USA > History > 2010 > Politics > States (I)

Governor Cuomo

December 30, 2010
The New York Times

Andrew Cuomo’s inauguration ceremony on Saturday will be comparatively modest — a long way from former Gov. George Pataki’s black-tie gala and marching bands. That is appropriate at a time when New York State is mired in both a fiscal and political crisis.

Even so, Mr. Cuomo will need more than symbolism to turn the state around. He will have to quickly confront all of New York’s vested political and economic interests.

His most pressing task will be to carve $9 billion out of the state’s $135 billion budget. His rash campaign promises to cap property taxes and end a small extra tax on high-income earners will make that even tougher.

He needs to jettison both tax promises. He will also have to negotiate less-generous pension plans for state workers. And he will have to come up with other savings from the state’s big-ticket school and Medicaid budgets. Those cuts must be made. But Mr. Cuomo will need to find ways to limit the damage to the state’s most vulnerable citizens in the process.

Mr. Cuomo’s first budget is due on Feb. 1. If he makes the tough but necessary choices, the Legislature, the unions and others will protest fiercely. The new governor can significantly increase his political leverage, and public support, by also committing to reform the state’s opaque budget process, which can be far too easily gamed — until the bills come due.

The need for reform goes far beyond the budget. Based on the 2010 census, the Legislature is supposed to start mapping new Congressional and legislative districts in time for the 2012 elections. During the campaign, Mr. Cuomo promised to work for an independent, nonpartisan redistricting commission. That one reform could finally end the scandalous gerrymandering that allows even the most incompetent and corrupt legislators to keep getting re-elected, vote after vote.

A majority of legislators in both houses signed a pledge to establish such a commission immediately. Now that they are re-elected, some are already waffling. A few Republicans are even hinting that the whole matter should be done with a constitutional amendment, which would ensure that nothing changes for another decade. Mr. Cuomo can improve the chances for real electoral reform by repeatedly reaffirming his vow to veto any redistricting plan “that reflects partisan gerrymandering.”

To clean up Albany’s swamp, Mr. Cuomo should immediately — next week — introduce an omnibus ethics reform bill.

That must include the creation of an ethics enforcement commission to investigate misdeeds in both the Legislature and the executive branch, including the governor’s office. All lawmakers must be required to reveal the sources and amounts of their outside income. There can be no exceptions for lawyers like Sheldon Silver, the Assembly speaker who could have clients with business before the state. The public doesn’t know.

Effective reform will also require sweeping changes in the state’s shamefully lax campaign finance rules with much stricter limits on contributions by individuals and limited liability corporations. And full disclosure should be easily available for all to see.

Mr. Cuomo repeatedly reminds New Yorkers that their tarnished state was “once a national model.” Now it is a model of dysfunction. Mr. Cuomo has a lot of work ahead and no time to waste.

Governor Cuomo, NYT, 30.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/31/opinion/31fri1.html

Tricky Call for New Governors:

Price of Their Inaugurals

December 30, 2010
The New York Times
By MICHAEL BARBARO

MIAMI — To warm up the Florida crowds for his inauguration as governor, Rick Scott has been flying around the state this week on a seven-city “appreciation” tour. For the main event on Tuesday, he will lead a parade featuring 26 marching bands, followed by a black-tie dinner for 2,100 people, with oysters Rockefeller and fried calamari served in mini-martini glasses. “Real classy,” said Christy Noftz, who is overseeing the catering.

After their election night victory speeches, the nation’s 26 new governors have had to wrestle with a symbolically rich decision that could set the tone for their time in office: how big a party to give for themselves.

It is always a tricky call. Penny-pinching can convey pessimism and impotence. Lavish celebrations may telegraph triumphalism and insensitivity in these budget-crunched times (“Out of touch,” groused a Democratic Party official in Florida about Mr. Scott’s inaugural plans. “Inexcusable,” grumbled one local editorial.)

But after an election rife with messages about voter anger and mistrust, the risks of an off-key bash are higher this inauguration season, and the governors-elect have starkly different answers to the question of how much party to put into party politics.

Or several parties, in some cases. In Nevada, Brian Sandoval, a Republican, will host back-to-back $1,000-a-head V.I.P. receptions, one of them at the Wynn Hotel on the Las Vegas Strip.

In Oklahoma, Mary Fallin, also a Republican, has organized two “preinaugural balls,” not to be confused with the inaugural ball itself, which will be held later at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City.

Others are embracing conspicuous frugality. In New York, Andrew M. Cuomo, a Democrat, is having a small preinauguration dinner for close friends at the governor’s mansion, and has parceled out so few invitations to his no-frills swearing-in ceremony that even some top aides have not made the cut.

Jerry Brown of California has issued guidelines: no paid entertainment (a school choir will sing) and a rent-free evening reception (in a state-owned building). To highlight his thrift, Mr. Brown, a Democrat, plans to stop at a cookout after he takes the oath to snack on hot dogs and chips.

The extremes seem to reflect the uncertain economic times: shoppers may have returned to their prerecession ways during the holidays, but state budget deficits are ballooning, and there are persistent mutterings about the deep repair work that is needed to fix the economy.

What is certain is that the new chief executives and their staffs, no matter the party, are carefully considering the optics of opulence.

“They are pros who understand what a high-stakes gamble it is,” said Bruce Buchanan, a professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin who has written extensively about political transitions.

“It’s awkward because it’s self-promotion. Whatever you do, somebody will think it’s insufficient, or too much. So you want to alienate the fewest and capture the attention and respect of the most.”

Not everyone succeeds. Take two of Florida’s governors. In 1995, Lawton Chiles shot off a homemade potato gun during his inaugural, grazing a car. Twelve years later, Charlie Christ refused to sing the state’s official song, “Old Folks at Home,” citing the racially insensitive lyrics. Some Floridians found it disrespectful.

This year, some incoming governors say they are being sensitive to the financial plight of their constituents. In New York, which recently slashed $40 billion from its budget, “people are disillusioned and disappointed,” Mr. Cuomo said in an interview.

As his staff sat down to plan a celebration, the governor-elect said he told them there was nothing to celebrate. “No balls, no concerts, no parades — no fanfare,” he said. “I think it would be discordant to the feeling of the body politic.”

Mark Dayton, the Democratic governor-elect in Minnesota, said he considered canceling his party, which is scheduled for Jan. 8. Instead, he has authorized a “Blue Jeans to Black Tie” ball with a loose dress code and a flexible ticket price. He plans to show up in jeans and an old hockey jersey.

Then there is Mr. Scott in Florida, whose multiday, multicity inauguration has become known wryly in political circles here as the “coronation.”

Preparations began shortly after Election Day with a prodigious fund-raising drive. Mr. Scott, a wealthy former health-care executive who dug into his own pocket to finance his campaign, received donations of $25,000 each from dozens of major state employers like Disney, Office Depot and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida, collecting nearly $3 million.

Good-government groups complained about potential conflicts of interest. (A spokeswoman for Mr. Scott said that in return for the donations companies would receive “nothing more than a series of events honoring and celebrating the people of this state.”)

Eyebrows rose anew when Mr. Scott, relying on the donated use of private planes, took his inauguration on the road. He started in the north on Monday, hitting Jacksonville, and made his way south to Miami by Wednesday.

That night, in the Little Havana neighborhood, Mr. Scott treated a largely Cuban-American crowd to giant platters of roasted pig, brown rice and boiled yucca. A procession of local politicians introduced and reintroduced Mr. Scott, extolling his financial acumen and management skills.

On Tuesday, for his official inauguration, Mr. Scott will hold a two-hour prayer breakfast with no fewer than 10 speakers; an afternoon concert featuring the country singers Lee Greenwood and Rockie Lynne; and a parade befitting Disney World’s home state.

Mr. Scott’s aides published the packed schedule on what amounted to almost 10 single-spaced pages on his Web site. Among the highlights: a rendering of the stage being built for Mr. Scott’s inaugural ball.

Democrats, especially, detected hypocrisy, and pounced. Mr. Scott, after all, campaigned on a platform of fiscal restraint and small government. Businessmen like himself, he declared shortly after the election, “accept austerity as the price for dramatic turnarounds.”

Pressed about the scale of the festivities, Mr. Scott said: “It absolutely is fitting for these times. We need to celebrate how we are going to change this state.”

As criticism mounted, his aides began pushing back. They produced data that suggested the inauguration would generate millions of dollars in economic activity, and they vowed that after covering the costs of the festivities, they would donate any money left over to a nonprofit group that aids wounded military veterans.

Most of the events, they said, are free to the public. Tickets to the ball, however, start at $95. Which may explain that elaborate spread of food, like a “Fresh Florida Gulf Display” that will include grilled Key West shrimp with a Florida avocado dipping sauce.

Why not limit the menu to hamburgers and hot dogs? The caterer said the menu was in sync with the tenor of the evening. “It’s a high-dollar ticket,” she said. Besides, a budget buffet “wouldn’t be very attractive.”

Monica Davey contributed reporting from Chicago.

    Tricky Call for New Governors: Price of Their Inaugurals, NYT, 30.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/31/us/politics/31inaugurations.html

Sister's Kidney Donation Condition of Miss. Parole

December 29, 2010
Filed at 8:49 a.m. EST on December 30, 2010
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
 

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — For 16 years, sisters Jamie and Gladys Scott have shared a life behind bars for their part in an $11 armed robbery. To share freedom, they must also share a kidney.

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour suspended the sisters' life sentences on Wednesday, but 36-year-old Gladys Scott's release is contingent on her giving a kidney to Jamie, her 38-year-old sister, who requires daily dialysis.

The sisters were convicted in 1994 of leading two men into an ambush in central Mississippi the year before. Three teenagers hit each man in the head with a shotgun and took their wallets — making off with only $11, court records said.

Jamie and Gladys Scott were each convicted of two counts of armed robbery and sentenced to two life sentences.

"I think it's a victory," said the sisters' attorney, Chokwe Lumumba. "I talked to Gladys and she's elated about the news. I'm sure Jamie is, too."

Civil rights advocates have for years called for their release, saying the sentences were excessive. Those demands gained traction when Barbour asked the Mississippi Parole Board to take another look at the case.

The Scott sisters are eligible for parole in 2014, but Barbour said prison officials no longer think they are a threat to society and Jamie's medical condition is costing the state a lot of money.

Lumumba said he has no problem with the governor requiring Gladys to offer up her organ because "Gladys actually volunteered that as part of her petition."

Lumumba said it's not clear what caused the kidney failure, but it's likely a combination of different illnesses over the years.

Barbour spokesman Dan Turner told The Associated Press that Jamie Scott was released because she needs the transplant. He said Gladys Scott will be released if she agrees to donate her kidney because of the significant risk and recovery time.

"She wanted to do it," Turner said. "That wasn't something we introduced."

Barbour is a Republican in his second term who has been mentioned as a possible presidential contender in 2012. He said the parole board agreed with the indefinite suspension of their sentences, which is different from a pardon or commutation because it comes with conditions.

An "indefinite suspension of sentence" can be reversed if the conditions are not followed, but those requirements are usually things like meeting with a parole officer.

The Scott sisters have received significant public support from advocacy groups, including the NAACP, which called for their release. Hundreds of people marched through downtown Jackson from the state capital to the governor's mansion in September, chanting in unison that the women should be freed.

Still, their release won't be immediate.

Mississippi Department of Corrections Commissioner Chris Epps said late Wednesday that he had not received the order. He also said the women want to live with relatives in Florida, which requires approval from officials in that state.

In general, that process takes 45 days.

Mississippi NAACP President Derrick Johnson said the Scott sisters' release will be "a great victory for the state of Mississippi for two individuals who received an excessive sentence" and he has no problem with the kidney donation requirement because Gladys Scott volunteered.

"I think it's encouraging that she's willing to share a kidney so her sister can have a better quality life," Johnson said.

National NAACP President and CEO Benjamin Todd Jealous said the suspension of the sentences represents the good that can come with the power of governors.

"It's again proof that when people get engaged, keep the faith, we can win," Jealous said.

(This version deletes incorrect reference to Barbour granting a suspended sentence to student's killer.)

    Sister's Kidney Donation Condition of Miss. Parole, NYT, 29.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/12/29/us/AP-US-Sisters-Pardon-Kidney.html

Ohio Court Limits Power of Localities on Gun Laws

December 29, 2010
The New York Times
By BOB DRIEHAUS

CINCINNATI — The Ohio Supreme Court has upheld a 2006 law that prohibits cities and other local governments from enforcing ordinances that are more restrictive than state gun laws.

The City of Cleveland had challenged the statute in order to continue enforcing ordinances that officials said were tailored to fight urban gun violence, including registration of handguns, restrictions on children’s access to firearms and prohibitions on the possession or sale of assault weapons. Banning such ordinances would violate the state’s home-rule laws, the city argued.

But in a decision released Wednesday, the court upheld the statute, 5 to 2.

“Law-abiding gun owners would face a confusing patchwork of licensing requirements, possession restrictions and criminal penalties as they travel from one jurisdiction to another” without a uniform statute, according to the ruling, written by Justice Evelyn Lundberg Stratton.

Justice Paul E. Pfeifer dissented, arguing that the statute “infringes upon municipalities’ constitutional home-rule rights by preventing them from tailoring ordinances concerning the regulation of guns to local conditions.”

Robert J. Triozzi, Cleveland’s law director, who led the city’s lawsuit, said that gun owners would now be able to walk through a public square with rifles, handguns and assault weapons, and that safety rules for possession of guns near children would also be removed, endangering residents. Ohio bans some assault weapons, like sawed-off shotguns, but Cleveland banned a broader array.

“The inability to control guns in Cleveland, where large numbers of people live, work and gather in close proximity to one another, limits proactive strategies for protecting our community and puts all of us at greater risk,” said Marty Flask, Cleveland’s public safety director.

Mr. Triozzi said the broader implication of the decision was a shift in power toward state legislators and away from city councils.

“All the Legislature has to do is to declare that a given issue is their turf, and there will be no ability for municipalities to enact any meaningful legislation to make their situation better,” he said.

The ruling was hailed by the National Rifle Association, Ohioans for Concealed Carry and the National Shooting Sports Foundation, as well as Attorney General Richard Cordray, a Democrat, who lost his re-election bid in November to Mike DeWine.

Mr. Cordray said revisions to state gun laws in 2006 provided a comprehensive set of rights and responsibilities applicable throughout the state. “This is an important victory for every gun owner in Ohio,” he said.

    Ohio Court Limits Power of Localities on Gun Laws, NYT, 29.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/30/us/30ohio.html

The Looming Crisis in the States

December 25, 2010
The New York Times

For most of this year, the state of Illinois has lacked the money to pay its bills. Some of its employees have been evicted from their offices for nonpayment of rent, social service groups have laid off hundreds of workers while waiting for checks, pharmacies have closed for lack of Medicaid payments. Faced with $4.5 billion in overdue payments, Illinois has proposed a precarious plan to sell its delinquent bills to Wall Street investors in exchange for cash, calculating that the interest it must pay the investors will be less than the late fees it owes.

It is no way to run the nation’s fifth largest state, and it is not even clear that investors will agree, but these kinds of shaky deals are likely to become increasingly common as the states try to cope with the greatest fiscal drought since the Great Depression. Starved for revenue and accustomed to decades of overspending, many states have been overwhelmed. They are facing shortfalls of $140 billion next year. Even before the downturn, states jeopardized their futures by accumulating trillions in debt that they swept into some far-off future.

But that future is not so distant, and the crushing debt has made recovery far more difficult to achieve. As The Times reported, Illinois, California and several other states are at increasing risk of being the first states to default since the 1930s. The city of Prichard, Ala., has stopped sending out its pension checks, breaking state law and shocking its employees.

A state or city unable to make its bond payments would send harmful ripples through the financial system that could cause damage even to healthier governments. But if states act quickly to deal with their revenue losses and address their debt — and receive sufficient aid from Washington — there is still time to avoid a crisis.

The most immediate cause of the states’ problems is the decline in tax revenue caused by the downturn, just as the demand for services has increased.

Over the last two years, combined sales, personal and corporate taxes have fallen by more than 10 percent. Although revenue is likely to tick up slightly in 2011, federal stimulus money — which has been keeping many states afloat — is largely scheduled to expire. Renewing a portion of that aid would be one of the most effective ways to assist the economy.

Many conservatives have said the revenue decline is a good incentive for states to cut their spending. That is precisely what almost all states have done, because they are legally barred from running deficits. State spending fell by 3.8 percent in the 2009 fiscal year and 7.3 percent more in the 2010 fiscal year, the only significant declines since at least the 1970s, even as the cost of education and health care rose.

School aid, Medicaid, transportation, employee salaries, social services, courts — whatever there was to cut, states have slashed it, often at ruinous costs to the most vulnerable: the poor, the sick and disabled, students, tens of thousands of laid-off workers.

But cutting spending will not affect the heaviest burden: the accumulated debt that comes from passing off the biggest problems to future generations. States and cities have nearly $3 trillion in outstanding bonds, and more than $3.5 trillion in shortfalls to pensions. Promised health benefits alone are more than $500 billion.

Some states have tried to pretend their pension obligations do not exist. New York is shortchanging its pension funds, and Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who claims to be so financially responsible, is the latest in a line of governors who have simply refused to pay the billions the state owes to its employee pensions. (Instead, it has often spent that money on tax cuts.) Public employee unions will need to give ground on pensions and other benefits, but it will be hard to start productive discussions if Mr. Christie and other governors refuse to acknowledge their obligations and bargain in good faith.

During the last year, 23 states raised taxes and fees, but only eight increased personal income taxes. Ultimately, states are going to have to acknowledge that more effective, targeted tax increases are inevitable, and can be achieved if they are structured properly. Governors also must explain to voters that they have cut spending. The nation’s richest taxpayers just got a windfall in the federal tax deal extorted from President Obama by Republican senators. States should not shy away from asking for more help from those most able to pay.

Too many newly elected governors have vowed not to raise taxes — including, unfortunately, Andrew Cuomo of New York — fearing giving bad news to voters who have not yet been told how dire things really are. Dan Malloy, the incoming Democratic governor of Connecticut, is one of the few who have been honest with their constituents, saying neither cuts nor tax increases alone can deal with his state’s $3.5 billion shortfall, one of the largest, proportionally, in the nation. “This is a time when people have to be on notice that they’ll be requested to participate in shared sacrifice,” he said recently.

Many governors claim tax increases are ill-advised during a recession, but more experienced economists say it is better to raise taxes on the rich than to lay off workers and cut spending, in effect offsetting Washington’s attempts at stimulus. The federal government missed a chance to begin to act rationally about its long-term deficit by giving away the store to the rich in the tax deal. States should not make the same mistake.

    The Looming Crisis in the States, NYT, 25.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/opinion/26sun1.html

24 Immigrants Pardoned by Governor

December 25, 2010
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

ALBANY (AP) — Gov. David A. Paterson announced on Friday that he had issued pardons to 24 immigrants with prior criminal convictions, to prevent their deportation.

In a statement, Mr. Paterson said his administration had reviewed more than 1,100 pardon applications and found that federal immigration laws were often “excessively harsh and in need of modernization.”

Mr. Paterson said the 24 people he pardoned had committed offenses in the past but had paid their debt to society and were now making positive contributions to their communities.

The governor made a similar statement after granting an earlier round of pardons to six immigrants on Dec. 6.

In May, Mr. Paterson created a panel to collect information and help deserving immigrants avoid deportation. He said the initiative was intended to counter aspects of federal immigration laws that may result in inflexible and unjust decisions to deport legal immigrants.

Mr. Paterson will leave office next week.

