Trump 'fine' with Supreme Court's gay marriage ruling

Donald Trump is "fine" with same-sex marriage and doesn't think the Supreme Court needs to revisit the matter, the president-elect said Sunday, diverting from the Republican Party's official position on the matter.

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/305803-trump-diverts-from-gop-fine-with-supreme-courts-gay-marriage

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Voting is beautiful, be beautiful ~ vote.©

Ruth Bader Ginsburg Walked All Over Texas' Restrictive Abortion Law

Ginsburg and her female colleagues were far from convinced. When Keller pointed to the biggest, most populous cities in the great state of Texas -- where clinics are complying with the law -- as proof that the procedure would remain available elsewhere if the court upheld the law, Ginsburg took him to task for what is likely the state's weakest argument.

"Well, how many women are located over 100 miles from the nearest clinic?" she asked.

That's when the slow and painful unraveling of Keller began. He conceded that "25 percent" of women -- by which he meant roughly 1.5 million -- do. To him that was no harm, no foul. He reasoned that some women could always go to nearby New Mexico, which doesn't have the same restrictions on abortion clinics as Texas.

"That's odd that you point to the New Mexico facility," Ginsburg shot back. "If your argument is right, then New Mexico is not an available way out for Texas, because Texas says to protect our women, we need these things." Instead, she said, the state proposed to "send them off" to New Mexico, whose clinics are not subject to any of Texas' health-conscious regulations.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/ruth-bader-ginsburg-texas-abortion-law_us_56d78d8ee4b0000de403673e?section=politics 

Voting is beautiful, be beautiful ~ vote.©

Justices poised to query voting rights focus on South

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - When the Supreme Court last scrutinized the 1965 Voting Rights Act in 2009, Justice Anthony Kennedy peered down from the bench and asked why federal rules were tougher for Alabama and Georgia than for Michigan and Ohio.

Chief Justice John Roberts pointedly added that it seemed lawyers defending the rules, which were created to protect black voters, believed that even in modern times "southerners are more likely to discriminate than northerners."

Now four years later, as the landmark law faces another challenge, the skepticism of Roberts and of Kennedy, often the decisive vote on racial dilemmas, is likely to emerge with even greater force.

In the dispute to be heard on Wednesday, the crucial issue is whether Congress may continue to require certain states, mainly in the South, to show that any proposed election-law change would not discriminate against African-American, Latino or other minority voters.

The screening provision known as Section 5 is one of the pillars of the law passed after the notorious "Bloody Sunday" on March 7, 1965, in Selma, Alabama, when state troopers attacked civil rights marchers with clubs and tear gas. The act broadly prohibited poll taxes, literacy tests and other rules depriving blacks of the franchise. In the 1960s, such measures existed throughout the nation but were especially common in the South with its legacy of slavery.

The modern relevance of the issues was underscored in the 2012 presidential election campaign when courts nationwide heard civil-rights challenges to newly adopted state voting-districts, voter identification laws, and polling-place limits, for example on hours of early voting. The most restrictive laws ended up being blocked before the November elections.

As the 2009 remarks of Kennedy, Roberts and other justices signaled, the conservative Supreme Court majority is skeptical that today's South still needs special oversight. The new case from Shelby County, Ala., is likely to come down to whether Congress documented sufficient evidence in its 2006 renewal of the law to justify treating different locales differently.

The Obama administration is defending the provision, asserting that the South still needs tough supervision. The court's ruling in one of the most closely watched cases this term could affect federal oversight of a swath of states through 2031 as well as the extent of minority participation in elections in crucial jurisdictions.

Nine designated states (and parts of seven others) must obtain federal approval before making any election-law changes, such as for voter-identification rules or in district boundaries. The nine fully covered states are Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia.

Conservative advocates and southern officials who have banded together against Section 5 say it is an archaic measure that encroaches on state sovereignty. The U.S. government, backed by civil rights groups, counters that in the case of Shelby County v. Holder that Congress has rightly continued to single out places with the worst bias.

In 2009, the Supreme Court avoided the large question about the scope of Congress's power to remedy discrimination and decided the case from Texas on narrow grounds. But Chief Justice Roberts fired a warning shot about how the court might ultimately rule when he wrote, "Things have changed in the South. Voter turnout and registration rates now approach parity. Blatantly discriminatory evasions of federal decrees are rare. And minority candidates hold office at unprecedented levels."

