Tag Archives: court

How Scott Walker and His Allies Hijacked the Wisconsin Supreme Court

by doyoubringlaptopstoclassincollege Posted on May 22, 2015

Mother Jones

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For three years, Wisconsin prosecutors have been investigating whether Republican Gov. Scott Walker broke campaign finance laws as he battled a 2012 recall effort sparked by his push for a law that undercut the power of public sector unions. Prosecutors allege that Walker and his aides illegally coordinated with conservative groups that were raising money and running ads to support Walker and his Republican allies. At least one group at the center of the probe, the Wisconsin Club for Growth, has gone to court to stop the investigation. Its fate now rests with the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which will rule any day now on whether the inquiry can proceed.

But there’s a rub. Two key targets of the investigation—the Wisconsin Club for Growth and Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce (WMC), the state’s leading business group—have spent over $10 million since 2007 to elect a conservative majority to Wisconsin’s top court. Given their involvement in the investigation, and the Wisconsin Club for Growth’s position as a party to the case, good government advocates question whether the four conservative justices elected with the help of these two groups should be presiding over the case.

Read about the scandal that could that could crush Scott Walker’s presidential hopes.

The Wisconsin Club for Growth and WMC did not make direct contributions to the campaigns for these justices. Instead, they poured millions into so-called independent issue ads that clearly conveyed messages that supported these campaigns. And in an odd twist, due to lax recusal guidelines—which were adopted at the urging of one of these conservative outfits—these justices on the state’s high court are not compelled to sit out a case involving these two groups.

The Wisconsin Club for Growth and WMC are top players in a years-long undertaking by Walker and his allies to create a conservative majority on the Supreme Court that is friendly to conservative policies—an operation that has included spending millions on ads, ending public campaign financing for Supreme Court elections, rewriting the court’s ethics guidelines, and amending the state’s constitution. This effort has led to one of the most partisan and dysfunctional judicial bodies in the country, a court with liberal and conservative justices who won’t appear together in public. And it could well end up benefiting the conservative groups under investigation should the jurists they helped elect rule the probe should stop.

“This large amount of money and special interests has impacted the workings of the court, the reputation of the court, and how it’s interacting internally,” says former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Janine Geske, who served on the court from 1993 to 1998.

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How Scott Walker and His Allies Hijacked the Wisconsin Supreme Court

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House Republicans do their part to commemorate National Women’s Health Week

by KaiWfbuikghxkh Posted on May 14, 2015

House Republicans do their part to commemorate National Women’s Health Week

By on 14 May 2015commentsShare

For National Women’s Health Week, we’re highlighting women’s health issues in the United States.

Yesterday, after years of Republicans threatening to do so, the House of Representatives voted to ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy.

The important thing to remember about abortions is that they are not pleasant things. One does not get an abortion, especially a late-term abortion, for the hell of it — one gets an abortion because she has decided that undergoing an emotionally trying and painful procedure has greater benefits to both her and the fetus than carrying the baby to term.

This particular bill targets women who are most in need, as women who are likely to seek later-term abortions are usually young and low-income. Data from the Guttmacher Institute indicates that nearly 60 percent of women were forced to delay their abortions due to financial and logistical constraints, and 58 percent of women wished they had undergone the procedure earlier in their pregnancy.

From The New York Times:

Representatives Diana DeGette of Colorado and Louise M. Slaughter of New York, Democrats who are the chairwomen of the House Pro-Choice Caucus, said the bill was another attempt by Republicans to erect barriers to medical care for women.

Prohibiting most abortions 20 weeks after fertilization would run counter to the Supreme Court’s standard of fetal viability, which is generally put at 22 to 24 weeks after fertilization.

“Every woman has a constitutional right to make health care choices in the manner she sees fit, and everyone in America should see this cynical attempt to seize control from women for what it is,” Ms. DeGette and Ms. Slaughter said in a statement on Tuesday.

Let’s get this straight: Republicans want to restrict abortions, but they also want to make it harder for women to access birth control. There are few things more dystopian than a state where women are left powerless to make their own reproductive decisions, but at least there’s a glimmer of hope: In January, the White House stated that President Obama would veto a bill like this one. Uteruses around the country salute you, Obama! (No, not like that.)

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House Republicans do their part to commemorate National Women’s Health Week

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This Judge Just Smacked Down A Key NSA Spy Program

by RosemarDavies Posted on May 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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A panel of federal judges slapped down the National Security Agency’s telephone metadata collection program Thursday, effectively saying that the program goes way beyond what the law allows. In a 97-page decision released by the 2nd US Court of Appeals, the three-judge panel found that the Patriot Act doesn’t allow the government to collect phone records in such a blanket way.