    24 Immigrants Pardoned by Governor, NYT, 25.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/25/nyregion/25pardon.html

Sentence Commuted in Racially Charged Killing

December 23, 2010
The New York Times
By COREY KILGANNON

Gov. David A. Paterson announced on Thursday that he had commuted the prison sentence of a black man who fatally shot an unarmed white teenager outside the man’s house in August 2006, weighing in on a case where the issue of race on Long Island became as much fodder for debate as the man’s innocence or guilt.

The trial of the man, John H. White, had racial overtones, as defense lawyers suggested that the tension associated with the Deep South in the civil rights era was alive in 2006, in a New York suburb with good schools, high property values and privileged children.

Mr. White, 57, was convicted of manslaughter for shooting Daniel Cicciaro, 17, point-blank in the face after Daniel and several friends had left a party and showed up late at night at Mr. White’s house in Miller Place, a predominantly white hamlet in Suffolk County.

The white teenagers had arrived to challenge Mr. White’s son Aaron, then 19, to a fight. The white teenagers used threats, profanities and racial epithets outside the house. Mr. White, who had been asleep, grabbed a loaded Beretta pistol he kept in his garage.

In a statement, Mr. Paterson, who leaves office next week, said, “My decision today may be an affront to some and a joy to others, but my objective is only to seek to ameliorate the profound suffering that occurred as a result of this tragic event.”

Mr. White, reached by phone at his home on Thursday night and asked for his reaction to the commutation, said, “I’m blessed and highly favored, brother.”

“I thank the Lord God most of all — he’s my savior,” he added. “Every day I thank my savior I am alive.”

Asked about the governor’s decision, he said, “I won’t get into all that; I’ll just say that Jesus is the reason we celebrate Christmas.”

Mr. White, who had served five months at an upstate New York prison for the killing, was convicted of second-degree manslaughter and of criminal possession of a weapon. He had remained free on bail during an appeal, but after the appeal was rejected, a judge gave him a sentence of 20 months to 4 years in prison, a spokeswoman for the State Division of Parole said. The maximum sentence, under legal guidelines, would have been between 4 and 11 years.

In July, Mr. White began serving his sentence at the Mount McGregor Correctional Facility, in Saratoga County. He would have been eligible for parole roughly two months after his first hearing date, next October.

Frederick K. Brewington, a defense lawyer who represented Mr. White during the trial, said a group of advocates for Mr. White made an application to Mr. Paterson for a pardon, “outlining the reasons, what the particulars were and the value to the community.” He added that supporters of Mr. White had organized a letter-writing campaign to urge the governor to consider Mr. White’s case.

A commutation lessens the severity of the punishment. A pardon excuses or forgives the offense itself.

At the trial, Mr. White testified that his son woke him from a deep sleep the night of the shooting, yelling that “some kids are coming here to kill me.” Mr. White said he considered the angry teenagers a “lynch mob.”

Mr. White said their racist language recalled the hatred he saw as a child visiting the segregated Deep South and stories of his grandfather’s being chased out of Alabama in the 1920s by the Ku Klux Klan. He testified that his grandfather taught him how to shoot and bequeathed him the pistol he used.

But Mr. White said the shooting happened accidentally after he began turning to retreat and Daniel lunged at the gun.

Thomas Spota, the Suffolk County district attorney, said in a statement, “I strongly believe the governor should have had the decency and the compassion to at least contact the victim’s family to allow them to be heard before commuting the defendant’s sentence.”

Reached at his auto body shop in Port Jefferson Station, the teenager’s father, Daniel Cicciaro, reacted with annoyance when a reporter identified himself.

“Yeah, what do you need? An oil change?” he said. “We got nothing to say about it.”

Mr. Brewington said that Mr. White was released from prison at 8 a.m. on Thursday, and that the White family was happy with the decision.

“They’re all very thankful, particularly at this time of year for the blessings bestowed upon them and the thoughtful approach by the governor’s office,” Mr. Brewington said.

Mr. Paterson has granted nine pardons, three commutations and one clemency, and plans to make more pardons in immigration cases before leaving office on Dec. 31, officials in his office said Thursday.

The governor began a special clemency process in the spring intended to help permanent legal residents who were at risk of deportation because of long-ago or minor convictions. This month, he pardoned six of those immigrants, including a financial administrator at the City University of New York.

In the case of Mr. White, his lawyer, Mr. Brewington, acknowledged that race had played a big role in the trial, but he cautioned against viewing the commutation as racially based, especially because Mr. Paterson is black.

“He reviewed this matter as he reviews any other matter,” he said. “People have to be careful not to fan the flames of racism. If the governor happened to be white and he commuted the sentence of a white person, would that be an issue?”

Angela Macropoulos contributed reporting.

    Sentence Commuted in Racially Charged Killing, NYT, 23.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/24/nyregion/24commute.html

Behind Census Figures Showing Boom in Nevada, a Story of Bust

December 22, 2010
The New York Times
By ADAM NAGOURNEY

HENDERSON, Nev. — By any measure, it should have been a cause for celebration in a place that surely needs one. The Census Bureau reported that Nevada grew by 35 percent over the last decade, making it the fastest-growing state in the nation.

Instead, it was another reminder of how bad things have become here, and how exhausting a decade this state has endured. This was the boom capital of the country — which explains the census report — until the economy collapsed in 2007. People started moving out, chasing jobs or escaping a house market with the highest foreclosure rate in the country. Unemployment here is now 14.3 percent, the highest in the country.

“People come for the good jobs and the good life, and if that’s no longer here, they are gone,” said David F. Damore, an associate professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “People are just moving out.”

The state demographer, Jeff Hardcastle, estimated that Nevada had lost more than 90,000 people since July 2008, and expects the decline to continue through next year. He said that before 2007, Nevada had been the top-growing state for most of the past 20 years.

People are leaving in search of more prosperous economic climates. But analysts said the state’s population had been hurt by a declining birthrate, not uncommon during tough economic times, and illegal immigrants leaving, or at least avoiding census takers as public attitudes toward them turned harsh.

Here in Henderson, a place of once seemingly unstoppable sprawl, there were banners Wednesday advertising cut-rate deals on homes built where there was desert 20 years ago. Or worse: places like Vantage Lofts on Horizon Ridge Road, a housing complex abandoned in mid-construction. A pile of exposed glass, plywood and cement, surrounded by chain-link fences, gave testimony to the hopes, and unfounded speculation, of developers.

Indeed, many of the abandoned or underused housing, office and retail developments were built by speculators drawn by what once seemed the prospect of endless growth, the lure of Wild West development and the promise of an economic jackpot. “Prior to 2007, the underlying assumption was, build it and they will come,” Mr. Hardcastle said.

Robert A. Fielden, an architect and urban planner in Henderson, said the state has been particularly hurt by real estate speculators who flipped property for profit and then just walked. “We have never faced anything like this before,” he said, reflecting the despair that can be heard in the voices of even Nevada’s biggest boosters.

“What we are living with now is, we let the free market reign without any controls at all. We talk about the United States being built on capitalism. But this wasn’t capitalism. This was greed.”

The population rankings are based on percentages, rather than raw numbers, which gives small states like Nevada an advantage on lists like this: It does not take many people moving in to produce a big percentage. The Census Bureau found the population here had increased from just under 2 million in 2000 to 2.7 million at the end of 2010.

And there was one very obvious benefit of all this: The size of the state’s Congressional delegation grew by one seat to four.

“We’ve had serious economic setbacks,” said Representative Shelley Berkley, a Democrat who represents Las Vegas. “But even that doesn’t begin to dwarf the enormous growth over the last five decades. I think it’s a very positive thing that we qualified for a fourth seat.”

Yet these numbers seem certain to only encourage the fundamental reassessment that has been going on in Nevada about its economic future, amid evidence that the construction boom that produced so many jobs is gone, and that tourism alone will not be able to make up the slack.

“The real big challenge for Nevada is, what’s going to happen to our growth industries,” Billy Vassiliadis, the chief executive of the advertising agency that represents the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. “That to me is why the future is questionable.”

“At this point,” he added, “I wouldn’t be looking for a fifth Congressional seat after the 2020 census.”

Stephen P.A. Brown, director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at U.N.L.V., said any future growth in population was directly related to the state’s ability to rebuild its economy — and, of course, an influx of more people who would contribute to the state’s economic growth. “There is no indication that people are moving back into the state at this point,” he said.

Ian Lovett contributed reporting from Los Angeles.

    Behind Census Figures Showing Boom in Nevada, a Story of Bust, NYT, 22.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/23/us/23nevada.html

Homes at Risk, and No Help From Lawyers

December 20, 2010
The New York Times
By DAVID STREITFELD

In California, where foreclosures are more abundant than in any other state, homeowners trying to win a loan modification have always had a tough time.

Now they face yet another obstacle: hiring a lawyer.

Sharon Bell, a retiree who lives in Laguna Niguel, southeast of Los Angeles, needs a modification to keep her home. She says she is scared of her bank and its plentiful resources, so much so that she cannot even open its certified letters inquiring where her mortgage payments may be. Yet the half-dozen lawyers she has called have refused to represent her.

“They said they couldn’t help,” said Ms. Bell, 63. “But I’ve got to find help, because I’m dying every day.”

Lawyers throughout California say they have no choice but to reject clients like Ms. Bell because of a new state law that sharply restricts how they can be paid. Under the measure, passed overwhelmingly by the State Legislature and backed by the state bar association, lawyers who work on loan modifications cannot receive any money until the work is complete. The bar association says that under the law, clients cannot put retainers in trust accounts.

The law, which has few parallels in other states, was devised to eliminate swindles in which modification firms made promises about what their lawyers could do, charged hefty fees and then disappeared. But foreclosure specialists say there has been an unintended consequence: the honest lawyers can no longer afford to assist Ms. Bell and all the others who feel helpless before lenders that they see as elusive, unyielding and skilled at losing paperwork.

The revelations three months ago that large banks were sloppy and negligent in preparing foreclosure documents underscore just how important it is for distressed homeowners to have representation, lawyers and consumer advocates say. Homeowners whose cases were handled improperly have little way of knowing it. Even if they found out, they would be hard-pressed to challenge a lender without a lawyer.

“Consumers just don’t know what is going on,” said Walter Hackett, a former banker who is now a lawyer for a nonprofit service in Riverside. “They get a piece of paper saying they are going to lose their homes and they freak out.”

The problem for lawyers is that even a simple modification, in which the loan is restructured so the borrower can afford the monthly payments, is a marathon, putting off their payday for months if not years. If the bank refuses to come to terms, the client may file for bankruptcy. Then the lawyer will never be paid.

Alice M. Graham, a lawyer in Marina del Rey, said a homeowner in default recently tried to hire her. When Ms. Graham declined, the despairing owner begged her in vain to accept payments under the table.

“The banks have all the lawyers they want, and the consumers are helpless,” Ms. Graham said.

In some states, including New York and Florida, foreclosure proceedings are overseen by courts. In California, the process is more of a private matter between the bank and the homeowner. Through Sept. 30, lenders filed notices of default on 229,843 homes in California this year, according to the research firm MDA DataQuick.

The length of time California households spend in foreclosure, which was rising as owners pursued modifications, fell in the third quarter to 8.7 months, from 9.1 months in the second quarter. That could indicate that the absence of defense lawyers is beginning to accelerate the process.

While lawyers for nonprofits like Mr. Hackett continue to represent clients, they are too overwhelmed to help everyone. “A homeowner in California is going to have an extraordinarily difficult time finding an attorney,” he said.

That group includes Ms. Bell, who owned two properties free and clear and then gave in to a friend’s urging to “put your money to work.” That friend was an agent, and soon Ms. Bell owned two more properties and was making unsecured loans.

The loans went bad, the investments went bust, and Ms. Bell is trying to salvage her home. She wants an advocate but is reluctant to respond to any of the solicitations that fill her mailbox. “I know better,” she said.

Many people did not. Defaulting owners saw television commercials or heard radio ads where a lawyer promised relief. They handed over a few thousand dollars and heard no more.

Two years ago, the state bar association had seven complaints of misconduct in loan modifications. By March 2009, there were more than 100 complaints, and a task force was formed to deal with the problem. Soon, there were thousands of complaints.

It was a public relations disaster. The president of the bar association wrote in a column last year that “hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of California lawyers” were victimizing people “at the most vulnerable point in their lives.”

Politicians heard complaints, too. Ron Calderon, a state senator who represents several communities east of Los Angeles, sponsored a bill that prohibits advance payments for modifications and required lawyers to warn clients that they could do the job themselves without professional assistance. Lenders were supportive of the bill, Senator Calderon said.

It passed 36 to 4 in September 2009. The maximum punishment is a $10,000 fine and a year in jail.

The law is working well, Senator Calderon said. “You do not need a lawyer,” he said.

Mark Stone, a 56-year-old general contractor in Sierra Madre, feels differently. A few years ago, he got sick with hepatitis C. Unable to work full time, he began to miss mortgage payments. The drugs he was taking left him “a little confused,” he said.

Mr. Stone knew that his condition put him at a disadvantage in negotiations with his bank. So he hired Gregory Royston, a real estate lawyer in Redondo Beach. It took Mr. Royston nearly a year, but he restructured the loan.

Without the lawyer, Mr. Stone said, “I’d be living under a bridge.”

The legal bill, paid in advance, was $3,500. “Worth every penny,” said Mr. Stone, who is now back at work.

Mr. Royston said winning modifications was never easy and often impossible. “The banks stymie the borrower, and they really stymie any third party who works on behalf of the borrower,” he said.

A spokesman for the Mortgage Bankers Association said it simply wanted to protect homeowners from fraud. “Be very careful about anyone who wants you to pay them to help you get a loan modification,” said the spokesman, John Mechem.

That advice has never been more true. If any honest lawyers still do modifications, they are lost in a sea of swindles. “This law,” Mr. Royston said, “took the wrong people out of the game.”

Suzan Anderson, supervising trial counsel of the California bar’s special team on loan modification, defended the law, saying that in other types of cases, including personal injury and medical malpractice, the lawyers do not get paid until the end. She acknowledged, however, it was “a very problematical situation.”

As for the swindlers singled out by the law, they appear unfazed. The state bar is investigating 2,000 complaints of modification fraud.

“I wish the law had worked,” Ms. Anderson said.

Wells Fargo to Modify Mortgages

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Wells Fargo agreed to modify about 14,900 adjustable-rate loans made by banks it acquired, according to filings released on Monday.

The agreement with the state attorney general will result in more than $2 billion in principal write-downs, interest-rate reductions and other concessions through June 2013, said Franklin Codel, chief financial officer of Wells Fargo Home Mortgage.

The deal applies to mortgages marketed as “pick-a-payment” loans by Wachovia and World Savings Bank, a subsidiary of the Golden West Financial Corporation.

Wachovia bought World Savings in 2006, and Wells Fargo bought Wachovia in 2008.

The mortgages were so named because their terms allowed borrowers to make payments at various levels each month, including a payment option that increased the loan’s principal by covering less than the monthly interest owed.

    Homes at Risk, and No Help From Lawyers, NYT, 20.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/21/business/21foreclosure.html

Two States Sue Bank of America Over Mortgages

December 17, 2010
The New York Times
By ANDREW MARTIN and MICHAEL POWELL

The attorneys general of Arizona and Nevada on Friday filed a lawsuit against Bank of America, accusing it of engaging in “widespread fraud” by misleading customers with “false promises” about their eligibility for modifications on their home mortgages.

In withering complaints filed in state courts in both states, the attorneys general accused Bank of America of assuring customers that they would not be foreclosed upon while they were seeking loan modifications, only to proceed with foreclosures anyway; of falsely telling customers that they must be in default to obtain a modification; of promising that the modifications would be made permanent if they completed a trial period, only to renege on the deal; and of conjuring up bogus reasons for denying modifications.

“Bank of America’s callous disregard for providing timely, correct information to people in their time of need is truly egregious,” Catherine Cortez Masto, the attorney general of Nevada said in a statement.

Many Nevada homeowners continued “to make mortgage payments they could not afford, running through their savings, their retirement funds or their children’s education funds.”

The lawsuit comes as top prosecutors nationwide are investigating whether the paperwork that banks used to support foreclosure cases often was egregiously sloppy, sometimes relying on robo-signers — employees who signed hundreds of documents a day — to sign sworn court documents.

Tom Miller, Iowa’s attorney general who is heading the multistate investigation into foreclosure fraud allegations, said the two states’ lawsuits would not dilute his inquiry. “It is clear that attorneys general in Arizona and Nevada believe that it is in their two states’ best interests to pursue coordinated civil cases against Bank of America,” he said in a statement.

A Bank of America spokesman, Dan Frahm, said bank officials were disappointed that the lawsuits were filed “at this time,” given the bank’s cooperation with the multistate investigation.

Mr. Frahm disputed the allegations in the lawsuit, saying the bank was committed to making sure no property was foreclosed until the customer had a chance to modify the loan or, if ineligible for a modification, to pursue another solution.

He said the attorneys general didn’t acknowledge the many improvements the bank had made, like providing a single point of contact for customers who have started the modification process and increasing staff to support “homeownership retention initiatives.”

Arizona and Nevada are among the states hardest hit by the housing downturn, and the state attorneys general said their lawsuits were prompted by hundreds of complaints by consumers who sought modifications of their mortgages.

The complaints in the lawsuit in many ways echoed problems encountered by homeowners nationwide who have tried with little luck to obtain mortgage modifications from banks, often through a federal program set up for that purpose. Thousands of homeowners complain that banks repeatedly lose their documents, fail to return calls or foreclose when a homeowner believes he or she is still negotiating a modification.

Indeed, according to the lawsuits, Bank of America’s efforts were the most anemic of the big banks and were not confined to the Western states but rather “reflect a pervasive nationwide pattern and practice of conduct.” The lawsuit noted that Bank of America ranked last in “virtually every homeowner experience metric” monitored in a monthly report on the federal home loan modification program.

Ms. Masto of Nevada said her office’s findings were confirmed by interviews with consumers, former employees, third parties and documents. Former employees said that Bank of America’s modification staff was “chaotic, understaffed and not oriented to customers,” according to a news release. One former employee said, “The main purpose of the training is to teach us how to get customers off the phone in less than 10 minutes.”

Another employee said, “When checking on a borrower’s status, I often found that the modification request had not been dealt with or was so old that the request had become inactive. Yet, I was instructed to inform borrowers that they were ‘active and in status.’ One time I complained to a supervisor that I felt I always was lying to borrowers.”

The Arizona complaint cites the case of an Apache Junction couple who faced foreclosure. When the wife called the bank, a representative told her ‘not to worry,’ there was a stop order on the foreclosure and the couple’s loan modification package would arrive the next day. The next day the homeowner learned that her house had already been sold, the suit says.

Terry Goddard, attorney general of Arizona, said the lawsuit was filed in part because the bank had violated the terms of a 2009 consent decree that Countrywide Home Loans — which Bank of America purchased in 2008 — had engaged in “widespread consumer fraud” in originating and marketing mortgages. As part of the judgment, Countrywide had agreed to create a loan modification program for some Arizona homeowners.

Mr. Goddard, a Democrat who lost a bid for governor, will leave office in January.

Two States Sue Bank of America Over Mortgages, NYT, 17.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/18/business/18mortgage.html

Los Angeles Confronts Homelessness Reputation

December 12, 2010
The New York Times
By ADAM NAGOURNEY

LOS ANGELES — It was just past dusk in the upscale enclave of Brentwood as a homeless man, wrapped in a tattered gray blanket, stepped into a doorway to escape a light rain, watching the flow of people on their way to the high-end restaurants that lined the street.

