The 2003 Alabama Workplace Mass Shootout: Why a Trial Court is Unfair and Why the District Court Is Not Enforcing It
For decades, the Supreme Court has tied its legitimacy at least in part to its ability to offer principled explanations for its decision-making. The idea is not that the court’s legitimacy flows from whether it’s getting these cases “right”; it’s that it flows from public acceptance that its decision-making is informed by principles – even principles with which many of us might disagree. Justice Amy ConeyBarrett said in an April speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library that before we become too critical of the court for handing down decisions that we think are wrong, we all need to read the opinion.
By a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court cleared the way last week for Alabama to execute Alan Miller, who killed three men in a 1999 workplace rampage. The court ruling came around 9 p.m. Thursday, about three hours before Miller’s death warrant was set to expire. Miller was scheduled to be killed before midnight, but prison officials were unable to use his vein to administer the lethal injection.
Nonetheless, it was the third time in less than a year that the justices have granted a state’s emergency request to allow an execution that lower courts had blocked to go forward.
The Miller case shows the costs of justices not explaining themselves. Under Alabama law, Miller is allowed to be put to death via nitrogen hypoxia instead of lethal injection.
The Thursday ruling was not an outlier. Time and again in recent years, the justices have relied on unsigned and unexplained orders, part of their so-called shadow docket, to grant requests for emergency relief – whether to clear the way for executions, to block state Covid-19 restrictions or to unblock lower court injunctions of federal policies.
The state had no record of the form, so it believed that it was free to use its lethal injection protocol. The District Court, after conducting an evidentiary hearing, found that it was “substantially likely” that Miller had in fact submitted the form, and that the state had simply misplaced it.
That kind of factual finding by a trial court is typically given significant weight on appeal, and can only be overturned if an appellate court concludes that it was “clearly erroneous.” The trial court has the right to be given deference. The lower court is not only closer to the issues but has had the chance to hear from witnesses and to assess their credibility directly.
In the process, the court has unmoored itself from both the Constitution it is sworn to protect and the American people it is privileged to serve. This could not be happening at a worse moment. The election deniers in the Republican Party undermine the integrity of the American electoral system. Right-wing political violence is on the rise.
To take another example, consider the justices’ summary ruling in June in a challenge to Louisiana’s congressional redistricting. After a lengthy evidentiary hearing a federal judge issued a ruling explaining why the district maps adopted by the Louisiana Legislature impermissibly discriminated against Black Louisianans in the Voting Rights Act. The District Court ordered the Legislature to try again, specifically concluding that there was plenty of time to draw lawful maps before the 2022 midterm cycle.
There is no serious argument to be made that the Supreme Court should be required to explain all its actions. The justices can’t give a detailed explanation for why they didn’t take most of the appeals. One might defend the practice of not typically providing an explanation when denying emergency relief, including when a death row inmate asks the justices to block an execution that lower courts have allowed to proceed.
The Biden-Dobbs-Inspired Supreme Court and the Future of a Constitutional-Reformal-Chiral-Law Court
During his speech at Independence Hall, President Biden called out Americans to stand against the assault of democracy by insurrectionists and would-be patriots. He said that they were powerless in the face of the threats. “We are not bystanders.”
For most of the court’s history, it was difficult to predict how a case would turn out based on the party of the president who nominated the justices. Even into the 21st century, as the country grew more polarized, the court’s rulings remained largely in line with the views of the average American voter. That is no longer the case. The opinions of the average Republican voter have now been mirrored by the court.
The liberal wing of the court, led by Elena Kagan, spoke more about courts subverting their own authority over the summer.
As the dissent in Dobbs noted: “The majority has overruled Roe and Casey for one and only one reason: because it has always despised them, and now it has the votes to discard them. The majority takes a rule from judges for the rule of law.
The role of the court in the Constitutional structure must be respected according to Chief Justice Roberts, who was the one who had the middle ground approach in the abortion decision.
David A. Strauss, a law professor at the University of Chicago, said the chief justice’s failed effort to broker a compromise in the abortion case presented him with an opportunity.
The same could happen to Dobbs. What we now see as a decision that ended a federal guarantee for abortion rights could eventually be a symbol of a Supreme Court that is indifferent to public opinion, or the beginning of the end for many of our rights to privacy.
The court has the power to decide which cases it hears, and often uses that discretion to resolve disputes in lower courts. Despite the lack of conflicts, the court agreed to hear a lot of major cases in the next term, an indication that the new majority is trying to set the pace of change.
Or, as Justice Amy Coney Barrett said last year while speaking to an audience at the McConnell Center at the University of Louisville, “this court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks.”
