Currently viewing the tag: “Effect”
In view of the controversy over whether the new Wisconsin collective bargaining law was properly published and thus in effect, Democrat Judge Maryann Sumi has revamped her previous ruling to say that the law was not published and thus is not in force.
This is quite a far cry from her original ruling, where she stated that she was merely ruling on whether the bill was in violation of Wisconsin’s open meeting law and not ruling on the validity of the law itself…but hey, lawfare is lawfare.
And I’m sure her son, who runs a company that lobbies for public employee unions and her union activist husband are certainly pleased.
Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau) called the order “judicial activism at its worst.”
“Once again, one Dane County judge is doing everything she can to stand in the way of our efforts to improve the economy and create jobs,” said a statement he issued.
Gov. Scott Walker’s administration said it would comply and discontinue the implementation of the law, and the next step is the State Supreme Court, which has not said it will take the case yet.
Unlike some other state’s Wisconsin’s Supreme Court justices are elected, and the controversy has affected an upcoming race.
Incumbent David Prosser is being challenged by Assistant Attorney General JoAnne Kloppenburg, for a ten-year term. The election is April 5th.
Kloppenburg is a former environmental lawyer and a fairly typical Left wing loon. Ordinarily she wouldn’t have a chance, but money talks.
By Wisconsin law, each candidate receives $ 300,000 in public funds and is restricted to that amount, but public employee union groups have spent huge sums on her behalf. The Greater Wisconsin Committee, a leftist organizing group with deep union ties, has funneled $ 3 million into anti-Prosser advertising. One ad they’re running around the clock falsely accuses Prosser of being ‘soft on pedophiles’ because he allowed a plea bargain for a Catholic priest some years ago when a court psychiatrist testified that forcing the two young victims to testify could cause them serious psychological trauma.
Even one of the victims, Troy Merryfield has come out publicly and said that Judge Prosser’s decision was the right one at the time and asked that the ad be pulled. And Prosser, understandably angered, demanded that Kloppenburg disavow the ads “which she knows are false’ but so far, she has refused.
“It is the worst ad that has ever been run in a judicial campaign,” he asserted. “If some third party ran an ad supporting me and attacking you, and it was despicable, and it was a lie, I would stand up and ask that the ad be pulled,” he argued. “You are not willing to do that, even at the request of the victim in the ad?”
Uhhh, nope. She isn’t.
Right now, the Court has a 4-3 conservative majority. If Kloppenburg gets in, that changes…but not for some months, so Prosser would still likely be the justice that hears the case even if he loses – and the State Supreme Court agrees to hear it.
The Democrats and the public employee unions are also pouring serious money into the state in an attempt to gin up a recall of Walker and other Republican state legislators.
In many ways, this is the first battle of the 2012 election.
Hitchens believes in it:
Can anyone imagine how the Arab spring would have played out if a keystone Arab state, oil-rich and heavily armed with a track record of intervention in its neighbors' affairs and a history of all-out mass repression against its own civilians, were still the private property of a sadistic crime family? As it is, to have had Iraq on the other scale from the outset has been an unnoticed and unacknowledged benefit whose extent is impossible to compute. And the influence of Iraq on the Libyan equation has also been uniformly positive in ways that are likewise often overlooked.
I really have no idea what Hitch is talking about.
The example of Iraq tainted the idea of democracy in the region and may well have postponed this reckoning, rather than aided it. And the indigenous pursuit of non-violence in Egypt and Tunisia as the path to democracy could not be more different than the external application of shock and awe, the use of torture (as a weapon for democracy!), and the chaotic, horrifying deaths of over a hundred thousand people.
Thus it is indeed rich to hear the unapologetic supporters of the Iraq war cite possible civilian casualties as the reason for intervening in Libya. Dennis Ross even claimed that 100,000 lives could have been lost in Banghazi. But roughly that number of civilians were killed while the US bore responsibility for internal security in Iraq. In that sense, we were as bad as Qaddafi if only in terms of gross negligence. And as for the regional effects of the Iraq war, it's clear that its empowerment of Iran's regime has led to the US' acquiescence in suppressing democracy in Bahrain.
After revising the original ruling for the third time, a Wisconsin Judge ruled that Governor Scott Walker’s law should
This time, the judge warned that any officials who violate it, will face sanctions.
Wisconsin state judge Maryann Sumi has ruled that the state’s hotly contested collective bargaining law is not in effect and cannot be implemented:
Wisconsin’s new collective bargaining law has not been published and is not in effect, a judge has ordered.
Judge Maryann Sumi ordered Thursday morning that the law “has not been published within the meaning” of Wisconsin law and “is therefore not in effect.”
A spokesman for Gov. Scott Walker had no immediate comment, and Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau, could not be reached immediately for comment.
But Assembly Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald, R-Horicon, repeated his previous statements that the judge “wants to keep interjecting herself into the legislative process with no regard to the state constitution.”
A spokeswoman for the state Department of Administration could not be reached immediately for comment.
Something tells me this isn’t quite over yet.