The court’s ruling won’t stop the program, as the New York Times notes. Rather, it punts the issue back to lower courts and Congress to determine exactly what’s okay and what isn’t. But the decision, written by Judge Gerard E. Lynch, doesn’t pull any punches either. “Congress cannot reasonably be said to have ratified a program of which many members of Congress—and all members of the public—were not aware,” he wrote.

Here are some highlights from his ruling, which you can read in full below:

On the government using “inapplicable statutes and inconclusive legislative history” in its arguments:

dc.embed.loadNote(‘//www.documentcloud.org/documents/2074277-appeals-court-ruling-aclu-v-clapper/annotations/216830.js’);

On the government’s “unprecedented and unwarranted” definition of what material is relevant to an actual investigation:

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dc.embed.loadNote(‘//www.documentcloud.org/documents/2074277-appeals-court-ruling-aclu-v-clapper/annotations/216834.js’);

On whether Congress, or the public, fully understood what the government was going to do with this program:

dc.embed.loadNote(‘//www.documentcloud.org/documents/2074277-appeals-court-ruling-aclu-v-clapper/annotations/216835.js’);

Full decision:

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Appeals Court Ruling ACLU v. Clapper (PDF)

Appeals Court Ruling ACLU v. Clapper (Text)

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This Judge Just Smacked Down A Key NSA Spy Program

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Want an Abortion This Year? Get Ready to Wait

by e0ebri1z Posted on May 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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For women seeking an abortion, 2015 is shaping up to be the year of the long wait.

Since the beginning of the year, six states have proposed or passed laws that would require a woman to wait days before she has an abortion—laws that critics say place an especially harsh burden on poor and rural women.

Conservative lawmakers in Arkansas and Tennessee have passed bills forcing women seeking abortions to attend an initial appointment and then wait 48 hours before the actual procedure. The Florida Legislature has passed a measure, which GOP Gov. Rick Scott promises to sign, creating a 24-hour waiting period between two appointments. A bill that died in Kentucky, which already requires women to receive counseling 24 hours before an abortion, would have forced women to receive that counseling in person.

And Oklahoma and North Carolina are poised to pass bills that would institute the longest waiting periods in the county: 72 hours between mandatory counseling and an abortion. The North Carolina proposal passed the Republican-dominated House on Thursday, and Oklahoma’s measure is awaiting the signature of Republican Gov. Mary Fallin. If the states approve the measures, Oklahoma and North Carolina will join Missouri, South Dakota, and Utah as the only other states with three-day waiting periods.

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Want an Abortion This Year? Get Ready to Wait

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Why the GOP’s Attack on Obama’s Climate Plan Will Probably Fail

by TyNevilleeiph Posted on April 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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This morning, several of the nation’s top environmental lawyers gathered at the US Court of Appeals in Washington, DC, for the first round of arguments in a pair of lawsuits challenging the cornerstone of President Barack Obama’s climate plan.

One of the suits was brought by coal company Murray Energy, the other by a group of a dozen states (all with Republican governors, and all either large producers or consumers of coal); they both contend that the Environmental Protection Agency doesn’t have the authority to set tough new standards for carbon dioxide emissions from existing power plants. The rules, first proposed last summer, are designed to cut the nation’s carbon footprint 30 percent by 2030 compared to 2005 levels. The question before the court today was whether the lawsuits can go forward.

We probably won’t know the judges’ decision for a month or more. As my colleague Kevin Drum pointed out, it’s conceivable they could rule against the EPA. All three judges on the panel were appointed by Republican presidents (two by George W. Bush, and one by his dad), and at least two of them have a history of anti-environmental rulings. One of the judges, Brett Kavanaugh, filed a dissent on a separate case in 2012 arguing that greenhouse gases shouldn’t be regulated as air pollutants.

Still, many experts believe that it’s unlikely the judges will decide to hear the case—at least not yet. That’s because the climate rules won’t actually be finalized until later this year. According to Reuters, one of the W-appointed judges, Thomas Griffith, said in court this morning that he and his colleagues “could guess what the final rule looks like, but we’re not usually in the business of guessing.”

For as long as the Clean Air Act has been on the books (half a century and counting), there have been attempts by polluting industries to tear it apart. Every time the Obama administration puts forward new regulations based on it (for mercury emissions, for example, and carbon emissions from new power plants), lawsuits start to pile up as soon as the draft language is out of the gate. But courts have never, not once, taken up a challenge to any EPA rule before it was made final.