In his brief for the Obama administration defending Section 5, U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli acknowledged that "there is no question that ‘things have changed in the South' since 1965." But Verrilli stressed that Congress found that states covered by Section 5 were still resisting minority voters' "right to participate in the political process."

He pointed to a federal court's decision last year that Texas legislators had redrawn voting districts along racial lines and disadvantaged minority voters. In separate 2012 actions, judges blocked Texas from imposing a tough voter-ID rule and Florida locales from curtailing an early-voting period. Critics of Section 5 note, however, that in 2012 northern states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania tried to impose voting restrictions that were rejected by courts.

PERPETRATORS TO VICTIMS

When Congress first adopted Section 5 in 1965, it wanted to prevent places with a history of bias from continually imposing new rules that would keep blacks from the polls. As the court observed when it upheld the law against its first challenge, in 1966, Congress found case-by-case litigation costly and inadequate to stop abuses. Congress sought "to shift the advantage of time and inertia from the perpetrators of the evil to its victims," the court observed.

As Congress has repeatedly renewed Section 5, it has retained a coverage formula linked to discriminatory practices of the 1960s and early 1970s. But it has allowed jurisdictions that can show a new, clean record to "bail out" and has extended coverage beyond those states originally covered.

In Shelby County's appeal to the Supreme Court, lawyer Bert Rein says Section 5 and its coverage formula achieved their goals and that Congress failed to document in 2006 the kind of systematic obstruction that originally warranted tough scrutiny.

Still, in Alabama, the U.S. Justice Department has repeatedly and recently blocked proposed electoral changes. One 2008 incident occurred in Shelby County when the city of Calera implemented a redistricting plan that caused the one African American on the city council to lose his seat. After the Justice Department forced Calera to redraw the map with fairer lines, he won his election.

NAACP Legal Defense Fund lawyer Debo Adegbile will represent that council member, Ernest Montgomery, and other Shelby County African Americans, on Wednesday.

Adegbile was at the lectern in 2009, on behalf of African Americans in that Texas case, when Chief Justice Roberts said it appeared the message of Section 5's defenders was that "southerners are more likely to discriminate than northerners."

Adegbile said then, and insists today, that it's not that discrimination does not happen outside Section 5's covered states but that repetitive violations are concentrated in those within its scope. "Voting discrimination continues," Adegbile told Reuters in a recent interview, "particularly in Alabama, and indeed Shelby County's own recent record proves that point."

House Amendment to Reverse Citizens United Ruling Meets With Mixed Support

House Amendment to Reverse Citizens United Ruling Meets With Mixed Support

Wednesday 12 October 2011

by: Britney Schultz, Truthout | Report

In the wake of the landmark Supreme Court case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which upheld that corporations were "persons" and that their deep-pocket political expenditures were a constitutionally protected expression of their free speech rights, much resistance to the decision has sprung up, from the grassroots to the halls of power in Washington.

Last month, Rep. Donna Edwards (D-Maryland) and Judiciary Committee ranking member John Conyers (D-Michigan) reintroduced an amendment to the US Constitution, HJ Res. 78, which called for a reversal of the Citizens United case by limiting corporate contributions in elections. The bill is cosponsored by 18 US representatives.

Representative Edwards expressed initial hesitation to amending the Constitution, but said that the Supreme Court left her with no other choice after its ruling in Citizens United. 

"Justice John Paul Stevens warned that the Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United threatened 'to undermine the integrity of elected institutions around the nation,' and how right he was," said Edwards. "Since that flawed ruling was issued, campaign spending by outside groups including corporationssurged more than four-fold to reach nearly $300 million in the 2010 election cycle." 

According to a poll conducted last year by Hart Research, an overwhelming majority of American voters agree that corporate spending has more to do with buying influence in Washington than with exercising free speech; 95 percent of those polledagreed that, "Corporations spend money on politics to buy influence/elect people favorable to their financial interests." 

The proposed amendment targets corporations' First Amendment "political speech rights," but does not include corporations' commercial "free speech rights." Rep. Edwards said that Congress has other routes of "policing" corporate marketing.

While HJ Res. 78 is praised by some activist groups, such as Free Speech for People, others regard the bill as it is written with skepticism, pointing out that it is not a comprehensive solution for groups actively working against the larger issue of corporate personhood.

