Del.icio.us Links

links for 2009-05-28

  • Rush Limbaugh isn't the only one calling Sonia Sotomayor a racist. Newt Gingrich is, too — and he's demanding that Obama's pick to the Supreme Court to withdraw her nomination.

    On Twitter, Gingrich pointed to a line in Sotomayor's 2001 speech to a Hispanic group in Berkeley that has drawn fire from some conservatives.

    "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life," Sotomayor said in that speech, describing how life experience can inform judicial opinions.

    On Wednesday, Gingrich tweeted: "Imagine a judicial nominee said 'my experience as a white man makes me better than a latina woman.' new racism is no better than old racism"

    Moments later, he followed up with the message: "White man racist nominee would be forced to withdraw. Latina woman racist should also withdraw."

  • When the majority of the Justices are interpreting the state constitution in order to evaluate statutory provisions, they can appeal not just to their own majority view but to the authority of the Constitution. But when the majority of the Justices disagrees with the views of voters who are trying to amend that very same Constitution, such an appeal no longer works. All the Justices can say is that they are protecting the rights of the minority, but the whole point of the dispute is that there's disagreement about what those rights should be.

    That's why I think the majority's view was correct here

  • Indeed, the drafters of the 1849 Constitution, in their message submitting the proposed Constitution to the people of California, expressly described the people's right to alter or reform the Constitution as an “inalienable right.” In like manner, when the people's authority to propose and adopt constitutional amendments by initiative was added to the California Constitution in 1911, the constitutional provision spoke of the initiative “not as a right granted the people, but as a power reserved by them.”
  • In any event, what makes those provisions wrong is not that they are legally "revisions" rather than "amendments" and thus illegal. What makes them wrong is that they are morally wrong and thus immoral. But ultimately that judgment about what is morally wrong, as I mentioned, is under the California Constitution left to the sovereign people, and not the sovereign's servants in the state supreme court.
  • This decision is based solely on the California Constitution. Within the federal system, the California Supreme Court's view of the meaning of the California Constitution is final, and the U.S. Supreme Court has no jurisdiction to revisit it. So there can be no federal review of the question whether Prop. 8 violates the California Constitution.

    2. Supporters of same-sex marriage rights can of course argue to the U.S. Supreme Court that the U.S. Constitution mandates recognition of same-sex marriage, in all states and under federal law. But it seems unlikely that the Court would accept such an argument at this point, and in any case this case is not a good vehicle for that, since the decision below was all about the California Constitution. (I'm not sure that federal constitutional arguments were even made by the challengers, but in any case they weren't considered by the Court.)

  • A federal court entered an order granting Alliance Defense Fund attorneys a motion to intervene Thursday on behalf of ProtectMarriage.com in a lawsuit waged by two men against the United States and the state of California to eliminate California’s state constitutional amendment protecting marriage and the federal Defense of Marriage Act. ADF attorneys filed a motion to intervene last month to defend the intended definition of marriage in a suit alleging that the passage of both Proposition 8 and DOMA violates the U.S. Constitution.
  • With budget deficits soaring and President Obama pushing a trillion-dollar-plus expansion of health coverage, some Washington policymakers are taking a fresh look at a money-making idea long considered politically taboo: a national sales tax.

    Common around the world, including in Europe, such a tax — called a value-added tax, or VAT — has not been seriously considered in the United States. But advocates say few other options can generate the kind of money the nation will need to avert fiscal calamity.

  • Richard Fisher, president of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank, said: "Senior officials of the Chinese government grilled me about whether or not we are going to monetise the actions of our legislature."

    "I must have been asked about that a hundred times in China. I was asked at every single meeting about our purchases of Treasuries. That seemed to be the principal preoccupation of those that were invested with their surpluses mostly in the United States," he told the Wall Street Journal.