"We hold that a nonconsensual search of a DWI suspect's blood conducted pursuant to the mandatory-blood-draw and implied-consent provisions in the Transportation Code, when undertaken in the absence of a warrant or any applicable exception to the warrant requirement, violates the Fourth Amendment," Judge Elsa Alcala of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals wrote on behalf of the five majority opinion judges. Four members of the nine-judge court dissented.
The ruling stems from the 2012 case of David Villarreal, who was pulled over in Nueces County for a traffic violation. After refusing to perform sobriety tests in the field, Villarreal was arrested and taken to a local hospital to have his blood drawn against his will and without a warrant. The arresting officer said the move was legal because state law requires the taking of a breath or blood sample of anyone previously convicted two or more times of driving while intoxicated.
Senate Democrats successfully blocked a bill Tuesday that would have approved construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. The controversial measure fell one vote shy of overcoming a filibuster, with 59 senators supporting it and 41 opposing. The vote followed the bill’s approval in the House by a much wider margin, with 252 lawmakers voting to advance the pipeline.
The vote largely fell along party lines. All Senate Republicans supported construction of the pipeline but they were joined by 14 Democrats, including three of the four Democrat incumbents who lost their re-election bids earlier this month. For Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), the bill’s main sponsor, the vote was considered an important test of her effectiveness in advance of a Dec. 6 runoff that will determine whether she keeps her seat. In the House, 31 Democrats crossed the aisle to side with the Republican majority.
1. The share of Americans who express consistently conservative or consistently liberal opinions has doubled over the past two decades, from 10% to 21%.
2. Partisan antipathy has risen.
3. “Ideological silos” are now common on the right and, to a lesser extent, the left. About six-in-ten (63%) consistent conservatives and 49% of consistent liberals say most of their close friends share their political views.
4. Differences between the right and left go beyond politics.
5. The center has gotten smaller: 39% of Americans currently take a roughly equal number of liberal and conservative positions, down from 49% in surveys conducted in 1994 and 2004.
6. The most ideologically oriented Americans make their voices heard through greater participation in every stage of the political process.
7. To those on the ideological right and left, compromise now means that their side gets more of what it wants.
President Obama has taken significant steps to the left since his party’s devastating losses in the midterm elections.
In a surprise, he announced a major deal on climate change with China during a trip to Beijing Tuesday. That followed another unanticipated move — a Monday statement pressuring the Federal Communications Commission to adopt new net neutrality rules for the Internet.
The moves are helping to rally a dispirited Democratic base while re-establishing Obama’s political leadership after he was sidelined during the midterms.
“He’s at his best when his back is against the wall,” said Democratic strategist Bob Shrum. “Jeremiah Wright in 2008, Scott Brown’s election in 2009, after the first debate in 2012 — he comes back and tends to fight pretty hard.”
“He’s a fourth-quarter player, and he’s in the fourth quarter of his presidency,” Shrum added.
The moves are also prompting questions about whether Obama is shifting to the left in his final two years in office, or if the moves are meant to cushion the blow when he moves to the center to negotiate with a Republican-controlled Congress.
A full two-thirds said they simply didn't have enough time to vote. More than half of this group - 35 percent of the total - said that scheduling conflicts with work or school kept them from getting to the polls last Tuesday. Another 34 percent of the total said they were simply too busy, or that they were sick, out of town, or forgot about election day.
Twenty percent said they didn't like the candidates, didn't know enough to vote, or simply didn't care. And another 10 percent said that technical difficulties kept them from the polls - a missed registration deadline, a recent move or lack of transportation.
In short, voters didn't make it to the polls for two overarching reasons - either they were indifferent and couldn't be bothered, or there were structural forces conspiring against them - rigid job/school schedules or difficulties with the voting process overall.
Governor-elect Greg Abbott won with 44 percent of the Latino vote, and Sen. John Cornyn won 48 percent, both improvements over the 38 percent Gov. Rick Perry earned when he was elected in 2011 for his third term.
