In public prayer case, the Supreme Court strikes another blow against American democracy

By Michael J.W. Stickings

The right-wing Republican majority on the Supreme Court has once again struck a blow against the very essence of American democracy, against the very idea of America itself.

When it's not handing democracy to the rich, effectively disenfranchising everyone else, or claiming that racial discrimination is no longer a problem, to name but two of its more prominent right-wing efforts of late, the Roberts Court, dominated by ideologues like Scalia but with the somewhat more pragmatic Kennedy often voting with the conservative majority, is tearing down the separation of church and state, that fundamental principle that guided the Founders and that is as essential as ever given fundamentalist efforts to theocratize America in stark contrast to its founding principles. And this effort was on display again today:

The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that a town in upstate New York did not violate the Constitution by starting its public meetings with a prayer from a "chaplain of the month" who was almost always Christian.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority in a 5-to-4 decision that divided the court's more conservative members from its liberal ones, said the prayers were merely ceremonial. They were neither unduly sectarian nor likely to make members of other faiths feel unwelcome.

"Ceremonial prayer," he wrote, "is but a recognition that, since this nation was founded and until the present day, many Americans deem that their own existence must be understood by precepts far beyond that authority of government to alter or define."

In dissent, Justice Elena Kagan said the town's practices could not be reconciled "with the First Amendment's promise that every citizen, irrespective of her religion, owns an equal share of her government."

Town officials in Greece, N.Y., near Rochester, said that members of all faiths, and atheists, were welcome to give the opening prayer. In practice, however, almost all of the chaplains were Christian. Some of their prayers were explicitly sectarian, with references, for instance, to "the saving sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross."

Kennedy's argument isn't entirely crazy, but it makes less and less sense as you consider that what is just "ceremonial" from one perspective may be theocratic and proselytizing on the other, and it's that other perspective that is very much at the core of activist conservative efforts to turn America into a (right-wing) Christianist state.

What's more, offering the opportunity to minority groups (in this case Jews or atheists, mostly) to have their own prayers recited doesn't fix the problem of effectively granting primacy to one religion in particular -- and the fact that the prayers themselves weren't necessarily welcoming, as when they tout the primacy of Christianity and indeed of certain strains of Christianity, only proves that point. Really, how is a non-Christian supposed to feel welcome when a government opens its proceedings with a prayer that refers to "the saving sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross"? Even if they wanted to offer their own prayer, how could non-Christians not feel excluded from their own government, from their own community, by their own fellow citizens?

No one is saying that organized religion, or spirituality generally, has no place in American life. While I personally abhor organized religion, what people choose to do in private, whatever "god" they choose to worship, is for the most part their own business, as long as no one gets hurt, as long as more fundamental rights are respected. But religion should have no place whatsoever in the public space except perhaps in some contexts when it is treated as history and anthropology -- it absolutely has no place where government, the self-governance of free and equal citizens, is considered. Just don't expect this deeply anti-American Supreme Court to defend what is fundamentally American.

A bit of an eye-opener

By Carl 

When you think "poverty in New York City," what springs to mind? What stereotype has been so drilled into our heads from the newspapers, magazines and TV shows we all watch, like Law & Order or The Wanderers?

The very poorest among us in this city are Hispanics, perhaps African-Americans. Want to portray a neighborhood as poor in a TV show? Get a graffiti-coated wall, and stick a couple of Latinos playing handball against it.

Right? I mean, that's the face of poverty in the Big Apple. Right? 

Wrong:

Despite a rise in employment, nearly half of New York City's population is living near poverty levels -- a problem that is particularly striking in the city's Asian population, which has surpassed Hispanics as the city's poorest group, according to a new report conducted by the Center for Economic Opportunity.

The study revealed 45.6 percent of New Yorkers are barely making ends meet, even with more adults working full-time since the recession. A combination of low wages, rising rents, and a lack of benefits is largely to blame.

The dismal numbers, presented Tuesday to City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, follows a growing number of studies showing the harsh realities of income inequality in New York. Just last week, city comptroller Scott Stringer released a study showing just how unaffordable the city has become, with the median rent in New York City rising a staggering 75 percent from 2000 to 2012.