Across town in Hollywood the next morning, homeless people were wandering up and down Sunset Boulevard, pushing shopping carts and slumped at bus stops. More homeless men and women could be found shuffling along the boardwalks of Venice and Santa Monica, while a few others were spotted near the heart of Beverly Hills, the very symbol of Los Angeles wealth.

And, as always, San Julian Street, the infamous center of Skid Row on the south edge of downtown Los Angeles, was teeming: a small city of people were making the street their home in a warm December sun, waiting for one of the many missions there to serve a meal.

At a time when cities across the country have made significant progress over the past decade in reducing the number of homeless, in no small part by building permanent housing, the problem seems intractable in the County of Los Angeles.

It has become a subject of acute embarrassment to some civic leaders, upset over the county’s faltering efforts, the glaring contrast of street poverty and mansion wealth, and any perception of a hardhearted Los Angeles unmoved by a problem that has motivated action in so many other cities.

For national organizations trying to eradicate homelessness, Los Angeles — with its 48,000 people living on the streets, including 6,000 veterans, according to one count — stands as a stubborn anomaly, an outlier at a time when there has been progress, albeit modest and at times fitful, in so many cities.

Its designation as the homeless capital of America, a title that people here dislike but do not contest, seems increasingly indisputable.

“If we want to end homelessness in this country, we have to do something about L.A.; it is the biggest nut,” said Nan Roman, the president of the National Alliance to End Homelessness. “It has more homeless people than anyplace else.”

Neil J. Donovan, the executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, said he believed that, after years of decline, there had been a slight rise in the number of homeless nationally this year because of the economic downturn, and that Los Angeles had led the way.

“Los Angeles’s homeless problem is growing faster than the overall national problem,” he said, “trending upwards in every demographic, dashing every hope of progress anywhere.”

In a reflection of the growing concern here, a task force created by the Chamber of Commerce and the United Way of Greater Los Angeles has stepped in with a plan, called Home for Good, to end homelessness here in five years. The idea is to, among other things, build housing for 12,000 of the chronically unemployed and provide food, maintenance and other services at a cost of $235 million a year.

The proposal, based on the task force’s study of what other cities had done, was embraced by political and civic leaders even as it served as a reminder of how many of these plans have failed over the years.

“This is not rocket science,” said Zev Yaroslavsky of the County Board of Supervisors. “It’s been done in New York, it’s been done in Atlanta, and it’s been done in San Francisco.”

Part of the impetus for this most recent flurry of attention is concern in the business and political communities that the epidemic is threatening to tarnish Los Angeles’s national image and undercut a campaign to promote tourism, particularly in downtown, which has been in the midst of a transformation of sorts, with a boom of museums, concert halls, restaurants, boutiques, parks and lofts.

The gentrification has pushed many of the homeless people south, but they can still be seen settled on benches and patches of grass in the center of downtown.

“If you have a homeless problem, then your sense of security is diminished, and that makes people not want to come,” said Jerry Neuman, a co-chairman of the task force. “It’s a problem that diminishes us in many ways: the way we view ourselves and the way other people view us.”

Fittingly enough, it was even the subject of a movie last year, “The Soloist,” which portrayed the relationship between a Los Angeles Times columnist, Steve Lopez, who has written extensively about the homeless, and a musician living on the streets.

The obstacles seem particularly great in this part of the country. The warm climate has always been a draw for homeless people. And the fact that people sleeping outside rarely die of exposure means there is less pressure on civic leaders to act. (In New York City, when a homeless woman known only as “Mama” was found dead at Grand Central Terminal on a frigid Christmas in 1985, it was front-page news that inspired a campaign to deal with the epidemic.)

The governmental structure here, of a county that includes 88 cities and a maze of conflicting jurisdictions, responsibilities and boundaries, has defused responsibility and made it nearly impossible for any one organization or person to take charge.

And Los Angeles is a place where people drive almost everywhere, so there are fewer of the reminders of homelessness — walking around a sleeping person on a sidewalk, responding to requests for money at the corner — that are common in concentrated cities like New York.

“It’s easy to get up in the morning, go to work, drive home and never encounter someone who is homeless,” said Wendy Greuel, the Los Angeles city controller. “I don’t think it’s seeped into the public’s consciousness that homelessness is a problem.”

The homelessness task force offered its plan at a conference that attracted some of the top elected officials here, including Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa and three of the five members of the Board of Supervisors, a notable show of political support.

“We believe that with the release of this plan, we now have a blueprint to end chronic homelessness and veteran homelessness,” said Christine Marge, director of housing for the United Way of Greater Los Angeles.

Yet in a time of severe budget retrenchment, the five-year goal seems daunting. Even though the drafters of the plan say that no new money will be needed to finance it — Los Angeles is already spending more than $235 million a year on hospital, overnight housing and police costs dealing with the homeless — government financing of all social services has come under assault.

“I don’t for a minute think it’s not going to require a tremendous amount of political will to make it happen,” said Richard Bloom, the mayor of Santa Monica. “Do I think it can happen? Yes, because I’ve seen what happens in other cities, like New York City, Denver and Boston.”

Still, Mr. Bloom, who said he regularly attended conferences involving officials from other communities, added: “Our numbers are way out of whack with those numbers I hear elsewhere. It’s just so much more enormous and daunting here.”

    Los Angeles Confronts Homelessness Reputation, NYT, 12.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/13/us/13homeless.html

The Crime of Punishment

December 6, 2010
The New York Times

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.

Four years ago, when the number of inmates in California reached more than 160,000, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a “state of emergency.” The state’s prisons, he said, are places “of extreme peril.”

Last year, under a federal law focusing on prison conditions, the lower court found that overcrowding was the “primary cause” of gruesome inadequacies in medical and mental health care. The court concluded that the only relief under the law “capable of remedying these constitutional deficiencies” is a “prison release order.”

Today, there are almost twice as many inmates in California’s 33 prisons as they were designed for. The court ordered the state to reduce that population by around 30 percent. While still leaving it overcrowded, that would free up space, staff and other vital resources for long overdue medical and mental health clinics.

The case will most likely be resolved by a vote of 5 to 4, with Justice Anthony Kennedy’s vote decisive. At the oral argument, he said that “at some point,” the court must say “overcrowding is the principal cause, as experts have testified, and it’s now time for a remedy.” After 20 years of litigation and 70 court orders, that point has come.

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.

    The Crime of Punishment, NYT, 6.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/06/opinion/06mon1.html

Pushing a Right to Bear Arms, the Sharp Kind

December 4, 2010
The New York Times
By MARC LACEY

PHOENIX — Arizona used to be a knife carrier’s nightmare, with a patchwork of local laws that forced those inclined to strap Buck knives or other sharp objects to their belts to tread carefully as they moved from Phoenix (no knives except pocketknives) to Tempe (no knives at all) to Tucson (no knives on library grounds).

But that changed earlier this year when Arizona made its Legislature the sole arbiter of knife regulations. And because of loose restrictions on weapons here, Arizona is now considered a knife carrier’s dream, a place where everything from a samurai sword to a switchblade can be carried without a quibble.

Arizona’s transformation, and the recent lifting of a ban on switchblades, stilettos, dirks and daggers in New Hampshire, has given new life to the knife rights lobby, the little-known cousin of the more politically potent gun rights movement. Its vision is a knife-friendly America, where blades are viewed not as ominous but as tools — the equivalent of sharp-edged screw drivers or hammers — that serve useful purposes and can save lives as well as take them.

Sure, knife fights and knife attacks are a concern. No knife-lover would ever deny that. In fact, Todd Rathner, the lobbyist for Knife Rights Inc., an advocacy group based in Arizona that is now in its third year, was mugged twice in New York City before moving to Tucson, once — “ironically,” he said — at knifepoint.

But the problem is with the knife wielder, not the knife itself, the knife lobby says, sounding very much like those who advocate for gun rights.

In fact, knife advocates contend that the Second Amendment applies to knives as well as guns. They focus their argument elsewhere, though, emphasizing that knives fill so many beneficial roles, from carving Thanksgiving turkeys to whittling, that they do not deserve the bad name they often get.

“People talk about how knives are dangerous, and then they go in the kitchen and they have 50 of them,” said D’Alton Holder, a veteran knife maker who lives in Wickenberg, Ariz. “It’s ridiculous to talk about the size of the knife as if that makes a difference. If you carry a machete that’s three feet long, it’s no more dangerous than any knife. You can do just as much damage with an inch-long blade, even a box cutter.”

As for the pocketknife he carries with him every day, Mr. Holder said: “I use it for everything — to clean my fingernails, to prune a tree or carve, even to eat dinner with. I never think about the knives that I carry or the knives that I make as weapons.”

Jennifer Coffey, the New Hampshire state representative who led the effort to overturn the state’s switchblade ban, is also an emergency medical technician who uses knives to extract people from vehicles after accidents. Even when switchblades were outlawed, there were exceptions for emergency workers and others who might use them on the job, but Ms. Coffey still considered the law outrageous.

“We had certain knives that were illegal, but I could walk down the street with a kitchen knife that I used to carve a turkey and that would be legal,” Ms. Coffey said. “I’d be more scared of a kitchen knife than a switchblade.”

She said switchblade bans were passed in the 1950s because of the menacing use of the knives in movies like “West Side Story” and “Rebel Without a Cause.” Her legislation drew the support of an array of knife-related entities: Knife Rights, a young upstart in knife advocacy; the American Knife and Tool Institute, a group based in Wyoming that represents knife manufacturers, sellers and owners; and publications like Blade, Cutlery News Journal and Knife World.

The effort to lift the ban on switchblades in New Hampshire even won the support of the New Hampshire Association of Chiefs of Police.

In Arizona, however, police groups were more circumspect about lifting all of the local knife laws. The Arizona Association of Chiefs of Police opposed the move, saying local jurisdictions ought to set their own knife restrictions. The Phoenix Law Enforcement Association remained neutral.

In much of the country, especially in urban areas, knives are still viewed as weapons in need of tight control.

District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. of Manhattan announced in June that his office had pressured retail stores that were selling illegal knives to remove them from their shelves, forfeit profits from the knives made over the last four years and help finance a campaign to educate people against illegal knives.

“What makes these knives so dangerous is the ease with which they can be concealed and brandished,” Mr. Vance said of the illegal switchblades and gravity knives, which require a wrist flip to open instead of a switchblade’s spring, that were bought by undercover agents.

Mr. Vance’s offensive drew the ire of the American Knife and Tool Institute, which issued an “action alert” and offered to assist New York retailers and individuals charged with knife violations with their legal defenses.

The knife lobby similarly rose up in 2009 when the federal Customs and Border Protection agency issued a proposal that would have reclassified many pocketknives and pocket tools as switchblades and thus made them illegal for import or sale across state lines under the 1958 federal Switchblade Act. In the end, Congress intervened and blocked the change.

A case now unfolding in Seattle shows how volatile knives continue to be. A police officer there fatally shot a man in August after, the officer said, he ordered the man several times to drop a knife that he was carrying. But the legitimacy of the shooting has been questioned by the Police Department, partly because the knife, which had a three-inch blade, was found in a closed position near the body of the dead man, who had been using it to carve a piece of wood.

Knife advocates are hoping that, just as Arizona’s immigration law has led to a national debate on that topic, its move to end knife restrictions will lead more states to take up the cause.

“Arizona is now the model when it comes to knives,” said Mr. Rathner, who was a National Rifle Association lobbyist before he switched to knives. “We’re now going to be moving to other states, probably in the Rocky Mountains and the Southeast. There’s probably half a dozen or more places that are ripe for this.”

    Pushing a Right to Bear Arms, the Sharp Kind, NYT, 4.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/05/us/05knives.html

Arizona Cuts Financing for Transplant Patients

December 2, 2010
The New York Times
By MARC LACEY

PHOENIX — Even physicians with decades of experience telling patients that their lives are nearing an end are having difficulty discussing a potentially fatal condition that has arisen in Arizona: Death by budget cut.

Effective at the beginning of October, Arizona stopped financing certain transplant operations under the state’s version of Medicaid. Many doctors say the decision amounts to a death sentence for some low-income patients, who have little chance of survival without transplants and lack the hundreds of thousands of dollars needed to pay for them.

“The most difficult discussions are those that involve patients who had been on the donor list for a year or more and now we have to tell them they’re not on the list anymore,” said Dr. Rainer Gruessner, a transplant specialist at the University of Arizona College of Medicine. “The frustration is tremendous. It’s more than frustration.”

Organ transplants are already the subject of a web of regulations, which do not guarantee that everyone in need of a life-saving organ will receive one. But Arizona’s transplant specialists are alarmed that patients who were in line to receive transplants one day were, after the state’s budget cuts to its Medicaid program, ruled ineligible the next — unless they raised the money themselves.

Francisco Felix, 32, a father of four who has hepatitis C and is in need of a liver, received news a few weeks ago that a family friend was dying and wanted to donate her liver to him. But the budget cuts meant he no longer qualified for a state-financed transplant.

He was prepared anyway at Banner Good Samaritan Medical Center as his relatives scrambled to raise the needed $200,000. When the money did not come through, the liver went to someone else on the transplant list.

“I know times are tight and cuts are needed, but you can’t cut human lives,” said Mr. Felix’s wife, Flor. “You just can’t do that.”

Such high drama is unfolding regularly here as more and more of the roughly 100 people affected by the cuts are becoming known: the father of six who died before receiving a bone marrow transplant, the plumber in need of a new heart and the high school basketball coach who struggles to breathe during games at high altitudes as she awaits a lung transplant.

“I appreciate the need for budget restraints,” said Dr. Andrew M. Yeager, a University of Arizona professor who is director of the Blood and Marrow Transplantation Program at the Arizona Cancer Center. “But when one looks at a potentially lifesaving treatment, admittedly expensive, and we have data to support efficacy, cuts like this are shortsighted and sad.”

State Medicaid officials said they recommended discontinuing some transplants only after assessing the success rates for previous patients. Among the discontinued procedures are lung transplants, liver transplants for hepatitis C patients and some bone marrow and pancreas transplants, which altogether would save the state about $4.5 million a year.

“As an agency, we understand there have been difficult cuts and there will have to be more difficult cuts looking forward,” said Jennifer Carusetta, chief legislative liaison at the state Medicaid agency.

The issue has led to a fierce political battle, with Democrats condemning the reductions as “Brewercare,” after Gov. Jan Brewer.

“We made it very clear at the time of the vote that this was a death sentence,” said State Senator Leah Landrum Taylor, a Democrat. “This is not a luxury item. We’re not talking about cosmetic surgery.”

The Republican governor has in turn blamed “Obamacare,” meaning the federal health care overhaul, for the transplant cuts even though the Arizona vote came in March, before President Obama signed that bill into law.

But a top Republican, State Representative John Kavanagh, has already pledged to reconsider at least some of the state’s cuts for transplants when the Legislature reconvenes in January. Mr. Kavanagh, chairman of the Appropriations Committee, said he does not believe lawmakers had the full picture of the effect of the cuts on patients when they voted.

“It’s difficult to be linked to a situation where people’s lives are jeopardized and turned upside down,” he said in an interview. “Thankfully no one has died as a result of this, and I believe we have time to rectify this.”

Across the country, states have restricted benefits to their Medicaid programs, according to a 50-state survey published in September by the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured. But none have gone as far as Arizona in eliminating some transplants, which are considered optional services under federal law.

Before the Legislature acted, Arizona’s Medicaid agency had provided an analysis to lawmakers of the transplants that were cut, which many health experts now say was seriously flawed. For instance, the state said that 13 of 14 patients under the state’s health system who received bone marrow transplants from nonrelatives over a two-year period died within six months.

But outside specialists said the success rates were considerably higher, particularly for leukemia patients in their first remission.

“Something needs to be done,” said Dr. Emmanuel Katsanis, a bone marrow transplant expert at the University of Arizona. “There’s no doubt that people aren’t going to make it because of this decision. What do you tell someone? You need a transplant but you have to raise the money?”

Just before the Oct. 1 deadline, Mark Price, a father of six who was fighting leukemia, learned he needed a bone marrow transplant. But his doctor, Jeffrey R. Schriber, found donor matches for his transplant the very day the new rules went into effect, and Mr. Price no longer qualified for coverage by the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System, the formal name for the state’s Medicaid program.

What happened next was at once inspirational and heart-rending.

Out of the blue, an anonymous financial donor quickly stepped forward and agreed to cover the hundreds of thousands of dollars needed for Mr. Price’s surgery. But Mr. Price died last weekend, after his cancer returned before the operation could be done. He was buried on Thursday, next to his grandfather.

“It’s not correct to say that he died as a result of the cuts,” said Dr. Schriber, who is active in lobbying for the financing to be restored. “Did it prey on his mind? Did it make his last days more difficult? No doubt.”

Elsewhere, the fund-raising is already under way.

Mr. Felix and others are now trying to raise enough for new organs through NTAF, a nonprofit organization based in Pennsylvania formerly known as the National Transplant Assistance Fund that helps transplant patients pay for their medical costs. National coverage of their plight has already led to more than $100,000 in donations for some of the patients affected by the budget cuts. The Felix family is also planning a yard sale this weekend so he does not lose the chance to get another liver.

There has been a flurry of lobbying to persuade the state to reverse the decision. Dr. Gruessner said he and others met with state health officials recently to propose other cuts associated with transplants, like eliminating tests typically conducted before surgery.

If the Legislature does decide to reconsider the cuts, one of the affected people, a plumber and father of three named Randy Shepherd, 36, who has an ailing heart and needs a transplant, plans to attend the debate.

“I’m trying not to take it personally,” he said of being cut out of the program. “None of the politicians had heard of me when they made their decision. They didn’t say, ‘Let’s kill this guy.’ ”

    Arizona Cuts Financing for Transplant Patients, NYT, 2.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/03/us/03transplant.html

2 Brothers Will Rule in Wisconsin

November 25, 2010
The New York Times
By MONICA DAVEY

MADISON, Wis. — Like brothers anywhere, Jeff and Scott Fitzgerald tend to interrupt each other. They share season tickets to University of Wisconsin Badgers football games. They bicker, jokingly, over work — who has the larger office, the tougher hours, the more complex job.

The State Capitol here will undergo one of the most marked shifts in the nation after this month’s election, from Democratic dominance to Republican control. But another remarkable change is coming: Representative Jeff Fitzgerald was picked to be the next speaker of Wisconsin’s State Assembly, and Senator Scott Fitzgerald was chosen as majority leader of the State Senate, creating a rare fraternal alignment, experts say, for any state in recent memory.

While all sorts of relatives have served at various times in state legislatures (including husband-and-wife teams, siblings and, after this election, a mother-and-son duo among New Hampshire’s lawmakers), the Fitzgeralds’ particular circumstances as simultaneous leaders of both chambers are extremely unusual.

“A lot of people think we turn it off at home,” Representative Fitzgerald said the other day of the brothers’ propensity to talk politics and policy during daily cellphone calls, at family birthday gatherings and pretty much everywhere else they happen upon each other. “But no,” he said. “It only gets worse.”

The brothers, both conservative Republicans and veteran legislators, acknowledge that they battled as boys over the “things boys fight about,” Senator Fitzgerald said. More recently, they have cast only a few opposite votes here and there, on the state budget, for instance, and on ethanol standards.

But in a Capitol in which some Assembly leaders have barely been on speaking terms with their counterparts in the Senate, the Fitzgerald brothers are predicting particular cooperation between the chambers (even if Senator Fitzgerald persists in portraying the Assembly as “big, loud and raucous” and Representative Fitzgerald mocks the Senate for regularly heading home, so he asserts, by 2 in the afternoon).