The legitimacy of the Supreme Court and the justices discussing it in the public is reason enough for us to talk about it. And what’s striking about the comment from Thomas in particular is how it roots the challenge to the court’s legitimacy in the inside baseball surrounding the leak rather than public discontent with its decisions that Kagan spoke about. In a similar disconnect, Roberts and Alito both take for granted the legitimacy of the Supreme Court and its decisions, as if its power were inherent to the institution — part of the natural order of things rather than something that’s been mediated by politics throughout the court’s history. Roberts says that the court has the exclusive right to say what the law is because it exists outside the system of checks and balances.
Towards an Independent State Legislature in Georgia During the 2008 Midterm Elections: Senator Chuck Schumer and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul
The suspension of the law was extended by the Ohio decision. The state’s abortion ban is on hold while the court case proceeds, giving a bit more certainty for providers and women.
The seat Veronica Klinefelt was trying to win in suburban Detroit is important to her party as they look to take back the chamber. “I am tired of seeing cuts in aging communities like ours,” she told one voter, gesturing to a cul-de-sac pocked with cracks and crevasses. “We need to reinvest here.”
Democratic governors have fought efforts to impose restrictive abortion laws in several states, so they will be key in the governor’s races.
The justices are expected to decide whether to grant nearly unfettered authority over such elections to state legislatures — a legal argument known as the independent state legislature theory. If the court does so, many Democrats believe, state legislatures could have a pathway to overrule the popular vote in presidential elections by refusing to certify the results and instead sending their own slates of electors.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer expressed some concern Thursday over Democratic prospects in Georgia in the final weeks before the midterm elections, but he remained hopeful about Pennsylvania after the their nominee’s recent debate performance.
Georgia is the state where we are going downhill. It’s hard to believe that they will go for Herschel Walker,” the Democratic leader said of the Republican Senate nominee, adding later, “But our vote, our early turnout in Georgia is huge, huge.”
Of Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman’s high-stakes debate performance against Republican Mehmet Oz, Schumer said: “It looks like the debate didn’t hurt us too much in Pennsylvania … so that’s good.”
The comments came during a conversation between Schumer, Biden and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul on the tarmac. Biden gave a speech in the state Thursday as part of his midterm closing message in which he painted Republicans as a threat to Americans’ pocketbooks.
Laura Laura Oz and the Case for an Abreast Pennsylvania Senator: The 2016 Florida Senate Primary in the Light of the Laura Lindgren Scenario
The Democrats have a chance to keep their majority in the Senate, but they need the votes of Vice President Harris to win. Georgia and Pennsylvania, which are in play, are important to the mission.
The Democratic leader said his party was “picking up steam” in Nevada, where Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto is among the party’s most vulnerable incumbents.
The Georgia race was thrown into turmoil this week after a woman claimed she was in a years-long romantic relationship with Walker. She said at a press conference on Wednesday that he pressured her into having an abortion. Walker, who has already been accused by a former girlfriend of encouraging her to have the procedure and then reimbursing her the cost, has denounced each claim as a lie. CNN has not independently confirmed the first woman’s allegations. She has not been identified in public reports.
Most polling shows that Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock has a small lead over Republican Walker in the final stretch of the campaign.
Fetterman wants to turn voters attention to the abortion issue in Pennsylvania, which is where Oz talked about the procedure in the debate. The Republican said that “local politicians” should contribute to women’s medical decisions.
“You can’t afford to give a clown a vote on Roe v. Wade,” Fetterman told MSNBC’s Joy Reid on Thursday, adding that Oz’s comment showed “what he actually believes about abortion.”
But while Democrats immediately seized on Oz’s comments in their paid advertising, most of the post-debate attention was focused on the effects of Fetterman’s stroke.
It was important to be there and we wanted to be there. And we showed up,” the Democrat told Reid. “And getting knocked down, I always got back up. And, to me, that’s really at the essence of our campaign, is that we’re running for any Pennsylvanian that ever got knocked down that has to get back up. That is what we are running on.
The Case for Inflation: Reflections from the House and Senate, and a Case Study of Democratic and Republican Congressional Campaigns in the United States
Sign up to get the weekly column as a newsletter. We’re looking back at the strongest, smartest opinion takes of the week from CNN and other outlets.
The war in the Ukraine is a classic VUCA moment. So is Tuesday’s midterm election in the US. The vote for all the seats in the House and more than a third in the Senate is volatile, uncertain, complex and potentially, ambiguous.
Will this be a judgement on the leadership of Joe Biden and the Democrats in Congress? Will it strengthen or weaken the election denialism adopted by GOP after Donald Trump refused to accept his election loss? If GOP control of one or both chambers of Congress, how would America’s future be shaped over the next two years?