Wisconsin state judge Maryann Sumi has ruled that the state’s hotly contested collective bargaining law is not in effect and cannot be implemented:
Wisconsin’s new collective bargaining law has not been published and is not in effect, a judge has ordered.
Judge Maryann Sumi ordered Thursday morning that the law “has not been published within the meaning” of Wisconsin law and “is therefore not in effect.”
A spokesman for Gov. Scott Walker had no immediate comment, and Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau, could not be reached immediately for comment.
But Assembly Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald, R-Horicon, repeated his previous statements that the judge “wants to keep interjecting herself into the legislative process with no regard to the state constitution.”
A spokeswoman for the state Department of Administration could not be reached immediately for comment.
Something tells me this isn’t quite over yet.
Nearly two weeks ago, Wisconsin state Judge Maryann Sumi issued a temporary restraining order (TRO) prohibiting Wisconsin’s Secretary of State from “publishing” Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) anti-union law. Because Wisconsin law requires the Secretary of State’s office to publish a law before the law may take effect, this TRO should have suspended the law for as long as Sumi’s order remains in effect. Nevertheless, the state’s Republican leadership asked a different government office to publish the law on its website, and the Walker Administration has already begun to implement the law in defiance of Sumi’s original order.
This morning, Judge Sumi issued a new order clarifying that any attempt to implement Walker’s assault on working families is lawless:
[I]t is hereby DECLARED that 2011 Wisconsin Act 10 has not been published…and is therefore not in effect.
In a third order, issued two days ago, Judge Sumi threatened sanctions against officials who act in defiance of her court orders. Under Wisconsin law, someone who intentionally defies a court order is in contempt of court, and can be fined up to $ 2,000 for each day that they disobey the court or imprisoned for up to six months.
One interesting twist in this entire debacle is that the sole basis of Sumi’s orders is a claim that Wisconsin Republicans violated the state’s open meetings law by passing the order without proper notice. Accordingly, Gov. Walker’s anti-union allies could eliminate this legal barrier simply by voting on the law again after providing the legally required notice. The fact that they have not yet done so suggests that they many no longer have the votes to ram Walker’s massively unpopular legislation through the legislature.
Funny how it takes Christopher hitchens to acknowledge that none of the change in the Middle East would have been possible without President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq
American Thinker Blog
Funny how it takes Christopher hitchens to acknowledge that none of the change in the Middle East would have been possible without President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq
American Thinker Blog
My friend and former fellow Salvatori fellow, law prof and former FEC chairman Brad Smith blogs that:
It’s been barely a year since the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission and the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruling in SpeechNow.org v. Federal Election Commission resulted in a dramatic liberalization of the law regarding independent expenditures in political campaigns, but that hasn’t stopped the unending chorus of dire warnings from “reform” jannisaries who see themselves as the ancient protectors of the old regulatory regime. In fact, though, the early anecdotal evidence and numbers are almost all good. Citizens United and SpeechNow have coincided so far with an explosion in the number of competitive races, more political speech, and campaigns with a greater focus on big issues of national direction rather than trivia, faffe, and personality.
The latest bit of data supporting the wisdom of the courts’ deregulatory, pro-First Amendment jurisprudence is a short report by Michael Beckel for the Center for Responsive Politics (no relation). While we don’t think Beckel intended for this to be a positive report on Citizens United and SpeechNow.org, that’s the logical conclusion from the information. …
[The data show a] modest increase in campaign speech, which is generally regarded as a good thing, even by those who would rather have the government would do it rather than the citizenry. At the same time, these added voices clearly did not “drown out” anybody else. They simply added to the debate. And the primary beneficiaries were, as we predicted, smaller businesses and family owned enterprises, not the Fortune 500 companies that have large lobbying operations and large traditional PACs. …
When all is said and done, the hysterical predictions about the consequences of Citizens United, SpeechNow.org, and other recent court decisions protecting the First Amendment have proven badly off the mark, and appear to be fueled largely by the perception that the wrong side will win, at least in the short term.
Go read the whole thing.
According to Gallup polls in over a hundred countries, average global approval for the leadership of the United States is higher than for other obvious candidate countries. While there was a slight decline in 2010 compared to 2009, approval under the Obama administration is markedly higher than it was under the Bush administration. The trends are not even across the globe, with approval for the U.S. suffering especially in the Americas in 2010. Perhaps Obama’s recent trip has some effect in that regard. China appears to have lost some momentum.
Whether all of this matters is a matter of debate. Global politics is, after all, not a popularity contest where you lose if you are voted off the island (no matter how much Thomas Friedman may want that). There is some evidence that it can be important. For example, Alan Krueger and Jitka Maleckova found in an article published in Science that there is
a greater incidence of international terrorism when people of one country disapprove of the leadership of another country.
It is also often hypothesized (though I am not aware of good evidence) that it is easier to build coalitions on foreign policy issues when popularity is high. The rationale is that it may be easier for, say the French president, to cooperate with the U.S. when the French public values U.S. leadership than when it does not (this is some evidence for the importance of electoral mechanisms). Nevertheless, increasing U.S. standing across the globe was one of the Obama administration’s main campaign promises and an important issue in US public opinion in 2008. It is hard to deny that the initial numbers look good for Obama. We’ll see what happens after the Libya intervention.
