Five Best Tuesday Columns

Noah Feldman on reading the Supreme Court, Fouad Ajami on the Muslim Brotherhood, Dana Milbank on immigration, Joe Nocera on Madoff's victims, and Ramesh Ponnuru on Romney's VP.

Noah Feldman in Bloomberg View on the Supreme Court's tea leaves Feldman dissects the various ways Monday's Supreme Court decision on Arizona's immigration law might foreshadow the upcoming health care ruling. He wonders, for instance, whether the liberals sided with Anthony Kennedy, despite his split decision on Arizona's law, to woo him onto their side for health care. "Liberals may be excited about what this might mean for health care. But they should not get too excited. At the same time that it decided the immigration case and struck down mandatory life without parole for juveniles, the court issued a one-page per curiam opinion invalidating a Montana law that limited political contributions by corporations."

Fouad Ajami in The Wall Street Journal on Egypt's election Ajami says we should allow time for the Egyptian military and the newly elected Islamist president Mohammed Morsi to navigate their conflicts and priorities. Turkey, he says, could provide Morsi with a model for Islamic leadership over a secular state. "Many are eager to rebuke this Egyptian interlude. Those who had given the reign of Hosni Mubarak three decades of indulgence are unwilling to see in the last 18 months the birth pangs of a democratic possibility," he writes.

Dana Milbank in The Washington Post on reactions to the immigration ruling The Supreme Court decision that invalidated much (though not all) of Arizona's immigration law came soon after President Obama's policy shift on deportations of young illegal immigrants, and Milbank dissects the statements of immigration hardliners from Arizona's Gov. Jan Brewer to Mitt Romney. After spending the day refusing to say whether he agreed with the ruling, Romney eventually issued a mild critique. "It wasn't exactly what immigration hard-liners had wanted: The Supreme Court invalidating most of the Arizona law in a 5-to-3 vote, and the Republicans' presidential standard-bearer becoming skittish about a law he once praised. But Brewer did not let such concerns get in her way," Milbank writes.

Joe Nocera in The New York Times on Madoff's victims Monday the Supreme Court also declined to take up a case on compensating the victims of Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme, allowing a decision to pay the net losers with the gains from the net winners to stand. "In all the fighting between net winners and net losers, what tends to get overlooked is that the big boys — the 'deep pockets' who could actually afford to compensate the Madoff victims — are being allowed to walk away from the fraud," Nocera writes. He documents how big institutions like HSBC and JPMorgan Chase held responsibility for allowing Madoff's fraud, and how laws protect them from liability to the investors who lost money.

Ramesh Ponnuru in Bloomberg View on the VP pick Ponnuru argues that Mitt Romney's vice presidential pick probably won't heavily influence the general election, but joins many that offer predictions on Romney's choices. He argues Romney will pick someone ready to take the job of president with whom he feels personally comfortable, and that this will lead to a more traditional pick -- i.e. not a Marco Rubio. "If Romney picks Kyl, McDonnell, Pawlenty, Portman or Thune ... he should make the announcement soon. None of those guys is going to excite the Republican convention, so there is no point in waiting for it," he says. "If Romney is going to do something boring, in other words, he should at least do it in a novel way."