Super conservative judge throws out Affordable Care Act all at once, shouts out tea party

“The act, like a defectively designed watch, needs to be redesigned and reconstructed by the watchmaker.”

Here’s the ruling. Judge Roger Vinson of Federal District Court in Pensacola, Fla. because the second Republican-appointed judge to toss out the individual mandate part of the Affordable Care Act. Only, this time, he threw away the entire thing as well, considering the mandate “non-severable” from the rest of the bill:

In sum, notwithstanding the fact that many of the provisions in the Act can stand independently without the individual mandate (as a technical and practical matter), it is reasonably evident, as I have discussed above, that the individual mandate was an essential and indispensable part of the health reform efforts, and that Congress did not believe other parts of the Act could (or it would want them to) survive independently. I must conclude that the individual mandate and the remaining provisions are all inextricably bound together in purpose and must stand or fall as a single unit. The individual mandate cannot be severed.

Of course, he notes, he’s bucking tradition and precedent, and that this case is a special little snowflake. What judicial activism?

This conclusion is reached with full appreciation for the normal rule that reviewing courts should ordinarily refrain from invalidating more than the unconstitutional part of a statute, but non-severability is required based on the unique facts of this case and the particular aspects of the Act. This is not a situation that is likely to be repeated.

And, in case anybody wanted to notice, here’s a special shout-out to his homies in the tea party:

It is difficult to imagine that a nation which began, at least in part, as the result of opposition to a British mandate giving the East India Company a monopoly and imposing a nominal tax on all tea sold in America would have set out to create a government with the power to force people to buy tea in the first place.

So, the score now is two Republican judges have thrown it out (one only threw out the mandate, this one the whole thing), and two Democratic judges have found it constitutional.

The consequences of having the white meat

Nadia Arumugam wrote an interesting piece at Slate about the economic history of America’s obsession with the white meat of the chicken:

Once Americans signaled a clear preference for breast meat in the ’60s and ’70s, producers needed an outlet for the dark meat that wasn’t selling domestically. They knew that foreign markets, notably in Asia, prized the moist, succulent, and richly flavored leg meat. (In Asia, it’s the breasts that end up in bargain buckets.) And so they worked to convert a domestic waste product into a profitable export. American chicken legs were purchased eagerly by Asian importers, and for a while a happy equilibrium was struck. Yet in the 1980s, when chicken consumption in the United States increased at a phenomenal rate, the poultry industry needed new outlets to absorb the growing numbers of discarded legs.

It was most fortuitous, then, that the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, resulting in the relaxation of trade restrictions that had hindered commerce with the formerly Communist state. U.S. chicken exporters, eager to exploit this fresh market, were able to underprice virtually all other animal protein produced in Russia, and American dark meat flooded the country. The chicken legs became so popular that locals endearingly nicknamed them “Bush legs,” after President Bush Sr.

Well, that’s a much more endearing Bush-Senior-inspired slang term than the one that Japan coined.

Beating Technology

You want victory?  You want to beat technology?  Of course, who doesn’t like to outsmart the system?  Well, I have a small victory for you today – assuming you hate automatic flushers.

There are a couple of things that get us through the day such as the bathroom break and the opportunity to choose our own lunch.  But just like watching the price on a cafeteria grilled cheese go up every three months, sitting down on the John can be irritating at times.  Automatic flushers and I do not get along, it causes all kinds of problems. As soon as you get up to wipe it flushes, I scurry to wipe fast enough just in time to throw a dirty piece of toilet paper in a toilet already filling up with water.  It forces another flush.  Some times the same toilet will flush three or four times as your trying to finishing up.  Nobody wants to hang out close to flushing toilets, especially those that spit – you know what I’m talking about.  And how about those toilets that just flush when you didn’t even get up – not cool

I don’t like it, not only is it uncomfortable to hang out in close quarters with an unstoppable sputtering toilet but it’s a water use issue.  Public toilets can use two to four times more water per flush than a residential toilet.   In addition the automatic flushes aren’t achieving the desired results.  I believe the goal is to make sure the toilet is empty and presentable for the next patron, however all to often we find toilets with dirty rolls of toilet paper floating around.  Clearly the toilet was prematurely flushing itself before the last person was done wiping.

Well, today I wanted to share my secret.  Click ahead to find out. Continue reading »

Redefining rape

We noted this morning that Republicans in the House are trying to change the definition of “rape” to only mean “forcible rape” in terms of access to abortion. Specifically, they want to make sure that abortions are only available to women who have been raped by force, whatever that means.

