Tag Archives: supreme

How Hobby Lobby Undermined The Very Idea of a Corporation

by AidenLoche Posted on July 3, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Here’s one more reason to worry about the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision, which allowed the arts and crafts chain to block insurance coverage of contraception for female employees because of the owners’ religious objections: It could screw up corporate law.

This gets complicated, but bear with us. Basically, what you need to know is that if you and some friends start a company that makes a lot of money, you’ll be rich, but if it incurs a lot of debt and fails, you won’t be left to pay its bills. The Supreme Court affirmed this arrangement in a 2001 case, Cedric Kushner Promotions vs. Don King:

linguistically speaking, the employee and the corporation are different “persons,” even where the employee is the corporation’s sole owner. After all, incorporation’s basic purpose is to create a distinct legal entity, with legal rights, obligations, powers, and privileges different from those of the natural individuals who created it, who own it, or whom it employs.

More MoJo coverage of the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision.


Hobby Lobby’s Hypocrisy: The Company’s Retirement Plan Invests in Contraception Manufacturers


The 8 Best Lines From Ginsburg’s Dissent


Why the Decision Is the New Bush v. Gore


How Obama Can Make Sure Hobby Lobby’s Female Employees Are Covered


Hobby Lobby Funded Disgraced Fundamentalist Christian Leader Accused of Harassing Dozens of Women

That separation is what legal and business scholars call the “corporate veil,” and it’s fundamental to the entire operation. Now, thanks to the Hobby Lobby case, it’s in question. By letting Hobby Lobby’s owners assert their personal religious rights over an entire corporation, the Supreme Court has poked a major hole in the veil. In other words, if a company is not truly separate from its owners, the owners could be made responsible for its debts and other burdens.

“If religious shareholders can do it, why can’t creditors and government regulators pierce the corporate veil in the other direction?” Burt Neuborne, a law professor at New York University, asked in an email.

That’s a question raised by 44 other law professors, who filed a friends-of-the-court brief that implored the Court to reject Hobby Lobby’s argument and hold the veil in place. Here’s what they argued:

Allowing a corporation, through either shareholder vote or board resolution, to take on and assert the religious beliefs of its shareholders in order to avoid having to comply with a generally-applicable law with a secular purpose is fundamentally at odds with the entire concept of incorporation. Creating such an unprecedented and idiosyncratic tear in the corporate veil would also carry with it unintended consequences, many of which are not easily foreseen.

In his opinion for Hobby Lobby, Justice Samuel Alito’s insisted the decision should be narrowly applied to the peculiarities of the case. But as my colleague Pat Caldwell writes, the logic of the argument is likely to invite a tide of new lawsuits, all with their own unintended consequences.

Small wonder, then, that despite congressional Republicans defending the Hobby Lobby decision as a victory for American business against the nanny state, the US Chamber of Commerce—the country’s main big business lobby—was quiet on the issue. Even more telling: Despite a record tide of friends-of-the-court briefs, not one Fortune 500 weighed in on the case. In fact, as David H. Gans at Slate pointed out in March, about the only sizeable business-friendly groups that did file briefs with the court were the US Women’s Chamber of Commerce and the Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce. Both sided against Hobby Lobby.

See the original post: 

How Hobby Lobby Undermined The Very Idea of a Corporation

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on How Hobby Lobby Undermined The Very Idea of a Corporation

Presidential Appointments Were Already a Total Nightmare. Now They Just Got Worse.

by FrankieReeder Posted on June 26, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Barack Obama had better hope nobody resigns from his administration during the final two years of his presidency. Thanks to a new Supreme Court ruling released Thursday, it’s going to be a lot harder for Obama, and every other future president, to staff the executive branch.

In a unanimous decision penned by Justice Stephen Breyer, the court greatly reduced the president’s ability to make recess appointments with its decision in Noel Canning v. National Labor Relations Board. Breyer’s opinion rejected a lower court’s ruling that would have essentially nullified the president’s ability to appoint nominees to temporary jobs in the executive branch when Congress is out of town. But Breyer and his fellow eight justices said that the president can’t ignore Congress when it claims to still be at work, even if those sessions are just show meetings to obstruct the president. While upholding the concept of recess appointments, the new ruling will in essence prevent the president from using recess appointments anytime the opposition party controls one side of Congress. The Senate can’t enter a recess without the consent of the House, and they’re unlikely to ever get permission to officially leave town if the House majority is opposed to the president. The court’s decision also leaves countless labor dispute decisions in doubt.

