The White House has taken charge of the confirmation process for Solicitor General Elena Kagan’s nomination to the Supreme Court, National Public Radio reported Tuesday.

During the Bush and Clinton administrations, the nerve center for the confirmation process was run out of the Justice Department.

Former Assistant Attorney General for Legal Policy Rachel Brand, now of Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP, ran preparations for the confirmation of Justice Samuel Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts. She told NPR that mock confirmation hearings were held in a conference room on the fourth floor.

“It’s a ceremonial conference room, with formal historical portraits of attorneys general on the walls” around a large table, Brand said. “And we would have the nominee sit on one side of the table and have four or five lawyers sit across from him playing senators.”

Professor Martha Kumar of Towson University said that when there are so many deputy positions that have yet to be filled, “you have no choice but to run the operation out of the White House.”

After lingering in the Senate for 10 months, Assistant Attorney General for Legal Policy Christopher H. Schroeder was confirmed just last month.

The Supreme Court last week heard oral arguments on a case that could determine whether citizens can receive compensation for bringing False Claims Act lawsuits based on information already publicly available at the local level, AboutLawsuits.com reported.

Whistleblowers are entitled to between 15 percent and 25 percent of the money recovered by the federal government under the False Claims Act – if the information used in the case has not already appeared in congressional, administrative or Government Accountability Office reports, audits or hearings. Last week’s case centers on whether that same prohibition extends to publicly available  information from state and local sources.

A federal appeals court has ruled that a whistleblower claim could be brought under the federal False Claims Act,  even though information on which she based her suit was publicly available — from a county audit.

Whistleblower Karen Wilson, an employee of Graham County, N.C., Soil and Water Conservation District, accused her employer of fraudulently handling relief funds after a 1995 storm.

Because much of the information on which Wilson based her False Claims Act suit was publicly available,  a federal judge initially threw out the claim. But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit reversed that decision, arguing that the law applies only to federal reports. The county appealed and the high court accepted the case — Graham County Soil & Water Conservation District v. United States.

The federal government backs Wilson. Assistant U.S. Solicitor General Douglas Hallward-Driemeier last week told justices that the federal government lacks the ability to comb through local audits and reports, so the law should be read to only apply to federal documents.

But Christopher Browning, arguing on behalf of Graham County, said that allowing local reports to be used by whistleblowers would prompt a flood of frivolous suits stemming from problems that officials are already aware of.

SCOTUSblog reports that it’s unclear how the court stands, with Justice Stephen Breyer conceding that he is “up in the air� over the case. Chief Justice John Roberts also seemed undecided, asking Browning whether he had “any tie-breaker on your side.� Justices Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg said that they were concerned that the case could wind up reducing the ability of whistleblowers to file qui tam lawsuits.

Browning argued that relators (as citizens filing False Claims Act cases are called) filing cases on behalf of the federal government could use already publicly available reports to bilk the federal government of money. But Breyer questioned why the court should not simply defer to the federal government, since it is the one arguing for the broader interpretation, and the federal government would ostensibly suffer from the effects of an onset of frivolous suits, according to False Claims Counsel.

The Justice Department last month announced that it had recovered $2.4 billion in settlements and judgments from False Claims Act cases in fiscal 2009, the second largest haul since the statute was reformed more than 20 years ago.

Slate Magazine Senior Legal Correspondent Dahlia Lithwick (By Steve Bagley for Main Justice)

Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee’s Constitution and civil rights subcommittee said Thursday the conservative wing of the Supreme Court was acting against the cause of civil rights.

Committee members said the point of their hearing yesterday was not to criticize the Supreme Court, but to discern how to legislate in the face of what they characterized as an agenda against civil rights. “We could be blasting the hell out of the court system,” House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.) said, “because they’ve sure done some pretty lousy work, not just recently, but historically.”

