Given the consequences of the Farm Bill, one might surmise that Congress spends a long time weighing costs and benefits before foisting it upon us. But in the parallel universe of Washington DC, that’s not quite how things work.
This summer, the Supreme Court quickly dispensed with a campaign finance law from Montana in American Tradition Partnership, even though the state argued that there was, indeed, a history of corruption that gave the state a compelling interest in limiting independent campaign expenditures. This decision did not speak explicitly about judicial elections, but a more recent decision of the 9th Circuit has invoked Citizens United to weigh in on a different speech issue concerning judicial elections, making the relationship between money, speech, law, and politics deliciously convoluted.
SAT Scores are down nationwide, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday. According to recent data from The College Board, the
If teachers are paid well, which in Chicago they are, then they should expect to perform their work the same way other professionals, e.g., lawyer, doctors, engineers, financial professionals, perform theirs. Teachers should expect to be hired to perform to a certain expectation of success, to be compared to the success of their peers at achieving those expectations, and to be fired if they consistently fail to meet them. The ultimate result would be the achievement of the one thing that all sides in this fight seem to agree that they are working, the best possible education for Chicago’s public school students.
Rather than condemning the profligacy of the State in providing basic human rights for its most marginalized, we must continue to demand positive rights for all. Demanding humane treatment of inmates is substantively necessary, but can also be strategically valuable because it is one of the few spaces in our jurisprudence that recognizes the language of positive human rights.
In a recent television interview, Rep. Todd Akin, a member of the House Committee on Science, the Republican candidate for
The less rigorous test proposed by the concurring justices produced a desirable result in this case, but it seems to portend an approach that gives less than full scrutiny to asserted government interest in content-discrimination….If the Court relies on the Alvarez concurrence’s approach in future cases, it could well give short shrift to what should be its starting presumption: that content-based restrictions on “lies,” like any other form of speech, are justifiable only in extraordinary circumstances.
Hercules Industries, a Denver company that provides heating and air conditioning equipment recently won a preliminary injunction against the imposition of the preventive care requirement adopted pursuant to the Affordable Care Act. Predictably, conservatives lauded the decision as a victory for religious freedom, because, at least for the moment, this family-owned business that employs around 300 people has the religious freedom to tell their employees they’re on their own to pay for reproductive health services. Don’t expect it to last.
Can we square the invocation of evolving standards of decency with the recognized fact that the criminal justice system in the United States is, in general, far more punitive than it once was? I think that we can, if we allow for a fuller recognition of both the compromises that go into legislation and the expression of social values in extra-legal settings.
In Miller v. Alabama, the Supreme Court voted 5-4 that the Eighth Amendment prohibits a sentencing scheme that mandates life in prison without parole for juvenile homicide offenders. Despite Justice Kagan’s protestations, the Court was not eliminating an outlying vestige of once common, brutal punishment, but instead a practice that was common. The holding suggests the Court may be willing to take a more activist role in monitoring state criminal justice systems.
United States v. Pleau raises legal questions that deserve more attention than the case is likely to receive. The case can actually be seen as being about the location of the primary police power in the American system of constitutional federalism, and it exposes the increasing strain that the modern conception of federal power is placing on the founding era experiment in dual sovereignty. Pleau should challenge progressives to think critically about the desirable scope of the federal government’s power under the Commerce Clause.
