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By Karen Connelly
$11.90
By John Howard
$19.14
$22
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By Eugene Robinson — I believe in affirmative action, but I have to acknowledge that there are arguments against it. One of the more cogent is the presence of Justice Clarence Thomas on the U.S. Supreme Court.
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AP Photo / Darko Vajinovic
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The remaining days of Ali Hassan al-Majid, aka “Chemical Ali,” are numbered. More specifically, after an Iraqi court upheld his June sentence, al-Majid, who earned his nickname by playing a key role in the gassing deaths of some 100,000 Kurds in 1988, has 30 days or less to live.
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AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa
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Someone page Larry Flynt, stat! A Spanish high court judge has ordered a recall of all copies of the satire magazine El Jueves that featured a cartoon of Spain’s Prince Felipe engaging in conjugal relations with his wife, former TV journalist Letizia Ortiz. Updated
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msnbc.com
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In a landmark ruling, a federal appeals court has sided with broadcasters against the Federal Communications Commission on the issue of indecency, saying the regulatory body has not adequately explained how the Constitution could permit the censorship of “indecent” language.
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A federal appeals court is looking into the legitimacy of “do-overs” for detainee tribunals at Guantanamo Bay. Critics say the practice is unfair because it effectively allows the government to retry cases until it gets the results it wants, but there may not be much the high court can do under current legislation.
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Yet another court has ruled against the 1994 Child Online Protection Act, a major victory for civil rights advocates. The law has been a mess from the start. With the stated goal of protecting kids from pornography, it would punish offending websites with $50,000 fines and jail time for exposing children to “harmful” material, whether intentionally or not. Innocent sites like Salon and BoingBoing could’ve been targeted under the legislation.
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Jose Padilla has been ruled competent to stand trial, a rebuke to his lawyers. The defense had sought to have him treated for PTSD before the trial began. Padilla has been held in isolation for three and a half years, during which time he was subjected to varying kinds of interrogation and, very likely, torture.
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A provision slipped into a spending bill by the last Congress and approved by the president makes civilian contractors in Iraq subject to military court-martial. But legal scholars believe the rule could also be extended to include civilian government employees and even embedded journalists. (h/t: Largest Minority)
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Hurrah for the Garden State, whose state Supreme Court ruled today that same-sex couples are entitled to “the same rights and benefits enjoyed by opposite-sex couples under the civil marriage statutes.”
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Although a judge recently ruled Bush’s warrentless wiretapping program unconstitutional, a federal court unanimously agreed to keep the program running until an appeal is decided, though the three judges involved gave little explanation as to how they reached their decision.
Posted on Oct 5, 2006
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By Andy Borowitz — The political satirist reports on the brouhaha surrounding an unconventional choice to hold sway over the dictator’s trial.
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flickr/nukeit1
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An Army officer has recommended the execution of four soldiers, should they be found guilty of murder. The soldiers are accused of improperly shooting three Iraqi detainees during a raid. No U.S. soldier has been executed since 1961.
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Did you know that airline officials can’t force you to show your ID before a flight? Every sign you see at U.S. airports that says otherwise is false. Also, the regulations governing this area are being kept secret from the public. Read about the man petitioning the Supreme Court to shed light on the situation.
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AP / Ted S. Warren
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First Lt. Ehren K. Watada is one of only a handful of officers who have taken such a stand, and is apparently the first to face a court-martial for doing so. He wrote: “I am wholeheartedly opposed to the continued war in Iraq, the deception used to wage this war, and the lawlessness that has pervaded every aspect of our civilian leadership….”
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The New York Court of Appeals stated last week that it upheld a gay marriage ban because gay couples make more stable parental units than heterosexual couples—and thus the latter need the benefits of marriage to assist them. The reasoning behind this is wild, but it’s also insidious. Check it out.
Update: Nebraska just reinstated its gay marriage ban.
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Looks like we were a little too hasty on this one. We had blogged that Sen. Arlen Specter had introduced a bill that would require Bush to get court approval for his NSA wiretapping programs.
Turns out that’s not the case. Specter’s bill would merely give Bush the option of bringing his program before a court—which Bush should have done in the first place. Think Progress and AMERICAblog have the details.
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Testifying before Congress yesterday, the Justice Department’s top lawyer had a succinct answer to a question posed by a senator about whether Bush was wrong or right in his interpretation of the Supreme Court’s Hamdan case: “The President is always right.”
