Tag Archives: supreme

Why Is Texas So Gung Ho to Execute This Delusional, Mentally Ill Man?

by OpalSkillen Posted on December 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Almost no one wants to see Scott Panetti put to death. Conservatives such as Ron Paul and Ken Cuccinelli and evangelical leaders have spoken up on his behalf. The European Union has protested his pending execution, which is temporarily on hold thanks to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. Even some of Panetti’s victims don’t believe he should be killed by the state.

The Supreme Court has ruled that states cannot execute a mentally ill person who lacks a rational understanding of the nature of his punishment. Panetti fits that standard: He insists that Texas wants to kill him to prevent him from preaching the Gospel. And yet the state has gone to great lengths to ensure that Panetti gets the needle. Right up until December 3, when the 5th Circuit temporarily halted Panetti’s execution with hours to spare, the state has deployed legal gamesmanship that seems more appropriate for patent litigation than a death penalty case.

Panetti’s schizophrenia has been apparent since 1978, when he was 20 years old. By 1986, the Social Security Administration had declared him disabled by his brain disorder and therefore eligible for federal benefits. Six years later, after a series of hospitalizations and bizarre incidents—in one case he buried demon-possessed furniture in his yard—Panetti shot and killed his in-laws, Joe and Amanda Alvarado.

His criminal case was a theater of the absurd from the outset, thanks to a series of puzzling legal decisions by Texas and federal judges. It began when Kerr County District Judge Stephen Ables, still on the bench today, permitted Panetti to represent himself at trial over the objections of the state. He showed up wearing what a friend of the family later described as a 1920s-era cowboy outfit: “It looked idiotic. He wore a large hat and a huge bandana. He wore weird boots with stirrups, the pants were tucked in at the calf,” she testified in an affidavit. “He looked like a clown. I had a feeling that Scott had no perception how he was coming across.” Thus clad, standing before the jury, Panetti called himself “Sarge” and rambled incoherently for hours with little interruption from the judge—who did, however, argue with the defendant over the relevance of belt buckles and whether he could discuss the TV show Quincy. As part of his defense, Panetti issued a stream-of-consciousness description of his crime, from Sarge’s perspective:

Fall. Sonja, Joe, Amanda, kitchen. Joe bayonet, not attacking. Sarge not afraid, not threatened. Sarge not angry, not mad. Sarge, boom, boom. Sarge, boom, boom, boom, boom. Sarge, boom, boom.

Sarge is gone. No more Sarge. Sonja and Birdie. Birdie and Sonja. Joe, Amanda lying kitchen, here, there, blood. No, leave. Scott, remember exactly what Sarge did. Shot the lock. Walked in the kitchen. Sonja, where’s Birdie? Sonja here. Joe, bayonet, door, Amanda. Boom, boom, blood, blood.

Demons. Ha, ha, ha, ha, oh, Lord, oh, you.

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Why Is Texas So Gung Ho to Execute This Delusional, Mentally Ill Man?

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Five Times The Supreme Court Tried To Understand Pop Culture

by CasiePressley Posted on December 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s fans might refer to her as The Notorious RBG, but when it comes to understanding rap culture, the Supreme Court has some catching up to do. That was clear on Monday, when the justices heard arguments in Elonis v. United States, a case about whether gory, rap-style rhymes posted on Facebook by a Pennsylvania man constituted a real threat to his estranged wife.

Lawyers for Anthony Elonis asserted that his posts should be read as creative self-expression. (Some sample lyrics: “There’s one way to love you but a thousand ways to kill you. I’m not going to rest until your body is a mess, soaked in blood and dying from all the little cuts.”) Justice Samuel Alito didn’t seem convinced that these lines weren’t menacing. “This sounds like a road map for threatening a spouse and getting away with it,” he said. “So you put it in a rhyme…and you say, ‘I’m an aspiring rap artist,’ and so then you are free from prosecution.” Those comments are consistent with how judges and jurors tend to think about rap lyrics—they’re likely to see them as autobiographical and literally true, even though many rappers assume fictional personas.

