This story was originally published on Wed May 15, 2013 5:01 PM EDT

DAILY RUNDOWN: NBC's Pete Williams reports on the main argument in Tuesday's Supreme Court case, "Is Proposition 8 constitutional?" 

TODAY: The Supreme Court will hear arguments today as they consider whether or not California's same-sex marriage ban is constitutional. If the court strikes down Proposition 8, same-sex marriage would resume in California. NBC's Pete Williams reports and legal analyst Lisa Bloom discusses the case.

NIGHTLY NEWS: As public opinion on gay marriage continues to shift, the U.S. Supreme Court will consider whether the federal government can refuse to recognize it, and whether the states can ban it in the first place. NBC's Pete Williams reports. 

In a historic oral argument on a challenge to state laws that limit marriage to heterosexual couples, the Supreme Court indicated Tuesday that it might not strike down such laws.

The justice whom many observers view as the swing vote in the case, Justice Anthony Kennedy, voiced worry at one point during the argument that proponents of same-sex marriages were asking the court to issue a decision that would “go into uncharted waters.”

After the oral argument, Pete Williams of NBC News reported that it seemed “quite obvious that the U.S. Supreme Court is not prepared to issue any kind of sweeping ruling” declaring that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry.

Williams said there seemed to be “very little eagerness” from any of the justices to “embrace that broad a ruling.”

LISTEN: Audio of the oral arguments

At issue Tuesday was California’s Proposition 8, the state constitutional amendment enacted by voters in 2008 that limits marriage to one man-one woman couples. Those seeking to have the court strike down Proposition 8 argue that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment includes a right for same-sex couples to marry.

Williams said that both the liberal and the conservative justices seemed wary of issuing a decision that would apply to any state outside of California.

Art Lien

A courtroom sketch of the oral arguments.

It seemed possible the court would not issue any ruling on marriage at all – deciding instead that it had made a mistake in even agreeing to hear the case since the plaintiffs, supporters of Proposition 8, might lack the legal standing to bring the suit.

“I just wonder if the case was properly granted,” Kennedy said at one point to attorney Theodore Olson who was representing those challenging the California law.

And a few justices seemed to imply that it might be prudent for the court to step back and allow the states to assess what the effects of same-sex marriages might be.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor said at one point, “If the issue is letting the states experiment and letting the society have more time to figure out its direction, why is taking a case now the answer?”

Along similar lines, Justice Samuel Alito said “there isn't a lot of data” about the social effects of the institution of same-sex marriage.

“And it may turn out to be a good thing; it may turn out not to be a good thing, as the supporters of Proposition 8 apparently believe,” Alito said to Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, who was arguing for the Obama administration, as a friend of the court, in opposition to Proposition 8.

“But you want us to step in and render a decision based on an assessment of the effects of this institution which is newer than cell phones or the Internet?”

Alito added, “On a question like that, of such fundamental importance, why should it not be left for the people, either acting through initiatives and referendums or through their elected public officials?”

Kennedy, while expressing those same concerns, also noted, “On the other hand, there is an immediate legal injury or legal – what could be a legal injury, and that's the voice of these children. There are some 40,000 children in California ... that live with same-sex parents, and they want their parents to have full recognition and full status.”

It is possible that a majority of the justices could support a ruling that applies only to California – or one that applies only to California and several other states which allow domestic partnerships that are almost identical to marriage in all but name.

During the argument, Justice Antonin Scalia was the one justice who voiced the most skepticism about the argument that limiting marriage to heterosexual couples is a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.

He said to Olson, “I'm curious, when did it become unconstitutional to exclude homosexual couples from marriage? 1791? 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted? Was it always unconstitutional?”

Olson replied that “when we as a culture determined that sexual orientation is a characteristic of individuals that they cannot control” then at that point limiting marriage became unconstitutional.

Scalia then asked, “When did that happen?”

Olson responded, “There's no specific date in time. This is an evolutionary cycle.”

At another point Chief Justice John Roberts asked Olson whether those seeking to strike down Proposition 8 were interested only in the label “marriage,” since the state of California already grants same-sex couples almost all the legal protections and rights provided to heterosexual married couples.