Republican strategists in the state point out tha Abbott made 17 visits to the heavily Hispanic Rio Grande Valley during his campaign and ran months' worth of ads featuring his Latina wife and mother-in-law. His campaign ran his first Spanish-language spot during the World Cup game between Mexico and Brazil.
"The Latino voters cannot be taken for granted. The right candidate with the right message can make a difference," says Jorge Lima, the policy director for the LIBRE Institute, a nonprofit that promotes free-market principles in the Hispanic Community.
Another factor, Republicans say, that helped Abbott win Latino voters and undermined Democratic efforts in the state, was the candidate Abbott was running against. His Democratic opponent, Wendy Davis, had burst onto the national scene as a fierce defender of abortion rights. Latino voters, however, tend to be much more socially conservative than other Democratic constituencies. While reproductive rights might motivate millennials and single women voters, it's not an issue that drives Latinos to the polls for Democrats in droves.
"The results were partly a backlash against that blatant liberalism from the Davis campaign and from Battleground Texas," Texas-based Republican strategist Ray Sullivan says. "The message she delivered did not play with Hispanic Texans."
Over the dissents of five judges, the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit refused on Wednesday to rehear the sequel of the University of Texas affirmative action case, Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin. The order is here. That decision, supported by ten judges, leaves intact a divided three-judge panel ruling upholding some use of race in selecting the university’s incoming freshman classes. The panel ruled after the Supreme Court ordered it to take a new look.
A statement by the organization that has arranged Abigail Fisher’s challenge, indicating that the case will be taken back to the Supreme Court, is here. Ms. Fisher sued the flagship university after being denied admission; she claimed her rejection was due to her race — she is white.
After a Fifth Circuit panel had upheld the university’s first-year admissions program, which made some use of race, the case went to the Supreme Court. The Justices overturned that decision, finding that the university had not given an adequate justification for the role that race had played in the process.
The Fifth Circuit panel upheld the plan again in July, and Ms. Fisher pursued en banc review by the full Fifth Circuit. The majority of ten judges did not explain their refusal to vote for further review. Circuit Judge Emilio M. Garza, who had dissented from the panel decision, wrote a one-page opinion dissenting from the denial of en banc review. He referred mainly to his prior dissent.
He was joined in dissent by Circuit Judges Edith Brown Clement, Edith H. Jones, Priscilla R. Owen, and Jerry E. Smith.
It is doubtful that the new case will reach the Supreme Court in time to be decided in the current Term, even if review is granted. Ms. Fisher has ninety days to file for review.
Establishment Republicans, who had vowed to thwart the Tea Party, succeeded in electing new lawmakers who are, for the most part, less rebellious. And when the new Congress convenes in January, the Republican leaders who will take the reins will be mainly in the mold of conservatives who have tried to keep the Tea Party in check.
But they have not crushed the movement’s spirit.
As Republicans on Capitol Hill transition from being the opposition party to being one that has to show it can govern, a powerful tension is emerging: how to move forward with an agenda that challenges the president without self-destructing.
Some conservatives believe that the threat of another shutdown is their strongest leverage to demand concessions on the health care law and to stop the president from carrying out immigration reform through executive order. Yet their leadership has dismissed the idea as a suicide mission that could squander the recent gains.
In 2010, the Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court effectively blew apart the McCain-Feingold restrictions on outside groups and their use of corporate and labor money in elections. That same year, a related ruling from a lower court made it easier for wealthy individuals to finance those groups to the bottom of their bank accounts if they so chose. What followed has been the most unbridled spending in elections since before Watergate. In 2000, outside groups spent $52 million on campaigns, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. By 2012, that number had increased to $1 billion.
