Tag Archives: supreme-court

Lone Gay Marriage Holdout Acting "Under the Authority of God"

by AstridTerrill62 Posted on September 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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Sigh.

A county clerk in Kentucky who objects to same-sex marriage on religious grounds denied licenses to gay couples on Tuesday, just hours after the Supreme Court refused to support her position.

In a raucous scene in the little town of Morehead, two-same-sex couples walked into the Rowan County Courthouse, trailed by television cameras and chanting protesters on both sides of the issue, only to be told by the county clerk, Kim Davis, that she was denying them marriage licenses “under the authority of God.”

The optimist in me says that if the biggest backlash to the Supreme Court’s gay marriage decision is one clerk in a tiny town in Kentucky, then we’ve gotten off pretty easy. And really, the more I think about it, that really does seem like the main takeaway from this.

But it’s obvious that the endgame here is for Kim Davis to be fired, or tossed in jail for contempt. The Supreme Court itself has ordered her to issue licenses, so she has no further legal recourse. Only recourse to God.

I’m now curious to see what the Republican field will make of this. On the one hand, most of them are treating the primary contest as a zero-sum race to see who can move furthest to the right. On the other hand, do they really want to get on the wrong side of gay marriage and immigration? On the third hand, there’s the whole rule of law thing. And on the fourth hand, Donald Trump is not an anti-gay warrior. He’s the guy everyone is responding to, so maybe that means this will stay low key.

The Huckabees and Carsons of the world will surely support Davis. The rest of the field….probably not. That’s my guess. Then again, if video of Davis being hauled off to the county pen ends up on a 24/7 loop on Fox News, who knows? Defying the will of a small groups of pissed off base voters is not something the Republican field is exactly famous for.

UPDATE: Greg Sargent confirms my sense that holdouts like Davis are very rare. “In the seven southern states where the backlash might have been expected to be fiercest, only one — Alabama — still has multiple counties that are holding out. One other — Kentucky — has only two remaining counties holding out.” The national campaign director for Freedom to Marry says that, all things considered, “things are going exceedingly smoothly.”

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Lone Gay Marriage Holdout Acting "Under the Authority of God"

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Meet the (Potential) Democratic Candidate Who Thinks Bernie Sanders Isn’t Liberal Enough

by Rufus08541345975 Posted on August 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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An outspoken Cantabrigian is launching an exploratory committee for president on a platform of breaking a “rigged system” that’s fueling runaway inequality. Unfortunately for progressive activists, it’s Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig, not Elizabeth Warren.

Lessig, who says he’ll jump into the race if he can raise $1 million by Labor Day, has spent much of the last four years fighting what he considers the pernicious influence of money in politics ushered in by the Supreme Court in the Citizens United case. The two leading candidates for the Democratic nomination, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, have both promised to appoint Supreme Court justices who oppose Citizens United. But Lessig thinks Sanders et al. aren’t going far enough. His platform consists of one item—the “Citizens Equality Act of 2017,” which is sort of an omnibus bill of progressive wish-list items. It would make election day a national holiday, protect the right to vote, abolish political gerrymandering, and limit campaign contributions to small-dollar “vouchers” and public financing. After Congress passes his bill, Lessig says he’ll resign.

Lessig has to hope his newest political venture will be more successful then his 2014 gambit, in which the Harvard professor started a super-PAC for the purpose of electing politicians who supported campaign finance reform. The aptly named Mayday PAC raised and spent $10 million, but only backed a single winner—Rep. Walter Jones (R-N.C.) who was virtually assured of re-election in a deep-red district.

Here’s Lessig’s announcement video:

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Meet the (Potential) Democratic Candidate Who Thinks Bernie Sanders Isn’t Liberal Enough

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Big Coal is freaking out over this latest Obama move

by MalissaHarlow Posted on July 16, 2015

Big Coal is freaking out over this latest Obama move

By on 16 Jul 2015commentsShare

The Obama administration’s less-than-stellar relationship with the coal industry is about to get worse. The Interior Department is rolling out new rules to protect waterways and groundwater from the various toxic messes made by coal mining companies.

The proposed regulations are aimed at the controversial process of mountaintop-removal mining, a way of getting at coal seams by lopping off mountaintops and dumping them into valleys, thereby burying the waterways that run through those valleys. More than 2,000 miles of waterways have been destroyed through the practice, which also leads to substances like selenium, iron, and aluminum showing up in streams and causing significant health problems for humans and wildlife.

The proposed rules would require mining companies to test water quality before they start mining, as they mine, and after they mine, creating a data set showing how their operations affected the area. It would also require the companies to restore streams that were “mined-over,” and replant areas with native trees and vegetation, and to put up bonds to make sure there’s funding for restoration.

