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The Supreme Court Just Got Deluged With Arguments Against Texas’ Stupid Anti-Abortion Law

Mother Jones

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On Tuesday, a wide-ranging group of organizations and individuals asked the Supreme Court to overturn the Texas anti-abortion law that threatens to close the majority of clinics in the state. The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments for the case in March and make a decision this summer.

The groups, which included medical professionals, legal experts, economists, religious organizations, the Obama administration, and more than 160 members of Congress, filed 45 briefs explaining their opposition to HB 2, the sweeping 2013 anti-abortion law that has been caught up in legal battles ever since it was passed. More than half of the state’s 41 clinics have closed as a result of the law. If the Supreme Court does not overturn HB 2, the number of clinics in the state could drop to just 10.

“For many women in Texas, HB 2 would create a legal regime in which a real choice about whether to carry a pregnancy to full term ‘exists in theory but not in fact,” argued attorneys at the Department of Justice in a brief, adding that the restrictions imposed by the law “do not serve—in fact, they disserve—the government’s interest in protecting women’s health.”

Both abortion rights opponents and advocates say the case will affect existing restrictions on abortion across the country and will also determine to what extent states can restrict abortion. The case, Whole Women’s Health v. Cole focuses on two aspects of HB 2: one that requires abortion facilities to meet hospital-like architectural standards, and another requiring abortion doctors to have admitting privileges with a nearby hospital.

“There is incontrovertible evidence that imposing these unjustified burdens on abortion providers is impeding women’s access to quality, evidence-based medicine,” wrote a number of the leading physician’s organizations, including the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Family Physicians, and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, in their brief. “HB 2 has delayed, and in some cases blocked, women’s access to legal abortion. Both outcomes jeopardize women’s health.”

The 45 briefs filed on Tuesday were an unprecedented demonstration of opposition to anti-abortion laws, according to Nancy Northrup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights.

“Never before has such a diverse array of organizations and leaders from the fields of medicine, government, law, business, and religion stepped forward to condemn abortion restrictions at the US Supreme Court,” Northrup told reporters. “These briefs present a thorough record of the undeniable damage Texas’ sham law has and will continue to cause, and an indisputable legal argument for why it must be struck down. This deceptive law is an affront to science-based medicine, an insult to women’s dignity, and reflects a total disregard for the rule of law and the rights of millions.”

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The Supreme Court Just Got Deluged With Arguments Against Texas’ Stupid Anti-Abortion Law

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Black Juror: Prosecutors Treated Me "Like I Was a Criminal"

Mother Jones

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Until I contacted her in Rome, Georgia, on Tuesday, Marilyn Garrett had no idea she had become a minor celebrity in legal circles. Nearly 30 years ago, she briefly served in the jury pool during the capital trial of Timothy Foster, a 19-year-old black man charged with murdering an elderly white woman. The prosecutors dismissed her, along with every other African American called to serve, leaving an all-white jury that convicted Foster and sentenced him to death. On Monday, unbeknownst to her, the 63-year-old played a starring role in US Supreme Court arguments over racial discrimination in jury selection.

The rejection has stuck with Garrett all these years in large part because she felt like the prosecutors treated her “like I was a criminal.” Their interrogation left her in tears, she told me, even though she was just there to do her civic duty. Now she’s gotten a little payback, courtesy of Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who channeled Garrett’s outrage in the chamber of the nation’s highest court.

Timothy Foster’s lawyers have long argued that the trial prosecutors illegally removed blacks from his jury pool, but the Georgia courts rejected every one of those arguments. The Supreme Court is now hearing the case thanks to a treasure trove of documents his lawyers discovered in 2006. A public records request unearthed prosecutors’ notes that make a mockery of a jury-selection process that was supposed to ensure racial fairness. (You can read about some of the sordid history here.)

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Black Juror: Prosecutors Treated Me "Like I Was a Criminal"

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Women in Texas May Have to Wait an Extra 20 Days for an Abortion

Mother Jones

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New research from the University of Texas—Austin has found that women seeking abortions in cities such as Dallas, Forth Worth, and Austin face staggering wait times of up to 20 days before they can get the procedure. The data, which researchers working for the Texas Policy Evaluation Project released Monday, provides a startling look at the effects of abortion clinic closures in Texas just as the Supreme Court is deciding whether or not to hear a case that could slash the number of remaining clinics by half.

Wait times at abortion clinics in Austin, Texas.

Researchers documented wait times for clinics in Forth Worth, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, and Houston from November 2014 to September 2015. In Austin, the average wait over the course of those 11 months was 10 days. In Dallas and Fort Worth, the annual average was 5 days. They also calculated the average monthly wait times and the range of wait times in a given month and found that average wait times within a single month reached up to 20 days in the Dallas-Fort Worth area—where there are five abortion clinics—and wait times for individual patients could reach up to 23 days.

