US Politics Mega-thread - Page 1133

On June 24 2014 01:21 xDaunt wrote:


Making it harder to sue corporations for securities fraud? That's a ridiculous spin on the impact of this opinion. All that the opinion does is front load part of the argument on the merits to the class certification stage, giving Defendants an opportunity to win early if Plaintiffs' claims lack merit. It doesn't substantively change what Plaintiffs have to do to win. The biggest problem with the judicial system today is the expense associated with litigation. Any change that reduces that expense without compromising the rights of the parties is clearly a good thing.

As an FYI, the liberal justices joined Roberts and Kennedy to form the majority. The rest concurred.

The Obama administration on Monday claimed victory at the Supreme Court for its sweeping new proposal to curb climate change with rules on coal-fired power plant emissions.

The court handed down a complicated decision, divided along ideological lines, to place some limits on scope of the Environmental Protection Agency's authority to clamp down on greenhouse gas emissions. Left unscathed was EPA's power to regulate climate-warming carbon emissions by declaring them a pollutant under the Clean Air Act, which is the legal premise for the rules on coal.

"Today is a good day for all supporters of clean air and public health and those concerned with creating a better environment for future generations," EPA spokeswoman Liz Purchia said in a statement. "We are pleased that the Court's decision is consistent with our approach to focus on other Clean Air Act tools like the Clean Power Plan to limit carbon pollution as part of the President's Climate Action Plan."

In other words, the EPA claims the ruling, although not specifically about President Barack Obama's new rules on coal, is consistent with the legal principle behind the executive action which was unveiled earlier this month and will be finalized in June 2015. The goal of the effort, which faces staunch opposition from national Republicans, is to reduce carbon emissions by 30 percent by 2030 (from 2005 levels).

The split decision in Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA, written by Justice Antonin Scalia, held that simply emitting greenhouse gases is not a sufficient basis to force industry groups to get a permit to expand or build new facilities. The EPA said the Court's ruling will allow it to regulate 83 percent of carbon emissions, as opposed to the 86 percent coverage it has claimed.

The Supreme Court decision doesn't necessarily mean legal challenges to the new EPA rules, which are widely expected, cannot succeed. But it appears to complicate one legal avenue for its opponents.

A federal court released on Monday a Justice Department memorandum justifying the drone killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, but government redactions still left large swathes of the reasoning behind the operation unrevealed.

Awlaki, an American citizen who allegedly rose to become a senior member of al Qaeda's Yemen branch, was killed in a September 2011 drone strike carried out by the CIA. Journalists, human rights activists and members of Congress like Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) have pushed the administration ever since to reveal its rationale for killing an American citizen without a trial.

"There is no precedent directly addressing the question in circumstances such as those present here," David Barron, a recently confirmed judge for the First Circuit Court of Appeals, writes in the July 2010 memo, acknowledging that he is in uncharted waters as he concludes that the law authorizing force against al Qaeda also justifies killing Awlaki.

The document released Monday is a 41-page memo authored by Barron, who was then acting chief of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. It was released as part of a public records lawsuit against the government by the American Civil Liberties Union and The New York Times.

The Justice Department released a white paper last year summarizing some of the memo's key conclusions: President Barack Obama's administration believed it could kill a senior member of al Qaeda as long as he posed an "imminent" threat to the United States.

But that white paper left many of the factual questions surrounding the justification for killing Awlaki unanswered, including how the government came to conclude that he was a senior member of al Qaeda, and why he posed an imminent threat.

The memo released Monday by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals did little more to answer those questions, after the court complied with the government's request to redact any facts that would reveal intelligence or military sources and methods.

Federal judge ends monitoring of City Hall patronage hiring

A federal judge declared Monday that Chicago can finally be trusted to keep politics out of government hiring, releasing City Hall from a 42-year-old court settlement that was supposed to ban patronage — often with mixed results.

The historic end to the Shakman consent decree that has influenced city hiring since 1972 came with a warning from every key player in the court case: Continued vigilance is needed to keep political considerations out of hiring for public jobs — a practice perfected by the Democratic machine during decades of one-party rule in Chicago.

