1)  National Labor Relations Board v. Canning

The Supreme Court is set to rule on the constitutionality of President Barack Obama’s controversial recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board without Senate confirmation. To date, three federal appellate courts have already held that Obama’s appointments were unconstitutional.

You may recall that President Obama’s questionable NLRB appointments were part of his administration’s “We can’t wait” call-to-action back in 2011, in which Obama announced that he intended to do as much as possible without Congress’s approval using executive orders or other means.  The Supreme Court is likely to hand Obama an embarrassing rebuke for his impatience, potentially invalidating every action undertaken by the NLRB during the time it had unconfirmed members.

2)  Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action

Schuette is another college affirmative action case, but with a bizarre twist — the Court is being asked to decide whether the Constitution sometimes might actually require racial discrimination. We previously reported this case as the “worst case of the year.”

The case was raised in response to a successful Michigan initiative amending the state’s constitution to prohibit the use of preferential treatment in college admissions and public hiring. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that under the circumstances, the state constitutional amendment requiring equal treatment was prohibited by the U.S. Constitution.

Presumably recalling the text of the Fourteenth Amendment, which requires “equal protection under the law,” a dissenting judge on the Sixth Circuit concluded that “a State does not deny equal treatment by mandating it.” Expect the Supreme Court, which in the past has been blunt in its denunciations of truly discriminatory “anti-discrimination” policies, to wholeheartedly agree.

3) McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission

In this campaign finance case, an Alabama resident and the Republican National Committee have asked the Court to strike down the current aggregated political contribution limits as unconstitutional under the First Amendment’s protection of political speech.

Currently, individuals may contribute no more than $2,600 per election to a candidate and no more than $32,400 per year to a national political committee like the RNC. However, individuals are also limited by aggregate contribution limits. For example, no individual may donate more than $48,600 to candidates or more than $74,600 to anything else during a two-year election period. That means someone can give the maximum legal contribution of $2,600 to 18 different candidates but not to 19 or more. The Justices may now overturn that somewhat arbitrary limit.

Last time the Court issued a significant campaign finance decision, liberals howled about the “end of democracy,” and President Obama took the unprecedented step of publicly scolding the Justices, right to their faces, at his nationally televised State of the Union address. Be on the look out for similarly dramatic hyperbole in the lead up to the decision.