“So it's just about the label in this case,” Roberts said.

“The label "marriage" means something,” Olson answered.

But Roberts then observed, “If you tell a child that somebody has to be their friend, I suppose you can force the child to say, ‘this is my friend,’ but it changes the definition of what it means to be a friend.”

Court observers caution that one should not read too much into the questions the justices ask and the comments they make during oral argument since they don’t necessarily reflect how any particular justice would ultimately vote in the case.

Charles Cooper, who served in the Reagan administration as assistant attorney general in charge of the Office of Legal Counsel, argued the case Tuesday for supporters of Proposition 8.

Although the justices are deciding a constitutional question, the argument is taking place as polls indicate that public opinion is shifting toward acceptance of same-sex marriage.

In recent years, nine states, either through court rulings, legislation, or ballot measures, have redefined marriage to include same-sex couples. But most states have laws or constitutional provisions that define marriage as the union of one man and one woman.

More elected officials, such as Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, and Sen. Jon Tester, D- Mont., are personally endorsing same-sex marriage, but it remains to be seen whether the justices will be influenced by public opinion.

In a statement Tuesday, Tester said, "no one should be able to tell a Montanan or any American who they can love and who they can marry."

Three weeks ago Tester signed an amicus brief filed by Democratic members of Congress urging the justices to overturn part of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act.

On Wednesday the high court will hear oral arguments in that challenge to one section of the Defense of Marriage Act, which for purposes of federal regulations and benefits, defines marriage as “a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife.”

This story was originally published on Tue Mar 26, 2013 4:01 AM EDT

DAILY RUNDOWN: President Barack Obama was greeted by a crowd in Ramallah Thursday, as only the third sitting president to visit Palestinian territories. The Daily Rundown's guest host Chris Cillizza reports.

TODAY: Just 24 hours after President Obama met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian National Authority, welcomed the president to Ramallah, in their first meeting in over a year. NBC's Chuck Todd reports.

MITCHELL REPORTS: Meet the Press moderator David Gregory and Dana Weiss, host of Israel's Meet the Press, explain whether President Barack Obama's speech showed a new approach to talking about the peace process. 

NIGHTLY NEWS:During a press conference Wednesday in Israel only two questions were permitted from American journalists, prompting the President to call out correspondent Chuck Todd on his multi-part question. NBC's Brian Williams reports. 

MORNING JOE: Top Talkers: New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has criticized Washington's inability to avert the sequester cuts, and the Morning Joe panel -- including GOP strategist Steve Schmidt and Time's Mark Halperin -- discusses why Christie is in the right and why he's well-positioned if he chooses to run in 2016.

DAILY RUNDOWN: Politico's Maggie Haberman, Alex Wagner, the Host of MSNBC's Now with Alex Wagner, and Editor at Large for Time Magazine Nancy Gibbs join The Daily Rundown's Chuck Todd to talk about the 2016 presidential election and whether Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton will possibly run.

NIGHTLY NEWS: As he starts a tour to publicize his new book about immigration reform, former Florida governor Jeb Bush is initiating a tough conversation about his party's inability to reach minority voters. NBC's Chuck Todd reports. 

In the raucous debate over the cuts in federal spending, also known as the sequester, which began taking effect Friday, a lot of numbers are being tossed around -- $85 billion, $42 billion, $1.2 trillion. And lots of adjectives, too -- “massive,” “deep,” “severe,” “arbitrary” and more.

You’d think that numbers would be more precise than adjectives, but there’s no agreement on the correct number to describe the size of the spending cuts required by the 2011 Budget Control Act.

The Congressional Budget Office explained last week that while the often-used figure of $85 billion “represents the reduction in budgetary resources available to government agencies this year” – the cash that would be on hand for agencies to spend -- in fact “not all of that money would have been spent in this fiscal year.”

Why is that?

Federal departments and agencies would have used some of that $85 billion to “enter into contracts to buy goods or services to be provided and paid for next year or in subsequent years,” the CBO said.

For instance, if the Navy is buying some submarines or if the Missile Defense Agency is buying new satellites, it may take them a few years to spend the money to do so.