Since 1976, funding for abortion, such as through Medicare, has been limited by federal law, one of the big exemptions has been victims of rape. The aptly-titled and New-Republican-majority-introduced “No Taxpayer Funding For Abortions Act” would change the standard: allowing abortions only for incest victims under 18 and for victims of “forcible rape.”

What does “forcible rape” mean? Nothing. It’s a phrase that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the legal system, and the bill doesn’t attempt to define it. Rape is generally understood at all levels to be forcible—sexual contact when the victim either does not, or is incapable of, consenting. But specifying that it needs to be “forcible” is reductive, and likely removes instances where the victim is incapable of consenting. Statutory rape is doesn’t count, not to mention when the victim is drugged.

Now, the rape exception to the law makes no sense from a “pro-life” stance either. If the sum of the anti-abortion argument is that abortion is the “murder”* of a child, how does it make a difference that the child is the result of rape? As Mark Kleinman notes:

If bans on abortion reflect the inalienable human rights of the fertilized egg, then surely those rights can’t be diminished by the conditions of conception. The “except for rape” rule would be justified only if the point of the law is to punish women for having sex. (That is the point, of course, which is why the “pro-life” lobby is strongly anti-contraception and anti-sex education. But it wouldn’t do to say so.)

Still, the gross (in both senses of the term) injustice of forcing a woman to bear her rapist’s child means that absolute bans on abortion have very little support among the voters. And the right-to-lifers have generally been satisfied with something that, according to the logic of their own position, shouldn’t satisfy them at all.

….

If the Republicans were trying to eliminate the rape exception entirely, they could at least lay claim to a sort of foolish consistency. But given that they’re willing to deprive some fetuses of their inalienable right to life in justice to their innocent mothers, the decision to proclaim that a large class of rape victims is not innocent can only be called stupid and heartless.

* Murder is a legal term meaning, basically, unlawful killing. Abortion is entirely legal, so it cannot actually be called murder.

New York Times Columnst Line of the Day

If you’re one of the four-or-so frequent readers of this here blog, chances are you also occasionally check out the New York Times op-ed page. You may even know the names: Thomas “Friedman’s Just Another Word For Nothing Left to Lose” Friedman, Gail “The Colander” Collins, Nicholas “The Dark Crystal” Kristof, &c. This is a daily feature dedicated to these folks: one line that is either awesome, funny, insightful, intelligent, ridiculous, or utterly divorced from reality.

Today’s is from Ross “Do That Thing” Douthat, who in his column “The Devil We Know,” writes:

It’s quite possible that if Mubarak had not ruled Egypt as a dictator for the last 30 years, the World Trade Center would still be standing.

Yeah, I’m going to go back to my scheduled poking my eye with a fork now.

Morning Constitutional – Monday, 31 January 2011

Good morning, everybody. Charlie Sheen checked into rehab. Now, your morning constitutional:

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak swore in a new Cabinet on Monday. Six Al Jazeera reporters have been arrested by Egyptian authorities. Protests continued Monday for the seventh day. Fax machines, ham radio and dial-up modems helping Egyptians cope with lack of Internet. How did the Egyptian government shut off the Internet?

Duck of Minerva: Egyptian “people power,” civil society, and the U.S.

A referendum on South Sudan independence passed with 99.57% of the vote. As a result, the South will declare independence on July 9, but not before.

An elected parliament convened for the first time in Myanmar in over a half century, but garners little attention as it is seen as a front for continued military rule.

Speaker Boehner said a U.S. default would be a “financial disaster” and the issue is “not on the table.”

ExxonMobil reported earnings of $9.25B, up 53% in the fourth quarter, the highest since 2008.

Trade, exports and economic competitiveness are the focus of the administration’s reorganization efforts that were announced during the State of the Union Address.

Chinese inflation is cutting the U.S. trade deficit as higher prices push companies to look to other countries for alternative suppliers.

House Democrats are calling for hearings on gun safety, as House Republicans reject the idea.

House Republicans are attempting to redefine rape to limit who can receive funding for abortion.

If you think science could use more swearing.

Finally, China’s state broadcaster tries to pass off Top Gun footage as a military drill.

