old (how time flies, eh?), but even so, with "Oops" being so central to defining Perry on the national stage, it certainly seemed like an obvious choice.

Perhaps the more shallow folks in the media were too occupied by the Caitlyn Jenner photo and the continuing fallout over the Josh Duggar revelations -- both of which sucked an astonishing amount of oxygen from the entire media this week. This even spilled over into the political news, as conservative heads exploded over the support Jenner received, while Mike Huckabee quietly scrubbed all Duggar endorsements from his campaign website.

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A flat month

This is going to be a rather abbreviated column, because President Obama's job approval poll numbers didn't change much either way in May. Not only were the changes minimal, it also flattened the trendlines out all the way back to February. Let's take a quick look at the chart to see what I'm talking about:

[Click on graph to see larger-scale version.]

May, 2015

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We continue our running series of taking a serious look at all the announced candidates for president with two new entries this week, one from each side of the aisle. Republican Lindsey Graham made his formal announcement earlier in the week, and today Democrat Lincoln Chafee is also set to announce his candidacy.

The two men are as different as chalk and cheese, as the old saying goes, but there is a thread of commonality running through both their campaign positions: they are both running to challenge the others in their own party on foreign policy grounds. Graham is running to be the hawkiest of the already-very-hawkish Republican field, and Chafee is going to challenge Hillary Clinton as being too hawkish on foreign policy. That's enough of a similarity to allow me to write a snappy headline, at the very least.

But rather than try to fit them both into some artificial construct of my own making, let's take a serious look at the two candidates, what they stand for and against, and then attempt to predict their chances in the race. And as I've done for the rest of these articles, I'm forgoing the use of snark for these candidate introductions -- but I do reserve the right to get snarky about them later, of course. Plenty of time for that in the weeks to come. For now, let's take a serious look at the two new entrants.

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So the USA FREEDOM Act is now on its way to President Obama's desk to be signed into law. I have a few disjointed thoughts on the process this bill went through, so bear with me because this means I'm about to write a rather disjointed column about it.

The first thing which strikes me is the name. Earlier this year, as an April Fool's joke, Congressman Mike Honda put up an amusing press release for his new "Accountability and Congressional Responsibility On Naming Your Motions (ACRONYM) Act," to spoof the popular tactic of coming up with cutesy names for bills to spell something out. You can see why I was reminded of this upon news of the passage of the "Uniting and Strengthening America by Fulfilling Rights and Ending Eavesdropping, Dragnet-collection, and Online Monitoring Act." Even properly using the acronym is painful, because both the USA FREEDOM Act (and the USA PATRIOT Act it replaces) are jarring to the eye -- the online equivalent of "shouting," due to all the capital letters. Most news organizations have just given up and gone with "Patriot Act" or "Freedom Act," even if it does break the style-book rules. I'm more of a stickler for detail, but that doesn't stop me from cringing every time I have to write USA PATRIOT Act (and, now, USA FREEDOM Act). Maybe passing Honda's bill wouldn't be such a joke after all. And maybe they should have gone for something more descriptive, perhaps the "Stopping NSA's Orwellian Warrantless Data Eavesdropping Now Act." The "SNOWDEN Act" certainly would more properly give credit where credit is due, wouldn't it?

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Yesterday, Senator Rand Paul stood firmly for his beliefs on the floor of the Senate. As a result, portions of the USA PATRIOT Act have been allowed to lapse today. Whether you think this is a tragedy, a victory, or even an absolute farce depends on your feelings for (or against) both the National Security Agency's metadata surveillance program and Senator Paul himself. But while others are debating the finer points of government surveillance, I'd instead prefer to focus on Paul's political tactics. Because, from where I'm sitting, Paul is to be admired and commended for both standing on principle and for using his position in the Senate to show the other candidates what actual (as opposed to rhetorical) leadership truly means.

Now, don't get me wrong -- I am not one of the "stand with Rand" bunch. I'm not endorsing either his candidacy or even his position on this particular issue. Instead, I'm merely offering up my own analysis and opinion on his tactics, of which I do approve. To do otherwise would be hypocritical of me, in fact.

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We're going to begin today with a rather loaded question. How much attention do you think the media should be paying towards a presidential nominee who is right now getting 13 to 15 percent support in public opinion polls of their party's voters?

It's a loaded question only because of a rampant double standard currently being applied by pretty much the entire media. The context of the answer matters, and it matters a whole lot. Republican Jeb Bush is currently at an average of 14.8 in the polls, and he has gotten quite a lot of press in the past month (to say the least). Bernie Sanders, however, is not getting nearly as much coverage, despite the fact that in two recent polls he was at 13 and 15 percent, respectively.

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Two things are worth noting here, before I jump in to taking a serious look (as I am doing for all announced presidential candidates from both parties) at the chances Martin O'Malley has of becoming president.

The first is that O'Malley comes with a built-in headline, which you'll notice I am using today. I have to warn you -- you'll be seeing a lot of this headline in the next few days, as the media covers his official entry into the race for the Democratic nomination for president. There's a reason all us pundits are going to be echoing the same headline, and that reason is: "O'Malley's March" is the name of a Celtic rock band that Martin O'Malley is a member of (and, assumably from the band's name, leads). So "O'Malley's march to the nomination" is going to be an early theme, because (after all) what pundit can resist a politician with a built-in headline? I certainly can't, that's for sure.

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For those of you keeping score at home, the list of official Republican candidates for president is growing by two names this week: Rick Santorum and George Pataki. This brings the official total to eight, as these two join those who have already declared: Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, Mike Huckabee, Rand Paul, and Marco Rubio. Santorum is announcing today and Pataki has scheduled his big announcement for tomorrow.

As with all the other candidates who have officially thrown their hats in the ring, today we will take a serious look at Santorum and Pataki, and attempt to predict what their chances for victory could be. [A side note: tune in to this column tomorrow when we'll be taking a look at Martin O'Malley over on the Democratic side, who is expected to make his own formal announcement over the upcoming weekend. Also, in the Republican on-deck circle are Lindsey Graham (scheduled announcement June 1) and Rick Perry (scheduled for June 4), but we'll get to them next week.]

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Please note that today's headline does not refer to a GOP race "to the bottom," but rather "at the bottom." Examining Republicans racing towards the bottom (however you define that concept) would be an entirely different subject, but what I'm talking about today is what is likely to become the most fierce fighting within the Republican Party's primary campaign -- the race at the very bottom of the polling -- because it will soon have an outsized importance for the overall contest to see which Republican will become the presidential nominee.

The Republican National Committee has (so far) successfully ducked responsibility for what is shaping up to be a very contentious issue: who, exactly, is allowed on stage at the Republican debates. They've essentially passed this baton to Fox News, which will be hosting the first debate of the season (on the sixth of August). Fox recently announced that they'll only allow 10 candidates on their stage, to be determined by an average of the five most recent nationwide polls. This is a lot of candidates, to be sure, but even so, the Republican field is expected to have somewhere around 15 candidates (perhaps as low as 14, but also perhaps even more than 16). This means some are guaranteed to be left out in the cold.

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