Continue Reading »

Originally posted here: 

Presidential Appointments Were Already a Total Nightmare. Now They Just Got Worse.

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Oster, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Presidential Appointments Were Already a Total Nightmare. Now They Just Got Worse.

Here’s What You Need to Know About the Supreme Court’s Big Abortion Ruling

by ErnestiGoshorn Posted on June 26, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

On Thursday, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that a Massachusetts law creating a 35-foot buffer zone around abortion clinics in which protest was forbidden is a violation of the First Amendment. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion, which held that the law was unconstitutional because it blocked peaceful protest on public streets.

The ruling will make it difficult for states to justify laws that establish buffer zones for abortion clinics. In cases where anti-abortion protesters obstruct access to clinics, the court says, states must pursue alternatives, such as court orders to limit protest. A problem with access to a clinic, for example, “could be addressed through a law requiring crowds blocking a clinic entrance to disperse for a limited period when ordered to do so by the police.” Only if those narrower measures fail and a state compiles a long record of problems caused by clinic protests, can the state generally bar clinic protest.

Three states, Massachusetts, Montana, and Colorado, have buffer zone laws on the books. The case, McCullen v. Coakley, was brought by a grandmotherly anti-abortion “sidewalk counselor” named Eleanor McCullen, who argued that the zone violated her First Amendment right to peacefully protest. Massachusetts countered that the law protected a competing right protected by the constitution: the right to obtain an abortion—which prior to the establishment of buffer zones, clinic protesters had endangered through threats, harassment, and physical hindrance.

The court agreed that buffer zones impeded the rights of McCullen and others who wish to “engage in personal, caring, consensual conver­sations with women about various alternatives.”

The fate of a 2000 Supreme Court ruling that permitted states to enact small “floating buffer zones” around people who are entering or leaving abortion clinics is not clear. The Court did not address that case, Hill v. Colorado, in this opinion. But the validity of floating buffer zones now seems in question, according to SCOTUSblog‘s Tom Goldstein. Floating buffer zones have been difficult to enforce, and abortion rights advocates have argued that they provide scant protection from violent protesters.

Here’s more background on the case:
In order for Massachusetts’s buffer zone law to survive a First Amendment challenge, lawyers for the state had to prove that the legislature had a compelling reason to limit speech, that the law wasn’t aimed at suppressing ideas, and that the law didn’t restrain speech more than necessary.

The Supreme Court agreed with Massachusetts that the state had a compelling interest and that the law didn’t target specific ideas. However, Roberts wrote, “The buffer zones burden substantially more speech than necessary to achieve the Commonwealth’s asserted interests.”

The Supreme Court’s decision partially hinged on how serious of a threat protesters posed to abortions rights.

In its argument to the court, Massachusetts noted that it has a history of violent protests at clinics. The state created buffer zones in 2000 in reaction to the 1996 murders of two abortion clinic workers. But the law was also a response to routine protests outside clinics in Boston, Worcester, and Springfield, where activists threatened women and physically barred them from entering the clinic. Here is a vivid, but typical example from a clinic worker who testified before the Massachusetts Legislature in 1999 about witnessing a particular protest:

A woman in her mid-20s and her elderly grandfather…were trapped inside the cab for several minutes…Two escorts were able to make their way to the woman’s side as she ran crying into the clinic. Her grandfather, who walked with a cane, was unable to run…In the amount of time it took him to walk from the cab to the clinic entrance, he was shoved and almost fell down twice. He was also forced to endure various insults about his race and remarks about how his handicap was a punishment from God.

Other clinic staff testified that protesters blocked them from going to work, pressed a clinic escort up against a car, and pushed a clinic worker into a moving car.