Favorite lines from Maksyn v. Board of Elections Commissioners of the City of Chicago (Rahmbo Case)

You can always count on a state supreme court to throw down some awesome smack-downs. Below are some of my favorite lines from the decision, which overthrew the appellate court’s decision that Rahmbo was not a resident and therefore not allowed to run for mayor. Note that for clarity, easy reading, and because you are not a lawyer or judge, I’ve edited out the citations. You weren’t going to look them up anyway. Here’s the PDF of the decision; it’s awesome reading.

“The appellate court left it to the reader to discern how the standard of proof was in any way relevant to what standard the court used to determine the merits of the residency issue.”

“The court ultimately determined that, as used in section 3.1–10–5(a), ‘resided in’ does not refer to a permanent abode, but rather where a person ‘actually live[s]‘ or “actually reside[s].’ …. However, the court never explained what it meant by these terms, other than to say that the candidate does not qualify as a resident if this definition is used.”

“The court acknowledged that section  3.1–10–5(a) contains a residency requirement, but held that its use of the term ‘resided in’ means something other than residency as that term is traditionally understood.”

“Thus, from April 1867 through January 24 of this year, the principles governing the question before us  were settled. Things changed, however, when the appellate court below issued its decision and announced that it was no longer bound by any of the law cited above, including this court’s decision in Smith, but was instead free to craft its own original standard for determining a candidate’s residency.”

“How can this court best construe the residency requirement in section 3.1–10–5(a) of the Municipal Code as to render it consistent and in harmony with the residency requirement contained in section 3–1 of the Election Code? The appellate court’s answer was to assign them inconsistent and competing meanings. How, exactly, this fosters consistency and harmony is unclear, and the appellate court makes no effort to explain.”

“Of course, the appellate court did not see the statutory question this way. But its reasons for departing from over 100 years of settled residency law are hardly compelling and deserve only brief attention.”

“The appellate court  then spends five pages examining section 3.1–10–5(d) of the Municipal Code, which is somewhat mysterious given that this section in no way speaks to the definition of ‘residency.’”

“By way of final thought on  this question, we wish to point out that, while this court’s traditional definition of residence may be plugged into the Municipal Code without creating any ambiguity or confusion, the appellate court’s new and undefined standard promises just the opposite.”

My personal favorite:

“Indeed, as its discussion of section 3.1–10–5(d) reflects, the entire appellate court opinion can be read as nothing more than an extended exercise in question begging, in which the appellate court sets forth the question to be answered as what it means to ‘reside’, and concludes that it means to have ‘actually resided’.”

And, finally (emphasis mine):

“So there will be no mistake, let us be entirely clear. This court’s decision is based on the following and only on the following: (1) what it means to be a resident for election purposes was clearly established long ago, and Illinois law has been consistent on the matter since at least the 19th Century; (2) the novel standard adopted by the appellate court majority is without any foundation in Illinois law; (3) the Board’s factual findings were not against the manifest weight of the evidence; and (4) the Board’s decision was not clearly erroneous.

Appellate court judgment reversed;

circuit court judgment affirmed.”

Bachmann’s plan would drastically cut veteran’s benefits

Rick Maze at Army Times:

Tea party favorite Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., has unveiled a plan for cutting $400 billion in federal spending that includes freezing Veterans Affairs Department health care spending and cutting veterans’ disability benefits.

Her proposed VA budget cuts would account for $4.5 billion of the savings included in the plan, posted on her official House of Representatives website.

Now, I can understand cutting money for poor people (as that is, after all, the Republican way), but veteran’s benefits? Especially when thousands of troops are returning home wounded from the wars that have lasted the better part of the past decade, this is the worst time possible to think of such a step. But, I guess this is the kind of thing that only Bachmann would come up with. Oh, wait:

The two veterans’ program cuts now advocated by Bachman were included in an Oct. 28 report from the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, about ways to cut $343 billion in federal spending. The think tank’s report projects that a freeze in VA health care costs would save $2.5 billion.

Oh, so it’s come from one of the most influential Republican think tanks.

Good news, bad news

The economy grew by 3.2% in the fourth quarter last year. That’s good news. Hell, demand grew 7.1%, the highest since 1984. But, Krugman wants to note that it isn’t all puppies and rainbows:

Today’s GDP report puts real GDP basically back where it was in the 4th quarter of 2007 (1/10th of a percent higher, but who’s counting?) Based on the trend between the previous two business cycle peaks, the economy should have grown — had the capacity to grow — around 2.3 or 2.4 percent per year over that period, so we’re actually around 7 percent below where we should be.

And growth is chasing a moving target: growth at 3.2 percent closes less than 1 percentage point of that gap each year.