The Elonis case isn’t the first time the Supreme Court has grappled with what constitutes legitimate artistic expression. From declaring that movies can be broadly censored because they could be “used for evil” to deciding that G-strings don’t limit nude dancers’ freedom of expression, the past results have been decidedly mixed. Here’s are the justices’ most offbeat efforts to play art critic:

1. Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio, 1915

The facts: An Ohio law required anyone who wanted to show a film to get permission from a board of censors, who charged for approval. Mutual Film Corporation, a motion picture company best known for producing Charlie Chaplin comedies, didn’t want to pay. It argued that its movies were protected by the First Amendment because of their power to enlighten and entertain.

The outcome: The justices unanimously sided with the state on the grounds that movies were a business, not an art form—and that they could corrupt the hearts and minds of innocent children. “They, indeed, may be mediums of thought, but so are many things,” wrote Justice Joseph McKenna. “They may be used for evil, and against that possibility the statute was enacted. Their powers of amusement…make them the more insidious.” It took until 1952 for the court to decide that film had proved itself “a significant medium for the communication of ideas.”

2. United States v. Thirty-seven Photographs, 1971

The facts: Customs agents at the Los Angeles airport stopped Milton Luros on his way home from Europe and confiscated 37 photos of couples having sex, based on a 1930 law banning the importation of obscene material. Luros claimed that the photos, which he’d planned to use to illustrate a copy of the Kama Sutra, shouldn’t have been confiscated because they were for private use.

The outcome: The court concluded that Luros’ right to privately possess obscene material didn’t extend to the airport. “A port of entry is not a traveler’s home,” Justice Byron White wrote. But Justice Hugo Black, a First Amendment absolutist, penned a scathing dissent. “I can imagine no more distasteful, useless, and time-consuming task for the members of this Court than perusing this material to determine whether it has ‘redeeming social value,'” he seethed.

(What’s with the weird name: Cases in which a federal court seizes property are traditionally named after the item seized, not the item’s owner—hence the epic-sounding 2011 case U.S. v. One White Crystal-Covered ‘Bad Tour’ Glove and other Michael Jackson Memorabilia.)

3. Barnes v. Glen Theatre, Inc., 1991

The facts: Two exotic dance clubs in South Bend, Indiana, wanted to add completely naked dancers to their lineup. State law required that the dancers wear at least pasties and a G-string. The clubs sued, arguing that the law infringed on the dancers’ freedom of expression.

The outcome: No redress for the would-be strippers. The fact that the nakedness would have been consensual didn’t matter to Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote, “The purpose of Indiana’s nudity law would be violated, I think, if 60,000 fully consenting adults crowded into the Hoosierdome to display their genitals to one another, even if there were not an offended innocent in the crowd.”

4. National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley, 1998

The facts: After a scandal over artists receiving federal funding—including Andres Serrano, whose 1987 photo Piss Christ depicted a crucifix submerged in a jar of urine—Congress added “taking into consideration general standards of decency” to the NEA’s grant requirements. Performance artist Karen Finley, whose work involved covering her naked body with chocolate, sued the government after her grant application was denied. She argued that the new grant requirements suppressed unorthodox ideas.

The outcome: Congress wasn’t regulating speech, just setting funding priorities, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote for the majority. She noted that the amendment didn’t preclude “indecent” art from receiving grants; it “simply adds ‘considerations’ to the grant-making process.”

5. Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, 2011

The facts: EMA, a trade association for the home entertainment industry, challenged California’s ban on the sale of violent video games to minors. Before the justices heard the case, they had copies of Medal of Honor and Resident Evil 4 delivered to the court so they could figure out what playing a video game was like.

The outcome: The gaming experience must have won the justices over. They ruled that video games deserved First Amendment protection, overturning California’s law. “Like the protected books, plays and movies that preceded them, video games communicate ideas—and even social messages—through many familiar literary devices… and through features distinctive to the medium,” Scalia wrote in his pro-gamer majority opinion.

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Five Times The Supreme Court Tried To Understand Pop Culture

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Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Undergoes Heart Surgery

by Rosie53Xgftn Posted on November 26, 2014

Mother Jones

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is “resting comfortably” after undergoing a coronary catheterization procedure, a press release from the nation’s highest court announced Wednesday morning.

Ginsburg, who at 81 is the Supreme Court’s oldest member, is expected to be discharged in the next 48 hours. From the release:

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg underwent a coronary catheterization procedure this morning at MedStar Heart & Vascular Institute at MedStar Washington Hospital Center to place a stent in her right coronary artery. The coronary blockage was discovered after Justice Ginsburg experienced discomfort during routine exercise last night and was taken to the hospital. She is resting comfortably and is expected to be discharged in the next 48 hours.