Thus, since not all of the $85 billion would have been spent anyway in the current fiscal year, the CBO said that in fact $42 billion will be the actual size of the cut in outlays in the fiscal year which ends on Sept. 30.

And how large is $42 billion when compared to the total amount of federal outlays?

The federal government’s outlays this fiscal year will total $3.55 trillion, according to the CBO’s latest estimate. Do the arithmetic and you’ll see that $42 billion is 1.16 percent of what the federal government would have spent this year if there had there been no sequester.

A 1.16 percent cut does not seem “massive.”

But the cuts do not apply equally across the board to every single category of federal spending – even though the term “across the board” is often used to describe the cuts.

In reality, the Budget Control Act was designed to shield much federal spending from the spending cuts.

Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP

The White House is seen through a chain-link fence where the inaugural reviewing stand once stood, Monday, March 4, 2013, in Washington, as the tear down on Pennsylvania Avenue from the inaugural neared completion.

What’s exempt is most mandatory spending -- the spending that goes to Medicare and Social Security for the old and the disabled, Medicaid and SNAP payments (“food stamps”) for the poor,  payments to low-income people in the form of tax credits, interest payments on the debt, federal employee retirement benefits, and other categories.

(The sequester does cut Medicare’s payments to hospitals, physicians, and the administrators of certain Medicare services by two percent.)

Since mandatory spending, which accounts for two-thirds of all federal spending, is mostly off limits, the spending cuts are highly concentrated on the remaining third of the budget, what’s called “discretionary spending” – the kind of spending that Congress would normally decide each year in its appropriations bills, sometimes increasing the amount spent on some items and perhaps lowering the amounts spent on others.

An example of discretionary spending: the money that goes to the National Science Foundation, which has an annual budget of about $7 billion and funds research in everything from the stickiness of spider webs to the demise of coral reefs in the Florida Keys.

In percentage terms, the CBO said, the amount available to spend for defense (other than for military personnel) will be cut by about 8 percent and the amount available for nondefense discretionary items will be cut by about 6 percent.

The Obama administration’s Office of Management and Budget has a higher estimate: a reduction in available money of 13 percent for defense programs and 9 percent for nondefense programs for the remaining seven months of this fiscal year.

Defense spending accounted last year for about 18 percent of all federal spending. Under the sequester, defense spending will bear a disproportionately large share of the cuts. And since the law gave President Obama the discretion to exempt military service members’ pay from the cuts (and he did so) the defense cuts will fall heavily on daily operations and maintenance, activities such as training missions for Navy aviators.

Finally, what about that other number that Obama used in his State of the Union address: “about a trillion dollars’ worth of budget cuts”?

Obama was referring to the full 10-year budget forecasting period and assuming that the Budget Control Act will remain in effect for the entire period.

If the automatic spending cut provisions were to remain in effect, they would reduce deficits by at least $1.2 trillion over the 10-year period from 2012 to 2021, the CBO has estimated. Total federal outlays over the next ten years will amount to $45 trillion.

This story was originally published on Mon Mar 4, 2013 10:37 AM EST

TODAY: President Obama signed an order allowing deep automatic budget cuts to become law, as he and House Speaker John Boehner pass the blame for doing nothing to stop the measures. NBC's Chuck Todd reports.

NIGHTLY NEWS:CNBC's John Harwood joins Lester Holt for more on the sequester. 

MORNING JOE: Top Talkers: As expected, the $85B in spending cuts kicked in on Friday, March 1, 2013. The totality of the impact will be felt slowly, and several members of both sides of the aisle are discussing the cuts and what they mean for the country. The Morning Joe panel -- including Mike Barnicle and former senior advisor for the McCain–Palin campaign Nicolle Wallace -- discusses.

If Wednesday’s argument before the Supreme Court is any indication, a majority of the justices seemed inclined to strike down or curtail key sections of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.  Even if the court does move in that direction, election officials in some states will have more leeway to change some procedures, but voters in 2014 won’t suddenly wake up in 1964.   