At 47, Senator Fitzgerald is older, shorter and, even he acknowledges, more stubborn than his only brother. Representative Fitzgerald is 44, the jock of the family, and more laid back. Senator Fitzgerald followed their father, Stephen (a former sheriff of Dodge County) into politics in 1994, then Representative Fitzgerald ran a few years later — blessed with built-in name recognition that most politicians could only dream of, but mildly worried, too, that there might be “fatigue” over seeing yet another Fitzgerald on the ballot.

Representative Fitzgerald lives in Horicon, a small city 50 miles northwest of Milwaukee — and five miles from Senator Fitzgerald’s Juneau home. Senator Fitzgerald represents his brother in the Senate, while Representative Fitzgerald’s district narrowly misses his brother’s home. They tease each other during the political season (“I’ve noticed a lot of your opponent’s signs in yards!”). They also have shared a political opponent, Vittorio Spadaro, who challenged one brother in one cycle, then the other.

Come January, the Fitzgeralds, who had grown used to leading the minorities in their chambers, will lead an Assembly of 60 Republicans, 38 Democrats and an independent and a Senate with 19 Republicans and 14 Democrats. Many legislators are new. Among the Democrats who lost jobs: the current Assembly speaker and senate majority leader.

Had one chamber flipped but not the other, the Fitzgeralds would not be nearly as optimistic about what comes next. The outcome of a divided Capitol, Senator Fitzgerald said, is “horse trading instead of compromise, and you end up voting for some really bad garbage.” As it is, Representative Fitzgerald said he was preparing to reintroduce a series of jobs bills that went nowhere when Madison was run by Democrats.

Yet these will hardly be simple times. Wisconsin faces a budget gap — more than $2 billion by some estimates — and a majority of voters who were clearly searching for something other than what they had. “I’m ready for it,” Senator Fitzgerald said. “If we don’t ruffle feathers this time, I think people are going to say we’re not doing what we said we would do.”

Before their caucuses selected them this month, the Fitzgeralds worried that some might object to granting so much power to one family. “Do you think they’ll let us?” Senator Fitzgerald remembered thinking. This is a nation that hates — but also adores — its political dynasties, and the Fitzgeralds easily won.

    2 Brothers Will Rule in Wisconsin, NYT, 25.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/26/us/politics/26wisconsin.html

Cuomo Visits Sing Sing and a Psychiatric Center

November 10, 2010
The New York Times
By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE and ELIZABETH A. HARRIS

It was, some might argue, an apt dry run for the New York governor-elect.

Andrew M. Cuomo visited a state prison and a state-run mental ward on Wednesday, the first stops in what aides billed as a postelection tour of the state government that Mr. Cuomo has pledged to tame and revive after he takes office.

The visits — first to the Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, N.Y., then to the Manhattan Psychiatric Center on Wards Island — marked the second day of formal transition activities for Mr. Cuomo, who also released a video in which he thanked New Yorkers for voting for him and pledged to make state government less secretive.

While there were no jokes about corrupt officials or the madhouse atmosphere that has prevailed in Albany in recent years, the visits were rich with practical and symbolic significance for Mr. Cuomo, the state attorney general and a Democrat.

Sing Sing was the scene of the first major test faced by Mr. Cuomo’s father, Mario M. Cuomo, after being elected governor almost three decades ago: In 1983, shortly after Mr. Cuomo took office, inmates rioted and held 17 guards hostage for two days. Governor Cuomo was intimately involved in the negotiations, and the hostages emerged without serious injury.

“In some ways, this comes full circle for me; when I first started in state government, I was working for a fellow named Mario Cuomo,” Mr. Cuomo, who served as an adviser to his father at the time, said at a news conference on Wednesday outside the prison.

“This was the first incident, first episode,” Mr. Cuomo added.

“He’d just been governor literally a few days, and this was the nightmare scenario,” he explained. “It was very frightening.”

The agencies that run prisons and mental health facilities also employ the largest number of state workers of any departments of government under direct control of the governor, part of a work force that Mr. Cuomo may be forced to trim, or demand significant concessions from, to plug the state’s projected $8 billion deficit for next year.

Mr. Cuomo used his visit to lay out some of the budget challenges that he will face in the months ahead, particularly when it comes to the billions of dollars a year that New York spends to run its own operations, a major component of the state budget.

More prisons were opened under Mr. Cuomo’s father than under any other governor in New York history, as high crime rates and 1970s-era mandatory sentencing laws drove significant growth in the state prison population. On Wednesday, Governor-elect Cuomo argued that with the prison population now shrinking, it was time to think about shrinking the number of prisons, too.

“On the prison side, the census is dropping; that’s good news,” Mr. Cuomo said. “We are locking up fewer people. But then you need fewer facilities. And the shrinkage of that system is going to be something that has to be thought through and managed.”

He said the state could not afford to have on its payroll state workers who have no real duties.

“I understand the economic consequences of losing state jobs,” Mr. Cuomo said. “The answer can’t be we are going to employ state workers who literally have no function.”

Govs. David A. Paterson, whom Mr. Cuomo met with on Tuesday, and Eliot Spitzer tried, with mixed success, to close correctional facilities, which provide much-needed jobs in some rural, upstate counties.

Robert Gangi, executive director of the Correctional Association of New York, a prisoners’ advocacy organization, said he would welcome a new push by Mr. Cuomo to reduce spending on prisons, especially in the wake of legislation passed last year that reduced sentences for many nonviolent drug offenders.

“My guess is, those kinds of efficiencies are available,” Mr. Gangi said. “He can really accomplish something for the state both in terms of improving the criminal justice system and in bringing down the costs.”

Mr. Cuomo used his later appearance, at the psychiatric center, to strike a different note. Standing directly underneath the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge, Mr. Cuomo said the state must balance the reality of scarce state dollars against the need to provide services, like mental health care, to the most vulnerable New Yorkers.

Balancing the budget is “a priority for me,” he said, but “the flip side of that equation is balancing that budget with the very necessary, important services that the state is providing, the services where you are literally taking care of human beings.”

    Cuomo Visits Sing Sing and a Psychiatric Center, NYT, 10.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/11/nyregion/11cuomo.html

States Out of Balance

November 9, 2010
The New York Times

The Republican Party’s most visible triumph last week was in the House of Representatives, but the more lasting — and possibly more destructive — result was in statehouses across the country. Republicans won more than 690 new legislative seats, taking back at least 19 state chambers and 10 governor’s seats from Democrats. Republicans previously had been in full control of nine states; now they will fully control at least 20.

There is no way that these newly elected Republican lawmakers and governors can follow through on their promises to erase huge deficits without raising taxes — except by making irresponsibly draconian cuts in critical state services, particularly for the poor and for education.

The states, like the federal government, need to get control of spending. That may mean dealing with out-of-control pensions. It may mean careful cuts in services combined with, yes, higher taxes. But with millions of people out of work, this is the worst possible time for the states to try to solve all their problems by simply slashing health care spending, spending on higher and elementary education, and services for the elderly and the poor. It would lead to tens of thousands of layoffs and even lower state revenues.

State budget cuts over the last two years have already been deep and painful, the biggest declines in three decades. High-spending states like New York, New Jersey and California can still find waste and fraud in programs like Medicaid. They are among the states that must make an aggressive effort to bring spiraling pension costs down to earth.

Many other states have little left to cut in government services. Nonetheless, as Monica Davey and Michael Luo reported in The Times this week, many newly elected Republican governors say they will balance their budgets that way. In Texas, Gov. Rick Perry and several state lawmakers have even floated the idea of dropping out of the Medicaid program and creating a low-cost insurance program for the poor.

That is an irresponsible, and counterproductive, way to try to close the state’s $25 billion deficit. It would mean giving up the federal government’s 60 percent share of the Texas program’s $40 billion annual cost. And for nearly four million participants, it would reduce the level of health care far below a minimum standard.

No matter what the politicians have promised, there is no sound way to balance budgets, protect the most vulnerable people, and the states’ own economies, without some tax increases.

The Republicans’ big wins in Washington will make the states’ plight even worse. As part of their campaigns, Republican members of Congress have vowed to cut discretionary spending, much of which goes to state capitols. Meanwhile, federal stimulus money — decried by the Republicans — is drying up.

The changes in state government will have another long-term effect as states begin the redistricting process to comply with the population changes documented in the 2010 census. This means that Republicans will be in a position to consolidate this year’s gains by redrawing Congressional and state legislative district lines to their advantage.

These highly partisan exercises in self-aggrandizement go on every 10 years, but the unusually large number of states with both Republican legislatures and governorships will sharply reduce the ability of Democrats to bring a little balance to the process.

States have long been in the paradoxical position of being closer to the lives of voters than the federal government, while receiving far less scrutiny and attention. But if Republicans begin abusing the privilege they have been handed, imposing unconscionable cuts and claiming an unfair partisan advantage, they may find the public’s outrage turning back on them in a hurry.

    States Out of Balance, NYT, 9.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/10/opinion/10wed1.html

Ready to Take the Reins in Two Troubled States

November 4, 2010
The New York Times
By ADAM NAGOURNEY and JENNIFER MEDINA

LOS ANGELES — Jerry Brown has seen this before: a budget in crisis, a Legislature divided, a state confronting the possibility that its glory days are behind it.

But as Mr. Brown — who in 1974 was elected as the state’s youngest governor and on Tuesday was elected as its oldest — met with state lawmakers on Thursday to confront a potential $19 billion shortfall, he was looking at a vastly different world. Within the year, Mr. Brown may have to oversee another round of state layoffs and a battle over pension cuts with the unions that supported him.

In some ways, the governor-elect’s associates said, Mr. Brown — whose quirky and often edgy personality made him an object of national attention even before he ran for president three times — also has changed over the decades.

This time, Mr. Brown, 72, will not be serving under the shadow of his father, Pat, a former governor and a legendary force in California politics, who died in 1996. Many of Mr. Brown’s friends said they considered his excesses the first time he served as governor as an attempt to distinguish his career from his father’s.

His closest aide of 30 year ago — a bald Frenchman who wore a beret, and whose presence fed the zany image Mr. Brown fought to escape — has been replaced by Mr. Brown’s wife, Anne Gust, the former chief administrative officer of the Gap.

As much as an iconoclast as Mr. Brown is, he is a product of the political world, in contrast to the current governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who came from Hollywood and never seemed at ease with the glad-handing that is often necessary in state government.

“I have already spoken to him five times since his election,” John A. Perez, the Assembly speaker, said of Mr. Brown.

“After the current governor, they are going to find an old, steady, experienced hand good to work with,” said Charles T. Manatt, who served as both state and national Democratic leader while Mr. Brown was first governor. “He’s matured. He’s double the age that he was when he was first governor. He has a nice wife. He has settled down. He has changed.”

Mr. Brown, in an interview on Thursday, said the situation he is facing now is much more dire than last time.

“Not even close,” he said. “No comparison. The budget gap is enormous. Polarization is deep. The contradiction between what is wanted and what is funded is enormous.”

Mr. Schwarzenegger is handing Mr. Brown a big budget deficit, just as Mr. Brown handed his successor, George Deukmejian, a $1.5 billion budget shortfall when he left office in January 1983.

“We’re facing a terrific deficit of maybe $20 billion,” said Darrell Steinberg, the Democratic leader of the State Senate and one of Mr. Brown’s new budget negotiating partners. “People have really lost confidence in the Legislature.”

Dealing with a budget deficit is more tangled in today’s California than it was 30 years ago. A series of voter initiatives — starting with Proposition 13, which limits property taxes and was passed in 1978, leaves the new governor far less flexibility in cutting programs or raising taxes and fees.

And the propositions keep coming. One that passed on Tuesday permits the Legislature to approve spending by a majority vote rather than two-thirds — a change that should help end the deadlocks that delayed the state budget by 100 days this summer. That said, a second proposition requires any increase in fees to be passed by a two-thirds majority in the Legislature; a similar mandate is already in place for taxes.

Voters also have imposed term limits on public officials, a move that has fundamentally changed the dynamics and motivations of the lawmakers with whom Mr. Brown is going to have to deal.

Mr. Brown’s biggest complication may be one he created for himself, in one of the few concrete pledges he made in defeating his Republican opponent, Meg Whitman: that he would not raise taxes without the approval of the voters. “To foreclose options by a blanket statement is not my preferred way of governing,” Speaker Perez said. “You just never know what you are going to need to do.”

But after running a characteristically enigmatic campaign, Mr. Brown will take office wrapped in the kind of mystery that he has seemed to enjoy in a career that has kept friend and foe off balance.

On his campaign Web site, he said that he intended “to renegotiate current pension formulas. We should require employees to work longer and to a later age for full retirement benefits.”

Yet it is a matter of conjecture here of how far he will go. Will he, for example, take advantage of being a Democrat who has natural union support and push for pension cuts?

“He may be a career politician, but nothing about him has ever been conventional,” said Christopher Lehane, a political consultant who has watched Mr. Brown for years. “If he is able to get through a lot of obstacles — and that is a big if — he could be the right person at this time, the sort of Nixon-goes-to-China way.”

Indeed, union leaders, who supported Mr. Brown and battled Mr. Schwarzenegger as he sought to cut pay and benefits, said they were hopeful that the new governor would look out for their interests.

“I would hate to have to predict what he’s going to do; you just don’t know with Jerry,” said Rose Ann DeMoro, the leader of the state’s nursing union.

“I think he is going to be looking at the pensions — but there’s nothing that indicates he’s going to gut them,” she said

But Art Pulaski, the chief of the California Labor Federation, offered a gloomier assessment: “I don’t think he cares about re-election, so he’s not going to focus on keeping his constituencies happy, and that includes us.”

    Ready to Take the Reins in Two Troubled States, NYT, 4.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/05/us/politics/05brown.html

In Iowa, Voters Oust Judges Over Marriage Issue

November 3, 2010
The New York Times
By A.G. SULZBERGER

DES MOINES — In a rebuke of the state supreme court with implications for judicial elections across the country, voters here removed three justices who participated in a ruling last year that made the state the first in the Midwest to permit same-sex marriage.

The close vote concluded an unusually aggressive ouster campaign in the typically sleepy state judicial retention elections that pitted concerns about judicial overreaching against concerns about judicial independence. Years of grumbling about “robed masters,” conservatives demonstrated their ability to target and remove judges who issue opinions they disagree with.

Each of the three judges received about 45-46 percent support with 91 percent of precincts reporting, according to The Associated Press, marking the first time members of Iowa’s high court had been rejected by voters. Under the system used here, judges face no opponents and simply need to win more yes votes than no votes to win another eight-year term.

Financed largely by out-of-state organizations opposed to gay marriage, those pushing against the judges were successful in turning the vote into a referendum on the divisive issue.

“I think it will send a message across the country that the power resides with the people,” Bob Vander Plaats, a Republican who led the campaign after losing the republican nomination for governor, told a crowd of cheering supporters at an election night party peppered with red signs declaring “No Activist Judges.” “It’s we the people, not we the courts.”

Though the Iowa election was the most prominent, similar ouster campaigns were launched in other states against state supreme court justices running unopposed in retention elections whose rulings on matters involving abortion, taxes, tort reform and health care had upset conservatives.

Together they marked the rapid politicization of judicial races that had been specifically designed to be free of intrigue. Over the last decade, just $2 million was spent on advertising in retention elections, less than 1 percent of total campaign spending on judicial elections in that period, according to data compiled in a recent report released in part by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School. More than $3 million was spent on retention election races this year, easily eclipsing the figure for the previous decade, according to the Brennan Center.

The defeat was a bitter disappointment to much of the legal community here, which rallied behind the three justices arguing that judicial standards require judges to follow their interpretation of the law and not their reading of public opinion. They had urged voters to consider issues like competence and temperament rather than a single issue when casting ballots.

The three justices — Marsha K. Ternus, the chief justice; Michael J. Streit; and David L. Baker — did not raise money to campaign and only toward the end of the election did they make public appearances to defend themselves.

“We wish to thank all of the Iowans who voted to retain us for another term,” the judges said in a statement. “Your support shows that many Iowans value fair and impartial courts. We also want to acknowledge and thank all the Iowans, from across the political spectrum and from different walks of life, who worked tirelessly over the past few months to defend Iowa’s high-caliber court system against an unprecedented attack by out-of-state special interest groups.

“Finally, we hope Iowans will continue to support Iowa’s merit selection system for appointing judges. This system helps ensure that judges base their decisions on the law and the Constitution and nothing else. Ultimately, however, the preservation of our state’s fair and impartial courts will require more than the integrity and fortitude of individual judges, it will require the steadfast support of the people.”

Though several groups formed to support their retention, they were significantly outspent by the organizations that bankrolled the ouster effort, including the National Organization for Marriage and the American Family Association.

“We’re concerned about the precedent this has set tonight and what it means for the influence of money and politics on the judicial system,” said Dan Moore, co-chair of Fair Courts for Us, which supported the judges.

The judicial races were perhaps the most hotly anticipated item on the ballot this year, a dramatic contrast from years past in which the election were so low profile that more than a third of those who cast ballots left the section blank. “That’s the main reason I came out,” said Michelle Kramer, 36, a college student from Des Moines. “People can do what they want to do, they can love who they want to love.”

Her friend and neighbor Cathy Hackett, 38, took the opposite view. “I voted no for every single one of them,” said Ms. Hackett, a customer sales representative who described herself as a conservative Christian. “I’m not anti-gay. I love everybody. But I believe that if two people are going to marry they should be a man and a woman.”

The outcome will have no affect on the ruling that triggered the campaign, a 7-to-0 decision that found that a law defining marriage as between a man and a woman represented unlawful discrimination under the state constitution.

But those who led the ouster campaign said they were more focused on highlighting to judges elsewhere, including those on the U.S. Supreme Court, the risks associated with leapfrogging public opinion on the issue of same-sex marriage. They noted same-sex marriage has been initially approved by supreme courts in four states and by legislators in only three.

Jeff Mullen, lead pastor at the Point of Grace Church, who helped organize religious leaders in opposition to the judges, said the vote should send a message to judges nationwide. “They weren’t supposed to legislate from the bench,” he said. “They did. They’re out of a job.”

Depending on the speed with which new candidates are nominated the replacement justices could be appointed either by Gov. Chet Culver, a democrat who lost reelection on Tuesday, or Terry Branstad, a republican who previously served as governor. Each appointed one of the departing justices to the Supreme Court and Mr. Branstad appointed Ms. Ternus to a lower court. Mr. Branstad has called for changing the selection system.

    In Iowa, Voters Oust Judges Over Marriage Issue, NYT, 3.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/03/us/politics/03judges.html

In Governor’s Races, Republicans Make Gains

November 3, 2010
The New York Times
By MONICA DAVEY

On an Election Day with one of the largest number of governors races in memory, Republicans gained governorships across the country, including those in the political battlegrounds of the industrial Midwest where Democrats have dominated in recent years.

In Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, Republicans seized seats that had been held by Democrats. They also took seats now held by Democrats in other parts of the country, including Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Wyoming.

In Wisconsin, a beaming Scott Walker, a Republican, took to a stage and praised all the voters who, he said, had emerged from the woodwork to “take our state back.”

As in so many states, much of the campaign there had focused around job losses, financial woes and state budget troubles, and Mr. Walker, like several of his Republican colleagues, had pledged to cut government waste, reshape government and upend a system that he said had failed. Minutes after his victory became clear, Mr. Walker issued a release that declared: “Wisconsin is open for business!”

But around the nation, the outcomes are expected to have effects that reach beyond local economic policies or legislation drawn up in statehouses.