The Supreme Court issued its guidelines for buffer zones in Hill v. Colorado in 2000, the same year Massachusetts passed its law. Following the court’s lead, Massachusetts created six-foot “floating buffer zones” around any person within 18 feet of an abortion clinic’s entrance or exit. Protesters were still allowed to stand next to a clinic’s doors, and they could approach within six feet of a person with that person’s consent.

The floating buffer zone law proved impossible to enforce. It was unclear to police what constituted an approach, and some protesters interpreted eye contact as consent to approach women and scream in their faces. In 2007, Captain William Evans of the Boston Police Department testified to the Legislature that his officers had probably arrested no more than five protesters in seven years (most for violating laws other than the buffer zone) despite the fact that protesters probably violated the law almost every weekâ&#128;&#139;end.

So that year, Massachusetts abandoned the floating buffer zones sanctioned by the Supreme Court, and established a more ambitious, hard buffer zone of 35 feet surrounding an abortion clinic’s entrance, exit, or driveway.

In oral arguments before the court in January, Mark Rienzi, the attorney for McCullen, dismissed incidents of violence and aggression at abortion clinics as the work of a few bad actors. He focused on McCullen, who plasters her refrigerator with baby photos she says she has received from women she talked out of having abortions.

This tactic worked. Roberts noted, “The record indicates that the problems are limited principally to the Boston clinic on Saturday mornings, and the police there appear perfectly capable of singling out lawbreakers. The petition­ers are not protestors; they seek not merely to express their opposition to abortion,” but to counsel women. “It is thus no answer to say that petitioners can still be seen and heard by women within the buffer zones. If all that the women can see and hear are vocifer­ous opponents of abortion, then the buffer zones have effectively sti­fled petitioners’ message.”

DV.load(“//www.documentcloud.org/documents/1209603-supreme-court-abortion-clinic-buffer-zone-decision.js”,
width: 630,
height: 820,
sidebar: false,
container: “#DV-viewer-1209603-supreme-court-abortion-clinic-buffer-zone-decision”
);

Supreme Court Abortion Clinic Buffer Zone Decision (PDF)

Supreme Court Abortion Clinic Buffer Zone Decision (Text)

View original article: 

Here’s What You Need to Know About the Supreme Court’s Big Abortion Ruling

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Oster, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Here’s What You Need to Know About the Supreme Court’s Big Abortion Ruling

Read the Supreme Court’s Decision on Obama’s Recess Appointment Power

by ShayneGooden Posted on June 26, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

On Thursday, the Supreme Court struck a blow to the president’s ability to use recess appointments, rejecting his ability to sidestep pro-forma sessions of Congress. Read the court’s full opinion below:

DV.load(“//www.documentcloud.org/documents/1209523-supreme-court-recess-appointments-decision.js”,
width: 630,
height: 820,
sidebar: false,
container: “#DV-viewer-1209523-supreme-court-recess-appointments-decision”
);

Supreme Court Recess Appointments Decision (PDF)

Supreme Court Recess Appointments Decision (Text)

View original post here:  

Read the Supreme Court’s Decision on Obama’s Recess Appointment Power

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Oster, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Read the Supreme Court’s Decision on Obama’s Recess Appointment Power

Sorry, Conservatives. The Supreme Court Isn’t Stopping Obama’s Climate Plan.

by MonserrateDeGil Posted on June 23, 2014

Mother Jones

“Supreme Court Limits EPA’s Global Warming Rules.”

“Supreme Court Ruling Backs Most EPA Emission Controls.”

These are just a couple of the many contradictory headlines in response to Monday’s US Supreme Court ruling in Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA, a case filed by industry groups and several states challenging some of the environmental agency’s efforts to restrict greenhouse gas emissions. So what’s going on here?

Despite some applauding headlines from the right—”Supreme Court Hits Obama’s Global Warming Agenda,” claimed the Washington Times—the ruling actually had very little effect. “This is not doing much of anything to hobble EPA,” explains Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law, adding: “Nothing that is being done today calls into question the EPA’s ability to regulate power plants, both new and existing, under section 111 of the Clean Air Act.”