Ginsburg has pushed back against suggestions she step down while President Barack Obama is still in office. In an interview with Elle last September, she defended her resistance to such calls. “Anybody who thinks that if I step down, Obama could appoint someone like me, they’re misguided. As long as I can do the job full steam…. I think I’ll recognize when the time comes that I can’t any longer. But now I can.”

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Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Undergoes Heart Surgery

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The Supreme Court Might Gut Obamacare. Your State Could Save It.

by AlyceL77dvcyrf Posted on November 11, 2014

Mother Jones

On Friday, the Supreme Court announced that it would hear King v. Burwell, a case that could gut Obamacare and leave millions of Americans without health insurance. The case hinges on what is essentially a typo in the Affordable Care Act, a mistake that conservatives claim invalidates most of the subsidies the bill provides to help people buy insurance. If the justices buy the conservatives’ argument—and there’s reason to think they might—residents of the 34 states that provide health insurance via the federal government’s HealthCare.gov, rather than through a state-run exchange, could lose their subsidies. Many people would be unable to afford to buy insurance (as the ACA requires), and the whole system could collapse.

Here’s the good news: There may be a workaround. But there’s also bad news: The solution requires the cooperation of Republican governors and legislators.

The King plaintiffs base their argument on the fact that in parts of the Affordable Care Act, the text says subsidies will be available for people “enrolled through an Exchange established by the State.” Conservatives argue that the phrase “established by the state” means the government never intended to, and therefore cannot, offer subsidies in the 34 states that use the federal exchange, a.k.a. HealthCare.gov. There’s plenty of evidence that Obamacare opponents are wrong about this. The rest of the law, its legislative history, and the recollections of lawmakers and journalists who were present at its creation all suggest that conservatives are misinterpreting a vague mistake in the legislation. Even the Cato Institute’s Michael Cannon—the intellectual force behind the lawsuit—once referred to this language as a “glitch.”

Salon‘s Simon Maloy calls the conservative case the “Moops” argument:

I’ve been trying to figure out how to best characterize and/or mock the legal reasoning… and I think it can be boiled down to one word: Moops.

I’m referring, of course, to George Costanza’s famous game of Trivial Pursuit against the Bubble Boy, in which Costanza tries to cheat his way out of losing by taking advantage of a misprint on the answer card: “Moops” instead of “Moors.”

“That’s not ‘Moops,’ you jerk. It’s Moors. It’s a misprint,” the Bubble Boy explains, accurately presenting the game manufacturer’s intent in spite of the minor technical error.

“I’m sorry, the card says ‘Moops,'” Costanza replies, adopting an absurdly narrow and nonsensical interpretation of the rules that furthers his own interests.

There are all sorts of other reasons why the anti-ACA argument here is ridiculous. (Brian Beutler gets into a few here.)

But let’s say the Supreme Court agrees that the card says “Moops.” What then? There’s a way out—for states that want it.

Remember: Even if the King plaintiffs succeed in invalidating health care subsidies for people using the federal exchange, state-run exchanges would remain eligible for subsidies. So if a state wants to save its residents’ health insurance, all it would need to do is set up its own exchange.

There’s even federal money available for states to do this, but the deadline to apply for those funds is this coming Friday, November 14. (The federal Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services would not say whether it would extend the deadline in light of the Supreme Court’s decision to hear King.) Health care exchanges are complex, and a few days is not much time for a state to get its act together.

States could still set up their own exchanges after Friday—as long as they do it with their own money, not federal funds. That could get expensive. But Nicholas Bagley, a professor at the University of Michigan law school, explains that there’s a relatively cheap workaround:

A state could…establish an exchange and appoint a state-incorporated entity to oversee and manage it. That state-incorporated entity could then contract with Healthcare.gov to operate the exchange. On the ground, nothing would change. But tax credits would be available where they weren’t before.