“None of us think this is the end of the story,” said attorney Michael Shakman, who triggered the court odyssey with a 1969 anti-patronage lawsuit and recently asked the U.S. District Court to end decades of federal oversight of city hiring. ...

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) on Monday accused Republicans of inviting the prospect of another partial shutdown of the federal government by pushing to attach anti-environment, pro-coal measures to appropriations legislation.

"We've had enough sequestrations and government shutdowns that I hope my Republican colleagues aren't headed in that direction again, given the importance of appropriations legislation and the need to keep our government operating," he said on the Senate floor.

Legislation to keep the federal government running once funding expires on Sept. 30 hit a wall last week amid disputes between Democrats and Republicans over amendments, something that has become common for even bipartisan bills in the Senate. This time the dispute was over an amendment to block President Barack Obama's new rules to combat climate change.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) sought a vote on his amendment targeting the proposed regulations on coal-fired power plants. Democrats insisted on a 60-vote threshold for passage and McConnell balked, demanding that it be held at a simple majority vote. In response, Reid pulled the legislation.

On Monday, Reid mocked the Republican leader's "recent conversion to the idea of insisting on simple majority votes," blaming the "McConnell rule" for turning the Senate into a 60-vote body for most initiatives. He then made an interesting offer to the Kentuckian: we'll allow your anti-EPA amendment to come up at a simple majority threshold if you allow the same for Democrats' bills to require gun background checks, a minimum wage hike and equal pay -- all of which enjoy majority support in the Senate but have been blocked by filibusters.

"Okay, Mr. Republican leader, if you want a vote on your EPA amendment, fine," Reid said. "You want a simple majority, we'll take that, but let's have a simple majority on these other issues we feel are extremely important to help the middle class -- in exchange for simple majority on ... minimum wage, student loans, equal pay for men and women, energy efficiency legislation, background checks for gun purchases."

McConnell hasn't accepted Reid's offer. "He offered 51 on one of ours and ALL of his, right?" Don Stewart, his spokesman, said in an email. He argued that McConnell's EPA measure was in a different category. "The standing rules of the Senate already allow for pending, germane amendments to have votes at a simple majority threshold," Stewart said.

The Mississippi Secretary of State's Office and the Mississippi Attorney General's office said observers from both offices will be present in Mississippi counties on election day Tuesday.

"Observers from both the Secretary of State’s Office and the Attorney General’s Office will be in Mississippi counties on Election Day," the offices said Monday in a joint statement providing guidance on election day.

The statement also said that "there is no authority in state law for a PAC or other outside group to place 'election observers' in Mississippi polling places."

Outside groups supporting state Sen. Chris McDaniel (R-MS), who is challenging Sen. Thad Cochran (R-MS) in the runoff for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate, say they plan to dispatch poll watchers to keep track of the turnout operation for Cochran to make sure the law is being followed.

Adam Brandon, the executive vice president for the conservative outside group FreedomWorks, told TPM that the observers will be looking for voters who voted in the Democratic primary who are trying to vote in the Republican runoff.

"If you voted in the Democratic primary, you are not eligible to vote in the Republican primary. So that being said, if you're a Democratic voter and you've decided you're going to vote in the Republican primary and you didn't vote in the Democratic primary well go for it," Brandon said. "But if you did vote in the Democratic primary —and there's files to check and all of that— we just want to make sure that stuff is being done to make sure that people can't be voting twice in this election."

The justices are one of the lasting legacies of the presidents who appoint them, and you might expect ones appointed by the same president to vote together particularly often. This is certainly true of the four newest justices. The ones appointed by President Obama, Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, have agreed 94 percent of the time. The members of the court appointed by President George W. Bush, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., have agreed 93 percent of the time.

The tendency is less marked among justices on the bench longer. President Bill Clinton's nominees, Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer, were less likely to agree, at 87 percent. And President Ronald Reagan's appointees, Justices Antonin Scalia and Anthony M. Kennedy, have agreed just 82 percent of the time.

On June 24 2014 10:30 coverpunch wrote:
Which Supreme Court justices vote together most often?




