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Obamacare Is Facing Yet Another Legal Challenge

Mother Jones

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Do you remember John Boehner’s House lawsuit against President Obama over some details of Obamacare? When it was finally unveiled, it turned out it had two parts. The first challenged a delay in implementing the employer mandate. That was a big meh. Even if the suit prevailed, it would be meaningless by the time it finished its trip through the court system.

But the second part was a surprise. It challenged the outlay of $175 billion as part of the Cost Sharing Reduction program, which pays out money to insurance companies and lowers premiums, primarily for the poor. Obama claims that CSR is like Medicare or Social Security: a mandatory payment that doesn’t require yearly authorizations. Congress claims it does, and went to court to fight its case. So how is that going? David Savage of the LA Times gives us an update:

In May, U.S. District Judge Rosemary Collyer voiced exasperation when a Justice Department lawyer tried to explain why the Obama administration was entitled to spend the money without the approval of Congress. Why is that “not an insult to the Constitution?” Collyer asked.

But the more formidable barrier now facing the lawsuit is a procedural rule. Judges have repeatedly said lawmakers do not have standing to re-fight political battles in court….But in late June, the high court gave the House lawsuit an apparent boost when it ruled the Arizona Legislature had standing to sue in federal court to defend its power to draw election districts….Ginsburg in a footnote said the court was not deciding “the question of whether Congress has standing to bring a suit against the president.” But administration supporters acknowledge the high court’s opinion in the Arizona case increases the odds the suit will survive.

….Washington attorney Walter Dellinger, a former Clinton administration lawyer, believes the courts will not finally rule on the House lawsuit. “There has never been a lawsuit by a president against Congress or by Congress against the president over how to interpret a statute,” he said.

If the courts open the door to such claims, lawmakers in the future will opt to sue whenever they lose a political battle, Dellinger said. “You’d see immediate litigation every time a law was passed,” he said.

In other words, this is starting to look an awful lot like King v. Burwell: a case that initially seemed like an absurd Hail Mary by conservatives, but that eventually started to look more formidable. In the end, King still lost, but not before plenty of liberals lost a lot of sleep over it.

I think that’s still the most likely outcome here. Allowing Congress to sue the president would be a huge reversal for the Supreme Court, and it’s not clear that even the conservatives on the court want to open up that can of worms.

But there’s more to this. If the Supreme Court rules that Congress has no standing to sue, but it looks like they might treat the case sympathetically on the merits, conservatives merely have to find someone who does have standing to sue. That probably won’t be too hard. It may take years, but one way or another, this might end up being yet another legal thorn in the side of Obamacare.

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Obamacare Is Facing Yet Another Legal Challenge

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Charts: Hollywood’s White Dude Problem

Mother Jones

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It’s 2014, yet women and people of color still are vastly underrepresented in the United States media landscape. A report published Wednesday by the Women’s Media Center found that, while some progress toward equality has been made, journalism and entertainment still lack a diversity of voices and a variety in representation. If the US media were a person, he’d be an old white guy.

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Charts: Hollywood’s White Dude Problem

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The Arctic hasn’t been this hot for 120,000 years

The Arctic hasn’t been this hot for 120,000 years

Christophe Roudet

The last time the Canadian Arctic was as warm as it is today, our ancestors were only just beginning to migrate out of Africa.

A study published in Geophysical Research Papers suggests that recent temperatures in the region were unmatched during the last 120,000 years.

“Our results indicate that anthropogenic increases in greenhouse gases have led to unprecedented regional warmth,” said University of Colorado at Boulder professor Gifford Miller, the lead author of the new paper.

Over three years, Miller and his colleagues collected dead clumps of moss that were left exposed by receding ice caps on Baffin Island, the largest island in Canada’s Arctic Archipelago. They concluded that the oldest were last exposed to the elements at least 44,000 years ago — but that they were probably far older than that. From the paper:

The ancient rooted plants emerging beneath the four ice caps must have been continuously ice-covered for at least 44 [thousand years]. However, because the oldest dates are near the limit of the radiocarbon age scale, substantially older ages are possible.

Based on temperature reconstructions for ice cores retrieved from the nearby Greenland Ice Sheet, the youngest time interval during which summer temperatures were plausibly as warm as present prior to 44 [thousand years ago] is ~120 [thousand years ago], at, or near the end of the Last Interglaciation. We suggest this is the most likely age of these samples.

The scientists found that the Arctic has been warming in recent decades, following thousands of years of cooling. From a CU-Boulder press release:

The new study also showed summer temperatures cooled in the Canadian Arctic by about 5 degrees Fahrenheit from roughly 5,000 years ago to about 100 years ago — a period that included the Little Ice Age from 1275 to about 1900.