This idea—a state exchange in name only—is clever, and it would take less time and money than a state setting up its own exchange. (It’s also eminently achievable: Oregon and Nevada already operate state exchanges that use federal technology.) But Bagley’s plan still requires a state to want to save its residents’ Obamacare subsidies. Republicans hate Obamacare—in fact, the reason so many states don’t have their own exchanges already is because state-level Republicans refused to set them up. And that’s the real problem: Most of the states that are on the federal exchange—and risk losing subsidies—are controlled at least partially by Republicans, who may block any attempt to salvage Obamacare. (The exceptions are Delaware, Illinois, and West Virginia, and the latter two states will fall under partial Republican control in January.)

“The politics of this will be volatile,” Bagley says. “Governors and legislators are going to come under intense pressure to think about creating exchanges, but it’s probably much too optimistic to assume that Republican governors and legislators will move to establish exchanges in short order. Even if at some point in the future all the states were to establish their own exchanges, that point could be a very long time from now.”

Some experts think it may never happen. Many states “will never establish exchanges, because it means going along with Obamacare,” says Timothy Jost, a health reform expert at Washington & Lee University Law School.

And that, it seems, is exactly the point of King: Setting up a system in which only a handful of blue states have Obamacare, while people in red states—the states that benefit the most from the law—go without. “My personal feeling is that a decision for the King plaintiffs would create an unavoidable catastrophe,” Jost says. “There is no easy way out of it.”

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The Supreme Court Might Gut Obamacare. Your State Could Save It.

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Texas Just Won the Right to Disenfranchise 600,000 People. It’s Not the First Time.

by JoanSanderz Posted on October 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Saturday morning, the Supreme Court ruled that Texas’ harsh voter ID law could remain in effect for the upcoming midterm elections, potentially disenfranchising some 600,000 mostly black and Latino voters. In her dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote that the law may be “purposefully discriminatory” and warned that it “likely imposes an unconstitutional poll tax and risks denying the right to vote to hundreds of thousands of eligible voters.” And Ginsburg noted that Texas’ 2011 law falls in line with the state’s long history of discriminatory voting laws. Here is a look at that history, based on expert testimony by Orville Vernon Burton, a professor of history at Clemson University, and Barry Burden, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison:

1865: Voter intimidation. Beginning with emancipation, African Americans in Texas were regularly denied the right to vote, through intimidation and violence, including lynching.

1895: The first all-white primaries begin. In the mid-1890s, Texas legislators pushed a law requiring political parties to hold primaries and allowing those political parties to set racist qualifications for who could participate.

1902: The poll tax. The Legislature added a poll tax to Texas’ constitution in 1902, requiring voters to pay a fee to register to vote and to show their receipt of payment in order to cast a ballot. The poll tax was equivalent to most of a day’s wage for many black and Mexican workers—roughly $15.48 in today’s dollars.

1905: Texas formalizes its all-white primary system. The Terrell Election Law of 1905 made official the all-white primary system, encouraging both main political parties and county election officials to adopt voting requirements that explicitly banned minorities from voting in primaries. The stated purpose of the law? Preventing voter fraud.

1918: Texas enacts an anti-immigrant voting law. The legislation banned interpreters at the polls and forbade naturalized citizens from receiving assistance from election judges unless they had been citizens for 21 years.

1922: Texas tries a new type of all-white primary. In 1918, black voters in Texas successfully challenged a nonpartisan all-white primary system in Waco. The state Legislature got around this snag by enacting a law banning blacks from all Democratic primaries. Because the Democratic Party was dominant in the South at the time, the candidate it selected through its primary would inevitably win the general election. Anyone voting in the party’s primary had to prove “I am white and I am a Democrat.”

1927: Texas tries a third type of all-white primary. After the Supreme Court struck down Texas’ all-white Democratic primaries, the Legislature got crafty again, passing a new law that allowed political parties—instead of the state government—to determine who could vote in party primaries. The Texas Democratic Party promptly adopted a resolution that only whites could vote.

1932: Texas tries again. In 1932, the Supreme Court struck down Texas’ white primaries once more. In response, the Democratic state convention adopted a rule keeping nonwhites out of primaries. The high court initially upheld the new system.

1944: And again. The high court eventually overturned the convention-based white primary system in 1944, but party leaders could still ensure that county officials were elected by whites. A nonparty county political organization called the Jaybird Democratic Association had for decades screened candidates for nomination without allowing nonwhites to participate. The Supreme Court only invalidated the practice in 1953.