Interior’s new proposal has been in the works for years, ever since the department admitted in 2009 that Bush-era rules were flawed. Those rules were struck down in 2014, so the regulations currently in place date from 1983.

The coal industry — which is suing the EPA over the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan and recently won a sort-of victory with the Supreme Court’s ruling on the EPA’s mercury regulations — is real upset about all this, and so are its allies in Congress.

“It’s outrageous that less than a month after being rebuked by the U.S. Supreme Court for ignoring the costs of its regulations, the administration is doing it again with this job-crushing, anti-coal rule,” said Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso (R). “It’s no secret that this overreaching rule is designed to help put coal country out of business.”

National Mining Association President Hal Quinn hit the same no-jobs line. “This is a rule in search of a problem,” he told The Washington Post. “It has nothing to do with new science and everything to do with an old and troubling agenda for separating more coal miners from their jobs.”

Green groups, meanwhile, welcomed the long-overdue proposed regulations, but said they don’t go far enough to fix this problem, and will in fact weaken existing requirements barring mining activities within 100 feet of a stream.

“Appalachian communities rely on the rivers and streams covered by these protections, and today’s proposal doesn’t adequately safeguard those communities,” said Bruce Nilles of the Sierra Club. “We need the federal government to create thoughtful stream protections that ban valley fills and ensure an end to this destructive practice.”

The rules aren’t a done deal yet. There will be a 60-day public comment period and five public hearings, after which the proposal could be revised. Final rules might be put in place next year.

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Big Coal is freaking out over this latest Obama move

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Supercut: Joe Biden Has a Really Itchy Face

by KimberlyGreen5 Posted on July 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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The first thing I want to say is this: I didn’t intend to make this video.

My project was more noble. I’ve noticed Vice President Joe Biden appearing a lot recently with President Obama at big news conferences—the Cuba embassy announcement, when the Supreme Court upholding a key element of the Affordable Care Act, the heckler scene at the White House’s LGBT Pride Dinner, the first White House reaction to the Charleston massacre. Biden is such a big, everyday presence in public life—like furniture in a comfortable room—that I wanted to see if there were any common threads I could pick out about him by watching these appearances. Has he visibly changed over the years in the same way Barack Obama has, for example? In what ways has his public performance changed over the years?

Instead, all I noticed was…his itchy face. He scratches his face a lot. More than other people behind the podium, or on stage. Far more. It’s true, it must get pretty boring, listening and clapping and laughing so much. And imagine if you wanted to scratch your face, it would build up and you would really want to scratch it.

Now, it’s all I can see.

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Supercut: Joe Biden Has a Really Itchy Face

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Ted Cruz Wants to Subject Supreme Court Justices to Political Elections

by NatishaSisco Posted on June 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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Last week was a tough one for conservatives. In the course of two days, the US Supreme Court upheld a major part of the Affordable Care Act and effectively legalized same-sex marriage. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) called it “some of the darkest 24 hours in our nation’s history,” and he’s not going to take it lying down. The presidential candidate and former Supreme Court clerk says he is proposing a constitutional amendment that would force Supreme Court justices to face retention elections.

“Sadly, the Court’s hubris and thirst for power have reached unprecedented levels. And that calls for meaningful action, lest Congress be guilty of acquiescing to this assault on the rule of law,” Cruz wrote in the National Review after the court’s Friday ruling on same-sex marriage. “And if Congress will not act, passing the constitutional amendments needed to correct this lawlessness, then the movement from the people for an Article V Convention of the States—to propose the amendments directly—will grow stronger and stronger.”

Cruz’s plan calls for the justices to face retention elections beginning with the second national election after their appointment, and every eight years after that. “Those justices deemed unfit for retention by both a majority of the American people as a whole and by majorities of the electorates in at least half of the 50 states will be removed from office and disqualified from future service on the Court,” Cruz wrote.

In defending his plan, Cruz wrote that 20 states already have judicial retention elections. What he didn’t mention was that many of those states have taken steps to compensate for a major problem that tends to arise when judges’ jobs get politicized. Of the 39 states that have some form of judicial elections (whether retention or otherwise), 30 have bans on judges personally soliciting donors for money to avoid conflicts of interest. Those bans were recently upheld by the Supreme Court itself, which ruled in April in Williams-Yulee v. The Florida Bar that states can legally prohibit judicial candidates from directly soliciting money. Why?

“Judges are not politicians, even when they come to the bench by way of the ballot,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the court’s 5-4 majority opinion in Yulee.

And there’s a good reason for Roberts’ reluctance to lump judges in with other politicians. In writing about the Yulee decision in April, Mother Jones reported:

Judicial elections have quietly become a major battleground in American politics over the last decade. State judicial candidates raised a combined $83 million in the 1990s, a total that was surpassed by roughly $30 million in the 2011-12 election cycle. More than $200 million has been donated to state supreme court candidates since 2000, and independent (and often unaccountable) spending on state judicial races has increased nearly sevenfold in that same time. Sue Bell Cobb, the retired chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, recently likened judicial elections to “legalized extortion.”

