Courts & Law

The REAL IRS scandal finally goes to court

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Just in time for this Tea-Publican dog and pony show on Thursday:

Reps. Gosar, Salmon, Schweikert and Franks to Host Congressional Field Hearing

Thursday, August 22, 2013

CONGRESSIONAL FIELD HEARING – THE I.R.S. AND THE E.P.A. – BUREAUCRATS OUT OF CONTROL?

TIME:  3:30PM- 7:30PM (Doors will open at 2:00PM)
LOCATION: Mesa Arts Center
Virginia G. Piper Repertory Theater
1 E. Main Street
Mesa, AZ 85211

The Washington Post reports today that Congressman Chris Van Hollen will file a lawsuit today over the REAL IRS Scandal — that any of these 501(c)(4) organizations engaged in politics ever received tax exempt status in the first place. Pay attention Doug MacEachern, you GOP agitprop hack. High-ranking
Democrat to sue IRS over tax-exemption rules:

Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), the ranking member of the House Budget
Committee, said Tuesday that he will serve as lead plaintiff in the
case, which addresses one of the main concerns that surfaced with the
recent IRS targeting controversy: differences between federal law and the IRS rules on eligibility for 501(c)(4) candidates.

Current law says the organizations must engage “exclusively” in social welfare activities, but IRS tax code
requires only that they are “primarily engaged” in such purposes. That
discrepancy has led to confusion for application processors, who have
struggled to determine what constitutes political activity and how much
should disqualify groups from tax-exemption, according to agency
officials.

“I don’t think the IRS should be in the business of
determining whether the primary purpose of an organization is political
or educational,” Van Hollen said in an interview Tuesday. “The statute
is very clear they should not be in that business.”

‘North Carolina’s new voter suppression law shows why the Voting Rights Act is still necessary’

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Professor Richard L.
Hasen is Chancellor’s Professor of Law and Political Science at the
University of California, Irvine. Hasen is a nationally recognized
expert in election law and campaign finance regulation, and is co-author
of a leading casebook on election law. He is editor of the Election Law Blog.

Hasen writes at Slate today that "North Carolina’s new voter suppression law shows why the Voting Rights Act is still necessary." Supreme Error:

Usually it takes years to judge when the Supreme Court gets something very wrong. Think of Justice Kennedy’s opinion for the court in the 2010 campaign-finance case, Citizens United,
freeing corporations to spend money on elections. He wrote that the
“appearance of [corporate] influence or access will not cause the
electorate to lose faith in our democracy,” a point that remains hotly
debated even as the amount of money in federal elections skyrockets.

But the conservative justices’ decision this past June in Shelby County v. Holder, striking down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, has already unleashed in North Carolina the most restrictive voting law we’ve seen since the 1965 enactment of the VRA. Texas is restoring its voter ID law
which had been blocked (pursuant to the VRA) by the federal government.
And more is to come in other states dominated by Republican
legislatures.

Coalition files lawsuit to overturn Rosemont groundwater permit

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Press release from the Save the Scenic Santa Ritas Association:

Local Coalition Goes to Court to Protect Southern Arizona Water

Lawsuit
filed to overturn Rosemont Groundwater Permit

(Tucson,
Ariz.) A diverse coalition of southern Arizonans filed a lawsuit on Friday to
overturn state approval of a key water permit for the proposed Rosemont Mine in
the Santa Rita Mountains, south of Tucson.

Despite
its name, the “aquifer
protection permit”
would allow a Canadian mining company to pollute Tucson’s groundwater supplies with
mercury, arsenic, lead and other dangerous contaminants.

The suit
seeks to overturn the Arizona Water Quality Appeals Board's (WQAB) decision to
approve Rosemont Copper Company’s Aquifer Protection Permit. The suit asserts that the WQAB
acted "arbitrarily and capriciously" when it rubber-stamped the
Administrative Law Judge’s rejection of administrative appeals of the permit.

(Update) Lawsuit to challenge the initiative to bankrupt the City of Tucson

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

On August 16, 2013, Judge James E. Marner ruled in the case of Yolanda Parker et al. v. City of Tucson et. al. (C20134029), the lawsuit to challenge the sufficiency of the initiative petitions filed by the
Committee for Sustainable Retirement, the local front group for ballot
initiative activist Paul Jacob and the
Liberty Initiative Fund.

You can read the 13 page ruling
Here (.pdf).

Long story short, Judge Marner is striking a number of the petitions submitted as invalid for the reasons stated in his ruling. The Tucson City Clerk is ordered to remove these invalid petition sheets and to recalculate the number of signatures eligible for verification and submit the appropriate number of signatures in the form of random sample to the Pima County Recorder's Office for determination of an error rate as mandated by A.R.S. §19-121.01. The Tucson City Clerk shall accomplish this by no later than August 23, 2013.

The GOP war on voting in North Carolina

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

The Washington Post editorial board, which in no way can be mistaken for liberal, condemned North Carolina's "draconian" new voter suppression law today in a damning editorial opinion. North Carolina law takes war on voting rights to a new low:

IN THE wake of the Supreme Court’s
Shelby v. Holder
 decision, which gutted significant portions
of the Voting Rights Act, it’s difficult to say which of the many
recently passed voter-suppression bills constitutes the greatest threat
to that most sacred of American freedoms: the right to vote. The contest
has several leading contenders, but the winner just might be North
Carolina’s especially draconian bill, signed into law on Monday.

The bill includes the usual provisions that have come to
characterize the quiet assault on the franchise: a shortened
early-voting period, the elimination of the state’s successful same-day
registration program and, of course, a strict photo identification
requirement despite any evidence of voter fraud in the state.

What makes this law unique is how much further it goes. It includes no fewer than 12 extra provisions
that prohibit such things as counties extending polling hours by one
hour in the event of unusual circumstances (such as, say, long lines);
provisional voting should someone, say, mistakenly go to the wrong
precinct; and pre-registration for 16- and 17-year-olds, who could
previously register to vote before they turned 18.