CARRIE SEVERINO on the oral argument in NLRB v. Noel Canning. “The arguments seemed to be a decided success for those challenging the appointments. The justices across the board seemed to appreciate how ad hoc and self-serving the administration’s defense of its actions are. So I don’t expect this to be a 5–4 decision that gets invoked by liberals as evidence of a conservative bench and by conservatives as evidence of how politicized the liberal justices have become. The result could be unanimous or nearly so, although the reasoning could well be fractured.”