Prop 8’s Arguments, California’s Prisons, & Criminalizing School Breakfast

THE 9TH CIRCUIT HEARD THE PROP 8 ARGUMENTS, AND IT LOOKS GOOD FOR DAVID BOIS AND TED OLSON

It is increasingly likely that the three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit will decide the Prop 8 appeal, not on the basis of constitutionality, bur rather on whether anyone on the Prop 8 side had the legal standing to bring the appeal at all. If so, that would be a win for the challengers, Bois and Olson, at least in California. Yet it may negate the possibility of a trip to the Supreme Court, which is the duo’s shot at making history. Still the discussion that took place between lawyers on both sides and the trio of judges about the central constitutional issues made for fascinating and instructive drama.

Slate’s Dalia Lithwick has a report on Monday’s day in court that captured the mood well. Here’s a clip:

Is there any reason to wall marriage off from gay couples? Any reason at all?

That is what the whole debate over the constitutionality of California’s Proposition 8, the voter referendum that banned same-sex marriage, came down to Monday in a long argument before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. It was amazing to see lawyers and even one judge scrape around to find any sort of justification—and how thin what they finally dredged up was. Ten or even five years ago, opposition to gay marriage looked like a thick blanket you could wrap yourself in. Now it’s threadbare, with more holes than stitching.

The three judges hearing the appeal of Judge Vaughn Walker’s ruling knocking down Proposition 8 may never actually get to this question, since it wasn’t clear two of them, at least, thought anyone speaking today on the side of the voter referendum had standing to be there. I’ll let Walter Dellinger tackle that part of the argument for us. But on the merits—does Proposition 8 have a constitutional leg to stand on?—it wasn’t much of a contest…..

Read the rest.

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THE NY TIMES CALLS CALIFORNIA’S PRISONS FOR THE HORRORS THAT THEY ARE

In the wake of the Supremes hearing arguments last week on Schwarzenegger v. Plata—The New York Times has run a very strong editorial on the issue. (It would be nice if more newspapers in our own state would do the same.)

Here’s how it opens:

In 2005, when a federal court took a snapshot of California’s prisons,

one inmate was dying each week because the state failed to provide adequate health care. Adequate does not mean state-of-the-art, or even tolerable. It means care meeting “the minimal civilized measure of life’s necessities,” in the Supreme Court’s words, so inmates do not die from rampant staph infections or commit suicide at nearly twice the national average.

These and other horrors have been documented in California’s prisons for two decades, and last week they were before the Supreme Court in Schwarzenegger v. Plata. It is the most important case in years about prison conditions. The justices should uphold the lower court’s remedy for addressing the horrors.

[BIG CLIP]

At the intense, sometimes testy argument, Justice Samuel Alito revealed the law-and-order thinking behind the California system. “If 40,000 prisoners are going to be released,” he said overstating the likely number, “you really believe that if you were to come back here two years after that you would be able to say they haven’t contributed to an increase in crime?” To Justice Alito, apparently, it was out of the realm of possibility that, rather than increasing crime, the state could actually decrease it by reducing the number of prison inmates.

Among experts, as a forthcoming issue of the journal Criminology & Public Policy relates, there is a growing belief that less prison and more and better policing will reduce crime. There is almost unanimous condemnation of California-style mass incarceration, which has led to no reduction in serious crime and has turned many inmates into habitual criminals.

America’s prison system is now studied largely because of its failure — the result of an expensive approach to criminal justice shaped by fear-driven ideology. California’s prisons embody this overwhelming failure.

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PARENTS WHO ENROLL THEIR KIDS IN SCHOOL BREAKFAST PROGRAMS ARE CRIMINALLY NEGLIGENT SAYS NATIONAL REVIEW EDITOR

And the Marie Antoinette award goes to……

Raw Story reports:

Parents of children who participate in school breakfast programs are “criminally negligent,” says the Washington editor of the conservative National Review.

Kate O’Beirne, who also appears as a pundit on MSNBC, made the comment at a Republican strategy session she moderated at the Hudson Institute Friday.
My question is what poor excuse for a parent can’t rustle up a bowl of cereal and a banana?” O’Beirne asked. “I just don’t get why millions of school children qualify for school breakfasts unless we have a major wide spread problem with child neglect.”

She continued, “If that’s how many parents are incapable of pulling together a bowl of cereal and a banana, then we have problems that are way bigger than — that problem can’t be solved with a school breakfast, because we have parents who are just criminally … criminally negligent with respect to raising children.”

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