law
stcynic | August 15, 2006David Mazel emailed me a link to this column by Robert Novak, which discusses Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and the fact that a lot of evangelical Christians won't vote for him because he's a Mormon. Novak writes:
Romney is well aware that an unconstitutional religious test is being applied to him, but he may be seriously minimizing the problem's scope as limited to relatively few fanatics.
This is nonsense. The constitution forbids religious tests for public office, which means no official eligibility requirement. For example, many states at the time had laws requiring that legislators…
stcynic | August 14, 2006I could not agree with this post by Jack Balkin more:
I don't know whether NSA domestic surveillance programs were important in providing needed intelligence to stop the bomber's plot. I will assume that they were. What lesson should we draw from that fact? The right lesson is that these programs are important and that some version of them will be part of our country's governance for the foreseeable future. The wrong lesson is that because they helped us they should continue to operate outside the law.
As we move toward a national surveillance state, government officials will convert what…
stcynic | August 13, 2006Radley Balko has done a great job of documenting the dozens and dozens of cases around the nation where SWAT teams have been used where they should not be used - serving routine warrants, for example - and the result was tragic. Here's his latest post on such an incident. The Maricopa County Sheriff's Department in Arizona sent in a SWAT team in full military gear, including tanks, and they ended up torching this house by shooting tear gas canisters into it. Here's the result:
And the tank they brought, here's where it ended up:
There was a mother and daughter inside that car, but…
stcynic | August 11, 2006A follow up on my earlier post about the equal access case involving Good News Club and access to a school take home flyer program. Marci Hamilton, a respected legal scholar from Yeshiva University, asks an interesting question:
How does one square this decision with the 4th Cir's willingness to permit the Wiccan woman to be excluded from delivering prayers at city council meetings? I'm blanking on the name of the latter case, but it would seem that equality is at issue in both cases, and the results would seem at first blush in conflict with each other.
A very intriguing question. The case…
stcynic | August 11, 2006And this one again involving a Good News Club, this time in Maryland. The Montgomery County Public Schools has a Good News Club chapter that uses school facilities for their meetings. In 2001, the group tried to use various fora provided by the school to promote the group, including in particular a take home flyer program that the school used, and allowed other groups to use, to send home information about activities that took place at the school but were not necessarily school sponsored (PTA events, scouting events, etc). The MCPS district refused to allow the Good News Club to use those…
stcynic | August 9, 2006The Washington Post had an editorial yesterday about student free speech and the Harper v Poway case, where the 9th circuit ruled that a school could prevent a student from wearing a t-shirt declaring that homosexuality was against God's law and shameful. I think they hit the nail pretty much on the head:
The case is hard -- pitting important First Amendment values against the ability of a public school system to create an environment in which all students feel welcome and comfortable. In our view, the court's answer presents serious problems. Identifying a better solution, however, is tricky…
purepedantry | August 7, 2006Yikes. You just can't win with embryos:
Pasko Rakic of Yale Medical School in New Haven, Connecticut and his team were similarly scanning experimental mice, to help inject dye into embryos. When later studying the brain development of these mice, the team noticed that certain neurons in the growing cortex were not behaving normally.
Rakic discussed his preliminary results at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in 2004...But he says he wanted more results to be convinced -- now, 335 mice later, he is.
Rakic says that he has no evidence that ultrasound scanning disrupts the brains of human…
stcynic | August 4, 2006As if we didn't have enough to worry about with our own government trying to increase its control over the internet, the Senate yesterday ratified a treaty that requires us to enforce the laws of other countries. Referred to as the Cybercrime Treaty, this agreement requires the US to cooperate with other nations in enforcing their laws if they are broken on American internet servers and ISPs. If we're talking about helping track down child porn websites or money laundering operations, no problem. But the treaty includes much broader powers and requires the US government to enforce laws from…
stcynic | August 4, 2006The Washington Post reports on a draft of the administration's proposal for how to structure the military tribunals. In stunning form, the proposal turns out to be a means of adding entirely new executive powers that we've never seen before:
A draft Bush administration plan for special military courts seeks to expand the reach and authority of such "commissions" to include trials, for the first time, of people who are not members of al-Qaeda or the Taliban and are not directly involved in acts of international terrorism, according to officials familiar with the proposal.
The plan, which would…
stcynic | August 1, 2006I've written before about the 9th circuit case Harper v Poway Unified School District, which I think the court got wrong. The case involved a student who wore a t-shirt to school on the day after the pro-gay Day of Silence event that said "Be Ashamed, Our School Embraced What God Has Condemned" and "Homosexuality is Shameful." The school told him he had to take it off, he refused and filed suit. The district court dismissed the case and a 2-1 panel of the 9th circuit upheld that dismissal, with a flaming dissent from Judge Kozinski. The 9th circuit then denied an en banc rehearing, but they…
stcynic | August 1, 2006The Scotsman is reporting that the Anti-Defamation League is calling for criminal charges to be filed against Mel Gibson for his anti-semitic remarks:
Calling for a criminal investigation into the Oscar-winning actor and director's remarks, Abraham Foxman, the national director of the US Jewish Anti-Defamation League, said: "We believe there should be consequences to bigots and bigotry."