States are preparing to carry out their once-a-decade redrawing of political districts — for the House and state legislatures — based on United States census counts collected this year, and many of these new governors will have important roles in deciding what those maps look like.

Going into Election Day, Democrats held 26 governorships, while Republicans had 24. Following most midterm elections after the arrival of a new president, the party in power in the White House typically loses some governorships, but the changes on Tuesday appeared to go deeper.

With votes in many states still being counted on Tuesday night, Republicans were already holding on to many of the seats they currently hold — in Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, Nebraska, Nevada, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas and Utah — as well anticipating significant gains.

“People are not happy with the direction of this country,” said Terry Branstad, a Republican and former governor who defeated Gov. Chet Culver of Iowa, another state where the economy seemed to overwhelm most other issues. “The status quo is not acceptable.”

Democrats were hoping that voters might turnout in high numbers and that efforts in the final weeks by President Obama and other Democratic leaders might lessen the damage.

There were certainly some indications of relief for Democrats, in states that included Arkansas, Colorado and California, where Jerry Brown, who has already been Governor, will return to the job having beaten Meg Whitman, the former chief executive of eBay who invested millions in the race.

In New York, too, Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo easily defeated the Republican, Carl P. Paladino, even though Republicans were expected to pick up seats in the state legislature and the Congressional delegation. In Massachusetts, Gov. Deval Patrick, a Democrat, beat Charles Baker Jr., a Republican and a former chief executive of one of the state’s largest health insurers. And in Maryland, Martin O’Malley, the Democratic governor, fought off a challenge from Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., a Republican who had once been governor. But the Republicans’ gains in the Midwest were daunting for Democrats, in part because of the size and scope of the shift.

In Wisconsin, Mr. Walker, the county executive of Milwaukee who has promised to shrink government, beat Tom Barrett, the Democratic mayor of Milwaukee. Mr. Walker equated electing Mr. Barrett with giving one more term to James E. Doyle, the current governor whose popularity ratings had become anemic.

In Michigan, where Jennifer M. Granholm, a Democrat, was barred from seeking re-election by term limits, Rick Snyder, a Republican who stunned the party establishment by beating better-known, more established candidates in a primary, defeated Virg Bernero, the Democratic mayor of Lansing. The issue in the state, which had suffered devastating economic losses even before the recession, was the same as everywhere: jobs and money.

Among the group of new Republican political leaders emerging on Tuesday: Nikki Haley, the nation’s first Indian-American female governor, a victor in South Carolina; Susana Martinez, a Republican district attorney who promised to end a pattern of corruption and to block illegal immigrants from getting driver’s licenses in New Mexico; and Mr. Snyder, the former head of Gateway Inc., who was elected governor of Michigan with a catch phrase, “one tough nerd.”

Of the 37 states voting for governor, 24 races were open seats from both parties, thanks to terms limits and to a climate that seemed to discourage some incumbents from seeking re-election.

From Maine to Hawaii, the governors’ races had been hard fought, with clear indications, leaders from both parties said, of the same broad national climate that was testing the survival of Democrats — and incumbents — for the House and Senate.

In another indication of how voters seemed in search of something, anything, entirely different from the status quo, third-party candidates had a particularly pronounced effect on governors races in at least five states. And in Rhode Island, Lincoln D. Chafee, a former Republican senator who ran for governor as an independent, won on Tuesday.

While much of the attention this season has focused on who will control Washington, the outcomes in these governors’ races were drawing particular notice because of redistricting.

The shapes of the political maps can carry lasting effects for partisan victories and losses in all sorts of offices. Governors in at least 36 states get a say in shaping Congressional maps, and governors in 39 states have a place in redrawing state legislative districts.

“This is the most important governors’ election in 20 years,” said Nathan Daschle, executive director of the Democratic Governors Association, which devoted $50 million to races this year, three times the amount the group spent four years ago, in the last comparable election. The Republican Governors Association spent $102 million on this year’s races.

Katharine Q. Seelye contributed reporting from Middleton, Wis., A. G. Sulzberger from Des Moines and Emma Graves Fitzsimmons from Chicago.

    In Governor’s Races, Republicans Make Gains, NYT, 3.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/03/us/politics/03govs.html

Cuomo Cruises to Win in New York Governor’s Race

November 2, 2010
The New York Times
By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE

Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo, completing a painstakingly plotted comeback from political ruin nearly a decade ago, won a resounding victory on Tuesday in the race for governor of New York, easily beating his Republican rival, Carl P. Paladino.

Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, triumphed with the help of independent voters, suburbanites and city dwellers from all corners of the state, a broad sweep that stood out as his party suffered setbacks in Congress and other statehouse races around the country.

The rise of Mr. Cuomo, 52, fulfills the restoration of a political dynasty and marks the first time a son of a New York governor has been elected to that office. Mario M. Cuomo was elected in 1982 and served three terms.

“The people of the state of New York want a government that they can trust, a government that they can be proud of once again, the government that they deserve — and they are going to get it,” Mr. Cuomo told a cheering crowd at a Midtown Manhattan hotel.

Mr. Cuomo’s campaign was aided by the virtual implosion of Mr. Paladino, a Buffalo real estate developer whose blunt manner and fiery rhetoric thrilled some disaffected voters, but ultimately thrust him into so many controversies that it forced him off his message of major tax and spending cuts.

Mr. Cuomo rolled up impressive tallies not only in Democratic strongholds like New York City, where early exit polls showed him collecting 8 in 10 votes, but also in the counties surrounding the city. Even upstate, he either outpolled or ran even with Mr. Paladino.

Mr. Cuomo’s margin was especially lopsided among women and African-Americans, suggesting that some of Mr. Paladino’s more incendiary behavior, like forwarding racially tinged and pornographic e-mails, had alienated those groups. Over all, Mr. Cuomo won by more than 20 points.

Mr. Cuomo drew support from more than 90 percent of blacks, according to the exit polling, conducted by Edison Research for the National Election Pool. He attracted the votes of two-thirds of women, 9 in 10 liberals and 7 in 10 moderates. White men were closely divided; Mr. Paladino ran best among less-educated whites and conservatives, who backed him three to one.

“He was done the first time he said, ‘I want to take a baseball bat to Albany,’ ” said Mark Sanna, 51, of Orchard Park, a suburb south of Buffalo, who works in sales. “You can’t negotiate with people when you come at them saying, ‘You’re just going to do what I say!’ ”

Mr. Paladino sought to channel voters’ anger and paint Mr. Cuomo as part of a discredited establishment. But Mr. Cuomo said that anger was not enough, and that his experience in government best equipped him to fix it.

“The people have spoken tonight and they have been loud and clear,” Mr. Cuomo said in his victory speech. “They are angry that they are paying for an economic recession that they didn’t cause. They are frustrated when they look at the dysfunction and degradation of Albany. They’re disgusted — and they are right. And what they are saying today is they want reform and they want that government in Albany changed. And that’s what they’re going to get.”

Mr. Cuomo, who will be New York’s 56th governor, did not mention his opponent by name, and bitterness between the candidates had become obvious in the final stretch of the campaign.

The two men did not speak before their respective speeches on Tuesday night. In Buffalo, Mr. Paladino brandished his trademark baseball bat, telling Mr. Cuomo that it represented the will of New Yorkers and suggesting that he bring it to Albany. If he did not, Mr. Paladino warned, Mr. Cuomo had not “heard the last of Carl Paladino.” He added, “Keep our pitchforks at the ready and never surrender.”

Mr. Cuomo has made clear in recent interviews that he was already preparing for an even more arduous campaign: breaking the grip of labor unions and other special interests over Albany, dragging state government out of severe financial problems and restoring public faith in a political system plagued by corruption and scandal.

Mr. Cuomo significantly outspent Mr. Paladino, who entered the race vowing to spend $10 million on his own campaign but appeared on track to come in about $2 million below that.

As of his most recent campaign finance report, Mr. Cuomo had already spent more than $20 million, much of it raised from the same lobbyists, unions and business interests that typically finance elections in New York.

Mr. Cuomo shuns public introspection and dismisses much of what is written about him as tedious psychoanalysis, but his victory on Tuesday represented the culmination of a personal quest.

He endured a humiliating withdrawal from the 2002 Democratic primary for governor, a period when many party elders viewed him as brash and overambitious. But four years later, after mending fences and setting his sights slightly lower, he won election as attorney general and embarked on crusades against health insurers and student loan companies, emerging as one of the most popular elected officials in the state.

Yet while the father was a lion of his party’s liberal wing, the son has positioned himself as a moderate and technocrat, pledging to rein in spending and hold the line on taxes. And while the last Governor Cuomo presided over a historic expansion of New York’s government, the future Governor Cuomo has promised to shrink it.

Mr. Cuomo’s decisive victory came after he ran one of the most secretive and cautious election campaigns in recent New York history, one that seemed built not around inspiring passion but on preserving his political standing in a treacherous election year much like the one that forced his father from office in 1994.

Even with the election over, Mr. Cuomo remains in some ways a remote figure to many voters, respected and admired for his work as attorney general but little known otherwise.

Rudolph B. Steward, Jr., 60, of Yonkers, a veteran on disability, said he would vote for Mr. Cuomo largely because he feared what would happen if Mr. Paladino won. “There was nothing about Cuomo that made me vote for him,” Mr. Steward said. “I just did it to fight the policies of the Republicans.”

Mr. Cuomo led in the polls throughout the race, but received something of a scare in the days after Mr. Paladino’s upset victory in the Republican primary, in September. The emergence of Mr. Paladino seemed to rattle the Cuomo campaign, which had been preparing to face Rick A. Lazio, a former congressman who had difficulty stirring enthusiasm among Republican voters.

But Mr. Paladino repeatedly found himself mired in controversy. He nearly came to blows with a reporter who questioned him aggressively and later opined that children should not be “brainwashed” into viewing homosexuality as acceptable.

As the campaign drew to a close, polls showed that large numbers of New Yorkers had deemed Mr. Paladino unfit to be governor.

Mr. Cuomo suggested in his speech that Mr. Paladino was part of a polarizing movement that persuaded voters elsewhere but failed to sway New Yorkers.

“The people of this state today say you’re not going to divide us, you’re not going to separate us, you can try it somewhere else but you’re not going to sell that in New York,” he said.

Elizabeth A. Harris and Nate Schweber contributed reporting.

    Cuomo Cruises to Win in New York Governor’s Race, NYT, 2.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/03/nyregion/03nygov.html

Secret Money in Iowa

October 26, 2010
The New York Times

Bruce Braley, a Democrat from northeastern Iowa, has been a popular two-term congressman and seemed likely to have an easy re-election until the huge cash mudslide of 2010. The Republican Party had largely left him alone, but then a secretive group called the American Future Fund began spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on distortion-heavy attack ads.

Mr. Braley is now struggling to maintain his lead against a Republican challenger, Benjamin Lange, who is running on a familiar program of smaller government and opposition to the health care law, the stimulus and growing federal spending. Mr. Braley has disclosed all of the donors behind his ads and his campaign; Mr. Lange generally will not discuss his independent support.

Mr. Braley has shown admirable political courage throughout the race, staunchly defending his support for health care reform, the stimulus and the Bush-era bank bailout. Each will benefit the country over time, he said. “I’m going to stand my ground and won’t be intimidated,” he told a local radio station a few weeks ago.

That position stood him well in the relatively liberal 1st District of Iowa until he became a target of the American Future Fund, one of several conservative groups spending millions of dollars to defeat Democrats while promising their donors anonymity.

As The Times reported recently, the American Future Fund was started with money from Bruce Rastetter, an ethanol company executive. Mr. Braley supports ethanol tax credits — a favorite in Iowa. Mr. Rastetter, who is pushing to defeat several Democrats on the House energy and agriculture committees, has not explained his political goals.

The fund, based in Iowa, has spent at least $574,000 to run a series of anti-Braley ads. One that is particularly pernicious shows images of the ruined World Trade Center and then intones, “Incredibly, Bruce Braley supports building a mosque at ground zero.” Actually, Mr. Braley has never said that, stating only that the matter should be left to New Yorkers.

Another implies that Mr. Braley supports a middle-class tax increase because he voted to adjourn the House at a time when some Republicans had proposed cutting income taxes on everyone. In fact, Mr. Braley supports extending the Bush-era tax cuts for the middle class, while letting them expire for families making $250,000 or more to avoid adding $700 billion to the deficit.

Mr. Braley has also been the subject of $250,000 worth of attack ads by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which also has not disclosed its contributors.

He is only one of many candidates being pummeled this year by secret money and shamefully false advertising. The American Action Network, another conservative group that does not disclose its donors, is targeting Representative Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, in his race against Sam Caligiuri, a Republican.

The group is running an ad claiming that the health reform law, which Mr. Murphy supported and Mr. Caligiuri wants to repeal, requires jail time for people who do not buy health insurance. The law does no such thing. At least one Connecticut television station has stopped running the ad.

The voters, who are the real victims of these distortions, haven’t the slightest idea who is paying for the ads. But rest assured that the big corporations and donors will make their identities known to the winners they push into office. The price for their support will be high.

    Secret Money in Iowa, NYT, 26.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/27/opinion/27wed1.html

The Mississippi Pardons

October 15, 2010
The New York Times
By BOB HERBERT

Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi has to decide whether to show mercy to two sisters, Jamie and Gladys Scott, who are each serving double consecutive life sentences in state prison for a robbery in which no one was injured and only $11 was taken.

This should be an easy call for a law-and-order governor who has, nevertheless, displayed a willingness to set free individuals convicted of far more serious crimes. Mr. Barbour has already pardoned four killers and suspended the life sentence of a fifth.

The Scott sisters have been in prison for 16 years. Jamie, now 38, is seriously ill. Both of her kidneys have failed. Keeping the two of them locked up any longer is unconscionable, grotesquely inhumane.

The sisters were accused of luring two men to a spot outside the rural town of Forest, Miss., in 1993, where the men were robbed by three teenagers, one of whom had a shotgun. The Scott sisters knew the teens. The evidence of the sisters’ involvement has always been ambiguous, at best. The teenagers pleaded guilty to the crime, served two years in prison and were released. All were obliged by the authorities, as part of their plea deals, to implicate the sisters.

No explanation has ever emerged as to why Jamie and Gladys Scott were treated so severely.

In contrast, Governor Barbour has been quite willing to hand get-out-of-jail-free cards to men who unquestionably committed shockingly brutal crimes. The Jackson Free Press, an alternative weekly, and Slate Magazine have catalogued these interventions by Mr. Barbour. Some Mississippi observers have characterized the governor’s moves as acts of mercy; others have called them dangerous abuses of executive power.

The Mississippi Department of Corrections confirmed Governor Barbour’s role in the five cases, noting that the specific orders were signed July 16, 2008:

• Bobby Hays Clark was pardoned by the governor. He was serving a long sentence for manslaughter and aggravated assault, having shot and killed a former girlfriend and badly beaten her boyfriend.

• Michael David Graham had his life sentence for murder suspended by Governor Barbour. Graham had stalked his ex-wife, Adrienne Klasky, for years before shooting her to death as she waited for a traffic light in downtown Pascagoula.

• Clarence Jones was pardoned by the governor. He had murdered his former girlfriend in 1992, stabbing her 22 times. He had already had his life sentence suspended by a previous governor, Ronnie Musgrove.

• Paul Joseph Warnock was pardoned by Governor Barbour. He was serving life for the murder of his girlfriend in 1989. According to Slate, Warnock shot his girlfriend in the back of the head while she was sleeping.

• William James Kimble was pardoned by Governor Barbour. He was serving life for the murder and robbery of an elderly man in 1991.

Radley Balko, in an article for Slate, noted that none of the five men were given relief because of concerns that they had been unfairly treated by the criminal justice system. There were no questions about their guilt or the fairness of the proceedings against them. But they did have one thing in common. All, as Mr. Balko pointed out, had been enrolled in a special prison program “that had them doing odd jobs around the Mississippi governor’s mansion.”

The idea that those men could be freed from prison and allowed to pursue whatever kind of lives they might wish while the Scott sisters are kept locked up, presumably for the rest of their lives, is beyond disturbing.

Supporters of the Scott sisters, including their attorney, Chokwe Lumumba, and Ben Jealous of the N.A.A.C.P., have asked Governor Barbour to intervene, to use his executive power to free the women from prison.

A spokeswoman for the governor told me he has referred the matter to the state’s parole board. Under Mississippi law, the governor does not have to follow the recommendation of the board. He is free to act on his own. With Jamie Scott seriously ill (her sister and others have offered to donate a kidney for a transplant), the governor should move with dispatch.

The women’s mother, Evelyn Rasco, told The Clarion-Ledger of Jackson, Miss.: “I wish they would just hurry up and let them out. I hope that is where it is leading to. That would be the only justified thing to do.”

An affidavit submitted to the governor on behalf of the Scott sisters says: “Jamie and Gladys Scott respectfully pray that they each be granted a pardon or clemency of their sentences on the grounds that their sentences were too severe and they have been incarcerated for too long. If not released, Jamie Scott will probably die in prison.”

As they are both serving double life sentences, a refusal by the governor to intervene will most likely mean that both will die in prison.

    The Mississippi Pardons, NYT, 15.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/16/opinion/16herbert.html

Pact Ends California Budget Impasse

October 2, 2010
The New York Times
By BLOOMBERG NEWS

SACRAMENTO — Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and top lawmakers agreed to a compromise to close a $19.1 billion deficit and give California a budget, ending the state’s record three-month impasse with a vote expected next week on the spending plan, according to legislative leaders.

The accord does not raise taxes, as sought by Democrats, nor does it dismantle the state’s welfare system, proposed by Republicans, the leaders said. Mr. Schwarzenegger and the Democratic and Republican heads of the Senate and the Assembly came to the agreement after five hours of negotiations in the governor’s Sacramento office.

”We have a comprehensive agreement,” said the Senate president pro tem, Darrell Steinberg, a Democrat from Sacramento. Lawmakers said more information about the substance of the agreement would be released Wednesday at a hearing.

Mr. Schwarzenegger and the lawmakers announced Sept. 24 that they had breached a stalemate that had persisted since the state’s fiscal year began July 1.

Mr. Schwarzenegger, a Republican nearing the end of his term, and Democrats, who hold a majority in both chambers, disagreed on how much spending to cut and whether to raise taxes. A two-thirds vote in the Assembly and the Senate is required to pass budgets; neither party holds enough seats to meet that threshold. That forced lawmakers to agree on a compromise plan to bring it to a vote.

    Pact Ends California Budget Impasse, NYT, 2.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/02/us/politics/02budget.html

Calif. Governor Postpones Execution

September 27, 2010
The New York Times
By JESSE McKINLEY and MALIA WOLLAN

SAN FRANCISCO — With the clock ticking and uncertainties — both legal and pharmaceutical — hovering, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger ordered a temporary last-minute reprieve on Monday in what would be California’s first execution in more than four years.

Mr. Schwarzenegger, a Republican in the final weeks of his administration, announced late Monday that he would postpone the execution of Albert G. Brown Jr. — who had been scheduled to die by lethal injection at 12:01 a.m. on Wednesday — until Thursday to allow time for legal appeals to be exhausted. The state Department of Corrections has rescheduled the execution for Thursday evening, the governor’s office said.

Mr. Brown, 56, was convicted in 1982 of raping and strangling a 15-year-old girl in Riverside, Calif.

The postponement came after a whirlwind day in which Mr. Brown’s fortunes seemed to rise and fall with each passing hour. Earlier Monday, Mr. Brown had been denied a stay from a state judge, Verna A. Adams, in Marin County, where San Quentin State Prison is located.

