President Barack Obama won more than 48 percent of the vote in November in this overwhelmingly white community northwest of the state capital.

Yet Canyon Creek, the heart of Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District Number One, is the site of a major Supreme Court battle over the federal government's often used and most effective tool in preventing voting discrimination against minorities.

The utility district's elected five-person board manages a local park and pays down bond debt. Because it is in Texas, the board is covered by a section of the Voting Rights Act that requires approval from the Justice Department before any changes can be made in how elections are conducted.

That requirement applies to all or parts of 16 states, mostly in the South, with a history of preventing blacks, Hispanics and other minorities from voting.

The utility district is challenging that section of the law, which Congress extended in 2006 for 25 years. The Obama administration is defending it.

The Voting Rights Act, enacted in 1965, opened the polls to millions of black Americans. The law "has been the most important and transformative civil rights act in our country's history," said John Payton, director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

Melisa Keeton and Shelley Wolfe of Des Moines received their waiver by 9 a.m.

Same-sex couples in Iowa began applying for marriage license Monday after a state Supreme Court ruling legalizing gay unions took effect.

The high court issued an order early in the day confirming that the appeals process in the case has officially concluded.

The Iowa Supreme Court's unanimous and emphatic decision on April 3 made Iowa the third state to allow same-sex marriage, joining Massachusetts and Connecticut. Vermont has passed a law that will take effect in September.

The Supreme Court, acting Monday, rejected an appeal from Salvador Magluta, who was convicted of laundering at least $730,000 in drug money and bribing a juror at an earlier trial. The federal appeals court in Atlanta threw out the bribery count, but otherwise upheld the lengthy sentence.

Magluta asked the high court to take his case to consider whether the government should have been barred from trying him again after a jury acquitted him in 1996 of charges based on the same conduct. He also disputed the sentence's length since the judge acknowledged he took into account money laundering charges on which the jury found Magluta not guilty.

Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Victoria Chaney ruled after hearing three days of testimony that detailed a scheme to recruit men who would claim they were rendered sterile by exposure to a pesticide in the 1970s.

Witnesses and investigators told of being in fear for their lives for exposing the fraud.

The judge denounced the lawyers who hatched the scheme and said there was a group of corrupt Nicaraguan judges "devouring bribes" to make judgments and aid the scheme.

The lawsuits ended up in the California court seeking enforcement of extravagant damages determined by Nicaraguan judges.

Thomas said Thursday that his chair was empty that day in November 2006 because he took a spill the night before.

"I had the wonderful opportunity to fall on my face one night and was not able to make oral argument the following day as a result of it," he said at a hearing of a House appropriations subcommittee on the court's budget for the next year.

Thomas didn't identify the arguments he missed, but court officials said later he was referring to the abortion case. Thomas voted to uphold the federal ban.

The accident came up Thursday as part of an account about how well the court's Web site works and a plea for an extra $800,000 for the site.

Since October 2006, the court has been making argument transcripts available the same day a case is argued.

"In order to stay up to speed on the case and what occurred at oral argument, I simply went to our Web site later that day and it was there," Thomas said.

The case from New Haven, Conn., pits white firefighters, who showed up at the court Wednesday in their dress uniforms, against the city over its decision to scrap a promotion exam because no African-Americans and only two Hispanic firefighters were likely to be made lieutenants or captains based on the results.

As is often the case with closely fought social issues at the court, Justice Anthony Kennedy appeared to hold the key to the outcome. He seemed concerned that New Haven scuttled the test without determining that there were flaws that might have led to the racially disproportionate results.

"So shouldn't there be some standard that there has to be a significant, a strong showing after the test has been taken that it's deficient? Before it can be set aside?" he said.

Kennedy often frowns on racial classifications, yet he is not as opposed to drawing distinctions on the basis of race as his more conservative colleagues.

But where Kennedy saw shades of gray, the rest of the court seemed to view the case clearly in terms of black and white.