The annual study also showed significant shifts within racial and ethnic demographics. As the report indicates, the poverty rate of Asians and Hispanics were "statistically identical" in 2008, at 22.4 percent and 23.5 percent, respectively. But by 2012, the rate surged to 29 percent for Asians, more than 3 percent higher than Hispanics.

The Stringer study is of particular note, as the rules governing rent control and rent stabilization in New York were amended in the last twenty years to allow landlords to force tenants above a certain income threshold to pay market rents. This effectively took a percentage of affordable housing off the market. An additional form of vacancy decontrol, as it's known, is to vacate an apartment for a year, make renovations, then petition the city to remove the rent controls. The landlord is entitled to an immediate 20% rent increase, plus one-fortieth of the costs incurred in renovations (which means premium pricing on plumbing, HVAC, and so on).

Estimates range as high as 300,000 units of affordable housing being taken off the market in the past twenty years.

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Make no mistake, the GWB scandal is pure Chris Christie

By Michael J.W. Stickings

The politically-motivated closing of lanes on the George Washington Bridge, targeting Democrats (probably not Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich but rather Senate Majority Leader Loretta Weinberg), speaks volumes about New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, those close to him, and the culture of bullying and retribution that lies at his core both personally and politically.

And while his various Republican pals and conservatives in the media are using this opportunity to slam President Obama, by suggesting that Christie, in contrast, owned up to the problem, apologized, and thereby showed true executive leadership, what we're actually seeing, and what is actually becoming more and more apparent as more and more comes out, is that Christie directly enabled this to happen whether he was in on the details or not and that there was a concerted effort to cover things up after the fact:

Some of Governor Christie's closest loyalists made an effort to keep information about the George Washington Bridge lane closures out of public view for months, as questions swirled about what now appears to have been a politically motivated vendetta, thousands of documents released Friday show.

The documents provide a sweeping timeline of the internal deliberations taking place among at least 10 of Christie's trusted aides. They stretch from the weeks before the September lane closings up to and beyond the November election and are punctuated with vulgarities aimed at the media and signs of tension between New York and New Jersey officials who share control of the agency that operates the bridge.

The documents also show that Port Authority Chairman David Samson, Christie's top appointee at the agency, blamed a New York official — the one who reopened the lanes and said the closings were possibly illegal — for a leak to the media.

Comparisons to Richard Nixon and his henchmen are apt, but any such historical perspective tends to shroud the point: This may all be rather Nixonian, but it's also pure Chris Christie: playing politics as if it's a feudal (and very personal) bloodsport, pitting loyalists against everyone else, bullying the media when the story emerged, resorting to sarcasm and ad hominem attacks to try to blow things off, along with that Jersey swagger that is so typically his, supposedly apologizing but hardly taking responsibility and really just blaming others, throwing anyone and everyone under the bus, whatever is required to save his political skin, showing his massive egotism in stressing how hurt he is by all this, how he was let down, suggesting he's the real victim here, his sycophantic minions circling the wagons and waging an ongoing campaign of lies and smears to protect their master, just he wanted from them.

Really, this whole scandal has it all. And however much he may continue to deny that he had any knowledge of anything that was going on, it has his fingerprints all over it.

Bad news that looks like good news: Possible changes to New York's marijuana laws

Guest post by Ted Leibowitz  

Ed. note: Ted is good friends with our former associate editor and co-blogger Creature, and Ted often wrote for Creature's now-on-long-hiatus blog State of the Day. He's an occasional guest blogger here at The Reaction. -- MJWS  

Ted Leibowitz is an award-winning internet radio music director / DJ focused on bringing the best new and interesting indie rock to his worldwide listenership via his 10-year old station BAGeL Radio. He has been featured on panels at music/tech conferences and writes about the exciting new business of music as well as the foot-dragging, entrenched, dinosaur-like old music industry. 

**********

The headline reads, "New York State Is Set to Loosen Marijuana Laws." To marijuana advocates, this sounds good on the surface. However, Governor Andrew Cuomo's gesture is being made more for political reasons than for the betterment of New Yorkers. 