The election is being fought on issues that the two parties differ on. Republicans emphasize inflation, crime and immigration in their campaign while democrats focus on threats to democracy and the overturn of the Wade amendment.
Republicans think they have the momentum in their effort to recapture control of the House and Senate, argued Alice Stewart, “because they have listened to voters, heard their concerns, and offered solutions. Democrats chose to focus on threats to democracy over everyday concerns about the cost of groceries and gas when it came to real issues impacting Americans. This election is not about fear of a fallen democracy, but about the basic need to feed families.
Democrats think the warnings they make about the future of democracy are correct. Dean Obeidallah wrote, “We all understand inflation is temporary but losing our democracy could be permanent.” He pointed out that a majority of the GOP nominees on the ballot for the 2020 election have denied or questioned the results. We have never seen anything like this in our lifetimes – if ever in the history of the United States.”
Voters prefer the economy to be top of mind. Meg Jacobs wrote that it was nothing new. She pointed out that the first televised political advertisement, for the winning Republican presidential candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952, focused on inflation. He talks to a woman who complains about high prices being a burden and Eisenhower promises to fight for her. That was at a time when inflation was less than 2%!”
“Battles over inflation — what’s the cause, who is to blame, what is there to do — get to basic fights over who should have what. Should corporations earn bigger profits, should workers earn higher wages and should consumers shoulder the burden of both?”
Lower-income households and workers are feeling the effects of rising energy prices, wrote Mark Wolfe, executive director of the National Energy Assistance Directors Association.
An “unnecessarily painful” recession is upon us, warned an American enterprise institute analyst. The reason: the “unusually rapid pace of monetary policy tightening” by the Federal Reserve Bank, which this week hiked interest rates by three quarters of a point for the fourth time in a row. Higher rates are rapidly slowing the housing market and putting pressure on companies to cut staffing, he argued. “The Fed’s hawkish policy stance is occurring in the context of a very troubled world economy that has also been plagued by high inflation.” The Fed’s leaders have signaled that they may start moderating the pace of interest rate hikes.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/06/opinions/midterms-are-vuca-election-opinion-column-galant/index.html
Predicting the future of the presidential race: Obama, Biden, and the Clinton-Newton midterms are vacua in the election column
“Obama served up the perfect closing question for voters: ‘Who will fight for your freedom?’” The answer is that the Democrats are in charge and the former president pointed to threats to reproductive rights by some Republicans.
Having Obama make the closing argument “might not be such a great idea,” wrote Republican Marc A. Thiessen in the Washington Post. “Hindsight can be rosy, but Obama’s record of helping down-ballot Democrats is … less than stellar. In fact, Obama presided over the loss of more House, Senate, state legislative and governors’ seats than any president in U.S. history… Many Democrats are not going to have Biden join them on the campaign trail. But Obama may not be the savior they are hoping for. To the contrary, based on this disastrous record, he may be electoral kryptonite.”
There are so many governorships across the country that on Tuesday, pivotal races will determine who controls the House, Senate and thousands of other positions. CNN has a My Election tool that will allow you to build a custom dashboard with contests that matter to you. Log in or create your free CNN account to get started.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/06/opinions/midterms-are-vuca-election-opinion-column-galant/index.html
The Washington, DC Metropolitan Police Officer Michael Fanone in the wake of the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol. What has the Congress done to end our democracy?
Former Washington, DC, Metropolitan Police officer Michael Fanone, who was injured in the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol, wrote, “When I speak privately with fellow officers who defended the US Capitol on January 6, the conversation often turns to why so many Americans remain indifferent about the insurrection. In other words, most Americans just don’t seem to care. An overt attempt to end our democracy? Meh…”
I think that the assault on Paul Pelosi will be a turning point, but I doubt it. We are no longer talking about isolated incidents or seeing universal condemnation of violence by our leaders. The 82-year-old husband of the woman who is third in line to the US presidency was beaten in his own home for political reasons, and right-wing media and some Republicans reveled in the violence,” Fanone added.
About three-quarters of the states have some initiative up for a vote this year. Joshua A. Douglas stated that democracy was on the ballot in 2022. “Not only do we have candidates who have questioned the 2020 election or refuse to say they will accept defeat this year, but numerous states and localities also will vote on measures to change how elections are run or who may vote in them.”
Word came Friday that former President Donald Trump is likely to announce his second campaign for the White House in the next few weeks. Zelizer stated, “Democrats should not discount the threat that Trump poses.”
