The Montana Supreme Court just issued a decision that public policy of Montana does not criminalize, and much in current public policy affirmatively supports, aid in dying. The court did not reach the question of whether the Montana constitution specifically protects aid in dying.
Montana citizens now have less than 30 days to offer comments on who will be selected to join the 5 men (there were 6 before Warner resigned) and 1 woman currently serving on Montana's Supreme Court.
Following the comment period, a seven-member panel will pick between three and five candidate. Then, Governor Schweitzer will select a replacement from that group.
Whomever is selected will have to immediately run in November of 2010 for this non-partisan seat. Vote.
I've got to say, it's pretty rare that I side with the conservatives on the Roberts Court, but in two recent SCOTUS decisions, I've basically come down with them: the DC gun case and the Louisiana death penalty case.
On both of these sides I've also ended up on the opposite end of most of my progressive brothers and sisters.
But then, just when I thought I was going to be all down with the Scalitos, they had to go and say that the Millionaire Amendment to McCain-Feingold violated the First Amendment, which strikes me as a damn clear case of putting issue advocacy ahead of Constitutional concerns.
I write this not to re-establish my non-existent maverick bona fides, but because I found it odd that I was agreeing with the conservative wing. I thought I'd ask my dear readers why I'm wrong (or right).
So, in preparation for 4 July 2008, give us your thoughts on our Constitution, free speech, the right to bear arms, and just how uncruel and usual punishments must be.
Two decisions made by the Supreme Court today. The first was a decision to reduce the punitive damages for the Exxon Valdez spill. Justice Souter, writing the majority opinion, said that the correct ratio of punitive to compensatory has usually been one to one. A previous court decision in the case set compensatory damage at one half Billion dollars. The justices reduced the punitive from 3.5 Billion to .5, just to be fair to Exxon. After the decision an Exxon executive said that they had already spent 3.5 Billion on clean up. Doesn't that qualify as compensatory? Shouldn't they have raised the punitive, instead?
Also, the court overturned a state law that declared capital punishment for child rape. This same law was also in place in five other states.
Is it just me or do you have to be an idiot to think capital punishment is a deterrent for a non capital crime? Get a clue, legislators. You are basically saying, 'Kill the kid. Punishment is the same.'
I have to say, I'm mildly bothered by this ruling. The Montana Supreme Court ruled that the Board of Advisers of the Bair Trust failed to perform their duties when they closed the Bair Museum -- a museum with few visitors in a very low-traffic corner of Montana. Under the terms of the trust, "the trustees [could] sell, transfer or relocate the museum and its property five years after Alberta Bair's death if 'acting on its sole judgment and discretion,' the board determined that the museum no longer served its public and educational purposes."
So the Board of Advisers acted, under its sole discretion, and was slapped down in court.
Why does this bother me?
The Bair Trusts have funded a number of fantastic charitable programs in the state (perhaps a necessary disclosure -- Forward Montana has not requested money from the Trust and has never had any plan to -- this is not a self-interested stance). Some of those programs will likely lose their funding so that a Museum in Martinsdale remain open.
Beyond that, I don't think the fundamental question for the court is whether the Board of Advisers made the right decision. The question is whether they were empowered by the Trust Agreement to make a decision. If they were allowed, after five years, to do something, it seems to me that they did it well within the scope of their authority.
What bothered the chief justice was that Exxon was being ordered to pay $2.5 billion - roughly three weeks' worth of profits - for destroying a long swath of the Alaska coastline in the largest oil spill in American history.
"So what can a corporation do to protect itself against punitive-damages awards such as this?" Roberts asked in court.
The lawyer arguing for the Alaska fishermen affected by the spill, Jeffrey Fisher, had an idea. "Well," he said, "it can hire fit and competent people."
The rare sound of laughter rippled through the august chamber. The chief justice did not look amused.
The so-called "large pot-growing operation" that government agents raided north of Dillon recently was in fact a private, personal medicine-growing facility for a desperately ill medical marijuana patient - and both the government confiscation of the medicine and the subsequent media coverage illustrate the persistent ignorance that enables the continued, unfair persecution of suffering patients, says Patients & Families United.
Patients & Families United is a support group for Montana's medical marijuana patients, regardless of their medical condition, and pain patients, whether they use medical marijuana or not. A wealth of scientific research over the last 30+ years has documented the value of medical marijuana in treating a wide variety of conditions, including severe chronic pain.
A case worth at least hundreds of thousands of dollars is moving closer to final consideration, at least at the District Court level.
Right now, there are dams all over Montana that operate for private profit without compensating the state for their presence on public land. Following a suit filed by a private party, the State intervened to demand their rents. Unsurprisingly, PPL and Avista refused. But a third dam owning company decided to save the lawyers' fees and just start paying rent -- which may give a good indication of where this case is likely to end up.
The suit will move the proceeds into the school trust.
The judge has already basically ruled that the corporations can be charged rent. The question now is simply what that rent will be.
A federal appeals court on Friday ordered the dismissal of a lawsuit challenging President Bush's domestic spying program, saying the plaintiffs had no standing to sue.
What does standing mean? It means that the people suing couldn't prove the government was surveilling them? Presumably, that proof would come in the form of a "smoking gun" like being declared a enemy combatant and getting thrown into a dark hole somewhere with no habeas corpus rights.
