Courts & Law

First Monday in October: SCOTUS preview

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

There are a number of controversial cases already on the U.S. Supreme Court docket for its 2013-2014 term, none more so than "Son of Citizens United," the McCutcheon v. FEC case to be argued tomorrow. Amy Howe at SCOTUSblog.com has a preview:

GavelToday is the first Monday in October, which means that this morning the
Justices will return to the bench for the first time since they issued a
series of historic rulings at the end of June.  In the Los Angeles Times,
David Savage looks ahead at the new Term, which he characterizes as one
that “gives the court’s conservative bloc a clear opportunity to shift
the law to the right on touchstone social issues such as abortion, contraception and religion, as well as the political controversy over campaign funding”; at BuzzFeed, Chris Geidner lists his eleven cases “that could change the U.S. in the coming year.”

The editorial board of The New York Times
weighs in on the new Term as well, emphasizing that, although “[n]o
case yet promises the high-profile splash of rulings on national health
care, voting rights or same-sex marriage, . . . in many of them,
long-established Supreme Court precedents may be at risk.”  And in the ABA Journal,
Erwin Chemerinsky focuses on the Court’s October sitting, concluding
that there is “every reason to believe that October Term 2013 will again
involve decisions that affect not only the law and legal system, but
each of us, often in the most important and intimate aspects of our
lives.”

Tomorrow the Court will hear oral arguments in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, in which it will consider the constitutionality of aggregate limits on campaign contributions.  Lyle previewed the case for us last week, while Carolyn Shapiro has a video preview at ISCOTUSnow.  The case is also the focus of the Room for Debate page of The New York Times, where debaters include Richard Hasen (who also has extensive links to coverage of the case at his Election Law Blog), Ilya Shapiro, Bradley Smith, Ciara Torres-Spellicsy, and Elizabeth Wydra; other coverage comes from Kenneth Jost at Jost on Justice, who observes that the Court in Citizens United “made
clear it has no qualms about setting corporations free to spend freely
on political campaigns,” and contends that “[a]ll signs suggest those
five justices are likely to have no qualms about unleashing McCutcheon
and other well-heeled contributors as well.”  And at the Constitutional
Accountability Center’s Text and History Blog,
Elizabeth Wydra describes McCutcheon as a case that “could make it even
harder for Congress to address one particular issue: the corrupting
influence of money in politics.”  Finally, in anticipation of the oral
argument in McCutcheon, the latest installment in C-SPAN Radio’s series on historic oral arguments looks back at the oral argument in Colorado GOP Federal Campaign Committee v. FEC.

South Carolina and another nullification crisis

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

The Washington Post's Colbert King got it exactly right in The rise of the New Confederacy.

Confederale SoldiersSouth Carolina, the state that gave us the Nullification Crisis with the South Carolina Ordinance of Nullification in 1832, until Congress in 1833 passed a Force Bill, authorizing President Andrew Jackson to use military force against South Carolina ended the crisis.

South Carolina, the home of Senator John C. Calhoun, the intellectual force behind states' rights and nullification, under which states could declare null and void federal laws which they viewed as unconstitutional, and who was an inspiration to the secessionists of 1860–61.

South Carolina, the first state to secede from the United States with the Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union.

South Carolina, whose Confederate militia batteries opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, the first shots of the American Civil War in 1861.

South Carolina, which has refused to accept its defeat in the Civil War or to accept the post-Civil War Amendments, in particular the 14th Amendment, which forever ended any debate over Sen. Calhoun's theories of nullification and secession.

Colbert King: The modern GOP is the New Confederacy

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

In a follow-up to my post, Republicans on the modern GOP: An anti-government, Neo-Confederate insurrectionist party of radicals, the Washington Post's Colbert King details today, The rise of the New Confederacy (excerpt):

Confederale SoldiersFederal government as the enemy.

Today there is a New
Confederacy, an insurgent political force that has captured the
Republican Party and is taking up where the Old Confederacy left off in
its efforts to bring down the federal government.