After a Democrat judge put a restraining order on the Wisconsin collective bargaining law passed by the State legislature that prohibiting it from being published as per state law, it looked like a court battle was upcoming.
But in an interesting twist, the legislation was published Friday to the Legislature’s website with a footnote that acknowledges the restraining order by a Dane County judge. But the posting says state law “requires the Legislative Reference Bureau to publish every act within 10 working days after its date of enactment.”
The Legislative Reference Bureau was not named in Judge Sumi’s restraining order!
Walker’s top cabinet official, Administration Secretary Mike Huebsch, gave only a brief statement:
“Today the administration was notified that the LRB published the budget-repair bill as required by law,” he said. “The administration will carry out the law as required.”
Bill Cosh, a spokesman for Republican Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen, said in a statement that no action is needed for the reference bureau to publish the law, and noted that Democratic Secretary of State Doug La Follette is not in violation of the restraining order ( which was actually issued against him) because he didn’t direct the reference bureau to publish the bill.
“The Wisconsin Department of Justice will evaluate how the lawful publication of Act 10 affects pending litigation. We have no further comment at this time,” Cosh said.
Needless top say, the Democrats and the public employee unions are going absolutely bananas over this.
It will certainly be interesting to see where this goes…and I predict the Obama Department of Justice will likely try to intervene to attempt to kill the law.
Those who accuse him of "weakness" are living in past paradigms. And little wonder, since most of them grew up in a different paradigm. But soft power matters as much as hard power in promoting US interests and values. And on that score, the promise of Obama's election (that I argued for here) is being fulfilled:
Ezra notes:
In 2007, the world preferred the bureaucrats running the authoritarian Chinese government to the people in charge of the American government. Today, they don’t. In fact, they don’t prefer the leadership of any major power to ours.
That kind of American exceptionalism – based on reality, not theological myth – is the kind of exceptionalism we should be cheering on.
(Eugene Volokh)
I’ve long been interested in the occasional anticooperative effect of law — the tendency of the threat of criminal punishment to sometimes discourage cooperation with the legal system (even though the deterrent effect usually tends to encourage following the law).
Max Boot points to the same effect of international criminal prosecution (a topic that international human rights law scholars have discussed in the past):
Hillary Clinton claims that Moammar Qaddafi may be exploring exit options. Count me as skeptical. The problem is that we don’t have a whole lot to offer a dictator in exile….Qaddafi … has committed war crimes such as the bombing of Pan Am flight 103. He knows that if he leaves power he could wind up in the dock at the International Criminal Court.
The ability of the international coalition or the Libyan opposition to make a deal for his abdication has been complicated by the Charles Taylor precedent. Taylor was the former president of Liberia who left office in 2003 as part of an agreement that allowed him to escape into exile in Nigeria. But Interpol promptly issued an arrest warrant for him and in 2006 Nigeria handed him over to the UN’s Special Court for Sierre Leone. Eventually he wound up in the custody of the International Criminal Court in the Hague where his trial continues to drag on….
[I]n return for getting Taylor into court, we are making it more difficult to depose other dictators. Qaddafi has every incentive to fight to the death and take a lot of people down with him….
As Boot points out, the threat of such an anticooperative effect is by no means always a reason against criminal punishment. (We don’t decline to punish rapists or robbers, for instance, just because the risk of punishment may increase the incentive for the criminal to kill the victim and thus eliminate a witness.) But it is a reason to seek some solution to the problem, especially when one possible consequence of the anticooperative effect — here, of a refusal to cooperate with a possibly win-win deal offered by the government — might be the death of many thousands in a protracted war. Meting out justice to murderers is an important goal, but not the most important goal.
Boot, for instance, suggests a procedure for granting immunity, something akin to the American Presidential pardon. (In fact, one value of pardons and amnesties has historically been the possibility of ending a civil war by offering most rebels a reason not to fight to the death.) I’m not an expert on the subject, but I’m inclined to think that’s probably a good idea.
Prokaryotes and others can post links here to interesting weekend news
Wheat prices climb after Russia cuts crop forecast
Wheat prices rose Friday after Russia cut its forecast for this year’s harvest, renewing concerns that global supplies will tighten.
Deputy Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov said the forecast called for 84 million to 85 million tons of wheat to be harvested this year, compared to an earlier estimate of 85 million to 87 million tons.
Russia was one of the world’s largest wheat exporters until last year when its crop was damaged by a drought that prompted an export ban. Zubkov said the ban remains in effect.
In the U.S. dry conditions have created problems for the winter wheat crop in the Great Plains.
While global wheat supplies are ample, stockpiles remain tight in the United States. Traders are speculating that global supplies may grow smaller, which could cause prices to rise.
Related Post:
ABC News’ Luis Martinez reports: The Pentagon says the attacks on Libya’s air defense systems are having a significant impact and that the no fly zone is in effect. Vice Admiral William Gortney, director of the Joint Staff, told Pentagon…
Political Punch