The escalating wait times are a result of successful efforts to close more than half of Texas’s abortion clinics. Most of those clinics were closed by HB 2, a 2013 anti-abortion law that many consider to be the harshest in the nation. Its provisions included a requirement that clinics must have admitting privileges with a hospital no more than 30 miles away. Before the measure, Texas had 41 clinics; four months after it took effect, there were only 22. Today, there are 19.

A final provision of the law, which may be the subject of a Supreme Court battle later this year, would close all but 10 clinics if it goes into effect. That measure requires abortion clinics to be regulated similarly to hospitals, which makes it dramatically more expensive to operate an abortion clinic. Leading medical organizations, such as the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, maintain this level of medical infrastructure is not necessary to safely perform most abortions. Whole Woman’s Health, a chain of abortion clinics with several providers in Texas, sued in federal court and succeeded in having the Supreme Court temporarily block the law. The court could make a decision to hear the full case as soon as this month.

A wait time of almost three weeks has serious consequences for women seeking abortions, ranging from her ability to afford an abortion, which becomes more expensive as the pregnancy progresses, to intensity of the procedure. In the second trimester, the cost of an abortion may go up by a hundred dollars every week. The researchers found that if the Supreme Court were to allow all but 10 clinics to close, it would almost double the number of second-trimester procedures in Texas—from 6,600 in 2013 to 12,400.

The researchers also predicted that if the Supreme Court upheld HB 2, the 10 clinics that would remain open would not have the capacity to meet demand. Those clinics today provide only one-fifth of abortions in Texas. If they were the only clinics in Texas, they would probably experience consistent wait times of around three weeks. For instance, the Houston area saw an average wait time of less than five days. But Houston has six clinics. If the law were fully in place, it would only have two clinics. And as clinics closed around the state, the number of abortions taking place in Houston would rise from 3,900 in 2013 to more than 11,000.

Clinics in states bordering Texas are already feeling the crush. Kathaleen Pittman, an official with Hope Medical Group of Shreveport, Louisiana, said in an interview that the proportion of Texans going to Hope Medical Group for Women in Shreveport, Louisiana, has leapt from 15 percent of patients in 2011 to 23 percent in 2014.

And the South isn’t the only region where clinic closures have sent a wave of patients looking for new providers. The problem is also pronounced in Ohio, where eight clinics have closed since 2011. Officials for Preterm, a clinic in Cleveland, say the number of patients traveling from a different part of Ohio has jumped 160 percent, and the number of patients from out of state has almost doubled.

As Mother Jones reported in a recent feature, a clinic called the Cherry Hill Women’s Center in southern New Jersey is seeing more and more patients from Virginia, because clinics in Maryland and Delaware are overbooked, and from the Midwest, because many clinics there have closed. An analysis by Mother Jones found that clinics are closing at a rate of 1.5 per week. If the trend keeps up, the new data from Texas may turn out to be a bellwether for the rest of the nation.

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Women in Texas May Have to Wait an Extra 20 Days for an Abortion

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5 Supreme Court Cases that John Roberts Could Use to Win Back Conservatives

Mother Jones

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Chief Justice John Roberts kicks off his 11th year on the US Supreme Court on Monday, not with accolades for his stewardship of the nation’s highest court, but as the target of GOP presidential candidates who think he’s gone soft for siding with liberals on the big Obamacare decision. But Roberts will have a good chance to redeem himself with his conservative base in the coming term.

Unlike last year, the October 2015 Supreme Court term that starts this week isn’t full of blockbuster cases. There are no abortion or religious freedom cases on the docket yet, although there are some waiting in the wings that will probably make it to the court before the end of the year. In the meantime, several cases driven solely by deep-pocketed conservative legal outfits will provide Roberts with opportunities to reassert his conservative bona fides by potentially slapping down racial preferences in college admissions, weakening union membership, or further undermine voting rights for minorities. He’ll also have a bevy of opportunities to continue his assault on workers’ and consumers’ ability to check corporate misconduct through class actions.

Not everything facing the Roberts’ court this term is political, though. The docket is heavily loaded with criminal justice cases, where ideological differences on the court are less likely to dictate the outcomes—after all, liberal justice Sonia Sotomayor is a former prosecutor. The death penalty makes another strong appearance this term, though not quite as dramatically as this past spring, when the Supreme Court rejected a challenge to lethal injection.

Here are five cases to watch:

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5 Supreme Court Cases that John Roberts Could Use to Win Back Conservatives

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Kansas Republicans May Have Just Shut Down the State’s Court System

Mother Jones

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What happens to a legal appeal when there’s no court to hear it?

That’s the tricky question before Kansas Republicans today as they grapple with the results of their own law, which threatens to shutter the state court system.