I think there should be consequences for bigotry too. They should be ostracized, shouted down, made to feel like the fools that they are. But I am absolutely opposed to criminalizing such behavior. The…
purepedantry | July 31, 2006Gov. Schwarzenegger and Tony Blair are endeavoring to create a California and Great Britain global warming pact, to pool their efforts in lowering CO2 emissions:
Britain and California are preparing to sidestep the Bush administration and fight global warming together by creating a joint market for greenhouse gases.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger plan to lay the groundwork for a new trans-Atlantic market in carbon dioxide emissions, The Associated Press has learned.
Such a move could help California cut carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping…
stcynic | July 31, 2006For sheer volume of nonsense, it's hard to top Judith Reisman, the religious right's favorite anti-sex crusader. In this Worldnutdaily column, she's responding to this article by Glenn Reynolds at MSNBC.com. It's filled with all the usual distortions and illogic one has come to expect from Reisman. Reynolds cites this article in the Washington Post about a new DOJ report that says that rape has gone down 85% since 1970:
The number of rapes per capita in the United States has plunged by more than 85 percent since the 1970s, and reported rape fell last year even while other violent offenses…
stcynic | July 27, 2006The Ohio Supreme Court, following in the steps of the Michigan court last year, has struck a strong blow against eminent domain abuse in that state. They ruled that economic development was not a legal reason to force people to give up their homes, halting a major development project in the process:
The Ohio Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Wednesday that economic development isn't a sufficient reason under the state constitution to justify taking homes, putting a halt to a $125 million project of offices, shops and restaurants in a Cincinnati suburb that officials said would create jobs…
stcynic | July 26, 2006The 5th amendment guarantees that property may not be taken for public use without just compensation. Radley Balko has a textbook example of how governments play games with compensation in eminent domain cases. A government agency in Tacoma, Washington is trying to buy up land for a parking lot. For one particular property, they initially offered $439,000, about $8 a square foot. That's what they paid for an adjacent piece of land from another owner. But the owner of this property balked and filed a suit to try and stop the takeover of the property. After losing that court case, the offer for…
stcynic | July 26, 2006Mark Creech of the Christian Action League of North Carolina is none too happy with the state judge who struck down that state's cohabitation law last week. His reasoning is, predictably, quite weak. For example:
Judge Alford's decision was judicial activism at its best. The state's lawyers rightly argued Hobbs didn't have standing in the case because she never had even been charged with a crime. Moreover, legal experts still debate the meaning of the Lawrence v. Texas case and how it applies to state law.
Two arguments he thinks proves the judge was "activist", both of them just plain silly…
stcynic | July 26, 2006Remember playing tag as a kid, when you had that one spot that was "safe"? If you had your hand on a certain tree, then you could not be tagged 'it'. The Bush administration seems to be treating national security largely as the safe spot, arguing that as long as they claim something is necessary for national security, not only can you not stop them from doing it, you can't even find out if they're doing it. Yesterday, a Federal judge dismissed a lawsuit that sought to stop AT&T from handing over phone records to the NSA because they hadn't proven that the company did that. Never mind that…
stcynic | July 24, 2006You all remember Specter's "compromise" bill, the one he says the White House reluctantly agreed to in negotations that would allegedly establish real oversight on the NSA programs? Well, Glen Greenwald has a post that analyzes the text of the bill in more detail and reveals that it's even worse than we initially thought. It actually gives the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence the right to end the discovery process without a judge agreeing. This bill is a complete cave in being sold as oversight. It needs to be stopped.
stcynic | July 21, 2006In all of the suits going on in various courts over the NSA's domestic spying programs, the government is arguing that the courts cannot even hear such cases because the process of discovery will violate the state secrets privilege. At least one court, the Federal circuit for the Northern District of California, has now rejected that claim (see ruling here). Now let's hope the ACLU's case here in Michigan goes the same way. And, interestingly enough, Judge Vaughn Walker, who issued the ruling, is a conservative. He was originally nominated for the Federal bench by Reagan, but faced fierce…
stcynic | July 21, 2006Remember the woman in North Carolina who was forced to quit her job as a deputy sheriff because she lived with her boyfriend and there was an old law on the books banning cohabitation in that state? A state court has now overturned that law, which is good news. The ACLU represented the woman and the judge ruled, apparently based largely on the 2003 Lawrence ruling. Always nice to see that ruling, which I consider one of the most important decisions of the last 50 years, cited as precedent and applied in other cases.