Hearing a challenge brought by Shelby County, Ala., several justices voiced skepticism about the formula the law uses to decide which states and other jurisdictions are required to get permission, or “preclearance,” from the Justice Department or a federal court in Washington for any change in voting procedures that they seek to make.

In 2006 Congress reauthorized Section 5 of the law for another 25 years. The current formula uses election data from 1972 and earlier to determine which places section 5 applies to. Critics of the law say the formula is archaic and ought to be scrapped.

Currently nine states, mostly in the South, as well as 54 counties in New York, California, Florida, North Carolina and South Dakota and 12 townships in Michigan and New Hampshire, are covered by section 5.

What effect would a ruling which struck down or curbed section 5 have on elections in the United States?

Would parts of the country now covered by section 5 revert to the days of poll taxes, literacy tests, murders of voter registration workers, racial gerrymandering of districts, and other devices to negate the power of African-American, Latino and other minority voters?

The short answer is no, and that’s because a separate section of the Voting Rights Act, section 2 – which is a permanent part of the statute and need not be periodically renewed, as section 5 must be – bans voting procedures that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership in one of the language minority groups identified by the law, which includes not only Spanish, but Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean and several Native American and Alaska Native language groups.

In recent years, the Justice Department, under both Republican and Democratic presidential administrations, has brought section 2 voting discrimination cases against jurisdictions in Massachusetts, Montana, Illinois, California, South Carolina, and several other states.

For example, in 2009 the Justice Department took action against Salem County, New Jersey and the borough of Penns Grove, N.J. for allegedly discriminating against Puerto Rican voters.

The Department charged that local election officials had never translated the ballot into Spanish in any election held in Penns Grove, and thus “numerous voters of Puerto Rican descent who cannot understand the ballot in English have been unable to fully exercise their voting rights.”

Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

With images of murdered Mississippi civil rights worker Medgar Evers, demonstrators rally in front of the U.S. Supreme Court February 27, 2013 in Washington, DC.

These kinds of enforcement actions will continue under section 2 no matter what the high court decides on section 5.

But the Solicitor General Donald Verrilli argued Wednesday that getting rid of section 5 – and its requirement that covered jurisdictions get pre-approval of their voting procedures – will make it more costly and time consuming for voters to challenge allegedly discriminatory practices. He said section 5 has a deterrent effect – blocking discriminatory practices before they’re ever implemented.

He said polling place changes are the most frequent type of election procedure submitted to the Justice Department under Section 5. “Changes in the polling places at the last minute before an election can be a source of great mischief,” he told the justices. 

He contended that “there is no way in the world you could use Section 2 to effectively police that kind of mischief.” Given the cost of litigation, he said, “The cost-benefit ratio is… going to tilt strongly against bringing these suits.”

Michael Pitts, an expert on the Voting Rights Act who is a professor at Indiana University School of Law and who worked on voting rights cases when he served as a trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, said, “There is certainly a possibility of more last-minute mischief with polling places if Section 5 were struck down.”

He said Section 5 enforcement actions “are rather simple. To attempt to get the same results using other provisions of the Voting Rights Act, such as Section 2, will be much harder.”

Responding to Justice Anthony Kennedy’s suggestion during Wednesday’s argument that some Justice Department attorneys who now are working on section 5 could shifted to section 2 enforcement, Pitts said, “The problem with Section 2 lawsuits is that at the very least, DOJ has to find out about the problem, then they have to conduct an extensive investigation before filing a lawsuit, and then they have to spend lots of time and resources to win the case.  Section 2 cases are not easy to win.”

University of Georgia political science professor Charles Bullock, an expert on the Voting Rights Act and Southern politics, said elimination of section 5 would “probably not” make a difference in voter registration or voting in places that are now covered by section 5.

He said in section 5 covered jurisdictions, black registration and turnout “is pretty much at the same level” as registration and turnout among white voters. He added, “Hispanic registration and participation rates are lower but that’s true whether you’re looking at section 5 states or looking at states which are not subject to section 5.”

Bullock said that when it comes to drawing new district line for state legislatures and for House seats that due to section 2, “there would still very much be a protection in place against actions which were found to be discriminatory even if section 5 were to be struck down.”