One of two Republicans to attend the hearing, ranking minority member Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (Wis.) took an opposing view, noting Supreme Court refused to “strike down” the Voting Rights Act of 1965 when it was up for renewal in 2006.

Conyers was unmoved. He mentioned three Supreme Court decisions from the past several years, including Alexander v. Sandoval, Gross V. FBL Financial Services, and Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tires.

In Ledbetter, Conyers noted, Judge Ruth Bader Ginsberg read her dissenting opinion aloud in court, calling the majority decision a “cramped interpretation” that was “incompatible with the statute’s broad remedial purpose.” Congress changed the law, in effect over ruling the court, when it passed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009. President Obama signed it into law in one of his first official acts as president.

Noting these precedents, subcommittee chair Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) said Congress needed to continue to examine how Supreme Court decisions effect civil rights. “Calling balls and strikes is the job of umpires,  but the Justices have a more complicated tasks,” Nadler said.

Those decisions, Nadler and panelists said, slowly chip away at civil rights. One panelist, Charlestown School of Law Prof. Armand Derfner, said he believes the laws have been misinterpreted by the courts.

“Today’s Supreme Court takes a very different approach to interpreting Congress’ laws,” Derfner said. “Fifteen cases the Supreme Court has decided, Congress has had to correct. It’s astonishing to have a record like that.”

Prof. Aderson Francois of Howard University School of Law took a more measured approach. He told the committee in his written testimony that “while the Court has certainly issued its share of decisions that can be fairly characterized as hostile to the advancement of civil rights and equality, it is probably premature to conclude that the Court has been – or will be – consistently anti-civil rights.”

Francois added that the tenure of Chief Justice John Roberts has not been a major change from that of the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist, another conservative. But “given the Supreme Court’s poor record in matters of civil rights over the last 20 years, the continuation of the Rehnquist Court jurisprudence under Justice Roberts has indeed left civil rights enforcement in a fragile and precarious position,” he said.

Rep. Frank Johnson (D-Ga.) asked panelists a provocative question about the confirmation process. “How can we make so they don’t deceive or lie about their intentions?” Johnson said of judicial nominees.

“I don’t know that there’s a way to do that,” Derfner replied.

Panelist Dahlia Lithwick, legal analyst and senior editor of Slate Magazine, said the media could do a better job of explaining the issues to the public. ”I think the Supreme Court is exquisitely sensitive to public opinion,” she said.

Today, in an 8-1 decision, the Supreme Court in Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District v. Holder upheld the controversial Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the only dissenting opinion coming from Justice Clarence Thomas.  In writing the majority decision, Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. wrote that Section 5 has achieved “historic accomplishments,� but “now raises serious constitutional concerns.�

Roberts said that while the Court would not shirk its duty to block “legislative encroachments� on the Constitution, the Court was also obliged (if the option was available) to interpret the scope of the legislation as opposed to striking down the law altogether.

Under this rationale, the Court decided that any and all local units of government wanting to change their election laws or methods must be given the option to bail out of the requirement for approval from the Justice Department if their practices survive scrutiny.  The case involved a district in Travis County, Texas seeking relief from the pre-clearance provision mandated by Section 5.  A court had ruled that bailout exemptions could only be sought by entities that formally register voters.

Read more at the SCOTUSBLOG.

UPDATE: Read Attorney General Eric Holder’s statement on the ruling below:

“The Supreme Court’s decision to leave in place Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act marks a victory for voting rights in America.  In a nearly-unanimous decision, the Court not only recognized the historic achievements of the Voting Rights Act as helping make us a ‘very different Nation’, but also ensured that this law will continue to protect free and fair access to the voting booth.  The Department of Justice will continue to vigorously enforce the Voting Rights Act, which was renewed with overwhelmingly bipartisan support in Congress in 2006.

“As a nation, we have made great strides in advancing and protecting civil rights in the past 44 years since the Voting Rights Act was first passed.  But there is still more work to be done to fulfill the promise of full voting rights, free from discrimination, for all Americans.