This is truly incredible. A secret wiretapping program that evades scrutiny because it is secret. Good work, judges, you've made a mockery of the Constitution.
I just read this writeup on the latest decision handed down from five men -- even in cases where gender discrimination is clearly at work, the aggrieved party only gets 180 days from the initial discriminatory decision to challenge it.
The decision was made in a case where a woman started off receiving comparable pay but slowly dipped well below what even the worst-paid man in a comparable position was paid. This wasn't a single decision in other words, it was a cumulative number of decisions.
According to Scott Lemieux, a professor of this stuff at Hunter College, this means that the court is basically saying that discriminatory pay is not a problem under statute, just the decision to pay in a discriminatory matter.
All in all -- crazy stuff, as far as I can tell.
Scott's right, though -- this is the sort of issue Congress can address very easily. They should do so.
It's time to nationalize the oil industry! Gas here in GF went up a mere ELEVEN FREAKIN' CENTS overnight. Now, in Chiapas they had an answer. They had one in Bolivia too when they tried to privatize their water. In fact, they've had answers all OVER Latin America to corporate fascism and neoliberalism But what can be done here in the U.S.? THAT is the question. The Bush crime family knows that Americans won't take up arms or take to the streets. We aren't equipped for that. And they also know that our politicos are powerless to do anythin. And they even know that Americans will suffer the worst outrages in silence. So, they are quite secure in the knowledge that the economic atrocities they committed in Latin America and are now committing here will simply be tolerated here. Even though we need a new revolution. A good start would be to nationalize the oil industry.
Amazingly, O'Neil has been trying this stuff for twenty years through a range of approaches, apparently including a foiled run for Supreme Court, an as-yet-unpassed Constitutional Amendment barring discrimination for admission to the bar on the basis of educational attainment, and other attempts to move jurisdiction over the bar from the Court to the legislature.
The paralawyer lost again. If, when he filed his papers for Supreme Court, he had applied for law school instead, this might not be a problem. Of course, he may not have made it through.
Two of the fired U.S. attorneys, Daniel Bogden of Las Vegas and Paul K. Charlton of Phoenix, testified before a subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday that Mercer told them they were dismissed to make room for others and not because of performance problems.
Bogden testified that Mercer told him the administration had a "very short, two-year window of opportunity concerning the United States attorney positions" and that "this would be an opportunity to put others into those positions so they could build their résumés and get experience as a United States attorney so that for future possibilities of being federal judges or other political type positions, they could better enhanced to do so."
Mercer, Charlton testified, told him he was being asked to resign so other individuals would have the opportunity to "touch base" as U.S. attorney before the end of the president's term.
Let's be clear. The position of U.S. Attorney is not some place to throw folks to build resumes. The U.S. Attorney is the chief federal prosecutor for their district. In other words, they are the people responsible for the prosecution of terrorists, drug traffickers, and various other very serious crimes.
Not so much for the Bush Administration, though. See, they've got two years, so now the Department of Justice's job is resume padding for the Young Republicans.
Sen. Arlen Specter is saying that it may be time for a new Attorney General. I think it is time for Bill Mercer's jobs performance (yeah, that's supposed to be jobs plural) to be reviewed.
The New York Timesreports that none other than Montana's own (OK, OK, we share him with D.C.) Bill Mercer is being subpoenad by the Senate over the brewing U.S. Attorney scandal:
The Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday took the first step toward issuing subpoenas to five Justice Department officials whose names have surfaced in Congressional testimony about the dismissals of eight United States attorneys.
[...]
In addition, the committee asked to interview Michael A. Battle, the outgoing director of the Executive Office of United States Attorneys, who told the prosecutors that they were being removed, and William Mercer, the acting associate attorney general who told one of the ousted prosecutors that he was being dismissed to make room for a replacement.
Mercer finds himself in the spotlight after two removed U.S. Attorneys testified that he told them point blank that they were being removed so their jobs could be given to other people.
Interestingly, David Iglesias, the (former) U.S. Attorney for N.M. who kicked up a storm by saying that Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM) and Rep. Heather Wilson (R-NM) pressured him to use his office for political reasons, was allegedly removed from his office because "The district was in need of greater leadership. ... Mr. Iglesias had delegated to his first assistant the overall running of his office. U.S. attorneys are hired to run the office."
Why is that so interesting?
Well, the senior federal judge in Montana has actually asked the A.G. to remove Bill Mercer for being an incompetent U.S. Attorney, since he spends too much time in D.C. to manage his own office.
In November 2005, Molloy implored U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to replace Mercer as Montana's U.S. attorney. In a letter, Molloy said Mercer was violating a residency law and shrugging off his work in Montana while holding a Justice Department job in Washington, D.C.
Mercer maintains a home in Montana but does not live here.
Gonzales disagreed with Molloy, and said Mercer complies with the residency law, which says a person can have two or more residences.
But on Tuesday, Molloy again charged Mercer with neglecting his duties in Montana while on dual assignment.
"Your lawyers are not getting their briefs in on time," Molloy said. "You're in Washington, D.C., and you ought to be here in Montana doing your work. Your office is a mess."
