Courts & Law

Two critical lawsuits to get a hearing in December

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Two critical lawsuits will get a hearing in December.

The lawsuit filed in Maricopa County Superior Court on behalf of 36 Republican legislators and a pair of citizens by lawyers for the Goldwater Institute contends the hospital assessment in the law is a tax that required a 2/3 vote of the Legislature under the state Constitution. It also alleges that allowing the director of the state's Medicaid program to set the assessment and exempt some providers gives him taxing authority that properly belongs to the state Legislature. Judge sets date to hear Medicaid expansion lawsuit:

Maricopa County Superior Court judge Katherine Cooper set a Dec. 9 date to hear the suit filed in September on behalf of 36 Republican state lawmakers and a pair of citizens.

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Brewer's lawyers want Cooper to throw out the suit. They say the plaintiffs don't have standing to sue and lawmakers could sue to stop any law it moves forward.

The Arizona Republic reported, Brewer’s lawyers: Suit challenging Medicaid expansion has no merit:

Arizona lawmakers on the losing side of the Medicaid expansion vote have no legal authority to stop the new law that broadens eligibility for low-income residents, attorneys for Gov. Jan Brewer argued in a court filing Wednesday.

Brewer’s attorneys asked Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Katherine Cooper to dismiss the lawsuit, filed last month by the conservative Goldwater Institute, saying the court should not get involved in a legislative dispute.

The Republican lawmakers “are a disgruntled faction within the Legislature that was outvoted by a bipartisan coalition,” wrote Douglas Northrup, an attorney with Fennemore Craig. “Legislators’ alleged injury is a loss of legislative and political power.”

Three other plaintiffs — two constituents and the state director of Americans for Prosperity — also lack authority to sue, he argued, largely because they can’t show they’ve suffered any harm from the portion of the law that’s being challenged, which is an assessment on hospitals to help pay for expansion.

“If the court found that standing to challenge a law’s constitutionality is found with such tenuous allegations of injury, every constituent whose legislator voted against an allegedly unconstitutional bill would have standing,” Northrup wrote.

He argued that the Arizona Supreme Court recognized the limits of legislative standing in a 2003 case, ruling that individual legislators did not have authority to challenge then-Gov. Janet Napolitano’s line-item veto authority.

U.S. Supreme Court to decide whether the legal fiction of ‘corporate personhood’ gives corporations religious liberty rights

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed to hear religious challenges to the requirement that employers provide health insurance for their workers that includes birth control and related medical services.  The Court said it would decide constitutional issues, as well as claims under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Lyle Denniston at SCOTUSblog.com reports, Court to rule on birth-control mandate (UPDATED):

The Court granted review of a government case (Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores) and a private business case (Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp. v. Sebelius).  Taking the Conestoga plea brought before the Court the claim that both religious owners of a business and the business itself have religious freedom rights, based on both the First Amendment and RFRA.  The Hobby Lobby case was keyed to rights under RFRA.

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The Court did not expedite the briefing schedules for the new cases, so presumably they will be heard in March.  Moreover, the Court has already released its argument schedule for all sittings through the February session.

Under the orders the Court issued in the health care cases, the Justices are not being asked to strike down the requirement that employers provide a full range of pregnancy-related health care under their employees’ health insurance plans. In that sense, these cases are different from the Court’s first rulings on the ACA two years ago, when it upheld a penalty for an individual who refused to obtain health insurance at all and nullified a requirement that states must broadly expand their Medicare program of health care coverage for the poor.

This time, the Court will be focusing only on whether the pregnancy-related care coverage can be enforced against profit-making companies — or their individual owners, when that is a very small group — when the coverage contradicts privately held religious beliefs.

GOP ramps up its war on voting

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Zach Roth at MSNBC reports With eye on 2014, GOP ramps up war on voting:

Working ballot by ballot, county by county, the Republican Party is attempting to alter voting laws in the biggest and most important swing states in the country in hopes of carving out a sweeping electoral advantage for years to come.

Changes already on the books or in bills before state legislatures would make voting harder, create longer lines, and threaten to disenfranchise millions of voters from Ohio to Florida, Pennsylvania to Wisconsin, Georgia to Arizona and Texas.