The result was a massive power shift, from the party bosses to the rich individuals who ran the super PACs (as most of these new organizations came to be called). Almost overnight, traditional party functions — running TV commercials, setting up field operations, maintaining voter databases, even recruiting candidates — were being supplanted by outside groups. And the shift was partly because of one element of McCain-Feingold that remains: the ban on giving unlimited soft money to parties. In the party universe, rich players like the Wylys, Tom Steyer or the Kochs were but single planets among many. The party bosses had to balance their interests against those who brought just as much to the table in the form of money or votes. A party platform has to account for both the interests of the oil industry and those of the ethanol industry; those of the casino industry and those of the anti-gambling religious right; those of Wall Street and those of labor.
Resistance leaders and the Continental Congress repeatedly urged George III to take their side in the struggle against Parliament’s assertion that it possessed unlimited authority to enact laws governing the colonies “in all cases whatsoever.” In their view, the king should act as a wholly independent monarch who would treat each of his empire’s representative assemblies as possessing essentially the same authority. If Parliament overstepped its power in enacting laws for the colonists, the king should intervene, wielding his royal veto against unjust legislation. He should act, as Thomas Jefferson memorably wrote in 1774, as “the balance of a great, if a well poised empire.” Far from clinging unthinkingly to the Glorious Revolution settlement of 1688 and its aftermath, which made the British king a decidedly constitutional and limited monarch, George III should reclaim his prerogative and vigorously exercise the independent powers that custom and theory located in the executive.
Texas turnout, already the worst in the country, dropped. The state’s population is larger than it was in 2010. More than 14 million Texans registered to vote, according to the secretary of state — up from 13.3 million in 2010. Turnout that year was 37.5 percent. Turnout this year (the numbers are unofficial) was 33.6 percent.
The people who did not show up appear to be Democrats. The Republican numbers were up in the governor’s race, while the Democratic numbers were way down.
At a post-election discussion last week, Gilberto Hinojosa, chairman of the Texas Democratic Party, suggested the voter ID law might be to blame for the decline, implying that Democrats are more numerous among non-voters than Republicans. His opposite on the Republican side — Steve Munisteri — guffawed at that, instead crediting his own party’s turnout efforts, the state’s recent voting history and the national trend against Democrats.
Munisteri skeptically answered a question about whether Texans should be allowed to register and vote on the same day. He fears that would introduce an opportunity for fraud — the same concern cited by proponents of the voter ID law. Actual cases of the type of in-person voter fraud targeted by that law are scarce. And it will take some time to know whether the new law was to blame for the decline in voter turnout.
Texas Democrats acknowledge that Republicans have been particularly successful in defeating white Democrats in rural districts.
Republicans have focused on white Democrats in a “very calculated” way “because they wanted to push this idea that the Democratic Party was just about minorities, which is not true,” said Jim Dunnam of Waco, a former representative who lost his seat to a Republican in 2010.
Political analysts said Democrats have been losing in rural areas because they are easier targets. Jerry Polinard, a political-science professor at the University of Texas-Pan American, said Republicans have focused on capturing districts with a majority of white residents, lightly redrawing district lines to favor their candidates.
Districts made up largely of minorities, which tend to lean Democratic, are not easily redrawn without inciting legal challenges, Polinard said.
“Obviously, in terms of the demographics of voting, Republicans pull much more strongly from the white vote,” Polinard said. Historically, minorities in Texas tend to vote Democratic.
Though political scientists long have noted the midterm dropoff, they don’t agree on precisely what it means. In an influential 1987 article, James E. Campbell theorized that “the surge of interest and information in presidential elections” typically works to the advantage of one party or the other; that party’s partisans become more likely to vote, while those of the disadvantaged party are more likely to stay home during presidential elections. Independents, “lacking a standing partisan commitment…should divide disproportionately in favor of the advantaged party.” Midterm elections lack that “wow” factor, according to Campbell, and turnout among both partisans and independents return to more normal levels and patterns.