This is not good news for legal marijuana advocates and should be opposed and worked around. As with what Governor Chris Christie did in NJ, or the mistakes made in Connecticut (legal since May 2012; however, the state still has no dispensaries!), a baby step like this will do more to delay medical marijuana for most people and legalization in general than doing nothing. 

Making medical marijuana legal for a very limited number of people doesn't help the hundreds of thousands in jail for possession, nor the hundreds of thousands more who will be incarcerated in the coming years due to way-out-of-line draconian New York State and federal drug laws. 

The continued destruction of lives by criminalization and incarceration for a benign activity partaken of by so many is a social injustice equal to denying sick people medicine that will improve their quality of life. 

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The new and improved Kirsten Gillibrand

By Michael J.W. Stickings

What a difference a few years can make.

Back in 2009, when then-New York Gov. David Paterson named then-Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand to fill Hillary's vacated spot in the Senate, I said it was "a horrible, horrible pick": 

Earlier, I suggested that Gillibrand, who represents a pro-Bush district, is "almost a Republican." Almost? I'd say she pretty much is, what with a 100% approval rating from the NRA, support for the Iraq War, and, as she herself put it, "one of the most conservative" voting records in the state, including voting for the FISA bill that included telecom immunity and to lift the ban on the possession of semi-automatic weapons in D.C. Her father was close to former Republican Governor George Pataki. She even once interned for former Senator Al D'Amato, a conservative and hyper-partisan Republican.

Was that wrong? No. But has Senator Gillibrand emerged as something altogether different? Yes.

The fact is, Gillibrand represented a fairly conservative district in upstate New York. (Obama won it decisively in 2008 and 2012, but Bush won it by fairly large margins in 2000 and 2004.) And so her views very much lined up with what she had to do to succeed there. That's not to say she was lying about herself. While she was strong on civil liberties and a proponent of same-sex marriage (and gays in the military), there is no doubt that she was genuinely a conservative Democrat, and that's why many of us were concerned when she was appointed to the Senate.

But give her credit. She's adapted to her role as New York's junior senator and broadened her views, or at least her positions, to reflect a significantly more progressive outlook.

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Weak tea

By Mustang Bobby

The election results in Virginia, New York, New Jersey, and Alabama indicate that the Tea Party had a bad day.

Terry McAuliffe, no one’s idea of a perfect candidate, beat Ken Cuccinelli for governor of Virginia. Mr. Cuccinelli was the personification of Tea Party ideology with the added touch of evangelical prudery, homophobia, and misogyny. That the election was close was probably more an indication of Mr. McAuliffe’s utter lack of charm than a late surge of voters in favor of transvaginal probing and banning sodomy. There’s only so much purity that the voters can take.

In New Jersey, the re-election of Chris Christie sets the stage for the 2016 primary starting today. Even though rational people know that Mr. Christie is not a moderate centrist Republican by any standard, he’s viewed with deep suspicion by the Tea Party because he once shook hands with Barack Obama and said nice things about him. That makes him a heretic in the eyes of the Inquisitors, and will doom any chances he has of winning in primaries in places like Texas or the Deep South.

Speaking of the Deep South, a run-off election in Alabama put an establishment Republican in the House over an avowed Tea Partier and birther. It’s hard to imagine that a bomb-thrower like that could lose in Alabama, but even there they seem to have their limit on the nutsery.

A lot of obituaries have been written about the Tea Party only to have the zombies rise from the grave once again, but it’s pretty hard to see yesterday’s election results as a sign of vigorous health for it. But rest assured that somewhere in the aftermath of these elections, there is some Republican strategist who is certain that they lost because their candidates weren’t conservative enough.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Behind the Ad: Cuomo vs. Cuomo on casino gambling

By Richard K. Barry

(Another installment in our extensive "Behind the Ad" series.)  

Who: The Committee Against Proposition 1.

Where: New York State (downstate).

What's going on: Politics is always about a lot more than who gets elected. Sometimes it's about referenda that could have a significant impact on policy decisions. It's not as exciting as horse race stuff, but it can be very important.

There is a proposition on the ballot in New York State to expand casino gambling. Current Gov. Cuomo supports it, which could add up to seven new casinos in the state.  Twenty years ago, his father, then Gov. Mario Cuomo lobbied against casino gambling.