Shortly after that denial state officials also made a surprise announcement that the execution would be the last in the state until the one of the drugs proposed for his execution — sodium thiopental, a barbiturate — could be restocked by the state’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

Moreover, Terry Thornton, a spokeswoman for the department, said its supply of sodium thiopental was good only until Friday. That expiration date is now just hours after Mr. Brown’s planned execution on Thursday.

Ms. Thornton said her department was continuing with preparations for Mr. Brown’s execution and had enough sodium thiopental to stop Mr. Brown’s heart. She added that the state was “actively seeking supplies of the drug for future executions.”

How exactly sodium thiopental became scarce is unclear. The Food and Drug Administration reported shortages in March, citing production issues with Hospira, an Illinois-based company that is the sole American manufacturer.

A company spokesman, Dan Rosenberg, said that the drug was unavailable because of a lack of supply of an active pharmaceutical ingredient and that Hospira was working to get the drug back on the market by early next year. But Mr. Rosenberg also expressed displeasure that the drug — meant to be used as an anesthetic — had found its way into death chambers.

“Hospira manufactures this product because it improves or saves lives, and the company markets it solely for use as indicated on the product labeling,” Mr. Rosenberg said in a statement. “The drug is not indicated for capital punishment, and Hospira does not support its use in this procedure.”

He added that the company had made that opinion clear to corrections departments nationwide.

Mr. Brown’s execution was cleared on Friday by a federal district judge, Jeremy D. Fogel, who had effectively halted executions in the state in 2006 after expressing concern about a three-drug cocktail commonly used in lethal injection procedures and various deficiencies in the state’s methods, including the training of execution teams, antiquated facilities and the preparation of execution drugs.

Since then, however, California has drafted detailed new regulations — approved earlier this year — to guide executions and built a new death chamber at San Quentin, north of San Francisco.

Those developments had apparently quelled Judge Fogel’s worries enough to allow Mr. Brown’s execution to proceed.

Mr. Brown is still seeking a stay from the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. His lawyer, John R. Grele, said Judge Fogel’s decision was “neither a legal nor rational response” to his client’s efforts to avoid execution or undue pain.

    Calif. Governor Postpones Execution, NYT, 27.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/28/us/28execute.html

Florida Court Calls Ban on Gay Adoptions Unlawful

September 22, 2010
The New York Times
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

A 30-year-old Florida law that prohibits adoption by gay men and lesbians is unconstitutional, a state appeals court ruled on Wednesday, and the state’s governor said the law would not be enforced pending a decision on whether to appeal.

The decision by Florida’s Third District Court of Appeal said that Florida’s adoption law, which bans adoption by gay men and lesbians while allowing them to be foster parents, had “no rational basis” and thus violated the equal protection clause in the State Constitution. Judge Gerald B. Cope Jr. wrote the opinion, which affirmed a 2008 decision from a lower court.

At a news conference on Wednesday afternoon, Gov. Charlie Crist applauded the decision, saying: “It’s a very good day for Florida; it’s a great day for children. Children deserve a loving home to be in.”

Because the decision applies statewide, he said, “We are going to immediately stop enforcing the ban.”

The state, however, has 30 days to appeal. The governor said that he had spoken with the secretary of Florida’s Department of Children and Families, but did not say whether there would be an appeal.

A spokeswoman for Bill McCollum, the state attorney general, who has voiced support of the adoption ban, said his office was representing the department in the case, “and will be in discussions with our client as to whether or not they plan to appeal.”

A spokesman for the department said, “The primary consideration on whether to appeal is finding the balance between the value of a final ruling from the Florida Supreme Court versus the impact on the Gill family.”

Judge Cope wrote that “our ruling is unlikely to be the last word.”

The case involved the efforts of Martin Gill, a gay man, to adopt two brothers he took in more than five years ago as foster children when one was 4 years old and the other 4 months old. They had ringworm at the time, and the younger child had an untreated ear infection. The older boy did not speak for the first month with Mr. Gill and his partner.

“When they came in the door, we were kind of shocked at what bad condition we were in,” Mr. Gill said Wednesday in an interview. “We realized we had our work cut out for us.”

He added, “I would say today they are two happy, healthy, normal kids.”

In a concurring opinion, Judge Vance E. Salter wrote that the steps taken to heal and raise the boys “are nothing short of heroic.”

Evidence presented at the trial by opponents of the ban found no difference in the well-being of children raised by gay parents versus heterosexual parents.

Judge Cope wrote that at the trial, the state presented only two expert witnesses, one of whom undercut the state’s case by disagreeing with the idea of a blanket ban on gay adoption, stating instead that adoptions should be considered case by case. The other expert called by the state, Dr. George A. Rekers, was criticized by opposing experts as having provided research that was rife with “errors in scientific methodology and reporting” and that “did not meet established standards in the field.”

The court did not comment on the fact that Dr. Rekers, who was paid $120,000 for his work in the case, has since been enmeshed in a scandal after he was discovered to have taken a 10-day trip to Europe with a young man who advertised sexual services on a site for gay escorts.

According to the lower court decision cited in the opinion on Wednesday, “Florida is the only remaining state to expressly ban all gay adoptions without exception.”

Howard Simon, the executive director of the A.C.L.U. of Florida, which represented the Gill family, hailed the decision on Wednesday as a blow against discrimination that means all potential adoptive parents “will be judged on their individual fitness to provide a loving, stable, permanent adoptive home.”

That means, he said, that “some gays will be disqualified, and some heterosexuals will be disqualified,” but that “nobody is going to be categorically excluded because of who they are.”

Conservative organizations attacked the decision. Mathew D. Staver, founder of Liberty Counsel and dean of the Liberty University School of Law, said in a statement, “Common sense and human history underscore the fact that children need a mother and a father.”

Mr. Gill said that during the long trial process he had been careful to shield the boys from news that might make them fear further disruption in their lives, including threats about being removed from their home.

“I try to keep it all positive, and try to insulate them from the negative,” Mr. Gill said. But, he added, “I’m certainly going to tell them we have a victory today.”

    Florida Court Calls Ban on Gay Adoptions Unlawful, NYT, 22.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/23/us/23adopt.html

The Brothers Koch and AB 32

September 20, 2010
The New York Times

Four years ago, bipartisan majorities in the California Legislature approved a landmark clean energy bill that many hoped would serve as a template for a national effort to reduce dependence on foreign oil and mitigate the threat of climate change.

Now a well-financed coalition of right-wing ideologues, out-of-state oil and gas companies and climate-change skeptics is seeking to effectively kill that law with an initiative on the November state ballot. The money men include Charles and David Koch, the Kansas oil and gas billionaires who have played a prominent role in financing the Tea Party movement.

The 2006 law, known as AB 32, is aimed at reducing California’s emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to 1990 levels by 2020 and by 80 percent at midcentury. To reach these targets, state agencies are drawing up regulations that would affect businesses and consumers across the board — requiring even cleaner cars, more energy-efficient buildings and appliances, and power plants that use alternative energy sources like wind instead of older fossil fuels.

The prospect that these rules could reduce gasoline consumption strikes terror into some energy companies. A large chunk of the $8.2 million raised in support of the ballot proposition has come from just two Texas-based oil and gas companies, Valero and Tesoro, which have extensive operations in California. The Koch brothers have contributed about $1 million, partly because they worry about damage to the bottom line at Koch Industries, and also because they believe that climate change is a left-wing hoax.

They have argued that the law will lead to higher energy costs and job losses, arguments that resonate with many voters in a state with a 12.4 percent unemployment rate. But this overlooks the enormous increase in investments in clean energy technologies — and the jobs associated with them — since the law was passed.

Overturning AB 32 would be another setback in the effort to fight climate change. The United States Senate has already scuttled President Obama’s goal of putting a price on carbon. The Environmental Protection Agency, while important, can only do so much. This leaves state and regional efforts as crucially important drivers — and if California pulls back, other states like New York that are trying to reduce emissions may do so as well.

The Kochs and their allies are disastrously wrong about the science, which shows that man-made emissions are largely responsible for global warming, and wrong about the economics. AB 32’s many friends — led by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California — have therefore mounted a spirited counterattack in defense of the law.

Another respected Republican, George Shultz — a cabinet member in both the Nixon and Reagan administrations — has signed on as a co-chairman of this effort. Mr. Shultz credits AB 32 for an unprecedented “outburst” of technological creativity and investment.

Who wins if this law is repudiated? The Koch brothers, maybe, but the biggest winners will be the Chinese, who are already moving briskly ahead in the clean technology race. And the losers? The people of California, surely. But the biggest loser will be the planet.

    The Brothers Koch and AB 32, NYT, 20.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/21/opinion/21tue1.html

California Braces for Showdown on Emissions

September 16, 2010
The New York Times
By ADAM NAGOURNEY

LOS ANGELES — A ballot initiative to suspend a milestone California law curbing greenhouse gas emissions is drawing a wave of contributions from out-of-state oil companies, raising concerns among conservationists as it emerges as a test of public support for potentially costly environmental measures during tough economic times.

Charles and David Koch, the billionaires from Kansas who have played a prominent role in financing the Tea Party movement, donated $1 million to the campaign to suspend the Global Warming Solutions Act, which was passed four years ago, and signaled that they were prepared to invest more in the cause. With their contribution, proponents of the proposition have raised $8.2 million, with $7.9 million coming from energy companies, most of them out of state.

This latest embrace by the Koch brothers of a conservative cause jolted environmental leaders who are worried that a vote against the law in this state — with its long history of environmental activism — would amount to a powerful setback for emission control efforts in Washington and statehouses across the country.

“It would have big implications,” said George P. Shultz, the former secretary of state, who is a chairman of a campaign to defeat the ballot initiative. “That is one reason why these outside companies are pouring money in to try to derail the same thing. At the same time, the reverse is true: they put this fat in the fire and if we win, that also sends a message.”

Gene Karpinski, president of the League of Conservation Voters, who has been traveling California to rally support against the proposition, called it “by far the single most important ballot measure to date testing public support for continuing to move to a clean energy economy.”

The campaign against California’s greenhouse gas law comes as business groups have invested heavily across the country in trying to defeat members of Congress who voted for a cap-and-trade bill that also mandated emission reductions; the bill passed the House but failed in the Senate in the face of strong opposition from lawmakers in industrial states.

Traditionally, public support for environmental measures suffers during tough economic times. Here in California, backers of the initiative have seized on that anxiety — which is particularly acute in this state, with its 12.3 percent unemployment rate — in search of a victory.

“I believe the battle over cap and trade in America is taking place in California on Nov. 2 of this year,” said Dan Logue, a Republican assemblyman from north-central California who wrote the ballot initiative. He added: “What we’re saying is, this is not the time for political correctness. This is a time for putting America back to work; let the experiments happen later.”

The law in question, known as A.B. 32, mandates slashing carbon and other greenhouse emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, by forcing power companies and industries to cap their emissions and by slashing carbon in gasoline. Some oil industry leaders said it would force them to invest millions of dollars to comply, and asserted that it would force companies to cut jobs and raise the price of gas at the pumps.

Although the vast majority of the money being contributed to fight the law is coming from oil companies, the oil industry is clearly not united in opposition: some major California oil refineries, including Chevron, have notably stayed out of the battle so far.

The ballot initiative, known as Proposition 23, would suspend the law from going into effect as scheduled in 2012 until state unemployment falls to 5.5 percent or lower for at least four consecutive quarters. That has happened only three times over the last 40 years, state officials said; thus, the proposition could have the practical effect of killing the law.

“The company believes that implementing A.B. 32 will cause significant job losses and higher energy costs in California,” said Katie Stavinoha, a spokesman for Flint Hills Resources, the petroleum company in Wichita, Kan., owned by the Koch brothers. “What’s more, the company thinks it sets a bad precedent for other state and federal governments to do the same thing.”

That said, the issue hardly breaks cleanly along business lines, reflecting in part the diverse business environment in California, which has always had a strong research and development sector, powered by venture capitalists ready to finance cutting-edge technology. Many business groups have opposed the drive to suspend the greenhouse law, and the list of contributors backing the measure is notable for the absence of venture capitalists.

“There is a huge clean energy revolution going on: this is going to happen,” said Thomas F. Steyer, founder of Farallon Capital Management, a hedge fund in San Francisco, and a co-chairman with Mr. Shultz of the campaign to defeat the proposition. “If we’re not careful, it’s just not going to happen in the United States.”

Mr. Steyer has contributed $2.5 million to the effort to defeat the initiative and said he was prepared to contribute an additional $2.5 million.

Mr. Schultz said that since the passage of the law, “a whole industry is developing here, and I might say a lot of jobs are connected with it.”

“There’s been a virtual eruption of research and development activities of all kinds on alternate ways to produce and use energy,” he said.

In most years, this should not be a worrisome battleground for environmentalists. The greenhouse gas law enjoyed strong support from the public when it passed four years ago, according to polls. The roster of opponents to Proposition 23 includes Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, who views the law as a defining accomplishment of his career here.

Early polling suggests that voters who know about the measure are evenly split.

Yet supporters said they were concerned that the proposition could slip through at a time when Democratic spirits are low. More significant is the question of how much more supporters of Prop 23 can raise to finance their campaign. Of the $8.2 million raised so far, $1 million came from the Koch firm, $4 million from the Valero Energy Corporation and $1.5 million from the Tesoro Corporation; both corporations are based in San Antonio.

“We have every reason to believe that they are going to put the money in to run a big television campaign in the most expensive media market in the country,” said Annie Notthoff, the California advocacy director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group. “We certainly are expecting to have a fight on our hands.”

Supporters of the law, if nervous about the proposition, remain optimistic than they can beat it back at the polls in November, and hope that such an outcome would have the opposite effect nationally that opponents of the bill are seeking. “If the proposition loses, the lesson is going to be there’s no going back,” said Wesley P. Warren, director of programs for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

    California Braces for Showdown on Emissions, NYT, 16.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/17/us/17pollute.html

Orange County Is No Longer Nixon Country

August 29, 2010
The New York Times
By ADAM NAGOURNEY

SANTA ANA, Calif. — Orange County has been a national symbol of conservatism for more than 50 years: birthplace of President Richard M. Nixon and home to John Wayne, a bastion for the John Birch Society, a land of orange groves and affluence, the region of California where Republican presidential candidates could always count on a friendly audience.

But this iconic county of 3.1 million people passed something of a milestone in June. The percentage of registered Republican voters dropped to 43 percent, the lowest level in 70 years.

It was the latest sign of the demographic, ethnic and political changes that are transforming the county and challenging long-held views of a region whose colorful — its detractors might suggest zany — reputation extends well beyond the borders of this state.

At the end of 2009, nearly 45 percent of the county’s residents spoke a language other than English at home, according to county officials. Whites now make up only 45 percent of the population; this county is teeming with Hispanics, as well as Vietnamese, Korean and Chinese families. Its percentage of foreign-born residents jumped to 30 percent in 2008 from 6 percent in 1970, and visits to some of its corners can feel like a trip to a foreign land.

The demographic changes that have swept the county reflect what is happening across the state and much of the nation. It has happened slowly but surely over the course of a generation, becoming increasingly apparent not only in a drive through the 34 cities that fill this sprawling 789-square-mile county south of Los Angeles, but also, most recently, in the results of a presidential election. In 2008, Barack Obama drew 48 percent of the vote here against Senator John McCain of Arizona. (By comparison, in 1980, Jimmy Carter received just 23 percent against Ronald Reagan, the conservative hero whose election as California governor in 1966 and 1970 was boosted in no small part by the affection for him here.)

“I was a city planner in San Diego in 1960 when Orange County was just orange groves and typecast as a conservative stronghold,” said Marshall Kaplan, the executive director of the Merage Foundations, which runs educational and other programs for recent immigrants here. “It isn’t anymore. I live in Irvine. My wife is Asian. In Irvine, I sometimes feel like I’m her affirmative action program.”

Manuel Gomez, the vice chancellor of student affairs at the University of California, Irvine, said the county where he was born 63 years ago is almost unrecognizable to him today. “With diversity comes more cultural voices and political voices,” he said. “And certainly better food.”

Orange County is not unique in being a reliable Republican region in California. But this county has always boasted of a zesty political brand: almost defiantly conservative, the anti-Los Angeles, a land of gated communities and great wealth that managed to produce a steady stream of colorful conservative figures, including the televangelist Robert H. Schuller and former Representative Robert K. Dornan — B-1 Bob, as he was known, for his advocacy of military projects. (In a sign of what was to come, Mr. Dornan lost the House seat in 1996 to a Democratic Latina, Loretta Sanchez).

With such world-famous attractions as Disneyland and Mr. Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral and enclaves like Laguna Beach and Balboa Island, Orange County is as much a symbol in California as it is nationally.

Indeed, to some measure, the extent of the county’s transformation may seem magnified simply because of the way people thought of it in the past. “The new Orange County is not a repudiation of the old,” said Kevin Starr, a California historian. “For all the attention paid the right-wingers there, they never really took up the whole place. They were just more mediagenic than everyone else.”

Still, by any measure, this is no longer Nixon’s Orange County.

Here in Santa Ana, a sign on a downtown furniture store the other day advertised a sale in Spanish only; nearly 95 percent of the enrollment in the public schools is Latino. The mayor of Irvine, Sukhee Kang, was born in Korea, making him the first Korean-American to run a major American city. “We have 35 languages spoken in our city,” Mr. Kang said.

A few miles away in Westminster — where Vietnamese immigrants began arriving about 30 years ago, earning the area the name Little Saigon — is a dazzling sea of Vietnamese characters on storefronts and billboards (including one for McDonald’s). “I’ve been here for 30 years,” said Kinh Tram, 59, as he sat in front of a two-story mall that was crowded with other Vietnamese immigrants. “When I first came here, most of these were open lots.”

There are pockets of deep poverty spread across a county long identified with suburban affluence and escape from urban Los Angeles. About 25 percent of residents here did not have health insurance at some point during 2009, according to a report released last week by the U.C.L.A. Center for Health Policy Research. Less than a mile from the entrance to Disneyland is a Latino enclave of low-income housing where trucks arrive every morning, with names like Yucatán Produce, to sell groceries and household goods to people who cannot afford a car to drive to the store.

Orange remains a Republican county, at least relatively: an influx of immigrants certainly does not equate to automatic Democratic gains, here or anywhere else across the country. Many Vietnamese immigrants are socially conservative and run for office as Republicans. Until the increased identification of the Republican Party with tough measures on immigration in recent years, Latino voters were also clearly in play for Republicans. Most elected officials in Orange County are Republicans.

But the political texture of this county, which is larger in population than Nevada or Iowa, is changing, and many officials say it is only a matter of time before many Republican officeholders get swept out with the tide.

While Republicans have been on a steady decline — in 1990, they made up 56 percent of the electorate — the percentage of independent voters, as in much of the state, soared to 20 percent this past June from 8.6 percent in 1990. President Obama’s strong showing here in 2008 continued a nearly 30-year pattern in which the vote for Democratic presidential candidates has steadily increased.

Mr. Tram, the Vietnamese immigrant in Westminster, said that he had voted for Mr. Obama and that he thought most of his Vietnamese friends had done the same. “The Republicans are for rich people,” he said.

A large reason for this transformation is immigration. But the changes also reflect how the regional economy has changed, with the shrinking of the aerospace industry, which supported the once dominant, mostly white middle-class community here. That has largely been taken over by service, tourism and high-tech jobs, the result being that this county is a contrast of the extremely wealthy and the lower middle class.

