Court keeps upcoming health care decision secret

WASHINGTON — It's 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 will rule on the constitutionality of President Barack Obama's health care overhaul.

This is information that could move markets, turn economies and greatly affect this fall's national elections, including the presidential contest between Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney. But unlike the Congress and the executive branch, the Supreme Court appears to truly value silence when it comes to upcoming court opinions.

No one talks, and that's the way they like it.

Contrast this with the rest of the government, which couldn't keep secret Obama's role in supervising an unprecedented U.S. cyberattack on Iran's nuclear facilities or the existence of a double agent inside al-Qaida's Yemen branch who tipped the U.S. to a new design for a bomb to put on a jetliner.

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 don't talk, and those who talk don't 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.

In addition to 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 Court's 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.

If any of these people also know anything about how the case is going to come out, they're not talking.