The Republicans are a strongly united party. Very little can shake that unity. … the ‘Never Trump’ contingent failed to emerge as a dominant force. Indeed, officials such as Congresswoman Liz Cheney were purged from the party.”
“If Republicans do well next week, possibly retaking control of the House and Senate, members of the party will surely feel confident about amping up their culture wars and economic talking points going into 2024. And given the number of election-denying candidates in the midterms, a strong showing will likely create the tailwinds for the GOP to unite behind Trump.”
Trump himself will feel emboldened, Zelizer wrote. Despite an investigation by a house committee, Trump is a viable political figure. … And once Trump is formally a candidate, it will make prosecuting him all the more difficult. Donald Trump is certain to claim that any investigation is simply a politically motivated “witch hunt” intended to take him out of the running.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/06/opinions/midterms-are-vuca-election-opinion-column-galant/index.html
The rise of antisemitism in the alt-right online communities: Elon Musk confronts his big rival, Donald Trump, and the CEO of Twitter
“The chorus of outrage about West’s disgusting attack on Jews was for many days muted – even factoring in the businesses that severed relationships with him,” Carter wrote. There is already a surge of antisemitic comments in the alt-right online communities despite the fact that some under played the impact of a big and famous person.
Elon Musk’s first few days of controlling Twitter have been tumultuous, with the Tesla CEO spreading misinformation, laying off a large share of the workforce and sharing the idea of charging users for blue-check verification status.
“Musk is making the remarkable power that US tech executives hold over our lives, from geopolitics to the health of democracy, painfully tangible to all,” wrote Marietje Schaake in the Financial Times.
“Immediately after the sale was confirmed, the number of neo-Nazi and racist tweets exploded on the site. The accounts marked as being linked to Russian and Chinese state media requested that the labels they were put on be removed. Speculation about whether Musk would reverse the account ban for extremists, conspiracy theorists or Donald Trump himself was rife.”
Musk “has placed no limits on his own speech,” wrote former advertising executive Rob Norman in the New York Times, “and, under his ownership, seems likely to enable the inflammatory, provocative and sometimes verifiably untrue speech of others.”
“I know from having represented the world’s biggest buyer of advertising space that advertisers worry about these things a lot. Advertisers might flee due to fears, costing the company almost all of its revenue. Without revenue, there is a chance that Mr. Musk will not get the chance to buy the platform.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/06/opinions/midterms-are-vuca-election-opinion-column-galant/index.html
Midterms Are Vuca Elections Column Galadasha: Martha Hickson’s Worst Year in the Job
Martha Hickson, a high school librarian in New Jersey for more than a decade, called it her worst year in the job. In 2021, protesters showed up at a school board meeting and “railed against ‘Gender Queer,’ a memoir in graphic novel form by Maia Kobabe, and ‘Lawn Boy,’ a coming-of-age novel by Jonathan Evison. They spewed selected sentences from the Evison book, while brandishing isolated images from Kobabe’s.”
“Next, they attacked Banned Books Week, an annual event celebrating the freedom to read. The protesters said it was a plot to lure kids to be degraded.
The sucker punch came when one protester branded me a paedo, pornographer and groomer of children. After a successful career, it was heartbreaking to be thrown into the villain role.
The response from Crickets was worse. The board sat in silence that night, and for the next five months refused to utter a word in my defense.”
The concluding personal essay in CNN Opinion’s series on midterm issues was written by Hickson. Nine education experts also weighed in with thoughts on how to move America’s schools forward.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/06/opinions/midterms-are-vuca-election-opinion-column-galant/index.html
The Brady-Bündchen Divorce: A Perfect Family-Celebrary Sweet Spot in a Past-Fashioned World
Elections in Latin America and the Middle East brought back familiar faces. In Brazil, former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva “posted a stunning political comeback,” beating the incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro, Arick Wierson wrote.
“Not since the end of the military dictatorship in the 1980s have Brazilians been faced with two more starkly contrasting candidates, each with diametrically opposing political outlooks for the country,” Wierson wrote. And “it’s clear that a sizable percentage of the voting population didn’t buy into either of their visions for the country.”
The last week’s election in Israel put Netanyahu in position to form a right-wing governing coalition, which will likely bring him back to power.
“Likud is the most stable and durable political party in Israel’s system. Israel is shaped more by the right wing than any other point in its history thanks to Netanyahu, who is its master.
The world of celebrity power couples is hardly uncommon in the case of the Brady and Bndchen divorce. There is enormous public interest in the split. The “fascination with the Brady-Bündchen divorce comes from the fact that this couple’s split hits a perfect celebrity sweet spot: These are two people who are absolutely nothing like us, but who nonetheless seem to be splitting up over a familiar gender dynamic that is imminently relatable.”