A major problem with all of this money is that more and more of it is independent and unaccountable spending, some of which comes from people who appear before the very judges they’re donating to. Even when judges don’t actively fundraise, outside groups pour funds into attack ads, putting money at the center of what was once a fairly sleepy and restrained electoral process. And that’s just on the state level. Imagine the national campaigns to retain (or unseat) Antonin Scalia or Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

“If the justices themselves couldn’t raise the money, who would step forward to run campaign contributions?” asks Liz Seaton, the campaign deputy executive director of judicial watchdog group Justice at Stake. “Why? And to what end?”

Seaton says that political attacks on the Supreme Court after controversial decisions aren’t new, and that the founding fathers gave federal judges lifetime tenure to protect them from exactly the kind of political pressure Cruz is hoping to apply.

“What kind of political campaigning and spending would there be if such a system would be put in place?” Seaton asks. “It’s just hard to imagine just how much that would blow the system out of the water.”

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Ted Cruz Wants to Subject Supreme Court Justices to Political Elections

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The Supreme Court Just Stopped Texas From Closing Almost All Of Its Abortion Clinics

by EuniceT24vtxxf Posted on June 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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The Supreme Court on Monday halted key portions of Texas’s anti-abortion law from going into effect that would have shutdown all but nine abortion clinics in the state. The stay will remain in place while abortion rights advocates prepare to take their case seeking to overturn portions of the Texas law to the Supreme Court.

The court’s four most conservative justices, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito, and Clarence Thomas, dissented from the order, indicating they would have let the clinics close.

From the New York Times:

The case concerns two parts of a state law that imposes strict requirements on abortion providers. One requires all abortion clinics in the state to meet the standards for “ambulatory surgical centers,” including regulations concerning buildings, equipment and staffing. The other requires doctors performing abortions to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital.

Other parts of the law took effect in 2013, causing about half of the state’s 41 abortion clinics to close.

Read the order:

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The Supreme Court Just Stopped Texas From Closing Almost All Of Its Abortion Clinics

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The Supreme Court just punched a hole in Obama’s plan to clean up power plants

by ElisabeJauncey Posted on June 29, 2015

The Supreme Court just punched a hole in Obama’s plan to clean up power plants

By on 29 Jun 2015commentsShare

The Obama administration has had a pretty good week at the Supreme Court, but that changed this morning when the court ruled, 5-4, that the EPA had gone about the process of regulating power plant pollutants incorrectly. The decision is a blow to the administration’s efforts to clean up America’s energy economy.

The decision, written by Justice Antonin Scalia on behalf of the court’s five conservatives, claimed that the EPA hadn’t correctly considered the cost of cracking down on mercury and other toxic pollutants, one of Obama’s signature environmental efforts. “It is not rational, never mind ‘appropriate,’ to impose billions of dollars in economic costs in return for a few dollars in health or environmental benefits,” wrote Scalia. For the time being, the regulation will stay in effect while the case goes back to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. Judges there may order the EPA to conduct additional cost-benefit analyses, or they may rule that the EPA overstepped its authority and strike down the regulation entirely.

Environmental groups expressed their outrage in unison. In a statement, Sierra Club attorney Sanjay Narayan accused the court of placing the public “at risk of unnecessary deaths, asthma attacks, and neurological damage.” Advocates argued that the whole cost-vs-benefits discussion is absurd: Even though the coal industry would have to pay an estimated $9.6 billion a year to clean up its operations, the EPA estimated (belatedly) that the monetary benefits of a healthier population were far greater, from $26 billion to $89 billion per year. And, treatment costs aside, how does one quantify the value of protecting children from mercury poisoning?

On the bright side, the rule may have already had much of its intended effect. Brad Plumer notes at Vox:

Even if the rule does get struck down, however, the practical impact on mercury pollution may be relatively limited. Ever since the rule was finalized back in 2012, electric utilities have spent billions installing scrubbers at coal plants and retiring a number of their oldest units in order to comply. While a handful of coal plants may get a reprieve from this ruling, many of the investments in pollution control spurred by the rule have already gone forward.

As this decision comes in, Congress is moving toward dismantling other aspects of Obama’s environmental agenda. Last week, the House voted to allow state governors to opt out of the Clean Power Plan, Obama’s push to limit CO2 pollution from electric plants. And similar legislation is working its way through the Senate, though Obama would, obviously, veto such a bill. The Clean Power Plan also faces its own slew of legal challenges, which will take years to play out. So it’ll be a long time before we know what Obama’s environmental legacy ultimately looks like.

