Category: politics/law

I missed this when it happened, but in case you did, too, the proposed Marriage Protection Amendment failed in the House.

On a peripherally related note, Justice Scalia raised a stir last week when he said that, for the sake of argument, he would accept that “sexual orgies eliminate social tensions and ought to be encouraged.” What he meant was that even if that were true, he doesn’t think it’s the right of the court to overturn laws prohibiting it. “It is blindingly clear that judges have no greater capacity than the rest of us to decide what is moral,” he said. To him, this was an argument for not overturning legislation regulating morality; to me, this is an argument for not passing legislation regulating morality. If no one possesses the capacity to decide what is moral, perhaps no one should be trying to impose their arbitrary decisions on the rest of the population.

Here’s a moderately interesting article about the cases on the Supreme Court’s agenda for this year. This article takes the view that nothing exciting will be considered, but I think a few of these mundane issues are very interesting — particularly those about medical marijuana and wine shipments. I read a different article a few months ago that claimed that if the Supreme Court overturns the state laws preventing shipment into the state, it will crumble the PA state liquor store thing and allow anyone to sell booze. Bring it on.

The second court thing is this, which actually happened a few days ago, but is an article about the overturning of a section of the Patriot Act. The piece overturned deals with whether or not the FBI can demand information from companies, like ISPs, without a court order, and then prohibit those companies from ever disclosing that they received such a demand — apparently even to a lawyer. Chiseling away; I like that.

And, finally, in case anyone out there is living completely in a hole and didn’t see the debates or hear any of the aftermath, I would just like to say that I was very impressed with Kerry’s performance. He was clear, straightforward, and made Bush look like a petulant little man. Although one could (and I’m sure Bush’s people will) take snippets of things that Kerry said during the evening and splice them together in such a way as to make him sound like a flip-flopper (Can we say ‘thong’ instead?), I was suprised at the coherence and reasonableness of Kerry’s position on the war in Iraq. I do hate it when he says things like, “I have a plan,” because a) I know he’s just saying that because he has to but, of course, he has planned nowhere the level of detail necessary to really call it “a plan”, and b) it sounds like Nixon. On the other hand, Bush’s “stay the course” and “how can you lead the troops if you don’t think they should be there” rhetoric sounds more like Nixon. But anyway, I hear being like Nixon is cool these days anyway, thanks to Ahhnold, so maybe both candidates are doing that deliberately.

My main point here — Kerry done good. If this continues through the next two debates, I think the Dems have a damn good chance.

Got around to finding the complete text of the bill I mentioned in my last post. Here it is, in its entirety. The complete text of the debate on the bill is posted on house.gov. Long, but the bits I read were pretty interesting.

AN ACT

To amend title 28, United States Code, with respect to the jurisdiction of Federal courts over certain cases and controversies involving the Pledge of Allegiance.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.

This Act may be cited as the `Pledge Protection Act of 2004′.

SEC. 2. LIMITATION ON JURISDICTION.

(a) In General- Chapter 99 of title 28, United States Code, is amended by adding at the end the following:

`Sec. 1632. Limitation on jurisdiction

`No court created by Act of Congress shall have any jurisdiction, and the Supreme Court shall have no appellate jurisdiction, to hear or decide any question pertaining to the interpretation of, or the validity under the Constitution of, the Pledge of Allegiance, as defined in section 4 of title 4, or its recitation.’. The limitation in this section shall not apply to the Superior Court of the District of Columbia or the District of Columbia Court of Appeals.

(b) Clerical Amendment- The table of sections at the beginning of chapter 99 of title 28, United States Code, is amended by adding at the end the following new item:

`1632. Limitation on jurisdiction.’.

Passed the House of Representatives September 23, 2004.

Attest:

Clerk.

END

Even though it’s very unlikely that this will become law, it’s scary that the House would pass it as all.

The New York Times > Washington > House Passes Court Limits on Pledge

“The Republican-led House of Representatives approved a measure on Thursday that would bar federal courts from ruling on the text of the Pledge of Allegiance.”

WHAT?

This is essentially Congress saying, “We know what we’re trying to do is unconstitutional but that’s okay — we’ll just pass a law saying no one can call us on it!”

On the plus side, one representative did propose an amendment (which was not passed) allowing some schools to opt out, citing Circle School v. Pappert. It’s not every day one’s alma mater is mentioned on the floor of the House.

Slashdot readers recently had the opportunity to ask Michael Badnarik, Libertarian candidate for president, questions about a number of issues.

Here’s the link to some of the most popular responses:

http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/20/1423219&tid=11&tid=219

Here’s one relevant to an issue I’ve been thinking about a lot:

When somebody you strongly dislike is running, it’s very tempting to vote for the person who is more likely to win against them rather than the person whose views you agree with more.

What is your response to the people who say that a vote given to a third-party candidate is wasted and should have gone to one of the main two parties, if only to make sure that the “bad candidate” doesn’t win?

If the “wasted vote” argument ever held any water, it doesn’t any more. The two major parties have moved toward a weird, non-existent “center” for the last 50 years, to the point where it’s difficult to tell them apart.

We could argue all day about whether Bush or Kerry is the “lesser evil.” The fact is that they both support the war in Iraq. They both oppose gun rights. They both supported the PATRIOT Act. They both support the war on drugs. They both support confiscatory taxation. They both support ruinously high levels of spending, huge deficits and increasing debt.

It’s hard to tell them apart on the real issues. They spend their time scrapping over “swing votes” in the gray area of the “center” — which means, in practice, “how do I not make too many people too angry to vote for me?” That’s no way to do politics. Politics, in my view, should be as unimportant as possible — but where it’s important, it has to value freedom, remain rooted in principle and be forward-looking.

All I can tell the “lesser of two evils” folks is that if they keep voting for evil, they’ll keep getting evil. If you don’t like the way things are, how do you change it by voting for more of the same?

Amen.