The decision, authored by Antonin Scalia, is actually the latest in a series of rulings by the Supreme Court on the ability of the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. The most important of these, 2007’s Massachusetts v. EPA, found that the agency had the authority to regulate these emissions under the Clean Air Act. In 2011, the court went further in American Electric Power v. Connecticut, ruling that states, cities, and other entities could not independently sue greenhouse gas emitters because the Clean Air Act and the EPA “displace” their ability to do so. It’s on the basis of such rulings that President Obama’s EPA has stepped forward to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from a variety of sources, including automobiles, newly constructed power plants, and, most recently, existing or older power plants.

Headlines notwithstanding, those regulatory actions weren’t really at issue in Monday’s decision. Rather, the latest case involved something called the EPA’s Prevention of Significant Deterioration (PSD) program, which issues permits for major new sources of air pollution, or for higher levels of emissions from existing sources. Permitted emitters are required to use the best technology available to mitigate their emissions.

As part of the EPA’s initiatives to combat global warming, the agency had tried to “tailor” this preexisting program, which covered other pollutants, to apply to large greenhouse gas emitters, while simultaneously ruling out smaller emitters like hospitals. Industry groups and some states sued in objection. The Supreme Court ruled that the EPA can’t target emitters based on their greenhouse gases under this program, but the court also said the agency can require major emitters already permitted under the PSD program for other types of emissions to curtail their greenhouse gas emissions, too. And by these lights, the EPA can still regulate 83 percent of all stationary sources of these emissions.

So we certainly shouldn’t be worried that the EPA can’t go forward on regulating greenhouse gases now, explains Sierra Club attorney Pat Gallagher. “There’s a slight ding in their program,” Gallagher says. But as he adds, “you’re still capturing most facilities, like 83 percent of the facilities.”

So, don’t freak out. The EPA is still taking major action on global warming. The latest Supreme Court ruling is no catastrophe. The fact that the court is tweaking such minor details in a sense affirms that the EPA’s broad approach to global warming is on track.

Source – 

Sorry, Conservatives. The Supreme Court Isn’t Stopping Obama’s Climate Plan.

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Oster, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Sorry, Conservatives. The Supreme Court Isn’t Stopping Obama’s Climate Plan.

Supreme Court Strikes Down EPA Interpretation of Clean Air Act

by JackieMesserly Posted on June 23, 2014

Mother Jones

A few years ago, the EPA added carbon dioxide to an established program that limits emissions of harmful pollutants. But there was a problem: the Clean Air Act says that permits are required by any source that emits more than 250 tons of a covered pollutant. Because CO2 is such a common gas, this would have forced tens of thousands of small sources to go through an expensive and pointless permitting process, something EPA wanted to avoid. So, for CO2 only, they unilaterally changed the threshold to 100,000 tons per year. This exempted most large businesses, but it also gave critics an opening to challenge the law. Today they won:

The Supreme Court, in a split ruling, has blocked the Obama administration from requiring special permits for some new power plants, but upheld them for others. In a dense 5-4 decision Monday, the justices said the Environmental Protection Agency had wrongly stretched an anti-pollution provision of the Clean Air Act to cover carbon emissions in new or modified plants.

But the ruling was confined to only one regulatory provision, and it is not likely to directly affect the broader climate-change policy that the administration announced earlier this month. That policy relies on a different part of the law that says states must take steps to reduce harmful air pollutants, which include greenhouse gases.

This doesn’t affect the EPA’s recent proposal that would limit CO2 emissions from power plants, since that relies on a different provision of the Clean Air Act that’s already been blessed by the Supreme Court. However, today’s ruling is a demonstration of something I’ve mentioned before: When an executive agency modifies the way it interprets a law, it’s a fairly routine affair. Interpretations of federal statutes, especially complex regulatory constructions, are notoriously difficult, and agencies do it all the time. There’s no presidential “lawlessness” or “tyranny” involved, and disputes over these interpretations are routinely resolved by courts. In this case, it was obviously a close call, since the decision was 5-4 and the opinion was long and dense.

This is what’s likely to happen in other cases where the Obama administration has interpreted a law in ways that his critics don’t like. If the critics are serious, they’ll go to court, and in some cases they’ll win. In others, they’ll lose. Welcome to the 21st century.

