The US Attorney for a region is part of the US Department of Justice and is tasked with prosecuting federal crimes in that region. They have a lot of power and some of them have developed a reputation of using that power in ways that infringe on the rights of people to due process.
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NPR had a wonderful story about someone whom I had never heard of. It was about a US District Judge named J. Waties Waring in South Carolina who, in a landmark school segregation case Briggs v. Elliott, declared that segregation “was an evil that must be eradicated”.
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Last Wednesday a three judge panel of the US Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments in the appeal of the US District Judge’s’ ruling that struck down Utah’s ban on same-sex marriage. Although over a dozen federal district courts around the nation have struck down the ban or aspects of it since the US Supreme Court’s DOMA decision last summer, and not a single judge has upheld it, this is the first time that this issue has reached the level of an Appeals Court, so this is a significant case
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You may recall the case of the New Mexico company named Elane Photographers that I wrote about in December that was sued because they refused to provide their services to a same-sex wedding because of religious objections. Their case went all the way up to the New Mexico Supreme Court that ruled against them, saying that as they were a public accommodation offering their services to all, they did not have the right to arbitrarily deny service to people without good grounds and that denying them to same-sex couples violated the New Mexico Human Rights Act that prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation.
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Stephen Colbert had two segments that explained clearly how the US Supreme Court decision last week in McCutcheon v. FEC has pushed the US further along the road to where just a handful of people will be able to purchase the government. This ruling said that while a contributor was still limited to donating $5,200 to individual candidates, there should be no limit to the total amount they can give to all candidates in an election cycle, which used to be $123,200 before this ruling. Only about 600 people bumped up against this cap in the past.
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US District Court judge Timothy Black of Cincinnati, Ohio said yesterday that he intends to issue a ruling by April 14 that will strike down Ohio’s ban on recognizing same-sex marriages that are legally performed in other states. The reason that he announced his intentions in advance is to allow the state to prepare to file an appeal, which Ohio’s Attorney General has promised he will do.
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In order to bring suit against someone in court, the plaintiff has to show that they have ‘standing’, which means that they have suffered a fairly direct injury of some sort that the court can redress. In response to my post on the cases bought against Obamacare because of its use of federal subsidies in the form of tax credits to make health insurance affordable to low income people, reader Mark Dowd posed the good question of how the people who were suing could have standing to do so. How can getting money from the government to purchase health insurance be considered to cause an injury?
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One of the key features of the highly complicated Affordable Care Act is the subsidy that is given to lower income people to enable them to afford to purchase health insurance. These subsidies are provided through both the state exchanges for those states that set them up and through the federal exchanges in those states that decided that they wanted to have no part of the ACA or decided to let the federal government set them up. So far, 16 states have set up their own exchanges and 34 exchanges are run by the Department of Health and Human Services. The subsidies come in the form of tax credits provided by the IRS.
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