5 posts tagged “civil rights”
Hooray! The California Supreme Court has ruled that same-sex marriage is legal in California!!!
Gays and lesbians have a constitutional right to marry in California, the state Supreme Court said today in a historic ruling that could be repudiated by the voters in November.
In a 4-3 decision, the justices said the state's ban on same-sex marriage violates the "fundamental constitutional right to form a family relationship." The ruling is likely to flood county courthouses with applications from couples newly eligible to marry when the decision takes effect in 30 days.
Now the battle with bigotry moves on to the voters. As Kevin Drum notes:
The initiative to strike down their ruling has already gathered over a million signatures and is just waiting for verification from the Secretary of State before it goes on the November ballot. It's 14 words long, identical to the wording of Prop 22 back in 2000: "Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California." This time, however, it's a constitutional initiative, not a statutory initiative, so if it passes it will be immune to court challenges.
Prop 22 passed overwhelmingly with 63% of the vote. Has 13% of the state decided to relax since then and allow gay couples to live in peace? We're about to find out.
What would you do with a guy who spent the main part of his career working to disenfranchise legitimate (Democratic) voters? Well, if you are the Bush administration, you'd put him in charge of the Department of Justice's Civil Rights voting rights section. While there, he would help transform the section's "historic mission to enforce the nation's civil rights laws without regard to politics, to pursuing an agenda which placed the highest priority on the partisan political goals of the political appointees who supervised the section." Do you think Alberto Gonzales was alone in wrecking the DOJ, and turning it into a partisan republican machine? This guy, Hans von Spakovsky (no, I'm not making that name up!), was one of the guys making the Karl Rove nightmare become reality. As this Slate story explains:
Among his numerous accomplishments at the Voting Section at DoJ, von Spakovsky can take credit for approving the Tom DeLay-sponsored midcensus redistricting in Texas—part of which was later deemed by the Supreme Court to have violated the Voting Rights Act. (To do so, von Spakovsky overrode a 73-page memo written by seven voting-rights experts finding that the DeLay scheme violated the Voting Rights Act by reducing minority voting strength in Texas.) Von Spakovsky similarly pushed for approval of Georgia's restrictive voter-ID law, again over the four-to-one objection of staff lawyers who (in a 51-page memo this time) felt the new law would disenfranchise black voters. State and federal courts later found that statute unconstitutional.
So, given that, what would you do with this guy? Well, if you were any sane person, you'd prosecute him... but Bush has instead given him the Medal of Freedom nominated him to the Federal Election Commission. Oh yeah, by the way, he taped a big "Fuck You Democrats!" note on the nomination. Of course the Democrats control the Senate, and are aware of this joker, so you'd think that they would simply tank his nomination. Once again, you'd be wrong. One Democrat on the Senate Rules Committee, Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE), voted to allow this jackass out of committee. So now his nomination is going to go to a vote by the full Senate. Damnit, I'm going to be pretty pissed if this guy gets a six year job on the Federal Election Commission after all he has done to undermine voting rights in this country.
Footnote: If you're interested you can read about von Spakovsky's attempts to intimidate Justice Department employees, stifle their appeals, single-handedly disenfranchise thousands of Arizonans and then give false testimony (later modified in written answers) to the committee about it, you can read Dahlia Lithwick's take at Slate and ThinkProgress' rundown of von Spakovsky's past.
The Senate just
killed an amendment to ensure federal courts could review the
legitimacy of individual' imprisonment on suspicion of involvement in
terrorism. The amendment had been proposed by Sen. Arlen Specter
(R-PA), chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. "It is a fundamental
protection woven into the fabric of our Nation," said Sen. Patrick
Leahy (D-VT), who supported the measure. It was defeated 48-51, largely
along party lines. Former torture victim Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), portrayed as a
"maverick" by earlier bucking the White House on the issue of detainee
treatment, voted against the amendment. The White House also opposes
the changes the amendment would make to the bill. Sens. John Warner
(R-VA) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who had also challenged the White
House over the bill, joined McCain in voting against the amendment.
From TPM Muckraker
Here we have another prime example of how the Bush machine works. As we all know, the Bushies are pretty good at running their political machine. How these things work is that you use the government as your money pot, and dole out contracts worth tons of money to companies which give you bribes election contributions. The other thing you do is dole out jobs to people who have supported you, and cut out those who are not supporters. Actually being qualified for the job doesn't really matter, the only qualification is that you are a staunch supporter. The Bushies have replaces many career professionals with cronies, and used political appointments to reward people who worked for the republican party. The most obvious example was "Brownie" over at FEMA, but there are thousands of other people you've never heard of at every government agency. Mostly these people toil in obscurity. One hopes that they just clock in and clock out and don't do much, but since most of these people have "drunk the kool-aid" of the Bushies, many of them work to actively undermine the functions of the agencies that they work at. I can provide many examples, but just one would be at the Dept of Justice where the political appointees virtually stopped civil rights enforcement cases, and the list is virtually endless. One of the things that the Bushies have been really focused on is destroying the Federal judiciary. They have quietly used the executive appointment power to fill Federal judgeships with partisan hacks. This is the tripple threat. First, these people work to enable the retrograde republican agenda at its worst by blocking enforcement of laws and/or "interpreting" existing laws in a way that benefits wealthy corporate interests and against the average citizen. Next, these wealthy corporate interests who benfit are happy, and give even more bribes election contributions to the republicans. And finally, since Federal judgeships are lifetime, these people can't be replaced when a more enlightend adminstration takes over. These people will be messing up our lives for decades to come. I suppose that's fitting however, because we'll be dealing with the residual fallout of the disaster of this administration for the rest of our lives anyway...
W court pick called a foe of civil rights
WASHINGTON -
The lawyer President Bush picked to replace a racially divisive nominee on a Southern appeals court would "turn back the clock" on civil rights, the American Bar Association charged yesterday.
Michael Wallace got a unanimous "not qualified" rating by the bar association after Bush tapped him in February to replace Charles Pickering on the 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in .
If Wallace - a Clinton impeachment adviser to Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and clerk to the late Chief Justice of the United States William Rehnquist - is confirmed, "it will be like 1965, not 2006," one lawyer told the bar association.
Wallace declined to comment yesterday, but a colleague called the charges "totally ridiculous."
His firm is full of black lawyers, and "if he was such a racist, he obviously wouldn't work here," partner Luther Munford, a Democrat, told the Daily News.
The killer rating was given after confidential interviews with 26 judges and 43 other lawyers and people who have known Wallace since childhood. The grim assessment was in testimony the bar association prepared for a postponed Senate hearing, officials said.
"The law will not get in his way," said a judge quoted in the report by lawyer Kim Askew.
The American Bar Association is often accused of liberal bias, but no other appeals court nominee in either Bush administration has drawn the unanimous bad rating.
Wallace has "an instinctive contempt for the socially weak" and would be "hostile" to minority rights, critics said.
Reputedly rude and abusive, Wallace allegedly regarded minority-group colleagues in a way that "suggested he did not treat these lawyers as equals," Askew wrote.
