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Court Finds DOMA Unconstitutional, Say It Forces MA To ‘Violate The Equal Protection Rights Of Its Citizens’

By Igor Volsky on Jul 8, 2010 at 10:27 pm

0403_court_decisionToday, a Federal District Court in Boston ruled that Section 3 of Defense of Marriage Act (“DOMA”) — the section of the 1996 law which denies federal benefits to legally married same sex couples — is unconstitutional, stating that it interferes with the traditional state right to define marriage and forces the state to “violate the equal protection rights of its citizens.” [Read the decision HERE.]

The decision is composed of two separate challenges, one brought by the state of Massachusetts and the other by Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders (GLAD) “on behalf of eight married couples and three surviving spouses from Massachusetts” who have been denied federal benefits available to heterosexual married couples.

In his decision, U.S. district court Judge Joseph Tauro concluded that “there is a historically entrenched tradition of federal reliance on state marital status determination,” and found that DOMA not only violates the tenth amendment but also “induces the Commonwealth to violate the equal protection rights of its citizens” embodied in the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment.

“DOMA plainly conditions the receipt of federal funding on the denial of marriage-based benefits to same-sex married couples, though the same benefits are provided to similarly-situated heterosexual couples,” the Court ruled:

As irrational prejudice plainly never constitutes a legitimate government interest, this court must hold Section 3 of DOMA as applied to Plaintiffs violates the equal protection principles embodied in the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

The decision is a milestone, but is expected to be appealed by the Justice Department. In the case, the federal government maintained that it “has the right to set eligibility requirements for federal benefits — including requiring that those benefits only go to couples in marriages between a man and a woman.”

“The next step in the case is for the federal government to decide whether it will appeal Judge Tauro’s ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. That decision should come within the next 60 days,” GLAD said in a press release.

Cross-posted on The Wonk Room.

Yglesias

Pat Riley is an Evil Genius

By Matthew Yglesias on Jul 8, 2010 at 10:20 pm

Quite a coup. Still, it seems pretty clear to me that LeBron’s best chance of winning championships would have been to sign with the Chicago Bulls. You’d need to add a shooting guard of some kind via the midlevel exception, but then you’d be looking at a starting lineup of Joakim Noah / Carlos Boozer / LeBron James / Shooting Guard X / Derek Rose with two very quality guys off the bench in Taj Gibson and Luol Deng. By contrast, it seems to me that it’s going to be very difficult for Miami to piece together the depth at 4-5 that they’ll need to seriously hang with LA, the Magic, or some hypothetical healthy version of Portland.

Politics

Angle: Rape victims should use their pregnancies as a way to turn lemons into lemonade.

By Tanya Somanader on Jul 8, 2010 at 8:05 pm

angleIn her campaign to capture the Nevada Senate seat from Harry Reid (D), Tea Party maven Sharron Angle (R) has maintained a hardline view on abortion. Earlier this year, Angle insisted that women should not have control over their reproductive rights in cases of rape or incest, because it would “interfere with God’s ‘plan’ for them.” In a more recent interview obtained by the Huffington Post’s Sam Stein, Angle refused to back down from her “pro-life sensibilities” and offered a more jarring take on rape victims. On the right-wing Alan Stock Show in June, Angle suggested that “a young girl raped by her father” deal with the “horrific situation” by making lemons into lemonade:

STOCK: What do you say then to a young girl, I am going to place it as he said it, when a young girl is raped by her father, let’s say, and she is pregnant. How do you explain this to her in terms of wanting her to go through the process of having the baby?

ANGLE: I think that two wrongs don’t make a right. And I have been in the situation of counseling young girls, not 13 but 15, who have had very at risk, difficult pregnancies. And my counsel was to look for some alternatives, which they did. And they found that they had made what was really a lemon situation into lemonade. Well one girl in particular moved in with the adoptive parents of her child, and they both were adopted. Both of them grew up, one graduated from high school, the other had parents that loved her and she also graduated from high school. And I’ll tell you the little girl who was born from that very poor situation came to me when she was 13 and said ‘I know what you did thank you for saving my life.’ So it is meaningful to me to err on the side of life.

Angle is not shy in making glib remarks about Nevadans enduring hardship. In another interview last month, Angle determined that those without jobs are “spoiled” and that she is “not in the business of creating jobs.” Incidentally, June was also the month Nevada became “the new no.1” in the U.S. for unemployment.