It's a clever tactic to tie the son to a prior position of the father, though Mario is having none of it. According to The Buffalo News:

Mario Cuomo released a statement tonight distancing himself from the claims in the new ad. "I made those statements in 1994. A great deal has changed in 20 years. The New York that I was dealing with was a different place. We didn't have casinos on every border. Gaming was only in Las Vegas and Atlantic City,'' he said in a written statement.

Mario Cuomo said his statement was made before New York legalized racetrack-based casinos and before casinos came to other states and provinces surrounding New York. "So if you want to vote with Cuomo, vote yes on Proposal One,'' he said.

Memo to the group that produced this ad: No one cares what Mario Cuomo said about anything twenty years ago.

Anthony Weiner's rise

By Carl 

(I promise, that's the only dick joke in the post.)

Anthony Weiner has officially announced his candidacy for mayor of the city of New York, to replace three term gadabout-with-nothing-better-to-do-than-trash-my-city Michael Bloomberg.

I'll probably end up voting for him in the primary.

That speaks less of Weiner, who has always come off in my book as a bit of a dick (ok, sorry, my bad), than it does about the other candidates running in the Democratic primary, which is essentially the coronation of the next mayor. Weiner is currently polling second at 15%, and that poll was taken before he formally announced. Christine Quinn, the "frontrunner," is polling at 25%, which speaks volumes about a woman who has been Council Speaker for twelve years.

Quinn should be the presumptive nominee, but at 25% she's polling very weakly for someone with as much visibility as she's forced upon New Yorkers, and with good reason: she's really pretty shitty, unless you live in the West Village or happen to be gay. For those constituents, she's about as progressive as they come.

For working and middle class New Yorkers, not so much.

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Church/State

By Mustang Bobby 

The Supreme Court will hear a case deciding whether or not a town council in upstate New York can open its meetings with a prayer:

For more than a decade starting in 1999, the Town Board began its public meetings with a prayer from a "chaplain of the month." Town officials said that members of all faiths, and atheists, were welcome to give the opening prayer.

In practice, the federal appeals court in New York said, almost all of the chaplains were Christian.

"A substantial majority of the prayers in the record contained uniquely Christian language," Judge Guido Calabresi wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel of the court, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. "Roughly two-thirds contained references to 'Jesus Christ,' 'Jesus,' 'Your Son' or the 'Holy Spirit.'"

Two town residents sued, saying the prayers ran afoul of the First Amendment's prohibition of the government establishment of religion. The appeals court agreed. "The town's prayer practice must be viewed as an endorsement of a particular religious viewpoint," Judge Calabresi wrote.

Cue up the Chorus of The Poor Persecuted Majority who will tell us that there is no place safe in America for them to impose their faith and practice on the rest of us whether we want it or not.

Solution: put an imam in the rotation as "chaplain of the month" and see how quickly they decide to bag the whole thing.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

A tale of two cites

By Carl 

So, it was the best of times last week as I took a week's break from the news and the grind of ordinary life and went on a tropical vacation to central America. Specifically, I went to the Honduran Bay Island of Roatan. And I couldn't help but take a critical eye to my surroundings.

Now, none of this should in any way, shape or form being construed as a reflection on either the people of or the government on the island. Everyone I met was very nice, hard-working, and friendly. But it was hard not to notice one glaring problem.

A little history is in order.

Honduras was originally two nations: Spanish Honduras, and British Honduras (now Belize). As you can imagine, Hondurans spoke Spanish, and Belizeans spoke English.

However, the Bay Islands were mostly populated by the Caracol people, originally black slaves from Jamaica and the Caymans who moved to the Bay Islands when Great Britain repealed slavery in the mid-1800s.

That population has moved out in large numbers over the past twenty years, primarily due to the devastation caused by 1998’s Hurricane Mitch, which devastated the island. Mainland Hondurans then moved in, as Roatan is one of the few places in Honduras where work is plentiful and easy to come by. It is a huge tourism destination, and has a deep water port that fits a cruise ship nicely.

Also, as part of the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef, the second largest in the world, the waters off the island are teeming with fish. And scuba divers.