According to Move to Amend organizer David Cobb, "It is a mistake to oppose Citizens United only on the basis of campaign finance reform." Kaitlin Sopoci-Belknap, also from Move to Amend, told Truthout that, because the bill legitimizes corporations' status as "persons" within the Constitution, it would actually make it harder for groups against corporate personhood to get their agenda through.

Rep. Edwards told YES! Magazine she has faith in passing the amendment: "We've amended the constitution 27 times, and this 28th amendment is no different. Some constitutional amendments have gone rapid-fire through the Congress, and I think that we have the potential for that kind of momentum here."

This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

House Joint Resolution 78 to Amend Constitution on Political Activity by Corporations

Women vs Walmart: Supreme Court Hears Argument in Sexual Discrimination Suit

Ginny Thomas turns to lobbying

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High court turns down early health care challenge

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court has turned down the first preliminary challenge to President Barack Obama's health care overhaul.

THIS STORY

• High court turns down early health care challenge
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• High court weighs Calif. effort to ban sale of violent video games to minors

The decision Monday to reject an appeal from a former Republican state lawmaker in California was no surprise because a federal appeals court has yet to consider the case. The high court almost never reviews cases before the issues have been aired in lower courts.
Of more significance is the sign that all the justices took part in rejecting the appeal. New Justice Elena Kagan refused to say during her confirmation hearings whether she would take part in the court's deliberations over the health care law. Kagan was Obama's solicitor general before joining the court.
The court has noted Kagan's absence in more than two dozen other cases, suggesting that she voted on the health care appeal.
Kagan has stepped aside from cases in which she was involved as a Justice Department official before joining the court.
Justice Clarence Thomas also apparently voted on the case. Some critics have called on Thomas to step aside from the health care cases because his wife, Virginia Thomas, has been an outspoken opponent of the law in her role as founder of the conservative advocacy group Liberty Central.
---
The case is Baldwin v. Sebelius, 10-369.

Corporate campaign ads haven't followed Supreme Court's prediction

Companies and unions have been able to avoid the transparency called for in the court's landmark ruling. Spending on next week's midterm election has been exorbitant

Chart: Money flowing into midterm campaigns

Reporting from Washington — The Supreme Court sent a wave of corporate and union money flooding into campaign ads this year, but it did so with the promise that the public would know — almost instantly — who was paying for them.

"With the advent of the Internet, prompt disclosure of expenditures can provide shareholders and citizens with the information needed to hold corporations and elected officials accountable for their positions," Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote in January. "This transparency enables the electorate to make informed decisions and give proper weight to different speakers and messages."

But Kennedy and the high court majority were wrong. Because of loopholes in tax laws and a weak enforcement policy at the Federal Election Commission, corporations and wealthy donors have been able to spend huge sums on campaign ads, confident the public will not know who they are, election law experts say.

Corporate donors have been able to hide their contributions despite the opposition of shareholders and customers — the very groups cited by Kennedy.

By an overwhelming margin, shareholders say they don't want their companies devoting money to political ads. Customers are also easily angered by corporate political stands. In a recent case, Target Corp.'s chief executive was forced to apologize after it was revealed the company had donated $150,000 to the campaign of a Republican candidate in Minnesota who opposed gay rights. The retail chain faced a possible boycott led by gay rights activists.

"The biggest change this year is that it is no longer possible to identify the individuals who are responsible for funding election communications," said Karl J. Sandstrom, a former FEC commissioner who advises Democrats on election law.

He called Kennedy's opinion naive and said it reflected a "very uninformed view of how disclosure works."

The high court ruling also has helped fuel the rise of several nonprofit political action groups, such as Republican strategist Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS, that have poured millions into an election season that is quickly reaching exorbitant spending levels.

Business groups, unions and interest groups had spent $266 million as of Tuesday, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, including at least $128 million by groups that are not required to publicly disclose their donors. Some have said outside spending by conservative groups alone could reach $400 million this year.

The Public Campaign Action Fund, a group that advocates for public financing of campaigns, issued a report Tuesday predicting that House candidates alone could spend as much as $1.5 billion by the end of the campaign.

This year's election marks the first time in 100 years that corporations and unions are free to spend their money on election ads. In the past, both companies and unions could encourage their employees or members to give money to political action committees, which in turn could pay for election ads.