Efforts underway include moving election days, ending early voting and forcing strict new voter ID laws. The results could significantly cut voter turnout in states where, historically, low participation has benefited Republicans.

In the 10 months since President Obama created a bipartisan panel to address voting difficulties, 90 restrictive voting bills have been introduced in 33 states. So far, nine have become law, according to a recent comprehensive roundup by the Brennan Center for Justice – but others are moving quickly through statehouses.

“We are continuing to see laws that appear to be aimed at making it more difficult to vote—for no good reason,” Daniel Tokaji, an election law expert at Ohio State University, said in an interview.

Legal fissure opens between AZ Secty of State and the AZ Lege over campaign finance limits

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

A legal fissure has opened between Arizona Secretary of State Ken "Birther" Bennett and the GOP leadership of the Arizona Legislature seeking to overturn the Arizona Court of Appeals decision in Arizona Citizens Clean Elections Commission, et al. v. The Honorable Mark H. Brain, and real parties in interest (.pdf), which struck down our lawless legisture's new campaign finance limits as unconstituional. Howard Fischer reports, Erasing campaign contribution limits now would create problems, Bennett tells court:

Reversing his earlier stance, Secretary of State Ken Bennett now wants to keep caps in place for how much money candidates can take from individuals and special interests, at least for the time being.

In legal papers filed with the Arizona Supreme Court, Bennett acknowledged he initially supported the bid by Republican legislative leaders to allow much higher limits — and, in some cases, no limits at all — on what donors can give and candidates can accept. In fact, his attorney argued to the state Court of Appeals, the Republican-controlled Legislature was legally entitled to make the changes.

The appellate court disagreed, blocking the higher limits from taking effect.

GOP leaders want the state’s high court to overrule the appellate court. But they concede a full-blown review of the issue could take months, so they are asking the justices to allow the higher limits to be implemented while the case plays out in court.

Bennett, through his lawyer, told the justices that would be a bad idea.

“The public has a significant interest in the smooth function of an election,” wrote attorney David Weinzweig for the secretary of state. He said changing the rules now — which actually would be for the third time — would result in “uncertainty and chaos.”

Bennett said he has worked since the appellate court ruling to inform both candidates and contributors that they are bound by what was on the books until September.

“Another change in regulations would undo those efforts and further upend Arizona’s campaign finance system,” he said.

Legal challenges filed against Kansas, Arizona ‘two-tier’ voting system

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Eric Lach at Talking Points Memo reports Dual Attacks Take On Voting Restriction Efforts In Arizona, Kansas:

Just weeks after Kansas and Arizona made clear their intentions to move ahead with two-tier voting systems, legal efforts are being mounted to fight those plans.

On Thursday, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit in Kansas directly challenging the state's two-tier system, where voters who show no proof of citizenship would be allowed only to vote in federal elections, not state or local elections. At the same time, the Brennan Center for Justice and the League of Women Voters of the United States teamed up to join the ongoing federal case that prompted Kansas and Arizona to start flirting with two tiers in the first place.

The ACLU case is straightforward. Filed in the Third Judicial Circuit in Topeka, Kan., the complaint argues that two-tier voting "divides registered voters in Kansas into two separate and unequal classes, with vastly different rights and privileges." According to USA Today, nearly 18,000 voters in Kansas who registered for the first time this year can vote in federal elections but not in state or local ones because they have not submitted citizenship documents.

"It all comes back to voters' equality," the ACLU's Molly Rugg wrote in a blog post on Thursday. "Kansas cannot treat equally qualified voters unequally on the whim of the Secretary of State. If you are qualified to vote in the presidential election, you are certainly qualified to vote in Kobach's re-election bid next year."

In both Kansas and Arizona, plans for two-tier systems began in the wake of Supreme Court's June ruling in Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council, the legal battle over Arizona's 2004 voter identification law. While the Supreme Court blocked the law, both Arizona and Kansas have focused on the wiggle-room the court left them. In August, the two states joined together to sue the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC), the agency which maintains the federal voter registration form, in an attempt to force the agency to add proof-of-citizenship language to the state-specific instructions on the federal form. (Each state has state-specific instructions on the federal form.) And in the meantime, officials in both states made preparations for two-tiered systems.