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Don't primary red-state Democrats

By Frank Moraes 

After a string of clueless attempts to be iconoclastic, Jonathan Chait managed to write something that is both iconoclastic and right, "Senate Democrats Wise to Block Background Checks." His argument is very simple: red-state Democrats have to make some non-liberal votes to maintain credibility with their voters; this bill was almost completely useless, or, as Chait puts it, "a compromise of a compromise"; therefore, this was a good bill to vote against. And as I noted on Monday, the final law could have been much worse than nothing at all.

One thing that Chait doesn't mention is that as much as these red state Democrats may annoy us from time to time, they are very strong members of the team. In fact, currently the Democratic Party has more discipline in the Senate than the Republican Party. So the calls I'm hearing from certain corners that we could to primary these red-state Democrats are just crazy.

There is a related issue that I think is really important. Democratic politicians from blue states are often quite conservative, especially on economic issues. Dianne Feinstein, from my own great state of California, comes to mind. When it comes to red-state Democrats, a primary challenge might end with a Republican winning the general election. But why aren't we primarying Democrats in blue states?

One of our biggest political problems is that the Republican Party is too extreme and the Democratic Party not extreme enough. One way to fix this would be to enforce a little ideological purity on our representatives from liberal areas. After all, what makes the Republican Party unacceptable is not that Orrin Hatch of Utah is an extremist. He's from an extremist state; he should be extremist. But why do the people of the very liberal state of New York have an economic conservative as governor?

So we need to stop this nonsense about primarying red-state Democrats and start talking about primarying their blue-state counterparts who have no good reason for being as conservative as they are.

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)

In charge of the six hundred

By Carl 

Not the Light Brigade, but the remaining families who are still homeless after Hurricane Sandy devastated and destroyed their homes.

They've been living in city-provided shelter, basically hotel rooms, since the disaster clean up began. On April 30, the city is pulling funding for that program. They will for all intents and purposes be homeless:

Many families who fell victim to Sandy will be left with no place to go when the city pulls the plug on its hotel program at the end of the month, advocates warn in a new report.

Some 592 families are still in hotels six months after the storm, and the city is trying to get them into other housing by the April 30 end of the program.

Advocates are urging the city to scrap the deadline.

I'm not one of those advocates. New York City can't possibly be expected to finance their living arrangements indefinitely.

But here's the thing: Where are all the free marketers who claim that private enterprise will step in when times are tough? These people live less than fifteen miles or so from the greatest concentration of wealth in this hemisphere, if not the world. You mean to tell me that those billion dollar bonus packages that bankers and brokers dole out annually couldn't have gone towards helping to fund relief in these areas?

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Freedom is free. Fascism, however...

By Carl 

So it turns out that Mayor Mike Bloomberg has yet another black eye in his third term – Occupy Wall Street:

After eleven months of talking in the courts, New York City has agreed to pay Occupy Wall Street almost a quarter of a million dollars.

The lawsuit, filed on May 24, 2012, by lawyers representing OWS, claimed that 3,600 of 5,000 books in the free People's Library were destroyed during the violent raid and eviction of the protest camp in Zuccotti Park.

In addition to books, also destroyed were computers, live streaming equipment and bicycles which were owned and operated by an environmental nonprofit, Time's Up.

It's barely a victory... after all, people were harassed and arrested and injured for the crime of protesting and assembling peacefully, and $186,000 of that is eaten up by attorneys' fees... and yet, it's a start.

The greater victory is this: the city actually acknowledged responsibility for the actions of its police officers. This is diametrically opposed to the usual, "Who? Him? Don't know him. Rogue cop."

I can sympathize with the city, but to a limited extent. The administration of a city the size of New York demands some corner-cutting somewhere, and the fact that rights were trumped is indicative of that. Safety and health have importance, too, as well as the rights of other people.

With OWS, however, we see a situation where – some sanitation issues aside – peaceful protestors were using a public space, admittedly provided by a private corporation but in exchange for zoning variances, effectively making it a public space. It was this company that demanded OWS be removed, which started the whole mess back in 2011.