Bullock said one major change that came about as a result of section 2 was the elimination of at-large districts for school boards, county councils, etc. and the move to single-member districts. At-large districts had been used to dilute the power of minority voters.

If the court eliminates section 5, “Would they (local officials) go back to at-large elections?” He thinks not, because “politicians tend to like the system under which they have succeeded, and they think there’s less uncertainty in a system which they’ve already worked successfully. County council or school board members elected under a single-member district system would be reluctant to go back to at-large elections even if that was what was traditionally done until, say 20, years ago.”

Bullock said if section 5 is struck down he does expect some of the now-covered states would move to enact voter identification laws which the Justice Department has so far blocked from enacting.

One unknown is how Congress would react if the high court does strike down section 5. Would it devise an updated formula, perhaps based on 2012 data, for that tried to target jurisdictions with large disparities of minority and white voter turnout? Would it use some other metric? It’s too soon to know, but it’s worth recalling that in 2006 Congress chose to avoid the difficulty of writing a new coverage formula – one reason the Shelby County case reached the high court.

This story was originally published on Thu Feb 28, 2013 1:35 PM EST

TODAY: The president hits the road today, heading to a Naval shipyard in Virginia in an attempt to build public support against a slew of spending cuts set to go into effect on Friday. NBC's Chuck Todd reports.

MORNING JOE: Must-Read Op-Eds: Before discussing Steve Rattner's charts on the potential effects of the sequester, Mika Brzezinski reads from a David Brooks NYT opinion column on why great presidents "...see situations differently" and why "[h]istory pivots around their terms."

DAILY RUNDOWN: Gov. Bob McDonnell, R-Va.,  joins The Daily Rundown's Chuck Todd to discuss sequester and how it will affect the state of Virginia as well as the state's comprehensive transportation bill. McDonnell also talks state politics showing his support for Ken Cuccinelli.

NIGHTLY NEWS: Lawmakers are emphasizing the urgency of preventing the large federal budget cuts from going into effect, so why wasn't there any progress all weekend? NBC's Peter Alexander reports. 

TODAY: As the clock ticks down with no signs of progress in Congress, President Obama is issuing warnings about the consequences of a sequester, including fewer FBI agents on the job, longer airport security lines, and more. NBC's Peter Alexander reports.

DAILY RUNDOWN: With less than 100 hours until the budget ax falls on Friday, President Barack Obama will meet with the nation's governors on Monday and later take his campaigning to Virginia. The Daily Rundown's Chuck Todd reports. 

MORNING JOE: Top Talkers: On Friday, March 1, 2013, $85B in spending cuts are set to kick in unless Democrats and Republicans can work out a deal to avoid the sequester. The Morning Joe panel – including the Council on Foreign Relations' Richard Haass and Mike Barnicle – discusses.

DAILY RUNDOWN: Chuck Todd talks about President Barack Obama’s praise for a bipartisan proposal on immigration reform.

MORNING JOE: Sen. John McCain, D-Ariz., and Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., discuss a bipartisan plan taking shape in the Senate that would reform the country's current immigration laws.

TODAY: The president will be traveling to Las Vegas, Nevada, to talk about the need for immigration reform just a day after a bipartisan group of senators unveiled their plan for dealing with the roughly 11 million undocumented people in this country. NBC's Kristen Welker reports.

NIGHTLY NEWS: NBC's Chuck Todd examines the immigration overhaul that could pass by late spring or early summer.

NIGHTLY NEWS: Four months after the attack in Benghazi, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave her final testimony to the House and Senate, showing rare public emotion and taking responsibility for what happened. NBC's Andrea Mitchell reports. 

MORNING JOE: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday, January 23, 2013 on the Sept. 11, 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya. The Morning Joe panel – including Random House's Jon Meacham, Donny Deutsch, NBC News' Kelly O'Donnell and economic analyst Steve Rattner – discusses. NBC News' Andrea Mitchell also reports.

DAILY RUNDOWN: The Gaggle discuss Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the Benghazi hearings and talk about the possibilities for her political future.