On Wednesday night, a district judge in Kansas struck down a 2014 law that stripped the state Supreme Court of some of its administrative powers. The ruling has set off a bizarre constitutional power struggle between the Republican-controlled legislature and the state Supreme Court. At stake is whether the Kansas court system will lose its funding and shut down.

Last year, the Kansas legislature passed a law that took away the top court’s authority to appoint chief judges to the state’s 31 judicial districts—a policy change Democrats believe was retribution for an ongoing dispute over school funding between the Supreme Court and the legislature. (Mother Jones reported on the standoff this spring.) When the legislature passed a two-year budget for the court system earlier this year, it inserted a clause stipulating that if a court ever struck down the 2014 administrative powers law, funding for the entire court system would be “null and void.” Last night, that’s what the judge did.

Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt warned that last night’s decision “could effectively and immediately shut off all funding for the judicial branch.” That would lead to chaos. As Pedro Irigonegaray, an attorney for the Kansas judge who brought the legal challenge against the administrative law, put it, “Without funding, our state courts would close, criminal cases would not be prosecuted, civil matters would be put on hold, real estate could not be bought or sold, adoptions could not be completed.”

Both parties in the case have agreed to ask that Wednesday’s ruling remain on hold until it can be appealed to the state Supreme Court, so that there is a functioning court to hear the appeal. On Thursday, a judge granted the stay. Meanwhile, lawyers involved in the case and advocates for judicial independence are preparing a legal challenge to the clause of the judicial budget that withholds court funding. Sometime in the next few months, the state Supreme Court is likely to rule on whether the legislature has the right to strip the Supreme Court of its administrative authority, and whether it can make funding for the courts contingent on the outcome of a court case.

“We have never seen a law like this before,” Randolph Sherman, a lawyer involved in fighting the administrative law, said in a statement, referring to the self-destruct mechanism in the judicial budget. “It is imperative that we stop it before it throws the state into a constitutional crisis.”

This story has been updated.

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Kansas Republicans May Have Just Shut Down the State’s Court System

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Kentucky Clerk Continues to Defy Supreme Court by Refusing to Issue Marriage License to Gay Couple

Mother Jones

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The Supreme Court on Monday night denied an emergency application from a defiant Kentucky clerk who is refusing to issue marriage licenses to gay couples. Today, Kim Davis, of the Rowan County Clerk’s office, is once again refusing to comply with a lower court’s order by denying marriage licenses to anyone, gay or straight.

When asked by a same-sex couple on Tuesday morning under whose authority she was failing to obey the high court, Davis answered, “under God’s authority.” She then told the crowd to leave and threatened to call the police.

The Supreme Court denied Davis’s application to turn away same-sex couples seeking marriage licenses because it did not align with her religious beliefs. Her appeal marks the first time since June’s historic Supreme Court decision that the justices have had to deal with the issue again.

If she continues to defy the court, Davis could be found in contempt and face possible jail time and fines. A hearing is set for Thursday.

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Kentucky Clerk Continues to Defy Supreme Court by Refusing to Issue Marriage License to Gay Couple

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First Amendment Law is Facing Some Very Big Changes

Mother Jones

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Adam Liptak says that Reed v. Town of Gilbert is the sleeper Supreme Court case of the past year. It unanimously struck down an ordinance that discriminated against signs announcing church service times, but only three justices ruled on the basis of existing law. The other six signed an opinion that went further, ruling that many other speech regulations are now subject to “strict scrutiny.” How far will this go?

Strict scrutiny requires the government to prove that the challenged law is “narrowly tailored to serve compelling state interests.” You can stare at those words as long as you like, but here is what you need to know: Strict scrutiny, like a Civil War stomach wound, is generally fatal.

“When a court applies strict scrutiny in determining whether a law is consistent with the First Amendment,” said Mr. Abrams, who has represented The New York Times, “only the rarest statute survives the examination.”

Laws based on the content of speech, the Supreme Court has long held, must face such scrutiny. The key move in Justice Thomas’s opinion was the vast expansion of what counts as content-based. The court used to say laws were content-based if they were adopted to suppress speech with which the government disagreed.

Justice Thomas took a different approach. Any law that singles out a topic for regulation, he said, discriminates based on content and is therefore presumptively unconstitutional.

Securities regulation is a topic. Drug labeling is a topic. Consumer protection is a topic.

This is obviously not news to people who follow this stuff carefully, but it was news to me. Apparently the reach of Reed is pretty spectacular: three laws have been struck down by lower courts in just the past two months based on the reasoning in the case. Any law that treats, say, medical records or political robocalls or commercial speech differently from any other kind of speech is in danger—and there are a lot of laws like this.

They say that hard cases make bad law. But Reed was an easy case. It failed “the laugh test” said Elena Kagan. And yet, it seems likely to have provided an excuse for an astonishingly broad change in how speech is regulated. So far it’s stayed mostly under the radar, but eventually something bigger than panhandling or ballot selfies will get struck down, and suddenly everyone will notice what happened. What then?