“It’s less of a middle-class suburb today,” said Michael M. Ruane, the director of the Orange County Community Indicators Project, which studies economic and demographic trends in the county. “You have areas of poverty and areas of great affluence and less of a middle.”

Even fans of the recent hit television series “The O.C.,” whose main characters were prosperous white residents of Newport Beach, got little hint of the diversity of the region. “The county is becoming more like California,” Mr. Ruane said. “The national image that it is an entirely conservative and entirely Republican county is wrong. Voter registration patterns and voting have shifted as a result of these demographic shifts.”


Kitty Bennett contributed research.

    Orange County Is No Longer Nixon Country, NYT, 29.08.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/30/us/politics/30orange.html

‘Grim Sleeper’ Arrest Fans Debate on DNA Use

July 8, 2010
The New York Times
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

LOS ANGELES — The arrest in the case of the “Grim Sleeper” — a serial killer who terrorized South Los Angeles for two decades — has put one of the hottest controversies in American law enforcement to its first major test.

Only two states, Colorado and California, have a codified policy permitting a so-called familial search, the use of DNA samples taken from convicted criminals to track down relatives who may themselves have committed a crime. It is a practice that district attorneys and the police say is an essential tool in catching otherwise elusive criminals, but that privacy experts criticize as a threat to civil liberties.

This week, law enforcement struck a significant blow for the practice when the Los Angeles Police Department used it to arrest a man who they say murdered at least 10 residents here over 25 years. It is the first time an active familial search has been used to solve a homicide case in the United States.

Lonnie D. Franklin Jr., 57, was charged Thursday with 10 counts of murder and one of attempted murder after the state DNA lab discovered a DNA link between evidence from the old crime scenes and that of Mr. Franklin’s son, Christopher, who was recently convicted of a felony weapons charge.

The information developed from the state’s familial search program suggested that Christopher Franklin was a relative of the source of the DNA from the old crime scenes. The police confirmed the association of Lonnie Franklin through matching of DNA from a discarded pizza slice. The match provided the crucial link in a seemingly unsolvable crime that struck terror and hopelessness throughout one of the city’s poorest areas for years.

Chief Charlie Beck of the Los Angeles Police said Thursday that he expected to connect Mr. Franklin, who is being held without bail, to other murders.

“This is truly a breakthrough,” said Attorney General Jerry Brown, whose office wrote the DNA policy, in a telephone interview. The use of the practice demonstrates that law enforcement can “stop criminals in their tracks and lock up some of the most vicious and dangerous members of our society,” Mr. Brown said. “That’s why this technology is so important.”

The arrest in the protracted, gory case could settle the internal debate among lawmakers and the law enforcement agencies across the country currently considering the use of familial search, evidence law experts said. California is awaiting a court ruling on whether its DNA database can be expanded to include people who have been arrested.

The Los Angeles case “shows why it can be tremendously useful in cases that seem pretty dead and hard to crack,” said Jennifer Mnookin, a law professor and evidence expert at the University of California, Los Angeles. “So therefore we will very likely see an increasing use of these techniques, and at a minimum one hopes it is done in a sensitive way that is thoughtful and attentive to the concerns” of its critics, she said.

At least some of those critics remain skeptical.

“Familial searching is a tool, and at this point it is a very imprecise tool,” said Michael Risher, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, who added there was the possibility of innocent people being harassed in the pursuit of a crime. “It has the potential to invade the privacy of a lot of people,” he said.

Many law enforcement agencies collect DNA samples of convicted felons in hopes that DNA from other crime scenes can be matched to those individuals.

In the case of a close but imperfect match between crime scene DNA and that of someone locked up, forensic scientists say, the person responsible in that crime may well be a relative of the person locked up. Through a software tool, scientists are then able to painstakingly parse the DNA to determine sibling or parent-child relationships, information the police use to pursue possible suspects.

While the practice is common in England, it has been limited largely to Colorado in the United States. But in 2008, the California Department of Justice began using familial searches — in the face of significant protests — to solve hard crimes. The state restricted the practice to major, violent crimes in which all other investigative techniques had proved fruitless.

Those who oppose the technique argue that there are inherent privacy concerns, and that it serves, in essence, as a form of racial profiling because a higher proportion of inmates are members of minorities.

“I can imagine lots of African-American families would think it is not fair to put a disproportionate number of black families under permanent genetic surveillance,” said Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University who has written about this issue.

Further, Mr. Rosen said, if other jurisdictions were not as strict at California about the technique’s application — expanding it to nonviolent crimes, for instance — the issue would be even more complex. “The technique is not inherently good or evil,” he said. “It all has to do with what crimes it is used for, who’s in the database, how the database is regulated and what is done with the samples.”

Investigators here had tried for years to solve the case of the Grim Sleeper, so known because of a 13-year hiatus in the killing streak, who committed the majority of his killings in the 1980s but in recent years had restarted his spree. The department, in conjunction with the state attorney general’s office, ran a familial DNA search for the first time in 2008 that was unsuccessful, said Detective Dennis Kilcoyne, who led the investigation, at a news conference on Thursday.

About a year and a half later there was the second run through the system, the detective said, and the department “learned of a man that as we know now turned out to be a direct relative of our suspect.” The authorities were then able to narrow their focus to the elder Mr. Franklin over the past weekend based on the proximity of his residence to the crime scenes, race, age and other factors.

Police then conducted around-the-clock surveillance of Mr. Franklin, following him as he walked or went on drives, and retrieved a plate and napkin he had thrown away after eating pizza, which provided the DNA match.

Only after closely guarded procedures were the victims’ families alerted and Mr. Franklin arrested Wednesday as he went to move his car.

The Grim Sleeper began his killing of women (and one man) in South Los Angeles in 1985, shooting his victims and leaving them in alleyways and Dumpsters. The killer stopped in 1988, then started again in 2002.

Gurtha Cole, 80, lives with her 38-year-old granddaughter in a building across the street from the home of Mr. Franklin, who the police say worked as a mechanic for the city’s Department of Transportation. She expressed surprise. “He’s very social with us,” she said. “On holidays and stuff he would invite the neighbors to come over to a picnic, and host everyone.”

At a news conference in downtown Los Angeles, a smattering of victims’ relatives squeezed together into the crowd, wearing solemn expressions. LaVerne Peters held a photo of her daughter Janecia Peters — the most recent victim, killed in 2007 — wearing a green cap and gown.

“This presents some relief,” Ms. Peters said. “There is nothing worse than having a child murdered.”


Rebecca Cathcart contributed reporting.

    ‘Grim Sleeper’ Arrest Fans Debate on DNA Use, NYT, 8.7.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/09/us/09sleeper.html

The Constitution Trumps Arizona

July 7, 2010
The New York Times
 

The Obama administration has not always been completely clear about its immigration agenda, but it was forthright Tuesday when it challenged the pernicious Arizona law that allows the police to question the immigration status of people they detain for local violations. Only the federal government can set or enforce immigration policy, the government said in its lawsuit against the state, and “Arizona has crossed this constitutional line.”

There is nothing terribly complicated about this principle, which is based on several aspects of the Constitution, acts of Congress, and Supreme Court decisions over the years. A patchwork of state and local immigration policies would cause havoc.

As the Justice Department points out in its complaint, the Arizona law will divert resources from the government’s pursuit of dangerous aliens, including terrorists, spies and violent criminals. It will harass authorized immigrants, visitors and citizens who might not be carrying their papers when stopped by the police. It will ignore the country’s cherished protections of asylum and will interfere with national foreign policy interests. (Already several Mexican governors are refusing to meet with their American counterparts in Arizona, a sign of the diplomatic disarray produced by the law.)

The courts have repeatedly made these fundamental ideas clear. A federal court in 1997 struck down Proposition 187 in California, which would have denied social benefits to illegal immigrants and turned state employees into enforcement agents because it was pre-empted by federal authority. (Appeals in the case were dropped.) The Supreme Court has said federal authority can pre-empt state law when the federal interest is dominant and where there already exists a system of federal regulations. The government has done a poor job enforcing its immigration rules, to say the least, but they do exist, and clearly fall under what the Constitution calls “the supreme law of the land.”

Though private lawsuits have done so, the government’s suit does not allege any discrimination or civil rights violations in the law, in part because that case is difficult to make until the law goes into effect on July 29.

The current Supreme Court, fortunately, has not been as active in recognizing state power as was the Rehnquist court, but it is not always easy to predict its direction on a volatile issue like this one. Should the case reach the court, those justices with a constructionist bent might take note of Justice Hugo Black’s words from 1941, quoted by the Justice Department on Tuesday in support of its lawsuit: “The supremacy of the national power in the general field of foreign affairs, including power over immigration, naturalization and deportation, is made clear by the Constitution, was pointed out by authors of The Federalist in 1787, and has since been given continuous recognition by this Court.”

The court has already taken a related Arizona case for its next term. It challenges a 2007 law penalizing employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants. The administration has urged the court to strike down that law for many of the same reasons it cited on Tuesday, and we hope the court uses that case to undermine the notion that states can set their own immigration policy.

In the meantime, there are steps President Obama can take. He can deny Arizona access to federal databases of immigration status and refuse to allow the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to cooperate with state officials in handling people detained under the law. The government should end the misguided program allowing local deputies to enforce immigration law after taking an educational course.

Most important, the president can follow through on his recent promise to end the chaos of the immigration system with a comprehensive reform bill. Stamping out unjust laws like Arizona’s is a good place to start.

    The Constitution Trumps Arizona, NYT, 7.7.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/08/opinion/08thu1.html

Justice Dept. Sues Arizona Over Its Immigration Law

July 6, 2010
The New York Times
By JULIA PRESTON

The Justice Department filed a lawsuit on Tuesday against Arizona to challenge a new state law intended to combat illegal immigration, arguing that it would undermine the federal government’s pursuit of terrorists, gang members and other criminal immigrants.

The suit, filed in federal court in Phoenix, had been expected since mid-June, when Obama administration officials first disclosed they would contest the Arizona law, adding to several other suits seeking to have courts strike it down.

The federal government added its weight to the core argument in those suits, which contend that the Arizona law usurps powers to control immigration reserved for federal authorities. The main suit was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and other civil rights groups.

The Justice Department argues the law would divert federal and local law enforcement officers by making them focus on people who may not have committed crimes, and by causing the “detention and harassment of authorized visitors, immigrants and citizens.”

“Arizonans are understandably frustrated with illegal immigration,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said. “But diverting federal resources away from dangerous aliens such as terrorism suspects and aliens with criminal records will impact the entire country’s safety.”

The Justice Department suit is also aimed at stemming a tide of similar laws under consideration in other states. “The Constitution and the federal immigration laws do not permit the development of a patchwork of state and local immigration policies throughout the country,” the suit says.

Justice Department officials are “sending an unmistakable cannon shot across the bow of any other state that might be tempted to follow Arizona’s misguided approach,” said Lucas Guttentag, director of the Immigrants’ Rights Project for the A.C.L.U.

The Justice Department asked for a court injunction to prevent the Arizona law from taking effect as scheduled on July 29. Hearings in the other cases are scheduled for July 15 and 22. The law, signed by Gov. Jan Brewer on April 23, makes it a crime to be an illegal immigrant in the state and requires officers to determine the immigration status of people they stop for another offense based on a “reasonable suspicion” that they might be illegal immigrants.

Ms. Brewer assailed the federal lawsuit. “As a direct result of failed and inconsistent federal enforcement, Arizona is under attack from violent Mexican drug and immigrant smuggling cartels,” she said. “Now, Arizona is under attack in federal court from President Obama and his Department of Justice.”

White House officials said Mr. Obama was not involved in the Justice Department’s decision to sue. But the suit came after steps by Mr. Obama in an effort to frame the immigration debate in terms that will favor Democrats in advance of midterm elections in November, including a speech on Thursday when he restated his commitment to overhaul legislation that would give legal status to millions of illegal immigrants.

The suit deepened the controversy over the Arizona law. Representative Darrell Issa, Republican of California, said the president was wasting resources that should be spent controlling the Southwest border.

“For President Obama to stand in the way of a state which has taken action to stand up for its citizens against the daily threat of violence and fear is disgraceful and a betrayal of his Constitutional obligation to protect our citizens,” said Mr. Issa, one of 19 Republicans signing a letter criticizing the suit.

Kris Kobach, a lawyer and consultant to Ms. Brewer who is a co-author of the Arizona statute, said it was tailored to complement federal law. The Justice Department’s suit is “unnecessary,” he said, and “the suspicion is this is more about politics than law.”

In a background call with reporters, a senior department official said the decision to file the lawsuit — and to do so on the ground that it pre-empts federal authority, rather than on civil rights grounds like racial profiling — followed extensive deliberations with the Civil Rights Division and others inside the department, and a trip to Arizona to meet with state officials.

Should the department fail to persuade the courts to block Arizona’s law, the official said, it would closely watch for signs that people of Hispanic appearance were being singled out.


Charlie Savage contributed reporting.

    Justice Dept. Sues Arizona Over Its Immigration Law, NYT, 6.7.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/07/us/07immig.html

Utah’s Gun Permit Popular With Nonresidents

July 5, 2010
The New York Times
By DAN FROSCH

James Roe, a 64-year-old computer consultant from rural Pennsylvania, spent a recent Saturday in a Pittsburgh suburb learning about riflings, hangfires and powder charges. The gun safety class was for people seeking a concealed-firearm permit in Utah, some 1,500 miles away. Never mind that Mr. Roe has not been to Utah in 20 years and has no plans to visit anytime soon.

Like thousands of other gun owners who will most likely never set foot in Utah, Mr. Roe wants a permit there for one reason: It allows him to carry his semiautomatic .45-caliber pistol in 32 other states that recognize or have formal reciprocity with Utah’s gun regulations.

“I think that all states should be as broad based with reciprocity and as careful as the state of Utah is,” said Mr. Roe, who wants the option of taking his handgun with him when he visits his son in Ohio, both for protection and for target practice. (Ohio does not honor Pennsylvania’s firearm permit.)

With the Supreme Court ruling last week that the Second Amendment’s guarantee of an individual’s right to bear arms applies to state and local laws, Utah is a popular player in Americans’ efforts to legally obtain firearms. The state is issuing what has become the permit of choice for many gun owners.

Fifteen years after the Utah Legislature loosened rules on concealed firearm permits by waiving residency and other requirements, the state is increasingly attracting firearm owners from throughout the country. Nearly half of the 241,811 permits granted by the state are now held by nonresidents, according to the Utah Bureau of Criminal Identification, which administers the permits.

In 2004, Utah received about 8,000 applications for the permits. Last year, 73,925 applications were submitted — with nearly 60 percent coming from nonresidents.

Laws for carrying concealed firearms vary widely by state, as do issuing standards for permits. New York, New Jersey and Connecticut do not honor other states’ permits. Some states, like Florida, allow nonresidents to qualify for permits. Utah stands out because its permit is relatively inexpensive and is broadly accepted, and the requisite safety class can be taken anywhere.

By passing the class and the background check, and paying a $65.25 fee, the applicant receives what many consider to be the most prized gun permit in the country. Permits are good for five years and cost $10 to renew.

Some Second Amendment proponents argue that people with permits are more likely to be law abiding because they have undergone at least some form of background check.

“The spirit of self-defense should not stop at a state’s border,” said Clark Aposhian, a Utah gun lobbyist who sits on the state’s Concealed Firearm Review Board, which helps regulate the permitting process. “Not once has there been a pattern of problems with Utah permit holders in other states.”

But Utah’s permit program has its critics. Peter Hamm, a spokesman for the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, asserted that Utah’s policy was dangerous because many states were lax in submitting felony and mental health records to the federal database used for background checks.

“I think it’s absolutely shameful and ludicrously irresponsible to say that anybody anywhere who wants one of our concealed-carry permits, and thus will be able to carry legally in dozens of states, can just log on to our Web site and pay 60 bucks and that’s all she wrote,” Mr. Hamm said.

As more people have turned to Utah for permits, the demand for instructors who teach Utah’s gun safety class in other states has increased. Of the 1,097 instructors certified by Utah, 706 are in other states. Advertisements for classes held throughout the country appear widely on the Internet.

Another source of contention is that the class does not require any actual shooting. One could conceivably obtain a Utah permit without ever having fired a gun. Nevada and New Mexico recently stopped honoring Utah permits because the class does not meet its live-fire requirements.

“Residents of other states should be aware that people who have a Utah concealed-weapon permit may not have actually fired a weapon,” said Dee Rowland, chairwoman of the Gun Violence Prevention Center of Utah. “I think that would be quite shocking to members of the public.”

Supporters of Utah’s policy counter that the state’s 50-page curriculum on gun safety, and background checks that are updated every 24 hours, ensure that the system is safe.

“We teach passive defense in Utah,” said State Representative Curtis Oda, a Republican from Clearfield.

“We have no idea what could have happened had there been an armed defender at Columbine and Virginia Tech,” Mr. Oda said, “but we know with absolute certainty what happens when there’s not.”

    Utah’s Gun Permit Popular With Nonresidents, NYT, 5.7.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/06/us/06guns.html

Illinois Stops Paying Its Bills, but Can’t Stop Digging Hole

July 2, 2010
The New York Times
By MICHAEL POWELL

CHICAGO — Even by the standards of this deficit-ridden state, Illinois’s comptroller, Daniel W. Hynes, faces an ugly balance sheet. Precisely how ugly becomes clear when he beckons you into his office to examine his daily briefing memo.

He picks the papers off his desk and points to a figure in red: $5.01 billion.

“This is what the state owes right now to schools, rehabilitation centers, child care, the state university — and it’s getting worse every single day,” he says in his downtown office.

Mr. Hynes shakes his head. “This is not some esoteric budget issue; we are not paying bills for absolutely essential services,” he says. “That is obscene.”

For the last few years, California stood more or less unchallenged as a symbol of the fiscal collapse of states during the recession. Now Illinois has shouldered to the fore, as its dysfunctional political class refuses to pay the state’s bills and refuses to take the painful steps — cuts and tax increases — to close a deficit of at least $12 billion, equal to nearly half the state’s budget.

Then there is the spectacularly mismanaged pension system, which is at least 50 percent underfunded and, analysts warn, could push Illinois into insolvency if the economy fails to pick up.

States cannot go bankrupt, technically, but signs of fiscal crackup are easy to see. Legislators left the capital this month without deciding how to pay 26 percent of the state budget. The governor proposes to borrow $3.5 billion to cover a year’s worth of pension payments, a step that would cost about $1 billion in interest. And every major rating agency has downgraded the state; Illinois now pays millions of dollars more to insure its debt than any other state in the nation.

“Their pension is the most underfunded in the nation,” said Karen S. Krop, a senior director at Fitch Ratings. “They have not made significant cuts or raised revenues. There’s no state out there like this. They can’t grow their way out of this.”

As the recession has swept over states and cities, it has laid bare economic weakness and shoddy fiscal practices. Only an infusion of federal stimulus money allowed many states to avert deep layoffs last year.

Cuts in Work Forces

The federal dollars are nearly spent. Last month, local governments nationwide shed more than 20,000 jobs. Should the largest struggling states — like California, New York or Illinois — lay off tens of thousands more in coming months, or default on payments, the reverberations could badly damage a weakened economy and push housing prices down still further.

“You’re not seeing these states bounce back, and that could be a big drag on the national economy,” said Susan K. Urahn of the Pew Center on the States. “It could be a very tough decade.”

In Illinois, the fiscal pain is radiating downward.

From suburban Elgin to Chicago to Rockford to Peoria, school districts have fired thousands of teachers, curtailed kindergarten and electives, drained pools and cut after-school clubs. Drug, family and mental health counseling centers have slashed their work forces and borrowed money to stave off insolvency.

