After a prolonged legal battle, the Minnesota Supreme Court held today that Al Franken, of Saturday Night Live fame, defeated Norm Coleman in the state’s Senate race in 2008. Senator Coleman conceded the race soon after the decision was released and, Minnesota’s governor, Tim Pawlenty, announced that he would sign Franken’s election certificate.
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Today the Supreme Court found no legal preemption in the realm of banking regulation, allowing the New York state Attorney General to investigate allegations of discriminatory lending practices by banks located in New York state. The banks claimed that they were subject to federal lending regulations which thus created field preemption over all state law claims against them. Although preemption claims by the banks delayed discriminatory lending claims from reaching state court, the dilemma of which regulations can apply to banks was decided after a four year journey to the Supreme Court where Justice Scalia wrote the majority opinion.
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This Time.com article details how California’s crisis, which will leave the state unable to meet its financial obligations next week without a balanced budget agreement, is rooted in Proposition 13. That measure, now over 30 years old, limits property taxes in California (collected by counties) to 1% of the property’s value, annually. As the article notes, Proposition 13 is extremely difficult to change and a political minefield in the state.
Massachusetts was one of the 13 states to follow suit, by way of a successful ballot measure.
]]>The real risk is that health care reform will be undermined by “centrist” Democratic senators who either prevent the passage of a bill or insist on watering down key elements of reform. I use scare quotes around “centrist,” by the way, because if the center means the position held by most Americans, the self-proclaimed centrists are in fact way out in right field.
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There are few things worse than getting poor grades as a 1L. Well, actually, there are a lot of things worse than getting poor grades as a 1L, rationally speaking. There are so many problems in our world that haven’t been solved, so much hurt, violence and injustice. What do good grades as a 1L have to do with those these? Do good grades make 1Ls more virtuous? There is little evidence that doing well in law school makes someone a better, or worse, person. One does not need good grades to be, for example, generous or brave. While good grades are sometimes indicative of fortitude or prudence, is it not more important to for 1Ls to wear their kind deeds as medals, their honesty as their class rank?
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This week, President Obama traveled to Green Bay, Wisconsin to push for healthcare reform. In his address, the president pushed for a “government-sponsored health plan to compete with private insurers.” Yet Obama’s plan may find some vehement opposition.
Although recent polling indicates that 62% of Americans believe the government should offer healthcare for all, the idea of government-run healthcare has met resistance from prominent conservatives, such as Ramesh Ponnuru of The National Review. Ponnuru recently derided the plan as “Obamacare” and called for its defeat. As in 1993, when Democrats last sought to have government-sponsored healthcare, organizations have also formed to oppose the push for universal healthcare coverage. One such organization is Conservatives for Patients’ Rights, which believes that “the path to effective health care reform must be based on the patient-doctor relationship and not from a top-down, big government perspective.”
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George H. W. BushFormer president George H. W. Bush defended Judge Sonia Sotomayor on CNN today. President Bush, who appointed Sotomayor to the federal district court for the Southern District of New York in 1990, told Politico:
“She was called by somebody a racist once. That’s not right. I mean, that’s not fair … It doesn’t help the process. You’re out there name-calling. So let them decide who they want to vote for and get on with it… . I don’t know her that well, but I think she’s had a distinguished record on the bench and she should be entitled to fair hearings.”
To read the entire story, click here.
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