Welcome to Supreme Court Brief. The justices kicked off their March oral argument session with a First Amendment double-header Monday morning, hearing three hours of oral arguments in back-to-back cases about alleged government coercion. 

The hearings followed a quiet orders list issued earlier in the morning in which the court declined to add any new cases to its merits docket for the October 2023 term. 

The subject of today's Brief will be the extensive discussion of angry government press officers during Monday's hearing in the case Murthy v. Missouri, which led to some telling revelations about the justices' own dealings with reporters before the bench.