A recent paper by Brown University researcher Brian Knight seeks to evaluate that surge-and-decline theory, as well as two competing explanations of why the president’s party nearly always loses seats at the midterms: a “presidential penalty,” or general preference among midterm voters for expressing dissatisfaction with the president’s performance or ensuring that his party doesn’t control all the levers of government, and recurring shifts in voter ideology between presidential and midterm elections. Knight concluded that while all three factors contribute to what he calls the “midterm gap,” the presidential penalty has the most impact.
Everybody in competitive races. Georgia Rep. John Barrow, Minnesota Rep. Collin Peterson, and West Virginia Rep. Nick Rahall are among the very last Democrats in districts that voted for the Romney-Ryan ticket in 2012. They went "aye." So did Iowa Rep. Bruce Braley and Michigan Rep. Gary Peters, both Senate candidates in tough races. On the Republican side, Senate candidates Tom Cotton and Steve Daines voted "aye," as did Colorado Rep. Mike Coffman and Florida Rep. Steve Southerland. They're the only two Republicans in seats that appear now to be toss-ups, with strong Democratic challengers cutting through the headwind.
Texas does not illegally prevent churches from campaigning for the recall of elected officials, a federal judge ruled.
Two Houston churches, the Houston First Church of God and Joint Heirs Fellowship Church, and Faith Outreach International Center, a San Antonio congregation, sued Texas Ethics Commission Director Natalia Ashley in January.
The lawsuit challenged parts of the state's election code that the churches claim illegally prevents them from supporting recall efforts.
At the time a campaign was under way in San Antonio to recall former Mayor Julian Castro and seven City Council members, for proposing an ordinance the churches say violated their freedoms of religion and speech.
The churches wanted to work together to support the San Antonio recall, through signature gathering, fund raising and speaking from the pulpit.
They alleged in an amended complaint that Texas law illegally restricts their political activities because they "cannot be involved in supporting the recall efforts through raising money, donating money, coordinating people's activities, promoting the recall effort on church websites, [or] allowing petitions to be signed and distributed on church grounds."
U.S. District Judge Sim Lake dismissed the lawsuit Tuesday, finding the incorporated churches lacked standing to challenge a law that bans corporations or labor organizations from making political contributions, including circulating petitions, for a recall election.
Because the churches are free to form a "direct campaign expenditure only committee" and Texas election officials would be barred from prohibiting their contributions to the committee under an injunction imposed by the 5th Circuit, Lake found the churches do not have standing.
A representative of the churches testified that they are against registering a political committee in any form.
. . . Lake found the statute was neither vague nor overbroad "because a person of ordinary intelligence can generally understand whether they are making an indirect transfer to a political committee by examining whether they coordinated with that committee with regard to a particular activity."
Plaintiffs' attorney Jerad Najvar said the ruling left in place a law that infringes the free speech rights of churches.
"The point that bears the most emphasis here is that our clients are churches whose First Amendment rights remain chilled under a law - a ban on corporate contributions to recall efforts - that even the Texas Ethics Commission refused to defend on the merits," Najvar told Courthouse News in an email.
"This is a critical issue. Churches are the natural hub of free association on some of the most important political issues of the 21st century, just as they were integral to organization preceding the American Revolution and on various issues of the 20th century, including civil rights. We are evaluating the court's decision and all of our options, including an appeal," Najvar said.
He will go from being Agriculture Commissioner to head of a major lobbying group - as these folks tend to do. Another example of the revolving door.Agriculture CommissionerTodd Staples lost out on his bid to be lieutenant governor, but he might be in line for another job before his term ends in January.
The Tribune's Jim Malewitz is reporting that Staples is set to be named the next head of the Texas Oil and Gas Association (TXOGA), the state’s largest and oldest petroleum group. Malewitz cites a source close to Staples saying an announcement is expected today.
"Staples would take over at a time of historic growth in oil and gas production. Spurred by technological advances like hydraulic fracturing, Texas has reached production numbers unseen in more than three decades, helping the state's Rainy Day Fund grow to $8 billion," Malewitz wrote. "The industry has also drawn increased scrutiny from those who have raised concerns about the industry’s impact on the environment, public health and local infrastructure."
