Bloomberg News

The Supreme Court has yet to decide this year’s attention-grabbing cases on same-sex marriage, affirmative action and the Voting Rights Act. But last week, a divided court decided Arlington v. FCC, an important victory for the Obama administration that will long define the relationship between federal agencies and federal courts.

Whatever the investigation into misconduct at the Internal Revenue Service reveals, we already have all the evidence we need to understand President Barack Obama’s fundamental attitude toward the rule of law. That evidence is right there in the public record, and what it shows is indifference and contempt.

AMERICANAH. By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Knopf (United States) and Fourth Estate (Britain). 496 pages. $26.95.

Ifemelu and her boyfriend, Obinze, are middle-class Nigerians, hardly “starving, or raped, or from burned villages” but still “mired in dissatisfaction.” They consider Lagos a backwater and they want out.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s fascinating, infuriating novel “Americanah” recounts their respective experience of the United States and Britain and, later, of the Nigeria they return to.

At 35, Adichie is already distinguished. Her 2006 novel “Half of a Yellow Sun,” about the Biafran War, won the Orange Prize for Fiction, and in 2008 she received one of the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius” grants. She writes beautifully polished, semiformal prose with a slight English accent.

And she likes to argue. Ifemelu could be speaking for the author when, told that one of her opinions is “pretty strong,” she shoots back, “I don’t know how to have any other kind.”

“Americanah” jumps around in time and space, from Ifemelu’s present at Princeton to her past in Lagos, to her early American years in Philadelphia and Baltimore, to Obinze’s difficult period as a paperless foreigner in London, and finally back to Lagos, where, after many years, they meet again.

WASHINGTON — Republican lawmakers pressed for answers after the first round of congressional hearings on the Internal Revenue Service’s scrutiny of small-government groups failed to show why the practice was started and who was behind it.

So far, the intense questioning and outrage by lawmakers on three separate committees directed at the IRS hasn’t revealed who decided to give extra attention to “tea party” and “patriot” groups applying for tax-exempt status based on their names. It hasn’t explained why the agency kept using what an inspector general called “inappropriate” criteria even after IRS officials tried to stop it in 2011.

WASHINGTON — Lois Lerner, the mid-level Internal Revenue Service official at the center of a controversy over treatment of small-government groups, Wednesday invoked her right not to testify after reading a statement denying that she had committed any crimes.

“I am very proud of the work that I have done in government,” she said Wednesday, reading a statement at the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing. “I have not done anything wrong. I have not broken any laws.”

Republican politicians and activists can barely contain their glee at the simultaneous eruption of three major controversies about the Obama administration.

Conservatives are at a low boil over the administration’s dissembling about its actions after the attacks on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya. The public is concerned about the targeting of conservative groups by the Internal Revenue Service. And even liberals are outraged by the administration’s heavy-handed investigations of leaks to the news media.

LOS ANGELES — Fox Broadcasting has unveiled nine prime-time programs for the 2013-2014 season, shaking up a schedule that has fallen into second place among key viewers after once dominating the ratings.

Five new comedies and four dramas will join the schedule, Kevin Reilly, chairman of entertainment for Fox, said in a statement. The Los Angeles-based network and other broadcasters are showing their new lineups to advertisers this week in an annual event known as the “upfronts.”