So, yippee: we’re on track to restore full employment circa 4th quarter 2018.

Friday Funny: The Affair

The Affair from Kids in the Hall.

Morning Constitutional – Friday, 28 January 2011

Good morning, everybody. Producer Jay-Z confirms there will be an Annie remake starring Willow Smith. Now, your morning constitutional:

Tens of thousands of protesters in Cairo are clashing with police, who are firing rubber bullets, tear gas and water cannons into the crowds. Officials have confirmed that Nobel Peace laureate Mohamed ElBaradei was placed under house arrest Friday. The Internet has gone dark in Egypt.

The U.S. economy grew by 3.2% in the fourth quarter driven by consumer spending.

Vice President Biden’s communication director Jay Carney has been named the next White House press secretary, succeeding Robert Gibbs.

President Obama’s effots to reorganize the federal government could be an uphill effort against entrenched interests in congress.

It’s no real filibuster reform, but the Senate has banned secret holds on bills and nominations.

McCaskey East High School in Lancaster, Pennsylvania is experimenting with segregation: separating students by race, gender and language for a few minutes every day in an effort to boost test scores.

Ford posts its biggest profits in 11 years. Meanwhile, GM is withdrawing an application for federal loans, a sign of the company’s new financial strength.

Japan: “An aging population is clogging the nation’s economy with the vested interests of older generations, young people and social experts warn, making an already hierarchical society even more rigid and conservative. The result is that Japan is holding back and marginalizing its youth at a time when it actually needs them to help create the new products, companies and industries that a mature economy requires to grow.”

Who wins and loses in the current U.S. corporate tax rate scheme.

President Obama’s call for more innovation follows a decade or longer of stalled innovation.

Walgreens is rolling out its own brand of beer.

Finally, this Valentine’s Day, Ken will be trying to get Barbie back.

State of the Union: PowerPoint Edition

The White House has posted on YouTube the full State of the Union Address from the other night. This version will be more familiar to those of you who get to sit in meetings or presentations, because it includes handy graphs and charts! It turns a boring ritual into a boring ritual of another kind!

But, actually, I kind of like it. At least the whole text of the speech wasn’t on the screen (I’m looking at you, everybody who uses PowerPoint in your presentations except a limited awesome few.)

Ridiculously tiny proportion of Muslims likely to double to just tiny proportion

A new Pew study projects that the number of American Muslims will more than double by 2030:

In the United States, for example, the population projections show the number of Muslims more than doubling over the next two decades, rising from 2.6 million in 2010 to 6.2 million in 2030, in large part because of immigration and higher-than-average fertility among Muslims. The Muslim share of the U.S. population (adults and children) is projected to grow from 0.8% in 2010 to 1.7% in 2030, making Muslims roughly as numerous as Jews or Episcopalians are in the United States today.

What the Pew study doesn’t show is at what point between 0.8% and 1.7% of the population Sharia law officially gets adopted and mosques get built on top of national monuments (wouldn’t the Washington monument look absolutely precious with a dome?). My guess is somewhere between 1.3% (margin of error +/-.04%).

Oh, and for those out there that freak out about immigrants:

About two-thirds of the Muslims in the U.S. today (64.5%) are first-generation immigrants (foreign-born), while slightly more than a third (35.5%) were born in the U.S. By 2030, however, more than four-in-ten of the Muslims in the U.S. (44.9%) are expected to be native-born.

Immigrants and Muslims together: A total wing-nut scare-fest.

New York Times Columnist Line of the Day

If you’re one of the four-or-so frequent readers of this here blog, chances are you also occasionally check out the New York Times op-ed page. You may even know the names: Thomas “Friedman’s Just Another Word For Nothing Left to Lose” Friedman, Gail “The Colander” Collins, Nicholas “The Dark Crystal” Kristof, &c. This is a daily feature dedicated to these folks: one line that is either awesome, funny, insightful, intelligent, ridiculous, or utterly divorced from reality.

Today’s is from Gail “The Colander” Collins, who in her column “Utah’s Gun Appreciation Day,” writes:

It is generally not a good policy to dwell on the strange behavior of state legislators since it leads to bottomless despair.

Morning Constitutional – Thursday, 27 January 2011

Good morning, folks. James Franco once made a sex tape. Now, your morning constitutional:

It weathered all over the dang place.

Say good-bye to the color-coded terror alert system: It’s finally going away in April.

Standard & Poor’s downgrades Japan’s debt.

