After a Pennsylvania high court threw out a drug arrest on grounds that a police officer lacked enough evidence, and a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the case, Chief Justice John Roberts "channeled his inner Mickey Spillane" (The Washington Post) in a stinging dissent:

The Supreme Court heard arguments Jan. 7 for a case that since September of last year has put executions across the United States in limbo. Death row inmates Ralph Baze and Thomas C. Bowling, both convicted in Kentucky of double murders, are challenging their sentences on the grounds that Kentucky's three-drug lethal injection protocol may in some accidental instances cause, in the words of attorney Donald B. Verrilli Jr., "torturous, excruciating pain."

The U.S. Supreme Court on Sept. 25 left in limbo thousands of litigants, attorneys, and court-watchers when it issued the unusual results of a "mega-conference" held the day before.

As is customary heading into the new term that begins Oct. 1, the nine justices had pow-wowed over a lengthy case list, the summer-recess accumulation of "petitions for certiorari" or "cert"-requests for high-court review. Uncustomary was the court's near-complete post-conference silence on a significant slate of cases involving religious liberty and social issues.

While the past several weeks haven't yielded many Supreme Court decisions on hot-button social issues, two developments within one week's time may signal the gelling of new personalities-and judicial philosophies-on the nation's highest court.

On June 5, the justices agreed to take up two cases that could end the use of racial preferences in public schools. And on May 30, the court issued its first ideologically aligned 5-4 decision since Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito joined the court.

President Bush dashed into 2006 with a schedule that took him from Texas to the Capitol to Illinois in less than a week. In San Antonio on New Year's Day, he challenged critics of his domestic terror-war policies. In Washington, D.C., he led mid-week meetings at the Pentagon and White House to pitch his game plan for the war in Iraq. And in Chicago on Jan. 6, he was scheduled to tout good economic news to the Chicago Board of Trade.

The nomination of a judicial powerhouse turned George Bush's bad patch of October into an early Christmas present. Not only was every section of the president's coalition cheering, but liberal interest groups, left-wing bloggers, and Democratic Senators reacted with such over-the-top rhetoric as to reduce the intellectual credibility of their O'Connor-seat defense.