- Washington Post: Poll Finds Public Wary on Tax Cut
The A1 headline in the Washington Post on the morning of September 11, 2001 was for this prescient story: "A majority of Americans say they are prepared to roll back President Bush's $1.35 trillion tax cut to help deal with the shrinking federal budget surplus and say Bush more than congressional Democrats bears responsibility for a problem that has suddenly put him on the defensive." - Commonwealth of VA vs. Kathleen Sebelius
I recommend a quick reading of the Fourth Circuit Court's smackdown of Ken Cuccinelli. The decision starts on page 17, and it reads like a Constitutional Law 101 lesson, one that Cuccinelli needs badly. "The sole provision challenged here—the individual mandate—imposes no obligations on the sole plaintiff, Virginia." End of story. - Wall Street Journal: Many Afghans Shrug at ‘This Event Foreigners Call 9/11’
In two Afghani provinces, 92% of 15–30-year-old men surveyed had never heard of September 11th. Keep in mind that few people have access to newspapers or television (TV was banned by the Taliban), that many Afghanis were young children when it happened, and that many of them probably find it preposterous that a building could be so tall that thousands of people could die in one.
Comments are closed.
Thanks for posting the link to that court case. I learned a lot. Of course, I never went to law school…
Smackdown? Please. You like the result, so you like the legal reasoning. By the way, the deciding issue is not one of constitutional law. It was decided on the very technical civil procedure ground of standing. They said that Virginia didn’t have standing to bring the suit. They never even touched the merits.
There are only two relevant, and even remotely significant, facts about this decision:
1) It was a 3-judge panel; two Obama appointees and one by Clinton. Hey, how ’bout that.
2) This matter was *always* heading to the SCOTUS, regardless who “won” at the appellate level. No outcome in this court would have impacted the proceeding in the SCOTUS in any meaningful way. Everyone has always known that the supremes will decide this on the constitutional merits (which didn’t happen in the 4th, by the way).
…and if the Supremes decide to honor the law instead of social engineer (as they did when appointing the 43rd POTUS) they will see this as a simple matter of standing too.
Now, when can we expect wingnuts to walk the walk on their professed belief – opposing judicial activism?
I didn’t say I liked the legal reasoning. I said it was a “smackdown,” meaning that it was a strongly worded decision that relied on bedrock law, and not layers of interpretation. This doesn’t require a citation of Carolene footnote 4, but instead a basic grasp of our legal system. The quoted bit says it all: “The sole provision challenged here—the individual mandate—imposes no obligations on the sole plaintiff, Virginia.” And that’s that.
I didn’t say it was one of constitutional law. I said it read like a Constitutional Law 101 class. Not just any Constitution Law 101 class—my own Constitutional Law class, in 2003, where all of these basics were explained to us.
What’s the likelihood that the SCOTUS decides there’s no reason to hear the Virginia case? Wouldn’t part of their decision be based directly on the 4th’s decision?