Thousands of Yemenis are rallying and calling for President Ali Abdullah Saleh to step down.

David Kato, a Ugandan gay rights activist, has been found beaten to death in his home after an anti-gay newspaper printed his picture with the headline “Hang Them.”

House Democrats have introduced a bill to tighten controls on offshore oil rigs and the companies that operate them.

Meanwhile, House Republicans passed a bill eliminating the public election financing program altogether.

Sarah Palin’s response to the State of the Union address: “WTF?” Also, Sharron Angle might run for president. Senator Jim DeMint, however, will not.

Jesus Christ, can we all just admit that Mitt Romney is running for president?

Is federal salmon oversight as complicated as President Obama suggests?

Finally, weed-shooting catapult discovered at U.S.-Mexico border.

I don’t come down to Burger King and tell you how to do your job

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is appearing in print and radio ads…in Illinois. They criticize Governor Quinn and recent tax increases, while saying that New Jersey is way nicer to business, asking “Had enough of outrageous tax increases?”

Here’s the radio ad (yes, hosted at the State of New Jersey official website). Here’s the print version in PDF.

Governor Quinn’s response:

“I don’t know why anybody would listen to him,” Quinn said of Christie. “New Jersey’s way of balancing the budget is not to pay their pension payment, not to deliver on property tax relief that was promised, to fire teachers, to take an infrastructure project — building a tunnel that had already been started — and end it and have to pay money back to the federal government. I don’t need that kind of advice from that guy.”

And, for the record:

“We don’t need some guy from Jersey to tell us how to do things in the land of Lincoln,” Quinn said.

Zing!

How about some good economic news?

Laurence Chandy and Geoffrey Gertz from Brookings:

In the new Brookings Institution report “Poverty in Numbers: The Changing State of Global Poverty from 2005 to 2015,” we updated the World Bank’s official $1.25-a-day figures to reveal how the global poverty landscape has changed with the emergence of developing countries. We estimate that between 2005 and 2010, nearly half a billion people escaped extreme hardship, as the total number of the world’s poor fell to 878 million people. Never before in history have so many people been lifted out of poverty in such a short period. The U.N. Millennium Development Goals established the target of halving the rate of global poverty between 1990 and 2015; this was probably achieved by 2008, some seven years ahead of schedule. Moreover, using forecasts of per capita consumption growth, we predict that by 2015, fewer than 600 million people will remain poor. At that point, the 1990 poverty rate will have been halved and then halved again.

Sure, you don’t have a job, MBNA is repo-ing your laptop, and you’re defaulting on your mortgage, but doesn’t it make you feel at least a little bit better that billions of people around the world are escaping from utter and extreme poverty?

No? Well, you just keep tuggin’ on those boot-straps, little John Galt Jr.

Hump-Day Song of the Week: Everyday I Write the Book by Elvis Costello

The hell is she looking at?

So, of course we stayed up after Rep. Ryan’s “official” State of the Union response for what promised to be significantly more entertaining: Rep. Bachmann’s tea-party-endorsed response.

It wasn’t easy. First, there were the bizarre visual aides, including some charts that were extremely ugly and dishonestly left out even-numbered years (thereby erasing Bush’s last year in office!). And, what the hell does the Iwo Jima memorial have to do with anything? Ladies and gentlemen, Michele Bachmann is no H. Ross Perot.

And what the hell was she looking at? It was almost the anti-Mona Lisa: Instead of looking at you from whatever angle you were looking at it, Bachmann’s gaze was directed exclusively off-camera, or right over your shoulder. She was that awkward person in your office who will never, ever make eye contact with you.

Morning Constitutional – Wednesday, 26 January 2011

Good morning, friends. The Jersey Shore is coming to Italy. Now, your morning constitutional:

President Obama asked for a bipartisan effort to create jobs in addition to calling on Americans to sacrifice and innovate in last night’s State of the Union address.

Tunisian Justice Minister Lazhar Karoui Chebbi has announced that an international arrest warrant has been issued against ousted President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

Russia has ratified the New START nuclear arms treaty.

Egypt’s interior ministry warns protesters and threatens them with imprisonment.

Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, the first Guantanemo detainee to be tried in civilian court, has been sentenced to life in prison without parole for his role in the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa.

The condition of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords has been upgraded from serious to good.

The N.R.A. has successfully choked off funding for research of firearms.

Finally, a disabled man in England has been banned from using his all-terrain wheelchair on streets because it has been classified as a tank.