Welcome to Justiceline, ThinkProgress Justice’s morning round-up of the latest legal news and developments. Remember to follow us on Twitter at @TPJustice.
- When he’s not busy claiming that Medicare is unconstitutional, Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) likes to tout his tort reform law as a way to reduce health care costs. He’s wrong. Texas’ “costs have grown at a rate of 7.4 percent through 2004, the last year for which data is available. The average rate of growth for the entire country is 6.7 percent.”
- A Perry apologist at the National Review claims that Perry’s belief that “federal laws regulating the environment, regulating guns, protecting civil rights, establishing the massive programs and Medicare and Medicaid, creating national minimum wage laws, [and] establishing national labor laws” are unconstitutional is “about as mainstream of a conservative position on constitutional law as there is.” That means that Justice Antonin Scalia, who disagrees with Perry on all of this, is a radical leftist, or something.
- Two new studies suggest that sex offender registries do little, if anything, to reduce recidivism among registrants.
- The Washington Post reminds us that the Senate went on a five week vacation without confirming 20 judicial nominees waiting for a confirmation vote.
- The Sixth Circuit upheld an American soldier’s conviction for killing an Iraqi family while he was stationed in that country.
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