But in January, the Supreme Court, by a 5-4 vote, struck down the legal ban on the use of corporate and union funds for direct election ads. In Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission, the justices said that corporations had the same right to free speech as individuals, and for that reason the government could not stop corporations from spending to help their favored candidates.

In the same decision, however, an 8-1 majority upheld the disclosure laws as vital to democracy. That part of the ruling has gone largely ignored.

The reasons, said Tara Malloy, a lawyer for the Campaign Legal Center in Washington, are "weaknesses in the tax law, radical under-enforcement by the FEC and the failure of Congress" to enact a new disclosure law.

Under the tax code, nonprofit groups can register as "social welfare" or other organizations, meaning they can spend money on campaign ads without having their name disclosed as long as their primary activity is not political. In a little-noticed opinion in August, a divided FEC took the view that big donors who fund ad campaigns need not be disclosed unless the donor gave the money for a "particular advertisement."

That is "an impossible-to-meet standard," said former FEC Chairman Trevor Potter, counsel for Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign, saying that almost any contributor can remain anonymous.

Of course, some donors are happy to take credit for their political spending. In recent weeks, union leaders and officials of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have boasted about how much they are spending.

But in many cases, anonymity is a way for donors to avoid backlash — and any unseemly appearances that they are trying to sway an election with big money.

Anonymity also provides protection to some corporate officials who might fear backing the wrong candidate. For example, if a company spent a large sum on ads urging the defeat of a powerful senator, it would have made an enemy if the senator won reelection.

Last week, Public Citizen and several other liberal advocacy groups complained to the FEC and accused the new political committees of evading the law.

The public needs "to know which corporations and billionaires are behind the attack ads now polluting our airwaves," said Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen.

But Bradley A. Smith, another former FEC chairman and a leading conservative foe of many of the campaign finance laws, said such disclosure was unnecessary.

"Voters do know who is funding the ads — every single one of them," he said.

Smith said the U.S. Chamber of Commerce discloses its spending on election ads, as does Rove's group, even if they do not specifically disclose their donors.

"Is there anybody who doesn't know where the chamber is coming from?" he asked. "None of this troubles me in the least."

david.savage@latimes.com

Kim Geiger in the Washington bureau contributed to this report.

Activism of Thomas’s Wife Could Raise Judicial Issues

Activism of Thomas’s Wife Could Raise Judicial Issues

Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
Virginia Thomas, left, of the organization Liberty Central, and Diana Reimer, in May lobbying against the health care bill.
By JACKIE CALMES

RICHMOND, Va. — As one of the keynote speakers here Friday at a state convention billed as the largest Tea Party event ever, Virginia Thomas gave the throng of more than 2,000 activists a full-throated call to arms for conservative principles.

For three decades, Mrs. Thomas has been a familiar figure among conservative activists in Washington — since before she met her husband of 23 years, Justice Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court. But this year she has emerged in her most politically prominent role yet: Mrs. Thomas is the founder and head of a new nonprofit group, Liberty Central, dedicated to opposing what she characterizes as the leftist “tyranny” of President Obama and Democrats in Congress and to “protecting the core founding principles” of the nation.

It is the most partisan role ever for a spouse of a justice on the nation’s highest court, and Mrs. Thomas is just getting started. “Liberty Central will be bigger than the Tea Party movement,” she told Fox News in April, at a Tea Party rally in Atlanta.

But to some people who study judicial ethics, Mrs. Thomas’s activism is raising knotty questions, in particular about her acceptance of large, unidentified contributions for Liberty Central. She began the group in late 2009 with two gifts of $500,000 and $50,000, and because it is a 501(c)(4) nonprofit group, named for the applicable section of the federal tax code, she does not have to publicly disclose any contributors. Such tax-exempt groups are supposed to make sure that less than half of their activities are political.

Mrs. Thomas, known as Ginni, declined through a spokeswoman to be interviewed without an agreement not to discuss her husband. In written responses to questions, Sarah Field, Liberty Central’s chief operating officer and general counsel, said that Mrs. Thomas is paid by Liberty Central, with the compensation set by the group’s board, and that the group has “internal reviews and protections to ensure that no donor causes a conflict of interest for either Ginni or her husband.”