UPDATE: I wrote this hastily because—and I know you’re going to love this excuse—a temporary crown fell out and I had to pop out to my dentist to get it re-cemented. But now that I’m back, it’s worth pointing out that today’s Supreme Court decision actually upheld most of the EPA’s new limitations on CO2 emissions. The main reason I highlighted the one piece they struck down was because I wanted to make a point about presidential “lawlessness” that’s become such a talking point on the right these days. In the case of the 250-ton rule, the EPA tried to reinterpret the law and the court ruled against them. Other interpretations were upheld. That’s the way this stuff goes.

Taken from – 

Supreme Court Strikes Down EPA Interpretation of Clean Air Act

Posted in Crown, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Supreme Court Strikes Down EPA Interpretation of Clean Air Act

Will The Supreme Court Kill Public-Employee Unions?

by GeorgeDeHamel Posted on May 26, 2014

Mother Jones

Forget Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and his fellow union-bashing governors. Forget the partisan Republican attacks on organized labor. The gravest threat today to public-employee unions—which represent cops, firefighters, prison guards, teachers, nurses, and other city and state workers—is a Supreme Court case named Harris v. Quinn, which could be decided as early as this Tuesday. And, strangely enough, it is the court’s most sharp-tongued conservative, Justice Antonin Scalia, who could ride to organized labor’s rescue.

The case pits several of the nation’s mightiest labor unions, such as the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), against their longstanding foe, the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, which helped bring the case. National Right to Work is funded by some of the biggest names in conservative philanthropy: the Bradley family, the Waltons of Walmart, Charles Koch, and DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund, two dark-money ATMs. Labor officials see Harris as an effort by the deep-pocketed conservative movement to wipe public-employee unions off the map—and to demolish a major source of funding and support for the Democratic Party. “This is an attempted kill shot aimed at public-sector unions,” says Bill Lurye, AFSCME’s general counsel.

The origins of Harris date to July 2003, when the Illinois legislature passed a bill recognizing certain home-care providers as “public employees” and designating a Midwest branch of SEIU to exclusively represent those workers. Before that, these workers were deemed independent contractors with no union representation, even though the Illinois government paid them with federal health-care funds. In June 2009, Gov. Pat Quinn, a Democrat, went one step further. By executive order, Quinn declared the state’s disability-care providers, another type of home-care worker, eligible for exclusive union representation. (Ultimately, the disability providers voted against unionizing.)

Organized labor hailed these moves. Unions see a huge opportunity in the rapidly growing population of elderly Americans—what SEIU president Mary Kay Henry calls the “silver tsunami.” Labor leaders believe that organizing home-care workers across the country could slow the decline in union membership.

When the Illinois labor bill passed in July 2003, no home-care worker was forced into SEIU. But if they chose not to join, the union still was allowed to deduct a small amount of money from their paychecks. Why? It was the union’s responsibility to represent every home-care worker impacted by the new law. To pay for representing union and non-union home-care workers, the union began taking what it calls a “fair share” fee. (This money cannot be used for political activity.) The Supreme Court has upheld a union’s right to collect fair share fees. (This is where so-called right-to-work laws come in. Such laws ban unions from collecting fair share fees from non-union workers even if the employees benefit from union-negotiated contracts.)

Home-care workers, consumers, and advocates in Illinois say union representation has led to higher quality care, safer workplaces, and more stability. Flora Johnson, an 85-year-old home-care worker in Chicago and SEIU member, says union-funded training sessions taught her how to properly lift a person and how to feed patients without choking them. Johnson points out that the union brought a level of professionalism to her industry. “Before we got the union, it was like we was babysitters,” she says. “We had no dignity.”

But there was a backlash. In April 2010, a group of Illinois home-care workers, led by plaintiff Pamela Harris, filed a class action arguing that the state had infringed on their First Amendment rights by forcing them to be represented by a union and pay fees. (The suit named two unions, SEIU and AFSCME, as defendants.) A district court and the US Seventh Court of Appeals each dismissed the case.