Professor Robert Post said the majority opinion, read literally, would so destabilize First Amendment law that courts might have to start looking for alternative approaches. Perhaps courts will rethink what counts as speech, he said, or perhaps they will water down the potency of strict scrutiny.

“One or the other will have to give,” he said, “or else the scope of Reed’s application would have to be limited.”

Stay tuned.

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First Amendment Law is Facing Some Very Big Changes

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

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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Huckabee Says He’d Consider Using Federal Troops to Stop Abortions

Mother Jones

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Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee told supporters in Iowa on Thursday that if he were elected president he would consider using the FBI or National Guard to end abortion by force. Per the Topeka Capital-Journal:

“I will not pretend there is nothing we can do to stop this,” Huckabee said at the event, where a Topeka Capital-Journal correspondent was present.

At his next stop, in Rockwell City, Huckabee answered follow-up questions from the correspondent, saying: “All American citizens should be protected.”

Asked by another reporter how he would stop abortion, and whether this would mean using the FBI or federal forces to accomplish this, Huckabee replied: “We’ll see if I get to be president.”

That’s crazy. The right to an abortion has been upheld by the Supreme Court. Huckabee is saying he might simply disregard the judicial branch and stop the practice unilaterally—that is, he’d remove the checks from “checks and balances.” It’s not the first time he’s proposed a constitutional crisis as an antidote to things he doesn’t like. Huckabee has also said states should practice civil disobedience by ignoring the Supreme Court’s decision on same-sex marriage.

And to think, we’re still nearly a week away from the first primary debate.

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Huckabee Says He’d Consider Using Federal Troops to Stop Abortions

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Enviros, Tea Partiers, and the Christian Coalition all agree: Florida needs more rooftop solar

Enviros, Tea Partiers, and the Christian Coalition all agree: Florida needs more rooftop solar

By on 10 Jul 2015 3:26 pmcommentsShare

There’s an increasingly energetic fight brewing in Florida — one that has odd battle lines, bringing Tea Party activists and environmentalists together against monopoly utilities and big-money right-wing groups like Americans for Prosperity, and turning city governments against neighboring city governments.

The issue at stake? Whether state law should be amended to allow organizations other than utilities to sell electricity, which would clear the way for more rooftop solar power.

Florida is one of only five states in the country that actively bars third parties from selling electricity. (Another 20-plus states don’t explicitly bar it, but don’t allow it either — what this means for solar companies is unclear, one group that tracks the issue told PolitiFact.) So Floridian homeowners aren’t allowed to buy energy from companies that install solar panels on their roofs.

The state’s utilities, at the moment, only draw 1 percent of their electricity from solar, despite the fact that the state ranks third in the country in terms of potential to generate solar energy, and despite the fact that solar energy has become cost competitive with fossil fuels and is often a safer investment for utilities.

A growing coalition — including environmentalists, the League of Women Voters, the Christian Coalition, and Tea Party activists who see the ban as meddling in the free market — is pushing to get rid of the third-party electricity ban. They’ve been gathering signatures to put an initiative on the 2016 ballot, called the Solar Choice amendment, that would allow businesses and individuals to sell up to two megawatts of solar power.

The utility companies have asked the Florida Supreme Court to throw out the ballot amendment, even before signature gathering is done. They have found allies in shadowy out-of-state, pro-big-business groups, but also recently won the support of the Florida League of Cities, a group of municipal governments. Last month, the league filed a brief with the Supreme Court in support of the utilities’ position, arguing that member cities would lose tax revenue.

But then a number of members of the league dissented, calling the brief “alarmist, unsupported and speculative” and asking for it be withdrawn. These dissenting city officials wrote:

The substantive arguments in The League’s brief are aggressive, speculative, and some are well outside the League’s scope or expertise. For instance, the brief argues that the amendment might create inequitable rate structures between solar and non-solar customers. When did the League’s interest include utility regulatory ratemaking design and policy?

“There’s a number of city leaders who are pretty disgusted with the league,’’ South Miami Mayor Philip Stoddard told The Miami Herald. “It feels like a really parochial organization that’s been co-opted by Florida Power & Light.”

One side effect of all this is that Florida’s utilities, which had seemed content to shrug off the state’s solar potential, are announcing new solar projects. But leaders of the rooftop solar movement told the Tampa Bay Times back in May that this was a cynical move aimed at quieting their rising voices.

The next big development in this saga will come when the state Supreme Court rules on the ballot measure. The court has scheduled a hearing on the issue for Sept. 1.

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Enviros, Tea Partiers, and the Christian Coalition all agree: Florida needs more rooftop solar

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Safer, solar, solar panels, solar power, Uncategorized, wind energy | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Enviros, Tea Partiers, and the Christian Coalition all agree: Florida needs more rooftop solar