Nonprofit groups with political agendas like Liberty Central are operating in this election cycle under evolving legal and regulatory standards, most notably the ruling last January by the Supreme Court in the Citizens United case, which eased restrictions on independent campaign spending by corporations and unions. In that case, Justice Thomas, long an advocate of dismantling campaign finance restrictions, was in the 5-to-4 majority. Wealthy individuals and some corporations, emboldened by the ruling, are giving to such groups to influence the election but still hide their tracks.

Unlike many other conservative nonprofit groups that are pouring donations into television advertising to benefit Republican candidates, Liberty Central has not done so, and it is not clear whether it will.

This month, Liberty Central began what it called its first ad campaign, but the ads were limited to Web sites for the conservative talk-show hosts Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin — suggesting an effort to build membership for Liberty Central, not elect candidates. The ads link to Liberty Central’s Web site and a video of Mrs. Thomas soliciting 100,000 signatures against the “Obama tax increase” — referring to the scheduled expiration of the Bush tax cuts on Dec. 31.

The bigger question for many is how she is financing these activities. Liberty Central reported the initial $550,000 on its 2009 tax return, though the identities of the two donors are redacted.

A federal law requires justices to recuse themselves in a number of circumstances where real or perceived conflicts of interest could arise, including in cases where their spouses could have a financial interest. But the decision to step aside is up to each justice; there is no appeal from the nation’s highest court.

“It’s shocking that you would have a Supreme Court justice sitting on a case that might implicate in a very fundamental way the interests of someone who might have contributed to his wife’s organization,” said Deborah L. Rhode, a law professor and director of the Stanford University Center on the Legal Profession.

“The fact that we can’t find that out is the first problem,” she said, adding, “And how can the public form a judgment about propriety if it doesn’t have the basic underlying facts?”

Steven Lubet, who teaches legal ethics at Northwestern Law School, said Mrs. Thomas’s solicitation of big contributions raised potential recusal issues for her husband. But he added, “There’s no reason to think that Justice Thomas would be anything other than extremely careful about it.”

“I think this is the world we live in, where two-career families are the norm and there are no constraints on the political activities of judicial spouses,” Mr. Lubet said.

Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University, said: “There’s nothing to stop Ginni Thomas from being politically active. She’s a private citizen and she has all of her constitutional rights.”

But as for the big donors, Mr. Gillers, citing a 1988 Supreme Court decision, said, “She has to tell him because the public is going to assume he knows,” and, Mr. Gillers said, fair-minded citizens could question Justice Thomas’s objectivity as a result.

The Supreme Court’s public information office said Mrs. Thomas had told court officials of her plans but it declined to provide any more information.

“Around the time of the launch of Liberty Central, Mrs. Thomas reviewed her involvement with the Supreme Court legal office. Discussions with the legal office that are part of efforts to obtain legal and ethics advice are not made public,” Kathy Arberg, the court’s information officer, wrote in an e-mail.

In past interviews, Mrs. Thomas has suggested she is being singled out unfairly; other spouses of judges are politically active, she has argued, usually mentioning Gov. Edward G. Rendell of Pennsylvania, a Democrat who is married to a judge on the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Mr. Rendell has to disclose direct contributions to his campaigns. And parties can appeal to the Supreme Court should his wife not recuse herself when her impartiality is questioned.

Mrs. Thomas’s political work has drawn criticism before from Democrats. In the weeks before a 5-to-4 majority of the Supreme Court, including her husband, decided the 2000 election for George W. Bush over Al Gore, Mrs. Thomas was compiling résumés for potential appointees to a Bush administration from her job at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative, Republican-leaning research group.

Mrs. Thomas’s supporters said she plays an important role as a bridge between grass-roots Tea Party activists and establishment Republicans in Washington. Ryan Hecker, a lawyer in Houston and a prominent Tea Party activist, said he had heard that Liberty Central was “doing a big get-out-the-vote effort” in some Congressional races. Despite the suspicion of many in the Tea Party that Republicans in Washington are trying to co-opt the movement, Mr. Hecker said the “charismatic and very genuine” Mrs. Thomas is not seen that way among activists.

“She’s been there for a long time, but she hasn’t been corrupted by it,” Mr. Hecker said. So she can be “a medium” to get the grass-roots’ views “to the people that matter.”

Kitty Bennett contributed reporting.

Uncly Jay Explains SCOTUS Nomination

http://unclejayexplains.com/2010/04/18/uncle-jay-explains-apr-19-2010/