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Constitutional expert and best-selling author Glenn Greenwald reminds us that the Supreme Court’s Hamdan decision not only outlawed Bush’s military tribunals, but also removed any conceivable argument to support Bush’s illegal wiretapping programs.
Greenwald: “Journalists should begin asking the Justice Department every day what their legal justification for warrantless eavesdropping is now that Hamdan has rendered frivolous their prior legal arguments in defense of the President.”
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By Marie Cocco — As we celebrate our Independence Day, let us thank the Supreme Court for granting us deliverance from the tyranny of a president who tried to fashion himself king.
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AP / J. Scott Applewhite
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Truthdig salutes the 86-year-old Supreme Court justice who wrote the majority opinion in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, which struck down the military tribunals Bush set up to try Guantanamo detainees. But more important, this decision, in the words of a Yale law professor, “effectively undermines the Administration’s strongest claims about Presidential power,” and may constitute the legal framework necessary to halt the more egregious of Bush’s civil liberties-infringing programs—like warrantless wiretapping and holding terrorism suspects without trial.
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The admiral in charge of the Guantanamo military detention center said he doubts Thursday’s Supreme Court ruling on presidential authority will have any effect on his operations. But a Bush administration lawyer wasn’t as sanguine, saying about the decision, “It’s very broad, it’s very significant, and it’s a slam.”
Posted on Jun 29, 2006
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In an analysis, the Washington Post says, “the Supreme Court has struck at the core of his presidency and dismissed the notion that the president alone can determine how to defend the country.”
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Specifically, today’s Supreme Court ruling held that the president overstepped his authority in ordering military war crimes trials for Guantanamo Bay detainees.
But more important, Think Progress interprets the ruling to mean that “the Authorization for the Use of Military Force—issued by Congress in the days after 9/11—is not a blank check for the administration.”
Also, SCOTUSblog says the ruling means that the Geneva Convention does apply to the conflict with Al Qaeda, and consequently “this almost certainly means that the CIA’s interrogation tactics of waterboarding and hypothermia (and others) violate the War Crimes Act.”
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From MSNBC
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The Supreme Court ruled that state legislators may draw new electoral maps as often as they like—meaning that we’ll likely see new gerrymandered voting districts every time there is a power shift at a state capital.
Disgustingly enough, this ruling is actually a vindication for Tom DeLay.
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This is a complicated issue. We’ll let the Washington Post take it: “The Supreme Court struck down Vermont’s strict limits on campaign contributions and spending yesterday, in a splintered ruling that left intact the constitutional basis of current campaign finance laws but may make it difficult to put new curbs on money in politics.”
Posted on Jun 26, 2006
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Samuel Alito’s conservatism has begun to make itself felt.
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The court today ruled that First Amendment guarantees do not always protect government employees when they speak out pursuant to their official capacities—as opposed to as citizens speaking out on matters of public concern.
Here’s how SCOTUSblog interprets the ruling: “This apparently means that employees may be disciplined for their official capacity speech, without any First Amendment scrutiny, and without regard to whether it touches on matters of ‘public concern’—a very significant doctrinal development.”
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Justice Antonin Scalia told fellow conservatives on Capitol Hill to butt out of the Supreme Court’s business in regards to using foreign law in its constitutional rulings. “It’s none of your business,” he said during a speech.
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Democrats say Republican officials made two dozen calls to the White House in 2002 as part of a plot to tie up get-out-the-vote efforts in New Hampshire’s 2002 Senate race. There are already three federal convictions and a pending indictment in the case.
Posted on Apr 11, 2006
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The indicted lobbyist’s attorneys assert he spent all the money “in his overly determined pursuit of helping people and charities.”
You’ll excuse us while we gag up a hidden Cayman Islands account or two.
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The 9/11 conspirator tells a Virginia court that he and would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid were supposed to fly a plane into the White House on Sept. 11.
Posted on Mar 27, 2006
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A federal appeals court allows the state of Tennessee to offer anti-abortion license plates that read, “Choose Life.” The court says that although the decision to offer the plates may be ill-advised, it does not contravene the First Amendment.
Of all the odd places for an abortion-rights battle to show up, state license plates has to be atop the list.
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Follow the paper trail on Samuel A. Alito Jr., President Bush’s Supreme Court nominee. Do his judicial opinions and decisions indicate how he would influence the court’s ideological balance?
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