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Sweet Vindication for Gavin Newsom, Who Staked His Career on Same-Sex Marriage

by HassieSchurr403 Posted on June 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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In 2004, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom unleashed a national political and legal tempest when he issued about 4,000 marriage licenses to same-sex couples. At a time when gay marriage was expressly prohibited by California law, even many of Newsom’s allies wondered aloud whether the rising Democratic star had effectively sabotaged his political career. Others grumbled that by forcing the hot-button issue into the presidential campaign, he’d handed a sharp weapon to the Republicans. During two political fundraisers in San Francisco that year, Barack Obama infamously refused to be photographed with Newsom.

But history was on Newsom’s side. In 2008, the California Supreme Court struck down the state’s same-sex marriage ban. Proposition 8, a subsequent, voter-backed constitutional amendment outlawing gay marriage, was later invalidated by a federal appeals court in a decision the US Supreme Court allowed to stand. Friday’s Supreme Court ruling has enshrined same-sex marriage as the law of the land, offering Newsom, now California’s Lieutenant Governor, sweet vindication 11 years after he took his rogue stance. I spoke with Newsom on Friday afternoon.

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Sweet Vindication for Gavin Newsom, Who Staked His Career on Same-Sex Marriage

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Sweet Vindication for Gavin Newsom, Who Staked His Career on Same-Sex Marriage

John Roberts Just Saved the Republican Party From Itself

by TristanFrank Posted on June 25, 2015

Mother Jones

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The Supreme Court’s Thursday ruling, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, that upheld a core tenet of the Affordable Care Act is good news for the millions of Americans whose health insurance was on the line. But it’s also, in a strange way, good news for a completely different group: the Republican politicians who have all but called for Obamacare to be shot into space on a rocket.

Had the court gone the other way, gutting federal subsidies while leaving the shell of the law on the books, congressional Republicans, as well as GOP governors such as Scott Walker and Chris Christie, would have been put in the uncomfortable position they’ve managed to avoid since Obamacare was signed into law—having to fix it. The Associated Press outlined Walker’s dilemma neatly on Wednesday:

About 183,000 people in Wisconsin purchase their insurance through the exchange and nine out of 10 of them are receiving a federal subsidy, according to an analysis of state data by Wisconsin Children and Families. The average tax credit they receive is $315 a month.

Health care advocates who have been critical of Walker for not taking federal money to pay for expanding Medicaid coverage have also called on the Republican second-term governor to prepare for the subsidies to be taken away.

And many of those Wisconsonites enrolled in the federal exchange are there because Walker put them there. As Bloomberg’s Joshua Green noted in a prescient piece in March, Walker booted 83,000 people from the state’s Medicaid program and put them on the federal exchange instead. That’s not the kind of crisis you want to be dealing with in the middle of a presidential campaign—or ever.

Conservatives would have been thrilled with a ruling in their favor on Thursday. But Roberts’ decision spares Walker and his colleagues from what would have come next, and frees them to continue lobbing rhetorical bombs at the law they’re now stuck with. As previous generations of Washington Republicans can advise, it’s much easier to go to war if you don’t need a plan for how to end it.

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John Roberts Just Saved the Republican Party From Itself

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Justice Anthony Kennedy Just Saved a Major Civil Rights Law

by LarueGovernor Posted on June 25, 2015

Mother Jones

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Congress passed the Fair Housing Act (FHA) to end pervasive segregation against the backdrop of urban race riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. On Thursday, mere months after riots exploded in Ferguson and Baltimore, the Supreme Court narrowly upheld the law’s most powerful tool for fighting segregation.

The decision was a welcome surprise to civil rights advocates who had feared that the conservative-leaning court under Chief Justice John Roberts—the same court that struck down part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act two years ago—was set to undo another major civil rights law.

In a 5-4 decision, Justice Anthony Kennedy joined the court’s liberal wing to uphold so-called “disparate impact” liability, preserving the law’s authority to root out policies that have a discriminatory effect on minorities. Under the FHA, policies that have a harmful effect—a disparate impact—on minorities are illegal, even if that harm was unintentional. For decades, disparate impact has been vital to fighting segregation in housing because of the difficulty in proving purposeful discrimination.

“I can’t help thinking that recent events in places like Ferguson and Baltimore must have had some impact on Justice Kennedy’s approach to this case,” says appellate lawyer Deepak Gupta, who filed an amicus brief on behalf of current and former members of Congress that urged the court to uphold the disparate impact standard. “We have de facto segregation in lots of places in the country. And if the only way to remedy that in the legal system is to prove that somebody did something on purpose and said so, then the civil rights laws are a lot less powerful in combating these problems.”

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Justice Anthony Kennedy Just Saved a Major Civil Rights Law

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