Staples would replace Rob Looney, the longtime head of the association, who said in March that he was leaving, Malewitz wrote.
A large part of this distrust [of cities] is driven by the fear of what urbanism brings: Poor people. Immigrant people. People who aren’t like us. That’s what drives our sprawl—that distrust, that fear of The Other. Diversity is no problem, as one longtime Houstonian once said, until we have to live together.
A hundred-plus years ago, the first American suburbs were created to afford escape from the masses of Eastern and Southern European immigrants – “the mongrel classes,” as they were known – that filled eastern cities. Now the descendants of those Polish and Italian immigrants live in places like Kingwood and League City, where they watch Fox News and send fevered Tweets about Ebola-infested Mexican babies crowding our inner cities.
Thirty years ago, a law professor named Jonathan Simon wrote a prescient essay, “The Emergence of the Risk Society,” in which he argued that in the emerging American cities, all of the old divisions – race, culture, religious affiliation – would become irrelevant, leaving only one question: Can you get credit and insurance, or can’t you? Simon saw our cities bifurcating into “grey zones”—filled with the poor, the sick, the poorly educated, and others considered “bad risks”—and “safe zones” of gated communities with first-class amenities, populated by well-educated professionals, the kind of people who have no problem getting approved for a bank loan.
We are living in the city Simon envisioned. An acquaintance once told me that his upscale Sugar Land enclave was “more diverse” than my slightly gone-to-seed subdivision in Alief, “because you have just one kind of people, and we have true diversity.” What he meant was that in his neighborhood, some of the Anglos and Latinos and Asians and African Americans were MBAs, and some were physicians, and some were attorneys, while in my neighborhood everybody was just poor. Poor is its own race, its own religion, and those who aren’t Poor fear it, distrust it, want to be as far away from it as they can. That’s how you end up with concentric circles of toll roads, and suburbs that stretch halfway to Dallas.
Many Texas courts in larger cities rely on a so-called “key man” selection process, where judges choose a commissioner responsible for recruiting a panel of grand jurors. That method — one that is unusual nationally — was not chosen for Perry’s grand jury because the visiting judge overseeing the case comes from a part of the state where random selection is preferred.
But as the Perry case moves to trial, it is prompting questions about Texas’ quirky key man grand jury system — and whether it is time to ditch it entirely. Critics of the key man system suggest that using random selection in Perry’s case was a good defense against perceived or actual bias — and that it should be used in all Texas criminal cases.
“The difficulty is, where did the ‘key man’ come from?” asked Larry Karson, a criminal justice professor at the University of Houston-Downtown who in 2004 studied the key man system. “What is the relationship of the key man to the judge? And what is the relationship of the potential grand juror to the key man?”
Texas law allows judges in its 254 counties to decide for themselves whether to have grand jurors chosen at random or selected by a key man — a method frequently used by judges in Austin, Dallas and Houston.
Texas nationalists are awaiting Scotland's pending vote on seceding from the United Kingdom in the hopes it could happen in Texas.
Scottish voters will hit the polls Thursday to decide whether to break long-standing ties with the United Kingdom, which currently contains Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
Secessionists in Texas have seized on Scotland's possible independence: in a post about the vote, the Texas Nationalist Movement wrote on their website, "Scotland's internal and external opponents of independence sound like the typical battered wife syndrome."
"Centralists in America fear that, if Scotland votes yes, it may set a chain of events in motion that could affect many more western regions," the movement organizers wrote. "Suddenly, the impossible seems possible."
With some new attention on Texas nationalism comes repeated arguments for independence: Yahoo columnist Rick Newman notes that — with its GDP of $1.6 trillion and population of 27 million — Texas would be the 13th largest country in the world if it obtained independence from the United States. He also wrote Texas could lure companies away from the United States and survive on the strength of its economy.