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Giving politics a worse name, New York-style

By Richard K. Barry

I know it's easy to have fun with numbers, especially when fooling around with percentages, but this is not good. BuzzFeed has done some calculating on the arrest rates of New York State politicians, and the results are stark:

When New York State Senator and former Majority Leader Malcolm Smith was arrested this week, he joined a remarkably large group: in the past six years, members of the New York State Senate have been about three times more likely than average Americans to run afoul of the law. And majority leaders have been over ten times more likely. 

The arrest rate in the country as a whole for a variety of crimes the FBI tracks is just over 4%. But the New York Public Interest Research Group says 11 state senators have been arrested in the last six years, bringing the arrest rate in the state senate (based on an estimate of how many have served in that time) to around 12%. And three of the five people to serve as majority leader or majority coalition co-leader during that time have been arrested. Which means the people who help make New York's laws are disproportionately likely to be accused of breaking them.

Come on, people. You're representing my home state, and you're embarrassing me. That's right. It's all about me. 

Connecticut enacts tough new gun law

By Michael J.W. Stickings

I used to think of Connecticut as that mildly pleasant but largely forgettable parcel of land that you drove through to get from New York to Boston and vice versa, back when my family lived in New Jersey and I went to college in the Boston area.

Okay, I still think of it that way sometimes, but, then, it's also the state where Sandy Hook happened, and now it's the state that has enacted serious new gun control legislation in response to that horrific event:

After more than 13 hours of debate that was at moments impassioned and agonized, the General Assembly early Thursday approved an historic and far-reaching gun-control bill that proponents said was their toughest-in-the-nation response to the Dec. 14 Newtown school massacre.

A majority of Republicans in both the House and Senate voted against the bill, shame be upon them, but it's nonetheless a solidly bipartisan piece of legislation.

Governor Malloy, a Democrat, signed the bill into law at noon today.

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From the frying pan into the fire

By Carl

I guess Malcolm Smith (nominal D-NY) can be forgiven. After all, he watched as Michael Bloomberg purchased the mayoralty three times.

Smith's problem is, he tried to buy the office of the mayor at the five-fingered discount:

At one stage, Mr. Smith was part of a Democratic power troika that lavished goodies on an openly crooked state senator, Pedro Espada Jr., in the process of getting Mr. Espada to vote with them. Mr. Smith himself recently jumped with a small group of Democratic senators to shift power to the Republican minority. Along the way, an inspector general’s report said he had finagled a casino land deal in Queens. The F.B.I. was also investigating nonprofit groups that he helped obtain government funds.

Undaunted, Mr. Smith set his ambitions on becoming the Republican candidate for mayor of New York City. Strictly speaking, as a Democrat, Mr. Smith had no business on a Republican ballot, but, understandably for a person practiced in the customs of Albany, that seemed like a small obstacle. In fact, he could get a spot on the primary ballot by special dispensation from three of the city’s five county Republican leaders.

These not-so-longish-shot hopes brought him into a series of negotiations that, a federal complaint charged, moved beyond the horse-trading of ordinary legal-graft politics into the realm of outright bribery.

What it seems to boil down to is that federal authorities claim that Mr. Smith swapped road improvements in Rockland County for a spot on the ballot in the Republican primary for mayor in New York City.

For the record, Rockland County is not near the city by a good stretch. It does give one pause.

It sort of boiled down to this, so bear with me, because it gets a little convoluted, but is an interesting read for those who want to read up on the machinations of local government.

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Gov. Andrew Cuomo, on top of the world

By Richard K. Barry

I'm still betting that Hillary Clinton will make a run for the White House in 2016, but, if she doesn't, Andrew Cuomo certainly might.

A new Sienna College poll has him with impressive approval numbers at the start of his third year in office:

As he starts his third year as Governor, Andrew Cuomo continues to enjoy strong support from voters, with a 71-24 percent favorability rating (down slightly from 72-21 percent last month) and 60-38 percent job performance rating (unchanged), according to a new Siena College Research Institute poll of New York voters released today.

Wow, those are Chris Christie-like numbers.

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More gun violence takes the lives of two firefighters

By Michael J.W. Stickings

CNN:

A man convicted of killing his grandmother decades ago ambushed firefighters on Monday, fatally shooting two of them as they arrived to battle a blaze in upstate New York, police said.