The case lay dormant until last October. That’s when, at National Right to Work’s urging, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Harris. Until that point, Harris was narrowly focused on the Illinois home-care workers; it posed no existential threat to the likes of SEIU and AFSCME. But after the high court intervened, National Right-to-Work expanded its argument to threaten all public-employee unions. As SCOTUSblog’s Lyle Denniston wrote, Harris “mushroomed…into a major test of the continuing validity of the Abood precedent.”

Cue organized labor’s freak-out. Abood v. Detroit Board of Education is the 1977 Supreme Court decision that, in effect, upheld the constitutionality of the public-employee union model. The majority in Abood said these unions did not infringe on the First Amendment by collecting representation dues and collectively bargaining on behalf of public workers.

During oral arguments in January, the Obama administration contended that overturning Abood would result in “radically reshaping First Amendment law.” Yet several of the court’s conservative justices appeared to want just that. Writing for the majority in 2012’s Knox v. SEIU, Justice Samuel Alito all but invited National Right to Work to challenge Abood. During the oral arguments in Harris, Alito and Justice Anthony Kennedy seemed eager to demolish Abood. The court’s four liberal justices questioned National Right-to-Work’s arguments at every turn, with Justice Elena Kagan saying that tossing out Abood would lead to a “radical restructuring of the way workplaces are run.” John Roberts, who has used his time as chief justice to push a pro-corporate agenda, gave few hints about where he stood on the fate of public-employee unions.

That leaves Justice Antonin Scalia. A conservative who says he interprets the Constitution through an originalist lens, Scalia would make for a strange ally of organized labor. Yet it was Scalia who asked some of the toughest questions of William Messenger, the lawyer for National Right to Work, challenging Messenger’s argument that public-employee unions are lobbying organizations focused mostly on influencing public policy. Forcing workers to be represented by a lobbying outfit, Messenger argued, infringes on the First Amendment rights of workers who don’t agree with the union’s positions.

Scalia didn’t appear to be buying it. He seemed to lean more toward labor’s argument: that unions exist to better the working conditions of the workers they represent. “Listening to Scalia’s voice in oral arguments made me feel like he really doubted that there was a need to go so far right now,” says Lee Adler, an expert on public-employee unions at Cornell University. “He couldn’t follow National Right to Work’s logic.”

The Supreme Court’s decision in Harris could cut several ways. It could affirm the lower court’s decision—a big loss for National Right-to-Work. It could issue a more narrow opinion, saying, for instance, that Illinois home-care workers aren’t public employees and shouldn’t be unionized without touching Abood. Or the high court could take that kill shot: Eviscerate Abood and gut public-employee unions.

Like many other court watchers, Cornell’s Lee Adler says the fate of Harris—and, potentially, the fate of public-employee unions—rests with Scalia. For the labor movement, Adler says, “He’s the great white hope.”

View original post here:

Will The Supreme Court Kill Public-Employee Unions?

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Safer, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Will The Supreme Court Kill Public-Employee Unions?

A Federal Judge Just Struck Down Wisconsin’s Voter ID Law. Read The Decision.

by Seymour89E Posted on April 29, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Wisconsin voters won’t be forced to present a photo ID to gain access to the ballot thanks to a new federal court decision. U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman ruled on Tuesday that the state’s voter ID law violates the constitutional rights of minority and low-income voters. In his decision, Adelman cited the Voting Rights Act to invalidate the 2011 Wisconsin law—passed by the state legislature and signed by Republican Gov. Scott Walker—that implemented a photo ID requirement for all voters.

Voting rights advocates despaired last summer after the Supreme Court blocked Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, a key provision of the law that required the government to approve any voting changes in states and jurisdictions with a history of discrimination (Wisconsin was not one of those states). Since that decision, states previously covered by Section 5 have rushed to add voter restrictions. But based on Adelman’s logic, these controversial photo ID requirements that have been implemented across the country run afoul of a part of the Voting Rights Act that the Supreme Court left untouched.

Continue Reading »

See the article here – 

A Federal Judge Just Struck Down Wisconsin’s Voter ID Law. Read The Decision.