1963: Long live the poll tax! In the middle of the civil rights era, Texans rejected a constitutional amendment that would have ended the poll tax. Efforts to repeal the tax were labeled a communist plot by mainstream Texas pols and newspapers. The tax remained in place until 1966. Research shows it dampened minority turnout until 1980.

1966: Texas implements a strict new voter registration system. After the Supreme Court invalidated Texas’ poll tax, the state Legislature enacted a restrictive registration system requiring voters to reregister annually during a four-month time period that ended nearly eight months before the general election. The high court ruled the voter registration regime unconstitutional in 1971.

1970: Texas draws discriminatory districts. The Supreme Court ruled in 1973 that the state’s 1970 redistricting lines were intentionally discriminatory. In each redistricting cycle since then, Texas has been found by federal courts to have violated the US Constitution or the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

1971: The state attempts to keep black students from the ballot box. Once 18-year-olds got the right to vote in 1971, Texas’ Waller County became a majority black county. To stave off the wave of new African American votes, county officials fought for years to keep students at the county’s mostly black Prairie View A&M University from accessing the polls.

1981: Texas draws discriminatory districts again. After the state redistricted a decade later, the attorney general found that two of the new districts were discriminatory and violated the Voting Rights Act. (Since 1976, the Justice Department has issued 201 objections to proposed electoral changes in Texas due to the expected discriminatory effects of the measures.)

2003: And again. In a 2006 ruling, the Supreme Court found that one of Texas’ recently redrawn counties violated the VRA.

2011: And again. A year later, a three-judge federal court ruled in Texas v. United States that the state’s local and congressional redistricting maps showed evidence of deliberate discrimination.

2011: Texas enacts its infamous voter ID law. The state’s voter ID law is the harshest of its kind in the country. Poll workers will accept fewer forms of identification than in any other state with a similar law. Earlier this month, a federal trial court struck down the law, ruling that it overly burdened minority voters. The Supreme Court reversed that court’s ruling this past weekend.

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Texas Just Won the Right to Disenfranchise 600,000 People. It’s Not the First Time.

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Is a Major Abortion Showdown Finally In Our Near Future?

by AmieSheppard Posted on October 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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It’s been obvious for a while that sometime soon the Supreme Court is going to take on another major abortion case. So far, what’s kept it from happening is probably the fact that both sides are unsure how it would go. Nobody wants to take the chance of a significant decision going against them and becoming settled law for decades.

But Ian Millhiser suggests today that this might be about to change. Conservatives have been unusually aggressive over the past four years in testing the limits of the law at the state level, and yesterday the Fifth Circuit Court upheld a recently-passed Texas statute that had the effect of shutting down all but eight abortion clinics in the entire state. Ominously, Millhiser says, the majority opinion went to considerable pains to acknowledge that its reading of the law was different from that of other circuit courts:

That’s what’s known as a “circuit split.”….Judge Elrod’s lengthy citation — which includes one case that was decided three years before the Supreme Court built the backbone of current abortion jurisprudence in Planned Parenthood v. Casey — is an unusually ostentatious and gratuitous effort to highlight the fact her own decision is “in conflict with the decision of another United States court of appeals on the same important matter.” If anything, Elrod is exaggerating the extent to which other judges disagree with her.

That’s a very strange tactic for a judge to take unless they are eager to have their opinion reviewed by the justices, and quite confident that their decision will be affirmed if it is reviewed by a higher authority. By calling attention to disagreement among circuit court judges regarding the proper way to resolve abortion cases, Elrod sent a blood-red howler to the Supreme Court telling them to “TAKE THIS CASE!”

Elrod, it should be noted, is not wrong to be confident her decision will be affirmed if it is heard by the justices. Justice Anthony Kennedy, the closest thing the Supreme Court has to a swing vote on abortion, hasn’t cast a pro-choice vote since 1992. As a justice, Kennedy’s considered 21 different abortion restrictions and upheld 20 of them.

Conservatives, including those on the Fifth Circuit, are increasingly confident that Anthony Kennedy’s position on abortion has evolved enough that he’s finally on board with a substantial rewrite of current abortion law. And since the other four conservative justices have been on board for a long time, that’s all it takes. Kennedy might not quite be willing to flatly overturn Roe v. Wade, but it’s a pretty good guess that he’s willing to go pretty far down that road.