Health

IRS Ombudsman Undermines GOP’s Fearmongering About ’16,500 New IRS Agents’ And The Individual Mandate

By Igor Volsky on Jul 8, 2010 at 7:53 pm

IRS_logoThe National Taxpayer Advocate’s Nina Olson, also known as the IRS ombudsman, issued a report today warning lawmakers that the agency does not have enough resources or manpower to enforce all of the provisions in the new health care law:

Spending for IRS taxpayer service programs has been declining in recent years. At the same time, more taxpayers have been contacting the IRS for assistance as the IRS has been tasked with administering an increasing number of social benefit programs,….The report says that as a result of the imbalance between taxpayer demand and IRS resources, the IRS has fallen short of providing adequate taxpayer service in important areas. [...]

Second, with respect to the IRS’s ability to deliver social programs, the report expresses concern that the IRS currently is neither structured nor funded to do the job effectively….Congress must provide sufficient funding and the IRS itself must recognize that the skills and training required to administer social benefit programs are very different from the skills and training that employees of an enforcement agency typically possess. ”

The report calls on Congress to adequately fund the agency, but it also undermines the GOP’s fearmongering about the IRS. Immediately after health care reform passed, Fox News and Republican lawmakers started pushing a talking point claiming that the IRS will need to hire more than 16,500 new agents to enforce the insurance mandate in the law and that the agency will impose harsh punishments on those who don’t purchase insurance. The claim originated from a report prepared by the Republican staff of the House Ways and Means Committee and was parroted by prominent Republican lawmakers. Rep. Dave Camp (R-MI) calling it a “dangerous expansion of the IRS’s power and reach into the lives of virtually every American.” Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) warned Fox News host Sean Hannity that “the IRS will be tasked with breathing down the neck of 300 million Americans every month to determine whether we have purchased governmentally acceptable levels of health insurance.”

IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman dismissed the GOP claims back in March, and now some Republican lawmakers are also backing away. In yesterday’s report card on the health care law’s first 100 days, for instance, Sens. Tom Coburn (R-OK) and John Barrasso (R-WY) argued that the IRS “can’t enforce the law requiring people to buy insurance because the new law deprives it of the powers it needs to do so.” The ombudsman’s report contradicts this claim as well. “I have no doubt the IRS is capable of administering social programs, including health care,” she said.

Economy

Minneapolis Fed President Endorses Tax To Ensure That Banks Pay ‘The Full Costs’ Of Their Riskiness

By Pat Garofalo on Jul 8, 2010 at 7:15 pm

Minneapolis Federal Reserve Board President Narayana Kocherlakota

Minneapolis Federal Reserve Board President Narayana Kocherlakota

During the financial regulatory reform debate, a fee on the country’s biggest banks that would have gone towards a resolution fund for unwinding a systemically risky financial firm was discarded after complaints from Republican lawmakers. At the same time, the financial services industry is gearing up to fight a $90 billion bank fee proposed by the Obama administration (even though such a fee is required by law to recoup losses resulting from the Troubled Asset Relief Program) on the grounds that “it violates the bill of attainder clause of the Constitution.”

The notion that a bank tax violates the Constitution is silly, but this highlights the difficulty that Democrats in Congress and the administration have had getting such a tax enacted. Today, though, bank tax advocates have one more ally — Minnesota Federal Reserve Bank President Narayana Kocherlakota, who in a speech advocated for creating a tax on bank risk:

I will argue that, knowing bailouts are inevitable, financial institutions fail to internalize all the risks that their investment decisions impose on society. Economists would say that bailouts thereby create a risk ‘externality.’ There is nearly a century of economic thought about how to deal with externalities of various sorts — and the usual answer is through taxation. Taxes are a good response because they create incentives for firms to internalize the costs that would otherwise be external.

“It is useful to tax a financial institution producing a risk externality, just as it is useful to tax a firm generating a pollution externality. The purpose of the tax in both instances is to ensure that the targeted firm pays the full costs — private and social — of its production decisions,” Kocherlakota added.

As Bloomberg News pointed out, the speech puts Kocherlakota, “closer than any other Fed official to the positions taken by the Obama administration and International Monetary Fund.” Plus, the concept of a bank tax has been embraced by the European Union, so there’s no need to worry about competitiveness issues with European banks (though those concerns are likely overblown anyway).

As David Leonhardt wrote in the New York Times, “a bank tax is akin to an insurance policy that taxpayers would require Wall Street to hold. The premiums on that policy would keep Wall Street from making big profits in good times while foisting its losses on society in bad.” Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, meanwhile, has called for the U.S. to “step up and lead” by implementing a bank tax, thereby showing the rest of the world that such a move can work. Now it’s just up to a reluctant Congress to actually get it done.