“Bündchen’s public comments indicate a worry about Brady’s health playing a dangerous sport and a desire – after years of sacrificing so that he could thrive professionally – for him to spend more time with their family.”
The woman who steps back to care for children in order to make her husband succeed is the one who has a hard time with the husband who pushes professionally far past when he needs to.
Abortion rights in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court decision: a challenge for Democrats and pro-choice advocates in the midterm elections
The question for Democrats — who are in a historically unfavorable position as the party in charge of the White House and facing growing concerns about inflation and the rest of the economy — is to what degree the energy unleashed by this summer’s U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade can be harnessed at the polls, and to what extent that energy can overcome voters’ economic worries.
Republicans are mostly interested in voters’ worries about the economy, inflation and crime. In some cases, they’re attempting to distance themselves from some of the most severe abortion restrictions that have taken effect since this summer’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision.
In the red state of Kansas voters resoundingly rejected a ballotinitiative that would have stated the state constitution does not contain protections for abortion rights, which was a major victory for supporters of abortion rights. But that was just about six weeks after the Dobbs decision was released.
The issue is on the ballot in several more states for this midterm election, including an anti-abortion measure in Montana, and measures in California and Vermont that would explicitly protect abortion rights in those states’ constitutions.
Abortion rights supporters have been pushing for passage of the Women’s Health Protection Act, designed to codify Roe’s protections in federal law. The legislation passed the House in a symbolic vote but did not have the necessary votes to overcome the Senate filibuster.
Marilyn Musgrave, vice president of government affairs at SBA Pro-Life America, said without a nationwide abortion ban, people will continue to travel from states with restrictions to those with more liberal abortion laws.
The president of NARAL Pro-Choice America said that it was too close for comfort, since Biden had promised he would veto any anti- abortion legislation.
Will it go that far? Sensitivity to the Supreme Court decision in Kentuckuckn’s case against a constitutional abortion right
We don’t want it to go that far. Timmaraju said that it was a bad precedent. “We’re absolutely not going to let it get to that point; that’s our goal.”
Many political analysts think that abortion rights will be a problem for Democrats in this election, which could be a tough one.
“Voting is like carrying your whole self into the ballot box; voters are whole people, they carry their whole selves into the ballot box,” he stated. When our fundamental freedoms are taken away, we don’t know if we’ll ever be able to get them back.
To that end, a coalition of national abortion rights groups is spending $150 million toward this campaign season, along with hundreds of millions more in abortion-focused ads from Democratic candidates themselves.
SBA Pro-life America’s says the group has contacted 8 million voters across the country on behalf of anti-abortion rights candidates.
Editor’s Note: Mary Ziegler is the Martin Luther King Professor of Law at UC Davis and author of the book “Dollars for Life: The Anti-Abortion Movement and the Fall of the Republican Establishment.” The views expressed here are her own. You can read the opinion on CNN.
Can Democrats manage the same thing across the country? There are limits on the plan of attack. In certain key states like Virginia, Wisconsin, Texas and Louisiana it’s hard to get a proposal before voters. And voters in conservative states have not become full-blown supporters of reproductive rights overnight. If Kentuckians were asked to vote on a constitutional abortion right, it might be different than they heard on Tuesday night.
None of this was likely to be popular. Even most Republicans support exceptions for rape, incest and health. It seems that Dobbs meant to mean that the bans on abortion go much further than the voters would like. It is not surprising that there is backlash to that.
Voters were reacting to what the Supreme Court did. There is no precedent for the court to destroy a constitutional right in a way that is disrespectful and mocking. In his opinion for the court, Justice Samuel Alito observed that more than half the electorate was female. He suggested that people could just vote if they didn’t like what the court had done. Last night, voters certainly took Alito’s advice.
More than a dozen states implemented trigger laws that banned all abortions, most without exceptions for rape or incest; others revived 19th century laws that barred almost all abortions. State laws made it harder for physicians to defend themselves when they intervened in cases of medical emergency, narrowing the kind of health threats to which physicians could respond or requiring physicians, rather than prosecutors, to prove that they needed to save a patient’s life.
State lawmakers want to go even further. Legislators in Texas have threatened the CEOs of large corporations with felony charges for reimbursing their employees for traveling out of state for abortions. The Idaho Republican platform does not allow exceptions for abortion.
And those are just the concrete consequences. But Americans’ reactions to Roe v. Wade over the past five decades were about much more than what the Supreme Court said in 1973. For a wide variety of movements and individual Americans, Roe became a symbol: for equality for women, for judicial overreaching, or even for a broad idea of reproductive justice.