We are rapidly approaching a point in half the states in America where abortions will be effectively available only to rich women. They’ll just jet off to clinics in California or New York if they have to. Non-rich women, who can’t afford that, will be forced into motherhood whether they like it or not. At which point conservatives, as usual, will suddenly lose all interest in them except as props for their rants about lazy welfare cheats.

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Is a Major Abortion Showdown Finally In Our Near Future?

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Conservatives Want to Wipe Out Coal Rules…Over a Typo

by JereFlockhart Posted on August 22, 2014

Mother Jones

This story originally appeared on Grist and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

If you can’t beat ’em, point out their typos.

That seems to be the lesson of the D.C. Circuit Court’s recent decision in Halbig v. Sebelius, which could render millions of Americans ineligible for health insurance subsidies on the basis of some sloppy syntax in the Affordable Care Act. After surviving more than 50 repeal votes in the House, a Supreme Court challenge to its constitutionality, and a famously rocky online rollout, health-care reform may end up hobbled by a mere drafting error. And the anti-regulatory crowd wasted no time in launching its next AutoCorrect attack: A new suit asks the D.C. Circuit to nix the president’s biggest climate-change initiative—EPA’s “Clean Power Plan”—due to a 25-year-old mistake in the text of the Clean Air Act.

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Conservatives Want to Wipe Out Coal Rules…Over a Typo

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Did the NRA Know About Robert Dowlut’s Reversed Murder Conviction?

by ArronKruger Posted on August 5, 2014

Mother Jones

For all its bluster, the National Rifle Association also knows how to maintain a disciplined silence in the face of uncomfortable questions. Most notably, it went to ground in the wake of the Newtown school shooting in December 2012, resurfacing after a few days with bland talking points, followed by Wayne LaPierre’s assertion that “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that in the week since I published an investigation into the complicated past of the NRA’s top lawyer, the gun lobby has not responded.

The subject of my article, NRA general counsel Robert J. Dowlut, is a low-profile yet influential legal expert who has spent more than 35 years pushing for an aggressively broad interpretation of the Second Amendment. In 1964, he was sentenced to life in prison for shooting his girlfriend’s mother in South Bend, Indiana. Several years later, the conviction was reversed due to bad police work and Dowlut eventually walked free.

Before I reported on Dowlut’s background, I contacted him 10 times by phone, email, and registered mail, explaining what I was writing about and inviting him to share his side of the story. When I did not hear from him, I asked the NRA and its public affairs head, Andrew Arulanandam, for comment multiple times. I also sent registered letters directly to NRA leaders including executive vice president Wayne LaPierre, president Jim Porter, and lobbying head Chris Cox. None responded.

If Dowlut or the NRA do decide to talk, here are the four questions I’d most like them to answer:

1. Did Dowlut ever disclose his past to his colleagues or the NRA? So far, none of Dowlut’s colleagues and friends have come forward to talk about what they did or didn’t know. David Hardy, a prominent gun-rights writer who’s known Dowlut “longer than I can remember” told me he had “no idea” about Dowlut’s previous conviction and reversal. Other gun-rights groups and bloggers have also been conspicuously silent since the story ran.

2. How did Dowlut’s experience influence his career? Dowlut’s writings strongly suggest that his legal odyssey played a role in shaping his philosophy. In a 1983 article, he disapprovingly cited Supreme Court Justice Byron White’s dissent in Miranda v. Arizona, a case very similar to his own. White had predicted that protecting criminal suspects’ rights “will return a killer, a rapist or other criminal to the streets.” Did Dowlut’s position—that gun rights are another essential defense against official overreach—stem from his time as the accused? Did this stance put Dowlut at odds with the NRA’s tough-on-crime talking points? (Consider that the NRA’s president from 1992 to 1994 was Robert Corbin, the prosecutor who made a point of retrying Ernesto Miranda after the landmark 1966 Supreme Court decision bearing his name. Corbin also served as the vice chairman of the NRA Civil Rights Defense Fund; Dowlut is the fund’s longtime secretary.)