Security

Conservatives Profess Support For Defense Budget Cuts, But Still Want Weapons The Pentagon Calls Unnecessary

By Pat Garofalo on Jul 8, 2010 at 7:00 pm

With the country facing unsustainable long-term structural deficits in the coming years, more and more lawmakers have been willing to broach the once untouchable subject of cutting defense spending to save money. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) said a few weeks ago that “any conversation about the deficit that leaves out defense spending is seriously flawed before it begins.” Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) added that “there are billions of dollars of waste you can get out of the Pentagon, lots of procurement waste. We’re buying some weapons systems I would argue you don’t need anymore.”

Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-GA) tried to sing the right notes yesterday, saying with regard to defense spending that “there are savings everywhere. We should be looking, as a Congress, toward finding savings.” However, Isakson that bristled at the notion that a program the Pentagon has repeatedly said it doesn’t want should be cut:

One expenditure, the second engine for the F-35 program, did receive Isakson’s support. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has recommended President Obama veto any defense spending bill that includes funding of the second engine. “The second engine makes sense from a standpoint of having a redundant system to protect the aircraft,” he said.

Gates has called the second engine “costly and unnecessary,” while U.S. Air Force Secretary Michael Donley has referred to it as “another rock” on top of the F-35 program.

Isakson is hardly alone in paying lip service to cutting defense spending while opposing actual cuts in weapons systems that no one wants. Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) has said “if we are going to put our fiscal house in order, everything has to be on the table. We have to be willing to look at domestic spending, we have to be able to look at entitlements, and we have to look at defense.” But Pence also supports the second engine.

And then there is conservative darling Sarah Palin, who said in a speech last month that “no government agency should be immune from budget scrutiny,” but then proceeded to say that we absolutely must purchase all the weapons Gates says we don’t need. “[Gates] said we have to ask whether the nation can really afford a Navy that relies on $3 [billion] to $6 billion destroyers, $7 billion submarines and $11 billion carriers,” Palin said. “Well, my answer is pretty simple: Yes, we can and yes, we do.”

In the last 10 years, the defense budget has almost doubled to $549 billion, and in real terms baseline defense spending “is now higher than at the height of the Reagan buildup, and total defense spending now exceeds what we spent any time since World War II.” As Ryan has said, “you know the current Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, he’s going a pretty good job of identifying obsolete weapons systems that are costing tens of billions of dollars that aren’t needed.” Now if only he could get Congress to go along.

Climate Progress

Bush MMS Director Defends Tenure: ‘When I Was There It Seemed To Work Well’

By Brad Johnson on Jul 8, 2010 at 6:28 pm

Johnnie Burton
Johnnie Burton, former MMS director

Johnnie Burton, the director of Bush’s Minerals Management Service (MMS) from 2002 to 2007, has no regrets about her tenure, saying in an interview that she found no problems within the agency, now disbanded in disgrace. Burton — at 70 now a case worker for Rep. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) — defended her record to the Caspar, WY, Star-Tribune. Under Burton, the “mismanaged, unaccountable” agency was so corrupt that even pro-drilling Republicans like Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) bashed the agency. Burton responded with insouciant calm, telling the Star-Tribune “when I was there it seemed to work well“:

As for allegations of lax enforcement at the Minerals Management Service, grossly inadequate spill response plans and other regulatory shortfalls, Burton said that as MMS director she was unaware of those problems. “I can’t answer all these questions at this point because when I was there it seemed to work well,” Burton said.

The agency worked so “well” that investigators found evidence of “cronyism and cover-ups of management blunders; capitulation to oil companies in disputes about payments; plunging morale among auditors; and unreliable data-gathering that often makes it impossible to determine how much money companies actually owe.”

Burton was in charge during the development of the offshore drilling plan that expanded drilling to the site of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Her Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Leasing Program 2007-2012 included 2008′s Lease Sale 206, in which BP purchased Mississippi Canyon Block 252 (MC252) for $34 million. MC252, also known as the Macondo Prospect, has been flooding the Gulf of Mexico with oil for months now. Burton’s plan dismissed the environmental threat of that sale, primarily because no huge disasters had taken place since the Ixtoc I blowout in 1979, as these excerpts show:

The analysis above shows that with regard to potential oil spill impacts, areas that contain wetlands and marshes such as the Central GOM are particularly sensitive. However, lessees have been producing oil and gas from the Central Gulf and other areas for over 50 years with a remarkable record of environmental safety. For more than 30 years, there have been no significant oil spills from platforms anywhere on the OCS. [p. 92]

No Environmental Justice impacts from accidental oil spills are expected because of the movement of oil and gas activities further away from coastal areas and, also, the demographic pattern of more affluent groups living in coastal areas. [p. 60]

The Central Gulf coastal area ranks second in marine primary productivity only to the Mid-Atlantic. The marine primary productivity of the Central Gulf does not appear to have been appreciably diminished by offshore exploration and production activities. The same is true of other areas of the OCS with existing operations and production. Thus, the size, location, and timing of lease sales in the PFP are consistent with the marine primary productivity of the areas in which lease sales will be held. [p. 95]