On the flip side, Newman pointed out that Texas would have to create its own defense apparatus and adapt to losing federal funds.
In addition, support for Texas nationalism is relegated to a relatively small contingent of Texas residents and is not a mainstream view, said Mark Jones, a political scientist at Rice University.
"That [popular] support is severely lacking," Jones said.
We're reading through some of Federalist #10 in GOVT 2305 this week and this story reminded me of some of the paper's content. In it Madison argues that political conflict ultimately stems from self interest. We take positions on issues based on how they impact us. Policy tends to be set by which ever side has a majority - so the interests of the majority will be most likely be served. Is a law proposed concerning private debts? It is a question to which the creditors are parties on one side and the debtors on the other. Justice ought to hold the balance between them. Yet the parties are, and must be, themselves the judges; and the most numerous party, or, in other words, the most powerful faction must be expected to prevail.
The federal law regulating garnishment harkens back to 1968, when the financial life of Americans was much simpler. Time has eroded what even then were modest protections. The law barred creditors from taking any wages from the very poorest of workers, but used a calculation based on the minimum wage to identify them. Since the federal minimum wage hasn't kept pace with inflation, today, only workers earning about $11,000 annually or less— a wage below the poverty line— are protected. The law also allows collectors to garnish a quarter of a debtor's after-tax pay, an amount that government surveys show is plainly unaffordable for many families.
And the law is silent on perhaps the most punishing tactic of collectors: It doesn't prohibit them from cleaning out debtors' bank accounts. As a result, a collector can't take more than 25 percent of a debtor's paycheck, but if that paycheck is deposited in a bank, all of the money in the account can be grabbed to pay down the debt.
State laws, while often more comprehensive than the federal rules, vary widely. Only a handful, for instance, automatically protect a minimum amount of funds in a debtor's account.
When garnishment protections do exist, the burden is usually on debtors to figure out if and how the laws protect their assets.
The previous post will call to mind Benjamin Franklin's famous quote. I stumbled on one person's explanation of the context of the quote. You might find it worth a quick read. It involves a power struggle during the colonial era.The words appear originally in a 1755 letter that Franklin is presumed to have written on behalf of the Pennsylvania Assembly to the colonial governor during the French and Indian War. The letter was a salvo in a power struggle between the governor and the Assembly over funding for security on the frontier, one in which the Assembly wished to tax the lands of the Penn family, which ruled Pennsylvania from afar, to raise money for defense against French and Indian attacks. The governor kept vetoing the Assembly’s efforts at the behest of the family, which had appointed him. So to start matters, Franklin was writing not as a subject being asked to cede his liberty to government, but in his capacity as a legislator being asked to renounce his power to tax lands notionally under his jurisdiction. In other words, the “essential liberty” to which Franklin referred was thus not what we would think of today as civil liberties but, rather, the right of self-governance of a legislature in the interests of collective security.
What’s more the “purchase [of] a little temporary safety” of which Franklin complains was not the ceding of power to a government Leviathan in exchange for some promise of protection from external threat; for in Franklin’s letter, the word “purchase” does not appear to have been a metaphor. The governor was accusing the Assembly of stalling on appropriating money for frontier defense by insisting on including the Penn lands in its taxes–and thus triggering his intervention. And the Penn family later offered cash to fund defense of the frontier–as long as the Assembly would acknowledge that it lacked the power to tax the family’s lands. Franklin was thus complaining of the choice facing the legislature between being able to make funds available for frontier defense and maintaining its right of self-governance–and he was criticizing the governor for suggesting it should be willing to give up the latter to ensure the former.
In short, Franklin was not describing some tension between government power and individual liberty. He was describing, rather, effective self-government in the service of security as the very liberty it would be contemptible to trade. Notwithstanding the way the quotation has come down to us, Franklin saw the liberty and security interests of Pennsylvanians as aligned.
