Courts & Law

Abortion politics in the U.S. Supreme Court

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

A couple of weeks ago, the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed as “improvidently granted” the case of Cline  v. Oklahoma Coalition for Reproductive Justice (docket 12-1094), an appeal from the state of Oklahoma to  revive a law that restricts doctors’ use of drugs rather than surgery to perform an abortion with the medication RU-486 and others, struck down by the federal courts.

Uterus-stateAround the same time, Planned Parenthood of Texas applied for an order setting aside the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals order permitting the Texas law requiring abortion practitioners to have admitting privilieges at a nearby hospital before they may perform abortions at a clinic or in a doctor’s office. Planned Parenthood of Greater Texas Surgical Health Services v. Abbott (13A452).

In a 5-4 decision along ideological lines, the Court declined on Tuesday to set aside the Fifth Circuit Court order. Lyle Denniston at Scotusblog.com reports, Texas abortion law left in effect:

Splitting five to four, the Supreme Court late Tuesday afternoon refused to block a Texas abortion law that critics say is forcing the closing of one-third of all clinics in the state.  The Court had been studying the issue for the past week.  The majority said that the challengers had not met the requirement for setting aside a federal appeals court’s order permitting the law to take effect on October 31.

The majority specifically included Justices Antonin Scalia, who wrote separately in a concurring opinion joined by Justices Samuel A. Alito, Jr., and Clarence Thomas.  But Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., and Justice Anthony M. Kennedy presumably voted with those three, because it would have taken five votes to act definitively on the plea by doctors and clinics when there were four Justices who wanted to block the law.

The specific order denying the application (13A452) was unsigned.  Both Justice Scalia’s opinion and that of the dissenters referred to the result as the action of “the Court.”

Update on status of marriage equality cases befor the Ninth Circuit

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Now that the state of Hawaii has enacted marriage equality, there is a change of status in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals cases from Hawaii (Jackson v. Abercrombie) and Nevada (Sevcik v. Sandoval), which the court had scheduled on a parallel track for briefing. Time extensions sought at Ninth Circuit for filing briefs in Nevada, Hawaii marriage equality cases:

EqualThe challenge to Hawaii’s same-sex marriage ban (Jackson v. Abercrombie) was appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals around the same time as the similar challenge in Nevada (Sevcik v. Sandoval). In both cases, the district court judges issued rulings against same-sex couples, and the Ninth Circuit initially put the cases on a parallel track, with similar briefing schedules. With Hawaii’s state legislature taking up a marriage equality bill, the plaintiffs in Jackson asked the appeals court for an extension of time. Governor Abercrombie filed his opening brief last month.

The plaintiffs in the Hawaii case have filed a new request for an extension of time to file their opening brief: from November 22 to December 22. The new unopposed request comes because, as the filing states, “the new [marriage equality] law will take effect on December 2, 2013,” and unless the law is somehow not put into effect, “the current appeal will likely be rendered moot.”

(Update) Hey, hysterical media villagers! ‘ObamaCare’ is working where the GOP is not sabotaging it

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

ChickenLittleIn all the media hysteria over the rollout of "ObamaCare," the feckless media villagers always leave out three predicate facts: Chief Justice John Roberts created the Medicaid opt-out with his poorly considered legal opinion upholding the constitutionality of "ObamaCare," opening the door to partisan mischief; second, said partisan mischief did occur with Red State Tea-Publicans refusing to expand Medicaid and denying more than 5 million desperate Americans access to health care; and third, Red State Tea-Publicans refused to set up their own state-run Marketplace insurance exchanges, creating the need for a complex federal system not contemplated. GOP sabotage should be included in every report.

As for all the unhinged media hysteria, Paul Begala at CNN writes Chill: Obamacare snafus are fixable:

[D]espite the bed-wetting from Beltway Chicken Littles, the President's problems are eminently fixable. The Affordable Care Act isn't collapsing. The Obama presidency isn't imploding.

Similarly, Ed Kilgore at the Democratic Strategist looks at the polling that media villagers are so enamored with, and writes in Polling Panic:

What does it all mean? Probably that most people aren't breathlessly following events in Washington other than to register their heat and noise.

Democrats didn't win the 2014 elections in October and they aren't losing them in November. It's time to chill a bit.

So chill out, media villagers. The sky is not falling despite your best efforts to recklessly and irresponsibly panic the public.

Mythbusters: No, ‘illegal immigrants’ are not voting in Arizona elections (but you already knew that)

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

In the reality-based community where facts matter, this is old news. But in the conservative media entertainment complex world of conspiracy theories, where Tea-Publicans routinely demonize Mexican immigrants and falsely claim that they are voting in elections to support voter I.D. requirements that have a disparate impact on the elderly, the poor, minorities and college students — a form of voter suppression — this is "new" news. The Arizona Republic today reports, Illegal immigrant vote-fraud cases rare in Arizona:

Arizona has spent enormous amounts of time and money waging war against voter fraud, citing the specter of illegal immigrants’ casting ballots.

State officials from Gov. Jan Brewer to Attorney General Tom Horne to Secretary of State Ken Bennett swear it’s a problem.

At an August news conference, Horne and Bennett cited voter-fraud concerns as justification for continuing a federal-court fight over state voter-ID requirements. And some Republican lawmakers have used the same argument to defend a package of controversial new election laws slated to go before voters in November 2014.

But when state officials are pushed for details, the numbers of actual cases and convictions vary and the descriptions of the alleged fraud become foggy or based on third-hand accounts.

An examination of voter-fraud cases in Maricopa County shows those involving illegal immigrants are nearly non-existent, and have been since before the changes to voter-ID requirements were enacted in 2004.

In response to an Arizona Republic records request, the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office provided a list of 21 criminal cases since January 2005 in which the suspect was charged with a felony related to voter fraud. A search of court records found 13 other cases.

Of the 34 Maricopa County cases, two of the suspects were in the country illegally and 12 were not citizens but living in the U.S. legally, court records showed. One of the suspect’s legal-residency status was unclear from the records.

The GOP rigs the game

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

A must-read article from Tim Dickenson at Rolling Stone, How Republicans Rig the Game:

Not only did Barack Obama win a second term in an electoral landslide in 2012, but he is also just the fourth president in a century to have won two elections with more than 50 percent of the popular vote. What's more, the party controls 55 seats in the Senate, and Democratic candidates for the House received well over a million more votes than their Republican counterparts in the election last year. And yet, John Boehner still wields the gavel in the House and Republican resistance remains a defining force in the Senate, frustrating Obama's ambitious agenda.

How is this possible? National Republicans have waged an unrelenting campaign to exploit every weakness and anachronism in our electoral system. Through a combination of hyperpartisan redistricting of the House, unprecedented obstructionism in the Senate and racist voter suppression in the states, today's GOP has locked in political power that it could never have secured on a level playing field.

Despite the fact that Republican Congressional candidates received nearly 1.4 million fewer votes than Democratic candidates last November, the Republicans lost only eight seats from their historic 2010 romp, allowing them to preserve a fat 33-seat edge in the House. Unscrupulous Republican gerrymandering following the 2010 census made the difference, according to a statistical analysis conducted by the Princeton Election Consortium. Under historically typical redistricting, House Republicans would now likely be clinging to a reedy five-seat majority. "There's the normal tug of war of American politics," says Sam Wang, founder of the consortium. "Trying to protect one congressman here, or unseat another one there." The Princeton model was built, he says, to detect "whether something got pulled off-kilter on top of that."