If they did, “it would create enormous mischief,” said Richard Revesz, a leading environmental law scholar who has testified to Congress in support of the proposed to rule and was in the courtroom this morning. “It would double the amount of litigation on every proposed rule.”

That’s because the final rule is almost certain to look quite different from what’s on the table now. The EPA is currently sifting through more than 4 million public comments on the rule, submitted by everyone from corporations and governors to environmentalists and your Grandpa Joe, and trying to amend the final rule accordingly. Once that rule is made public, it is inevitably going to face another round of legal challenges from the very same cast of characters. So it really doesn’t make sense for the court to listen to arguments about regulatory language that’s virtually guaranteed to change.

Once lawsuits on the final rule do get taken up, there are likely to be some really interesting debates. The meaning of some of the key Clean Air Act language being employed by the EPA is hotly contested, thanks in part to an apparent clerical error that led to potentially competing versions of the same passage both being signed into law. And there are constitutional issues at stake as well, such as whether the federal government has the right to tell states how to manage their energy supply (if past is any precedent, Revesz has repeatedly said, they do; that’s kind of the whole point of the Clean Air Act).

But for now, there’s a pretty good chance today’s hearing was just a warm-up round for a much more serious fight yet to come. At this point, says Sierra Club chief counsel Joanne Spalding, the EPA’s opponents “are trying to derail a train that’s still in the station.”

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Why the GOP’s Attack on Obama’s Climate Plan Will Probably Fail

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Ellen Pao Loses Her Gender Discrimination Lawsuit Against Silicon Valley VC Firm Kleiner Perkins

by Suzette87E Posted on March 27, 2015

Mother Jones

This is a breaking news story. We’ll be updating this post regularly.

Ellen Pao’s $16 million lawsuit against her former employer, venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, has captivated Silicon Valley for the past month. Pao, now the interim CEO of Reddit, sued her former employer on charges of gender discrimination and retaliation. Many have called the trial Silicon Valley’s version of the Anita Hill hearings, in part because it offers a rare glimpse into the challenges faced by women at the Valley’s elite companies, where cases of this rank usually settle rather than go public. At 2 PM pacific today, the jury returned a verdict, voting no on all four counts of alleged gender discrimination and retaliation by Kleiner Perkins.

But the official verdict barely lasted a half hour, thanks to an error in basic math: The judge asked each juror to list their individual verdict for the court. This revealed that on the fourth count—which alleges that Pao’s termination was retaliation for raising concerns about gender discrimination and filing her lawsuit—4 of the 12 jurors, two men and two women, voted yes. The judge ruled that 8-4 was an insufficient majority—a consensus among nine jurors is needed—and asked the jurors to return to the deliberation room for further discussion. That means that there hasn’t yet been an official verdict. We’ll keep updating this post as news unfolds.

Update, Friday, 7:45 p.m. EDT: After the first jury miscount, an official verdict is in and venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins has prevailed on all counts. The jury returned to the courtroom after several hours of additional deliberations to deliver the verdict. Juror 3, one of the four original “yes” votes on the retaliation count, flipped his vote. With a consensus of nine jurors or more on all counts, the case is over. Ellen Pao gave a brief statement to the press, thanking her family and friends for their support throughout the trial. “I have told my story and thousands of people have heard me,” she said. “If I’ve helped level the playing field for women and minorities in venture capital, then the battle was worth it.”

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Ellen Pao Loses Her Gender Discrimination Lawsuit Against Silicon Valley VC Firm Kleiner Perkins

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5 Death Penalty Cases Tainted by Racism

by AYZShantell Posted on March 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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The intersection of race and justice on the street has loomed in the headlines this past year or two, with racially charged killings—Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice, among others—sparking widespread protests and highlighting stark police biases: A recent Justice Department investigation, for instance, found that blacks in Ferguson, Missouri, accounted for an overwhelming majority of traffic stops, traffic tickets, and arrests over a two-year period—nearly everyone who got a jaywalking ticket was black. When black drivers were pulled over in Ferguson, the DOJ found, they were searched at twice the rate of white drivers.

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5 Death Penalty Cases Tainted by Racism

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Ted Cruz Is Running for President. Here’s What You Need to Know About Him.

by KarolynThibodea Posted on March 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) officially launched his presidential campaign today, making him the first contender in either party to officially enter the race. At midnight Monday morning, Cruz tweeted, “I’m running for President and I hope to earn your support!” He made a more formal announcement later in the morning at Liberty University in Virginia, the Christian university founded by Jerry Falwell—where he drew loud applause when he told the crowd about his father finding Jesus Christ. His speech was, not surprisingly, designed for social conservatives: He blasted gay marriage, gun safety laws, and Common Core education standards. And he bemoaned the fact that half of born-again Christians do not vote. “Imagine millions of people of faith coming out to the polls and voting our values,” he declared.