No shelling of a
Union fort, no bloody battlefield clashes, no Good Friday assassination
of a hated president — none of that nauseating, horrendous stuff. But
the behavior is, nonetheless, malicious and appalling.

The New
Confederacy, as churlish toward President Obama as the Old Confederacy
was to Lincoln, has accomplished what its predecessor could not: It has shut down the federal government, and without even firing a weapon or taking 620,000 lives, as did the Old Confederacy’s instigated Civil War.

Not
stopping there, however, the New Confederacy aims to destroy the full
faith and credit of the United States, setting off economic calamity at
home and abroad — all in the name of “fiscal sanity.”

Its members
are as extreme as their ideological forebears. It matters not to them,
as it didn’t to the Old Confederacy, whether they ultimately go down in
flames. So what? For the moment, they are getting what they want: a
federal government in the ditch, restrained from seeking to create a
more humane society that extends justice for all.

The ghosts of the Old Confederacy have to be envious.

The coverage gap in ‘ObamaCare’ is due to red state sabotage

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

The red states continue to vote against their own economic best interests because of "freedom!" to be ignorant and poor.

Non Sequitur

The New York Times breaks down the coverage gap in "ObamaCare" due to red state governors and legislatures sabotaging coverage for their poor citizens (with an assist from the Roberts Supreme Court on making participation in expanded Medicaid optional). Millions of Poor Are Left Uncovered by Health Law:

A sweeping national effort to extend health coverage to millions of
Americans will leave out two-thirds of the poor blacks and single
mothers and more than half of the low-wage workers who do not have
insurance, the very kinds of people that the program was intended to
help, according to an analysis of census data by The New York Times.

Because they live in states largely controlled by Republicans that have
declined to participate in a vast expansion of Medicaid, the medical
insurance program for the poor, they are among the eight million
Americans who are impoverished, uninsured and ineligible for help. The
federal government will pay for the expansion through 2016 and no less
than 90 percent of costs in later years.

Those excluded will be stranded without insurance, stuck between people
with slightly higher incomes who will qualify for federal subsidies on
the new health exchanges that went live this week, and those who are
poor enough to qualify for Medicaid in its current form, which has
income ceilings as low as $11 a day in some states.

Demographics-map

Interactive map Where Poor and Uninsured Americans Live

The 26 states that have rejected the Medicaid expansion are
home to about half of the country’s population, but about 68 percent of
poor, uninsured blacks and single mothers. About 60 percent of the
country’s uninsured working poor are in those states. Among those
excluded are about 435,000 cashiers, 341,000 cooks and 253,000 nurses’
aides.

“The irony is that these states that are rejecting Medicaid expansion —
many of them Southern — are the very places where the concentration of
poverty and lack of health insurance are the most acute,” said Dr. H.
Jack Geiger, a founder of the community health center model. “It is
their populations that have the highest burden of illness and costs to
the entire health care system.”

The Sun Center for campaign finance disclosure / political corruption in Arizona

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

A group of watchdog organizations rolled out a new multi-state effort
to share information and best practices on campaign finance legislation today, the first step in an effort to force organizations that spend
millions on political activity to disclose their donors. New multi-state group pushes campaign disclosure:

California's top campaign finance watchdog
announced Thursday a collaboration among multiple states to share
information on enforcing disclosure rules.

The 10-state effort,
which also includes New York City officials, was a goal of Ann Ravel,
the chair of California's Fair Political Practices Commission who is
soon leaving for a spot on the Federal Election Commission.

Ravel has repeatedly expressed her concern the federal government isn't doing enough to force disclosure of campaign donations, requiring states to step into the vacuum.

“For the first time, states
and cities are banding together to share innovative ideas, strategies
and legislation related to campaign finance,” she said in a statement
Thursday. 

The collaboration (http://fppc.ca.gov/SUNCenter/) is called States' Unified Network Center, or the SUN Center.