Overall, impacts on national parks, national wildlife refuges, national estuarine research reserves, and national estuary program sites due to routine operations are expected to be limited under the proposed action because these areas are restricted from development. Impacts from oil spills are unlikely because it is anticipated that 75 percent of the hydrocarbons developed, as a result of the 2007-2012 leasing program in the GOM area are expected to occur in deep water (>330 m) usually located far from the shoreline. [p. 57]

Any single large spill would likely affect only a small proportion of a given fish population within the GOM, and it is unlikely that fish resources would be permanently affected. [p. 57]

In areas with a large proportion of impact-sensitive industry, such as tourism, the potential incremental impacts of oil spills would likely result in a one-time seasonal decline in business activity. [p. 59]

Impacts of accidental releases to water quality would depend on the size of the spill, type of material or product spilled, and environmental factors at the time of the spill. However, there would be no long-term, widespread impairment of marine water quality. [p. 60]

Read more

Climate Progress

In a bizarre self-inflicted wound, The New Republic hires right-wing misinformer to debunk its articles

By Joe Romm on Jul 8, 2010 at 6:27 pm

Jim Manzi’s flawed critique of Al Gore’s piece

Why would you trust a magazine that doesn’t trust itself?  In a baffling display of ‘balance as bias’ — or perhaps ‘balance as baloney‘ — The New Republic has hired right-wing misinformer Jim Manzi to spread confusion about their articles.

Maybe magazines don’t bother employing fact checkers anymore, but when I coauthored the cover story for the Atlantic Monthly in 1996, “MidEast Oil Forever?” Drifting Toward Disaster, the magazine not only edited the piece, they made me provide a credible published source for every claim.  Even today, I know magazines like Wired fact-check every article.

But TNR appears to have proudly hired Manzi to un-fact-check their articles — at least in the area of energy and the environment, Manzi mostly spreads misinformation.   Indeed, as I will show, Manzi utterly misrepresents the important work of Harvard economist Martin Weitzman, which he discusses at length but doesn’t appear to know the first thing about.

I say TNR “proudly” hired Manzi because editor Franklin Foer has a June 22 column bizarrely titled, “The In-House Critics: Keeping TNR Honest” touting this self-inflicted wound to its credibility:  “it is an honor to be the subject of their criticism.”

I know, you probably thought that the “center-left” magazine paid Foer and Martin Peretz and a slew of other editors (and, one hopes, fact checkers) to keep them honest.  How wrong you are!

Read more

LGBT

Court Finds DOMA Unconstitutional, Forces Massachusetts To ‘Violate The Equal Protection Rights Of Its Citizens’

By Igor Volsky on Jul 8, 2010 at 5:44 pm

0403_court_decisionMoments ago, a Federal District Court in Boston ruled that Section 3 of Defense of Marriage Act (“DOMA”) — the section of the 1996 law which denies federal benefits to legally married same sex couples — is unconstitutional, saying that it interferes with the traditional state right to define marriage and forces the state to “violate the equal protection rights of its citizens.” [Read the decision HERE.]

The decision is composed of two separate challenges, one brought by the state of Massachusetts and the other by Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders (GLAD) “on behalf of eight married couples and three surviving spouses from Massachusetts” who have been denied federal benefits available to heterosexual married couples.

In his decision, U.S. District Judge Joseph Tauro concluded that “there is a historically entrenched tradition of federal reliance on state marital status determination,” and found that DOMA not only violates the tenth amendment but also “induces the Commonwealth to violate the equal protection rights of its citizens” embodied in the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment.

“DOMA plainly conditions the receipt of federal funding on the denial of marriage-based benefits to same-sex married couples, though the same benefits are provided to similarly-situated heterosexual couples,” the Court ruled:

As irrational prejudice plainly never constitutes a legitimate government interest, this court must hold Section 3 of DOMA as applied to Plaintiffs violates the equal protection principles embodied in the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

The decision is a milestone, but is expected to be appealed by the Justice Department. In the case, the federal government maintained that it “has the right to set eligibility requirements for federal benefits — including requiring that those benefits only go to couple sin marriages between a man and a woman.”

“The next step in the case is for the federal government to decide whether it will appeal Judge Tauro’s ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. That decision should come within the next 60 days,” GLAD said in a press release.

Update

On a conference call with reporters, GLAD explained that the ruling only applies to the state of Massachusetts. Theoretically, same sex couples would be eligible for federal benefits, although GLAD expects the federal government to request a stay and appeal the decision.

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