But amid the partisan complaints, the justices would want to point out that nobody disagrees with any other justice more than they agree. Agreement between all the justices is at least 65% and more than half the cases in 2014 were decided by unanimous votes, so there's a lot less partisanship than many critics might have you believe about the Supreme Court.

WASHINGTON -– One year after President Barack Obama rolled out his climate change action plan, the administration is putting fresh emphasis on its environmental agenda.

The White House plans to host two roundtable discussions this week on the economic threats that climate change poses and the "opportunities to overcome those risks," a White House official said in an email Monday night, which emphasized the potential costs of not addressing planet-warming emissions.

Treasury Secretary Jack Lew and White House leaders also plan to meet with billionaire climate activist Tom Steyer and former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson on Wednesday to discuss a report they will release this week titled, "Risky Business," which assess the economic costs of climate change. Steyer and Paulson are the co-chairs for the report.

Steyer, a former hedge fund manager turned environmental activist, has pledged to spend $100 million backing political candidates who support action on climate change through his political group, NextGen Climate Action. He has focused much of his political work on opposing the Keystone XL pipeline, which the Obama administration is considering for possible approval.

Lew, White House advisers John Podesta and Valerie Jarrett, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration head Kathryn Sullivan and Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Craig Fugate on Tuesday will meet with insurance industry representatives on climate impacts.

Obama himself will address the annual dinner of the League of Conservation Voters on Wednesday night. Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz and Secretary of Interior Sally Jewell plan to speak earlier Wednesday at an event sponsored by the League of Conservation Voters. The group is the biggest electoral spender among environmental groups.

Early last year, Wall Street traders somehow found out that the Obama administration planned to make a policy change to Medicare before the news was even announced.

The flurry of stock trades in major health care companies that followed has since caught the eye of federal law enforcement as well as Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), who has made investigating the matter one of his pet projects on the Senate Finance and Judiciary committees. In his search, Grassley has gone as far as to cast suspicion on the Obama administration as the source of the leak.

But in a twist, the Wall Street Journal reported last week that federal regulators and law enforcement officials have now focused their attention on a Republican health policy staffer in the House. A lawsuit filed on Friday by the Securities and Exchange Commission, first reported by the Journal, said investigators believe the staffer "may have been" the source of the leak. It also sought to force the staffer to turn over records to investigators, something he and the committee have reportedly refused to do despite being handed subpoenas.

The SEC lawsuit alleges that the House staffer, Brian Sutter, spoke with a lobbyist -- identified by the Journal as Mark Hayes, who happens to be a former aide to Grassley -- on the day of the leak. The suit alleges that Sutter was in touch with Hayes by both email and phone and that they discussed the upcoming Medicare policy change. Hayes then allegedly gave the information to a research firm, which distributed the flash that set off the trading, according to the SEC. A 2012 law, the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act, prohibits government officials from disclosing non-public information that could affect stock prices, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Grassley's office declined to comment to TPM about the latest development. He has also reportedly made inquiries into whether an aide to Sen. Orrin Hatch, his senior colleague on the Senate Finance Committee, had any role in the leak. Additionally, according to Politico, he has raised questions about Hayes’s role in the leaks. But the Obama administration appears to have been Grassley's initial and most public target when trying to identify the source of the leak.

Investigations into the Christie administration and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey have zeroed in on possible securities law violations stemming from a $1.8 billion road repair agreement in 2011, according to people briefed on the matter.

While the inquiries were prompted by the apparently politically motivated lane closings at the George Washington Bridge last year, these investigations center on another crossing: the Pulaski Skyway, the crumbling elevated roadway connecting Newark and Jersey City. They are being conducted by the Manhattan district attorney and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The inquiries into securities law violations focus on a period of 2010 and 2011 when Gov. Chris Christie’s administration pressed the Port Authority to pay for extensive repairs to the Skyway and related road projects, diverting money that was to be used on a new Hudson River rail tunnel that Mr. Christie canceled in October 2010.

Again and again, Port Authority lawyers warned against the move: The Pulaski Skyway, they noted, is owned and operated by the state, putting it outside the agency’s purview, according to dozens of memos and emails reviewed by investigators and obtained by The New York Times.