Mediaboss Marketing

WASHINGTON Its the biggest secret in a city known for not keeping them.

The nine Supreme Court justices and more than three dozen other people have kept quiet for more than two months about how the high court is going to rule on the constitutionality of President Barack Obamas health care overhaul.

This is information that could move markets, turn economies and greatly affect this falls national elections, including the presidential contest between Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney. But unlike the Congress and the executive branch, which seem to leak information willy-nilly, the Supreme Court, from the chief justice down to the lowliest clerk, appears to truly value silence when it comes to upcoming court opinions, big and small.

No one talks, and thats the way they like it.

Contrast this with the rest of the government, which couldnt keep secret President Barack Obamas direct role in supervising an unprecedented U.S. cyberattack on Irans nuclear facilities or the existence of a double agent inside al-Qaidas Yemen branch who tipped the U.S. to a new design for a bomb to put on a jetliner.

As Republicans air their suspicion that the leaks might be deliberate to enhance the Obama administrations stature, Attorney General Eric Holder has appointed two U.S. attorneys to investigate those two disclosures and probably additional recent national security leaks. Because far more people, of necessity, know about such secret national security operations, those investigators must examine hundreds, even thousands, of federal workers who might have known at least a chunk of the guarded information.

The Supreme Court is expected to rule on the law in the upcoming week or so. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, speaking to a lawyers convention June 15, noted a steady stream of rumors and fifth-hand accounts in the media about what the high court was likely to do.

My favorite among the press pieces wisely observed: At the Supreme Court ... those who know dont talk, and those who talk dont know, she said.

The justices, of course, know, having officially voted on the results the same week they heard arguments. But they are not the only ones in the loop: Each of the nine justices has four clerks who know not only how their justice voted but also how the other justices stand because these clerks help research and craft the majority opinions and dissents that are circulated for justices to sign if they agree.

In addition these 45 people surely in the know, there are an assorted number of secretaries, aides, security guards, janitors, support staff and family members keenly attuned to the inner workings of the Supreme Courts upper floors where the justices keep their chambers. At the last moment possible, printers who prepare the paper opinions to be handed out will know.

See the article here:
Mum really is the word on Obama health care ruling