Posted in Anchor, Citizen, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Sterling, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on A Federal Judge Just Struck Down Wisconsin’s Voter ID Law. Read The Decision.

Cardinal Defends Hobby Lobby: "All You Have to Do Is Walk into a 7-11" for Contraceptives

by DarnellFlick Posted on April 21, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

On Sunday, New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan, culture warrior extraordinaire, made a curious argument for why the Supreme Court should allow Hobby Lobby to eliminate the morning-after pill from its employee health care plan: if you want contraceptives, “all you have to do is walk into a 7-11 or any shop on any street in America and have access to them.”

The East Coast’s top Catholic made his comments Sunday on CBS’s Face the Nation. “I think they’re just true Americans,” he told host Norah O’Donnell of Hobby Lobby’s owners, who claim that providing emergency contraceptive pills violates their religious beliefs. “Is the ability to buy contraceptives, that are now widely available—my Lord, all you have to do is walk into a 7-11 or any shop on any street in America and have access to them—is that right to access those and have them paid for, is that such a towering good that it would suffocate the rights of conscience?”

Couple of things:

The owners of Hobby Lobby are proposing to eliminate one kind of contraception from the company’s employee health care plans: the morning-after pill. The Greens, who own the company, do not have a problem with all contraception. In fact, the company plan still covers birth control pills.
Birth control pills are a form of contraception that isn’t available without a prescription. They are not sold on any shop on any street in America.
If Dolan is talking about emergency contraception, we would note that only one type of morning-after pill for sale in the US without a prescription: Plan B One Step and its generics.
These are also not sold on any shop on any street in America.
These are not sold at 7-11.

It’s almost as if Dolan doesn’t know very much about the contraceptives he opposes. Either that, or he hasn’t been to a 7-11 since giving up Go-Go Taquitos for Lent.

Originally posted here:  

Cardinal Defends Hobby Lobby: "All You Have to Do Is Walk into a 7-11" for Contraceptives

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Cardinal Defends Hobby Lobby: "All You Have to Do Is Walk into a 7-11" for Contraceptives

This Climate Scientist Just Won Another Victory in Court

by UteBelairmt Posted on April 18, 2014

Mother Jones

Michael Mann, the perennially embattled climate scientist best known for his “hockey-stick” temperature graph, came out victorious yesterday in a court battle against a Virginia legislator and a conservative think tank that had sought to obtain thousands of Mann’s emails and research documents from his time as a University of Virginia professor.

The Virginia Supreme Court ruled that unpublished scientific research can be exempted from the state’s Freedom of Information Act requirements, because disclosing such information would cut into the university’s competitive advantage over other universities. As a result, some 12,000 of Mann’s emails and papers won’t be released to the Energy & Environment Legal Institute (formerly known as the American Tradition Institute) and Virginia Delegate Robert Marshall (R-Prince William), who had requested the documents in 2011.

In a statement on his Facebook page, Mann called the decision “a victory for science, public university faculty, and academic freedom.”

Back in 2012, a lower Virginia court ruled that the documents in question were considered “proprietary,” and thus shielded from FOIA requests. ATI appealed the decision, and the case landed with the state’s Supreme Court last October. The main question was whether research-related documents should get the same kind of protection as trade secrets and other information that could cause financial harm if released. ATI argued that Mann’s emails didn’t merit such protection, while Mann and U-Va. maintained that scientists should be able to hammer out their work behind closed doors before presenting a finished product to the public.

In a brief filed with the Supreme Court late last year, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press argued that in protecting Mann’s research, the lower court had actually set the scope too wide, leaving open the possibility that a university could claim virtually any document to be proprietary. But yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling revised the exemption criteria so that non-research-related documents—things like budgets and communications between administrators—could still be accessed with a FOIA, said Emily Grannis, the Reporters Committee staffer who authored the brief.

Of course, Grannis said, the ruling is only binding in the state of Virginia, but it could serve as a model for how other states set limits for what qualifies as proprietary if similar cases arise elsewhere.

Continue Reading »

Visit site: 

This Climate Scientist Just Won Another Victory in Court

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on This Climate Scientist Just Won Another Victory in Court