Two other volunteer firefighters were wounded in the attack in the Rochester-area town of Webster. A police officer from the nearby town of Greece suffered minor shrapnel wounds when his vehicle was hit by gunfire.

Investigators believe the suspect, William Spengler, 62, set the original fire, then likely set himself up on a berm with a clear view of the scene and started shooting.

As Pam Spaulding writes in response: "When will we have the broader discussion about why so many Americans are so damned violent and have hair-trigger tempers lit over irrelevant bullsh*t. The fact that lethal weapons are the first resort in minor disputes or even just uncertain situations (like this one — in what context should you shoot at a firefighter?!) is extremely troubling.

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Supreme Court to hear Prop 8 and DOMA cases

By Mustang Bobby

(Ed. note: For more on this, see my post from yesterday. My initial sense is that Chief Justice Roberts (who, I think, thinks about his and his court's place in history and how he and it will be perceived) will vote with the liberals and that marriage equality will win. Or the majority will punt, refusing to make any sort of definitive ruling. It's hard to see the justices collectively ruling that same-sex marriage is unconstitutional given recent dramatic shifts in public opinion and legislative action. -- MJWS)

The Supreme Court will hear arguments on both the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and California's Prop 8. Here's some background on both cases:

The new California case, Hollingsworth v. Perry, No. 12-144, was filed in 2009 by Theodore B. Olson and David Boies, two lawyers who were on opposite sides in the Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore, which settled the 2000 presidential election. The suit argued that California voters had violated the federal Constitution the previous year when they overrode a decision of the state's Supreme Court allowing same-sex marriages.

A federal judge in San Francisco agreed, issuing a broad decision that said the Constitution required the state to allow same-sex couples to marry. The decision has been stayed.

A divided three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, also in San Francisco, affirmed the decision. But the majority relied on narrower grounds that seemed calculated to avoid Supreme Court review or, at least, attract the vote of the presumed swing member of that court, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy.

[...]

The second case the court agreed to hear, United States v. Windsor, No. 12-307, challenges a part of the Defense of Marriage Act of 1996. Section 3 of the law defines marriage as between only a man and a woman for the purposes of more than 1,000 federal laws and programs. (Another part of the law, not before the court, says that states need not recognize same-sex marriages from other states.)

The case concerns two New York City women, Edith Windsor and Thea Clara Spyer, who married in 2007 in Canada. Ms. Spyer died in 2009, and Ms. Windsor inherited her property. The 1996 law did not allow the Internal Revenue Service to treat Ms. Windsor as a surviving spouse, and she faced a tax bill of about $360,000 that a spouse in an opposite-sex marriage would not have had to pay.

Ms. Windsor sued, and in October the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, struck down the 1996 law. The decision was the second from a federal appeals court to do so, joining one in May from a court in Boston. The Windsor case made its way to the Supreme Court unusually quickly because the parties had filed an appeal from the trial court’s decision in the case, which also struck down the law, even before the appeals court had ruled.

The two cases will go before the court by March with rulings expected by the end of June.

As expected, both sides are crowing that their side will win (JMG has a compendium of reactions), but since at least one request for a ruling by the Supreme Court came from the losing side, my instinct tells me that marriage equality will win.

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Excitement and trepidation: Supreme Court to rule on same-sex marriage

By Michael J.W. Stickings

In case you missed it, there was huge news coming out of SCOTUS yesterday:

The Supreme Court announced on Friday that it would enter the national debate over same-sex marriage, agreeing to hear a pair of cases challenging state and federal laws that define marriage to include only unions of a man and a woman.

One of the cases, from California, could establish or reject a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. The justices could also rule on narrower grounds that would apply only to marriages in California.

The second case, from New York, challenges a federal law that requires the federal government to deny benefits to gay and lesbian couples married in states that allow such unions.

The court's move comes against the backdrop of a rapid shift in public attitudes about same-sex marriage, with recent polls indicating that a majority of Americans support allowing such unions. After the elections last month, the number of states authorizing same-sex marriage increased by half, to nine. 

So the Court may rule on the constitutionality of same-sex marriage, or it may not.

And if it determines, with public opinion shifting and proponents winning at the state level, that it's an issue best left to the political arena, it may punt.

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