3. Did Dowlut ever disclose his past to the bar? Several readers have asked if Dowlut disclosed his experience as a criminal defendant while applying for admission to the bar. (He was admitted to the District of Columbia Bar in 1980 and is also a member of the Virginia Bar.) I don’t know: bar applications are confidential and it’s not clear what was asked on the Character and Fitness sections of the DC and Virginia Bar applications four decades ago. Currently, the DC Bar asks applicants to disclose all previous arrests, charges, and convictions, even for matters that have been dismissed or expunged. The Virginia Bar asks applicants to disclose any involvement in criminal proceedings (including juvenile cases and traffic offenses). Assuming that Dowlut faced similar questions when he became a lawyer, how did he respond?

4. What really happened 51 years ago in South Bend? The South Bend police still consider the murder of Anna Marie Yocum on the night of April 15, 1963 to be an open case. Most of the main characters involved in Dowlut’s murder trial are dead; the victim’s daughter is alive, but refused to speak with me. The court records I obtained, while voluminous, offer competing narratives that leave a trail of nagging questions: The police interviewed several other potential suspects—what were they asked, and why were they released? If Dowlut had no knowledge of the crime, how was he able to lead detectives to a buried gun allegedly linked to it? Whom did the gun belong to? And finally, what does Dowlut think actually happened on that night?

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Did the NRA Know About Robert Dowlut’s Reversed Murder Conviction?

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What Happens If Obama Loses the Halbig Case?

by wqds234der Posted on July 22, 2014

Mother Jones

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So let’s suppose the Halbig case goes up to the Supreme Court and they rule for the plaintiffs: in a stroke, everyone enrolled in Obamacare through a federal exchange is no longer eligible for subsidies. What happens then? Is Obamacare doomed?

Not at all. What happens is that people in blue states like California and New York, which operate their own exchanges, continue getting their federal subsidies. People in red states, which punted the job to the feds, will suddenly have their subsidies yanked away. Half the country will have access to a generous entitlement and the other half won’t.

How many people will this affect? The earliest we’ll get a Supreme Court ruling on this is mid-2015, and mid-2016 is more likely. At a guess, maybe 12 million people will have exchange coverage by 2015 and about 20 million by 2016. Let’s split the difference and call it 15 million. About 80 percent of them qualify for subsidies, which brings the number to about 12 million. Roughly half of them are in states that would be affected by Halbig.

So that means about 6 million people who are currently getting subsidies would suddenly have them yanked away. It’s even possible they’d have to pay back any tax credits they’d received previously.

So what’s the political reaction? The key point here is that people respond much more strongly to losing things than they do to not getting them in the first place. For example, there are lots of poor people in red states who currently aren’t receiving Medicaid benefits thanks to their states’ refusal to participate in Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion. This hasn’t caused a revolt because nothing was taken away. They just never got Medicaid in the first place.

The subsidies would be a different story. You’d have roughly 6 million people who would suddenly lose a benefit that they’ve come to value highly. This would cause a huge backlash. It’s hard to say if this would be enough to move Congress to action, but I think this is nonetheless the basic lay of the land. Obamacare wouldn’t be destroyed, it would merely be taken away from a lot of people who are currently benefiting from it. They’d fight to get it back, and that changes the political calculus.

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What Happens If Obama Loses the Halbig Case?

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The Legacy of the Hobby Lobby Case: Protecting Anti-Gay Discrimination?

by KieranNorthey Posted on July 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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In his majority opinion in the recent Hobby Lobby case, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito took pains to frame the ruling, exempting companies from complying with Obamacare’s contraceptive mandate if it violated the religious beliefs of their owners, as a narrow one. But gay and civil rights groups have long warned that a decision permitting such a religious exemption could have broad ramifications, potentially allowing employers to discriminate against gays. Now, their fears may be coming to pass.

“What we’ve seen since last week’s decision came down is that opponents of LGBT equality have pushed a misreading of that decision as having broadly endorsed discrimination against people, including LGBT people in the workplace,” says Ian Thompson, a legislative representative for the American Civil Liberties Union.

Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, told Mother Jones that the Hobby Lobby ruling “opens the door for corporations to discriminate against anyone that doesn’t look, sound, or share the religious beliefs that they do. This isn’t a business agenda; it’s an extreme social agenda and it is deeply unpopular with the American people.”

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The Legacy of the Hobby Lobby Case: Protecting Anti-Gay Discrimination?

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