So far, the young 2016 GOP contest has been dominated by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. Thanks to his early announcement, the spotlight will be on Cruz. Here’s the best of Mother Jones‘ coverage on the combative Texas senator:

Meet Ted Cruz, “the Republican Barack Obama.”
Also, meet Ted Cruz’s firebrand preacher father, Rafael, who as a surrogate speaker for his son said President Obama should “go back to Kenya.”
As a high-priced private lawyer, Cruz defended huge jury awards against corporate wrongdoers, but as a tea party politician he calls for tort reform that would prohibit such accountability.
As a politician, he has championed the death penalty, but while he was in private practice, he argued in a Supreme Court case that the criminal-justice system could not be trusted to implement capital punishment.
Cruz the lawyer also argued that Obama’s 2009 stimulus was a good thing.
His theory on why Romney lost in 2012? 47 percent.
Cruz has some interesting theories on climate.

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Ted Cruz Is Running for President. Here’s What You Need to Know About Him.

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This Man Is Missing a Chunk of His Brain. The Missouri Supreme Court Says It’s Okay to Execute Him.

by XiomaraElisha Posted on March 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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Cecil Clayton, a mentally ill Missouri man facing execution on Tuesday, was denied a crucial avenue to clemency this weekend: The Missouri Supreme Court ruled that Clayton is competent to be executed. But he’s missing one-fifth of his frontal lobe.

Clayton, 74, was sentenced to death in 1997 for murdering a police officer. Twenty-five years before that, he suffered a horrific accident that caused the removal of significant parts of his brain, transforming his brain chemistry and personality. His lawyers are aiming to secure him a stay of execution and a hearing to evaluate his competency to be executed, but Missouri law makes it highly difficult to do so after the trial.

In a 4-3 decision, the state’s highest court found that Clayton’s lawyers had not presented a sufficiently compelling case for the state to delay his execution and hold a hearing to evaluate his competency. The majority argued that though Clayton suffers from debilitating dementia, paranoia, schizophrenia, and a host of other conditions, “there is no evidence that he is not capable of understanding ‘matters in extenuation, arguments for executive clemency, or reasons why the sentence should not be carried out.'”

In their dissent, the three judges in the minority wrote that Clayton’s lawyers presented reasonable grounds that his “mental condition has deteriorated and he is intellectually disabled.” They noted that he is “incompetent to be executed and…is entitled to a hearing at which his competence will be determined.” And they contended that the “majority’s decision to proceed with the execution at this time and in these circumstances violates the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment.”

A few options remain for Clayton. On Monday, Clayton’s lawyers filed a petition to the US Supreme Court to stay the execution. Missouri Governor Jay Nixon (D) also can stay the execution and order a competency hearing. Clayton is scheduled to be put to death by lethal injection—a method his attorneys claim could cause him a “prolonged and excruciating” death—at 6:00 p.m. on Tuesday.

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This Man Is Missing a Chunk of His Brain. The Missouri Supreme Court Says It’s Okay to Execute Him.

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Why a German Court Just Ordered A Vaccine Skeptic to Pay $100K

by DixieHarden Posted on March 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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Four years ago, vaccine-skeptical German biologist Stefan Lanka posed a challenge on his website: Prove to him that measles is, in fact, a virus. To the first person who could do that, he promised a whopping 100 thousand Euros (about $106,000).

Despite loads of long-standing medical evidence proving the existence of the measles virus, Lanka believes that measles is a psychosomatic disease that results from trauma. “People become ill after traumatic separations,” he told a German newspaper.

German doctor David Barden took him up on the challenge. Barden gathered six separate studies showing that measles is indeed a virus. Lanka dismissed his findings.

But today, a district court in southern Germany found that Barden’s evidence provides sufficient proof to have satisfied Lanka’s challenge. Which means Lanka now has to cough up the promised cash.

This issue has taken on new urgency due to a measles epidemic in Berlin that began in October. Health officials announced last Friday that 111 new cases had been reported in the previous week, bringing the total number to 724. The majority of those affected are unvaccinated; last month an 18-month-old died of the disease.

Lanka said he plans to appeal the court’s decision.

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Why a German Court Just Ordered A Vaccine Skeptic to Pay $100K

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