“Although the Arctic has been warming since about 1900, the most significant warming in the Baffin Island region didn’t really start until the 1970s,” said Miller. “And it is really in the past 20 years that the warming signal from that region has been just stunning. All of Baffin Island is melting, and we expect all of the ice caps to eventually disappear, even if there is no additional warming.”

Baffin Island’s peaks have been covered with ice caps throughout modern history. As the ice caps melt away, the water is flowing into the ocean, where it is, of course, helping to raise sea levels. “This study really says the warming we are seeing is outside any kind of known natural variability, and it has to be due to increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.”


Source
Unprecedented recent summer warmth in Arctic Canada, Geophysical Research Letters
CU-Boulder-led study shows unprecedented warmth in Arctic, University of Colorado at Boulder

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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The Arctic hasn’t been this hot for 120,000 years

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We’re Still at War: Photo of the Day for September 9, 2013

Mother Jones

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US Soldiers with Echo Company 3-10 General Support Aviation Battalion (GSAB), rush off the flight line after a successful Sling Load Training exercise, Bagram Air Field, Afghanistan, July 30, 2013. GSAB conducts Sling Load Training biannually. US Army Photo by Spc. Ryan Green.

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We’re Still at War: Photo of the Day for September 9, 2013

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Leaked EPA document raises questions about fracking pollution

Leaked EPA document raises questions about fracking pollution

William Avery Hudson

The EPA isn’t looking too hard at what Cabot Oil & Gas Corp. is up to behind this fence, or anywhere else.

The EPA doesn’t seem very interested in finding out whether fracking pollutes groundwater. The latest indication of this emerged over the weekend in the Los Angeles Times.

Residents of the small town of Dimock in northeastern Pennsylvania have long been convinced that Cabot Oil and Gas Corp. was poisoning their drinking water by fracking the land around them. In July of last year, the EPA announced that although water from some local wells contained “naturally occurring” arsenic, barium, and manganese, the agency was ending its investigation there without fingering the any culprits.

Now we find out that staff at a regional EPA office were worried about the role of fracking in polluting the town’s water, but their concerns appear to have been ignored by their bosses.

An internal EPA PowerPoint presentation prepared by regional staffers for their superiors and obtained by the L.A. Times paints an alarming picture of potential links between water contamination and fracking. And it reinforces the perception that the EPA is giving a free pass to the fracking industry, perhaps because natural gas plays a key role in President Obama’s quest for “energy independence” and an “all of the above” energy portfolio. From the L.A. Times article:

The presentation, based on data collected over 4 1/2 years at 11 wells around Dimock, concluded that “methane and other gases released during drilling (including air from the drilling) apparently cause significant damage to the water quality.” The presentation also concluded that “methane is at significantly higher concentrations in the aquifers after gas drilling and perhaps as a result of fracking [hydraulic fracturing] and other gas well work.” …

Robert B. Jackson, professor of environmental sciences at Duke University, who has researched methane contamination in the Dimock area and recently reviewed the presentation, said he was disappointed by the EPA’s decision.

“What’s surprising is to see this data set and then to see EPA walk away from Dimock,” Jackson said. “The issue here is, why wasn’t EPA interested in following up on this to understand it better?”

The EPA confirmed the authenticity of the PowerPoint presentation, but dismissed it as “one [on-scene coordinator’s] thoughts regarding 12 samples” that was never shared publicly because “it was a preliminary evaluation that requires additional assessment.”

The Natural Resources Defense Council puts this latest retreat by the EPA into some context:

Unfortunately, what appears to have happened in Dimock is just the latest in a larger, troubling trend we’re seeing of EPA failing to act on science in controversial fracking cases across the country. Instead, the agency appears to be systematically pulling back from high-profile fracking investigations.

First, in March of 2012—without explanation—EPA abruptly withdrew an emergency order it had issued two years earlier against Range Resources Corporation after the agency found nearby natural gas production operations from the company had likely caused methane and toxic chemical contamination in Parker County, Texas drinking water supplies. … [T]he Associated Press reported that a leaked confidential report proved that EPA had scientific evidence against Range, but changed course after the company threatened not to cooperate with the agency’s ongoing national study of fracking. AP also reported that interviews with the company confirmed this. When asked to explain its actions in light of all of this, EPA’s silence has been deafening.

Then, in late June 2013, EPA made an equally abrupt and unexplained announcement that it was abandoning an investigation into a high-profile drinking water contamination case in Pavillion, Wyoming. …

Now it seems the third shoe drops in Dimock — the latest in what was a triumvirate of highly anticipated federal fracking-related investigations.

Maybe the EPA has forgotten what its middle initial stands for?

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Leaked EPA document raises questions about fracking pollution

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