In Beardstown, a small city deep in the western marshes, Ann Johnson plans to shut her century-old pharmacy. Because of late state payments, she could not afford to keep a 10-day supply of drugs. In Chicago, a funeral home owner wonders whether he can afford to bury the impoverished, as the state has fallen six months behind on its charity payments, $1,103 a funeral.

In Peoria — where the city faced a $14.5 million gap this year and could face an additional $10 million budget hole next year — Virginia Holwell, a trainer of child welfare caseworkers, lost her job when the state cut payments to her agency. She sits in her living room high above the Illinois River and calculates the months of savings left before the bank forecloses on her house.

“I’ve got enough to last until the end of August,” she says, matter-of-factly. “I’m 58 and I’m pretty good at what I do, and I got to tell you, I’m pretty devastated.”

Public colleges and universities occupy a fiscal sickbed all their own. This year they muddled through without $668 million expected from the state; the University of Illinois has yet to receive 45 percent of its state appropriation. Legislators made no pretense of promising to pay this bill soon. Instead they authorized colleges to borrow against the expected state payments.

“The big fear is that next year we’ll be down twice as much,” said Randy Kangas, an associate vice president of the university. “No one knows how to make the cash flow work.”

Illinois legislators tend to plead victim to economic circumstance, and the state’s maladies are considerable. In 2006, the Illinois unemployment rate stood below 5 percent; now it is near 11 percent, and the percentage of long-term unemployed exceeds the national average. Major manufacturers have eliminated thousands of jobs, and the state ranks in the top 10 nationally in foreclosures.

Five years ago, the Chicago suburb of Tinley Park issued about 650 home building permits; last year it processed one. The city of Rockford plans to close fire stations and lay off firefighters, and in Decatur, 180 impoverished seniors have lost their delivered meals. The lakeshore condo towers in Chicago bespeak affluence, but there are so many foreclosures on the bungalow blocks of southern and western Chicago that “for sale” signs sprout like sunflowers.

Few budget analysts are surprised to see Illinois, with a limping economy and broken political culture, edge close to the abyss. Two of the last six governors have served jail terms, and a third is on trial.

“We are a fiscal poster child for what not to do,” said Ralph Martire of the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability, a liberal-leaning policy group in Illinois. “We make California look as if it’s run by penurious accountants who sit in rooms trying to put together an honest budget all day.”

Stopgap Solutions

The Community Counseling Centers of Chicago is another of those workaday groups that are like the stitches on a baseball, holding together poor and working-class neighborhoods. With an annual budget of $16 million, the agency tends to families torn by crime and violence as well as people who are psychologically stressed and abusing drugs.

On any given Monday morning, the agency’s chief administrative officer, John J. Troy, 61, has no idea how he is going to keep its doors open until Friday. He said the state had not come through with an expected $2.2 million, which is about six months of arrears. He has laid off and recalled employees three times in the last two years.

“Two weeks ago, I had days to meet my $420,000 payroll and all I was looking at was a $200,000 line of credit from a bank,” recalled Mr. Troy. “I drove down to Springfield and said, ‘Hey, you owe us $3 million.’ They said: ‘Oh, that’s nothing. We owe another agency $10 million.’ ”

“The fact of the matter is,” he added, “I don’t sleep much these days.”

Illinois’s fiscal practices are thoroughly fractured. Large agencies survive from one payday to the next. Small agencies seek high-interest loans from out-of-state finance companies.

The state pension system is a money sinkhole and the most immediate threat. The governor and legislature have shortchanged the pensions since the mid-1990s, taking payment “holidays” with alarming regularity.

The state’s last elected governor, Rod R. Blagojevich, is on trial for racketeering and extortion. But in 2003, he persuaded the legislature to let him float $10 billion in 30-year bonds and use the proceeds for two years of pension payments.

That gamble backfired and wound up costing the state many billions of dollars. Illinois reports that it has $62.4 billion in unfunded pension liabilities, although many experts place that liability tens of billions of dollars higher.

Legislators this year raised the retirement age and slashed benefits. Though changes apply only to future employees, the legislature claimed immediate savings.

“Savings upfront and reforms down the road,” said Mr. Hynes, the state comptroller. “It’s just bad habits and bad practices.”

More broadly, Illinois is caught between blue state convictions about social safety nets and a red state aversion to taxes. For years, the Democratic-controlled legislature has passed budgets that are, in effect, in deficit. Lawmakers routinely skip around the state’s balanced-budget law, with few consequences. (Republicans are near monolithic in voting against any tax increases and borrowings. When one broke ranks to try to keep the pension solvent, he was stripped of a committee position, reducing his pay and pension.)

“The pension move was Enron-esque,” said Mike Lawrence, a press secretary to the former Republican governor Jim Edgar, who was the last governor to sign an income tax increase. “Blagojevich was not a tax-and-spend governor; he was a spend-and-borrow governor.”

The state’s income tax burden is not terribly high — Illinois ranks in the bottom half of states — and its government is not terribly large. (The budgets in New York and California, per capita, are much larger). Even if the state cut out all family and human services spending, more than half of the budget deficit would remain.

As comptroller, Mr. Hynes has trained his attention on the public and nonprofit agencies that rely on state money; he tends to roll his eyes at the notion that slashing alone is a solution.

“Only the most delusional people think you can solve this without raising taxes,” he said.

The legislature has a different instinct: to borrow. In good times, that leads to unsightly imbalances. In bad times, it becomes catastrophic. This year, leaders gave the governor authority to move money around and left town to campaign.

“Each budget has gotten historically worse during this recession,” said Laurence Msall, president of the Civic Federation, a policy research organization. “We’ve borrowed more and pushed larger unpaid bills into the future.”

‘Everything Is Triage’

So where is the exit door from this crisis? In Illinois, it depends on whom you ask. The state representative Barbara Flynn Currie, one of the Democratic leaders in the statehouse, sees salvation in the economic cycle. “In the long run, we’ll muddle our way through,” she said.

Perhaps, but many analysts, liberal and conservative, warn of a potentially far grimmer reckoning — Greece by Lake Michigan. Borrowing costs are rising, nonprofits that depend on taxpayer money are dropping contracts, and the state’s pension costs and unpaid bills balloon each month.

Newspaper reports offer stories of hundreds of young teachers moving out of state. Sounding as if she had been punched in the stomach, Ms. Johnson, 53, the pharmacist in Beardstown, said she was going to work at Wal-Mart. Mr. Troy keeps logging on to the comptroller’s Web site to see whether money might soon flow to his counseling centers.

And Ms. Holwell has joined Illinois People’s Action, which challenges banks and foreclosures. With a raspy voice, she talks of her irritation with “the people who just yammer.”

“We’ve helped save four houses,” she said. “Now I wonder: can I save my own?”

For now, Illinois spends a minor fortune papering over its budget holes. Last year, the comptroller’s office paid $55.3 million just in interest on two short-term borrowings to pay the state’s bills.

Mr. Hynes walked into his child’s elementary school recently and learned that kindergarten hours were being cut because of the state budget.

“Everything is triage now,” he said. “We work to avoid outright disaster.”

In past years, when nonprofits needed credit lines to see themselves through tough budget times, the comptroller issued letters assuring banks that vendors would be paid. Not anymore.

“I don’t feel comfortable doing that,” he said, adding with a shrug, “I mean, who knows, right?”

    Illinois Stops Paying Its Bills, but Can’t Stop Digging Hole, NYT, 2.7.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/03/business/economy/03illinois.html

In Budget Crisis, States Take Aim at Pension Costs

June 19, 2010
The New York Times
By MARY WILLIAMS WALSH

Many states are acknowledging this year that they have promised pensions they cannot afford and are cutting once-sacrosanct benefits, to appease taxpayers and attack budget deficits.

Illinois raised its retirement age to 67, the highest of any state, and capped public pensions at $106,800 a year. Arizona, New York, Missouri and Mississippi will make people work more years to earn pensions. Virginia is requiring employees to pay into the state pension fund for the first time. New Jersey will not give anyone pension credit unless they work at least 32 hours a week.

“We can’t afford to deny reality or delay action any longer,” said Gov. Pat Quinn of Illinois, adding that his state’s pension cuts, enacted in March, will save some $300 million in the first year alone.

But there is a catch: Nearly all of the cuts so far apply only to workers not yet hired. Though heralded as breakthrough reforms by state officials, the cuts phase in so slowly they are unlikely to save the weakest funds and keep them from running out of money. Some new rules may even hasten the demise of the funds they were meant to protect.

Lawmakers wanted to avoid legal battles or fights with unions, whose members can be influential voters. So they are allowing most public workers across the country to keep building up their pensions at the same rate as ever. The tens of thousands of workers now on Illinois’s payrolls, for instance, will still get to retire at 60 — and some will as young as 55.

One striking exception is Colorado, which has imposed cuts on its current workers, not just future hires, and even on people who have already retired. The retirees have sued to block the reduction.

Other states with shrinking funds and deep fiscal distress may be pushed in this direction and tempted to follow Colorado’s example in the coming years. Though most state officials believe they are legally bound to shield current workers from pension cuts, a Colorado victory could embolden them to be more aggressive.

Colorado pruned a 3.5 percent annual pension increase to 2 percent, concluding that was the fastest way to revive its pension fund, which was projected to run out of money by 2029. The cut may sound small, but it produces big results because it goes into effect immediately. State plans vary widely, but many have other costly features, like subsidized early-retirement benefits, which could likewise be trimmed for existing workers.

Despite its pension reform, Illinois is still in deep trouble. That vaunted $300 million in immediate savings? The state produced it by giving itself credit now for the much smaller checks it will send retirees many years in the future — people who must first be hired and then, for full benefits, work until age 67.

By recognizing those far-off savings right away, Illinois is letting itself put less money into its pension fund now, starting with $300 million this year.

That saves the state money, but it also weakens the pension fund, actually a family of funds, raising the risk of a collapse long before the real savings start to materialize.

“We’re within a few years of having some of the pension funds run out of money,” said R. Eden Martin, president of the Commercial Club of Chicago, a business group that has been warning of a “financial implosion” for several years. “Funding for the schools is going to be cut radically. Funding for Medicaid. As these things all mount up, there’s going to be a lot of outrage.”

Joshua D. Rauh, an associate professor of finance at Northwestern University who studies public pension funds, predicts that at the current rate, Illinois’s pension system could run out of money by 2018. He believes the funds of other troubled states — including New Jersey, Indiana and Connecticut — are also on track to run out of money in less than a decade, unless they make meaningful changes.

If a state pension fund ran out of money, the state would be legally bound to make good on retirees’ benefits. But paying public pensions straight out of general revenue would be ruinous. In Illinois’s case, it would consume about half the state’s cash every year, bringing other vital state services to a standstill.

Mr. Rauh said he thinks any state caught in that trap would have little choice but to seek a federal bailout. Bigger pension contributions and higher taxes can go only so far.

Many state officials, hoping for a huge recovery in the markets, say that such projections are too pessimistic, and that cutting benefits for future workers must suffice, given laws and provisions in state constitutions that make membership in a state pension fund a contractual relationship that cannot be breached.

Lawyers, though, are raising the possibility that those laws are being misinterpreted.

“It makes no sense to suggest that an employee who works for the state for a single day has acquired a right to have future pension benefits calculated for the next 20 to 40 years under whatever method was in effect on that single first day of service,” states a legal memorandum prepared for the Commercial Club of Chicago, which is concerned that a public pension collapse would badly damage the city’s business climate.

The club’s members include senior executives of big companies, like Boeing, Aon, Kraft, Motorola and I.B.M., that have frozen pensions or slowed the rates at which their workers build up benefits.

Some of those cuts set off titanic battles. The most famous was at I.B.M., which changed its pension plan just when many of its older workers were about to earn sharply higher retirement benefits. Aggrieved workers sued, but after a long battle, a federal appellate court found that the cuts were legal.

“An employer is free to move from one legal plan to another legal plan, provided that it does not diminish vested interests,” or the benefits workers have already earned, wrote Chief Judge Frank H. Easterbrook of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago. He did not distinguish between corporate employers and states.

Colorado is basing its legal defense, in part, on a 1961 state supreme court ruling that said pension cuts for current workers were allowed if “actuarially necessary,” and will argue that it applies to retirees as well. Other states may not have such legal tools.

In California, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has gone a different route, bargaining with the 12 unions that represent public employees. Last week four of them agreed to let the state cut its own contributions by requiring current workers to pay sharply more for the same pensions. The workers will contribute 10 percent of their pay, in some cases double the previous rate, to the state pension fund. Some other states are raising employee contributions as well, though less sharply.

In New Jersey, the administration of Gov. Christopher J. Christie recently imposed pension cuts on future hires, but has been quietly looking into whether it could also reduce the benefits that current employees expect to accumulate in the coming years.

“Can they change the benefit formula going forward? Sure. It’s not etched in stone,” said Edward Thomson III, an actuary and trustee of the New Jersey pension system who was asked to offer an opinion on whether New Jersey could adopt the federal pension law — the one that covers companies — as its governing statute.

A state assemblyman, Declan J. O’Scanlon Jr., recently introduced a bill to ratchet back a 9 percent pension increase that the state gave most workers in 2001.

“I think this will pass constitutional muster,” Mr. O’Scanlon said. “Otherwise, I fear the whole system will fall apart. Nine years — we’re out of money.”


Amy Schoenfeld contributed reporting.

    In Budget Crisis, States Take Aim at Pension Costs, NYT, 19.6.2010,http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/business/20pension.html

New York Nears Deal to Raise Cigarette Tax

June 18, 2010
The New York Times
By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE and DANNY HAKIM

Cigarette taxes in New York would jump by $1.60 a pack under a tentative deal reached between Gov. David A. Paterson and legislative leaders, which would give New York the nation’s highest state cigarette taxes.

The proposal, which officials said Mr. Paterson would include in an emergency budget bill due for a vote on Monday, would also raise wholesale taxes on other tobacco products like chewing tobacco, bringing the tax on those products closer in line with those of cigarettes.

In New York City, which levies steep taxes of its own on tobacco products, a pack of cigarettes would come with a tax of $5.85, making it the nation’s first city to break $5, antismoking advocates said. That would bring the overall cost of a pack of premium cigarettes above $10 in many stores in the city.

The legislation will also include a plan to begin collecting taxes on cigarettes sold off the reservation by Indian tribes in New York, an issue that has provoked confrontations between State Police officers and protesting tribe members in years past.

The proposal would generate $440 million in revenue this year, helping close a state budget gap estimated at over $9 billion. But it is unclear whether there are enough votes to approve the plan in the State Senate, where Republicans have threatened to vote against any emergency budget bill that includes tax increases and some Democrats oppose efforts to collect taxes on cigarettes sold by the tribes.

Should the measure fail, the government would face an unprecedented shutdown. Should it pass, lawmakers must still meet to find ways to close the entire budget gap.

“Our anticipation is that the budget extender will pass, that people will not want to shut down government,” said Robert L. Megna, the state budget director, who briefed reporters on the plan at the Capitol on Friday evening.

Mr. Megna said there had been extension discussions with the Legislature about the tobacco package but could not say whether it would pass. “We’ve been talking to them about it,” he said. “None of this is going to be a surprise.”

Austin Shafran, a spokesman for Senate Democrats, said, “We’re making substantial progress, and our members are going to review the details of the extender on Monday prior to the vote.”

New York’s state cigarette tax is currently $2.75 a pack. In his executive budget proposal in January, Mr. Paterson proposed an increase of $1 a pack — a proposal previously opposed by the Senate but supported by the Assembly.

That legislative leaders are now willing to consider the higher tax rate increase of $1.60 suggests how intent Mr. Paterson and the Legislature are to find new revenue to help lubricate the budget negotiations. The Assembly wants to restore some of Mr. Paterson’s school aid cuts, while the Senate is insisting on some form of property tax relief.

But neither chamber supports Mr. Paterson’s proposal for a tax on sugared beverages, worth $465 million. Mr. Paterson has ruled out borrowing money, which the Legislature would prefer.

Advocates for higher cigarette taxes cheered the proposal, saying it would cut down on smoking, provide the state with badly needed revenue and discourage cigarette smokers from switching one tobacco product for another.

“I think it’s wonderful,” said Peter Slocum, an official with the American Cancer Society. “Increased cigarette taxes have been one of the major successful public health interventions in the last decade in driving smoking rates to record lows in New York City and a lot of other parts of the country, too.”

A cigarette tax increase has been opposed by tobacco retailers, however, who say it merely drives consumers to black market cigarettes. “That large of an increase will further devastate legitimate retail sales of cigarettes and only serve to create more widespread black market cigarette sales and crime in New York,” said Thomas Briant, executive director of the National Association of Tobacco Outlets.

Representatives from the Seneca Nation were in Albany this week to express their concerns about any taxation proposal.

“Certainly we are going to stand up and fight and do everything possible for that not to happen,” J. C. Seneca, a tribal councilor for the Seneca Nation and co-chairman of their foreign relations committee, said Friday. “We have to protect and honor the treaties that were made by our ancestors, and that’s what we’re going to do.

“If the state wants to move in that direction, then really we have no choice but to defend our territory and our people’s rights.”

Mr. Megna said the state, in an effort to avoid a confrontation, would tax wholesalers who sold cigarettes to Native American tribes. Tribes would be allotted a certain amount tax-free for their residents.

“We would hope that there would not be any violence,” Mr. Megna said. “We’re trying to minimize any violent activity and make it clear that their product for their consumption is tax-free. The only thing we’re trying to tax is New York State residents’ consumption of taxable products.”

    New York Nears Deal to Raise Cigarette Tax, NYT, 18.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/19/nyregion/19tax.html

Justice Dept. Will Fight Arizona on Immigration

June 18, 2010
The New York Times
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD and MARK LANDLER

The Obama administration has decided to file a lawsuit to strike down a new Arizona law aimed at deporting illegal immigrants, thrusting itself into the fierce national debate over how the United States should enforce immigration policies.

The federal government only occasionally intervenes forcefully in a state’s affairs, and it carries significant political risks. With immigration continuing to be a hot issue in political campaigns across the country, the Arizona law, which grants the local police greater authority to check the legal status of people they stop, has become a rallying cry for the Tea Party and other conservative groups.

The lawsuit, though widely anticipated, was confirmed by an unexpected source: Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who answered a question about it from an Ecuadorean TV journalist in an interview on June 8 that went all but unnoticed until this week.

Noting that President Obama had publicly objected to the law, Mrs. Clinton said, “The Justice Department, under his direction, will be bringing a lawsuit against the act.”

A spokesman for the Justice Department said the matter was still under review, but other senior administration officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said a decision had indeed been made and only the details of the legal filing were still being worked out.

These officials said several government agencies were being consulted over the best approach to block the statute, which, barring any successful legal challenges, takes effect July 29. At least five lawsuits have already been filed in federal court, and civil rights groups have asked a federal judge to issue an injunction while the cases are heard.

A State Department spokesman, Philip J. Crowley, said Mrs. Clinton’s comments, made during a visit to Ecuador’s capital, Quito, were meant to answer deep qualms about the law in Mexico and other Latin American countries. “It is important to recognize that this has resonated significantly beyond our borders,” Mr. Crowley said.

Still, in focusing on Arizona, the Obama administration is making a politically risky calculation: the move could help repair America’s image south of the border but open the administration to charges that it is trampling state’s rights. And a legal battle could energize the right during an election year.

At home, polls show that a majority of Americans support the law, or at least the idea of states more rigorously enforcing immigration laws. But Latino groups and elected officials have denounced it as an affront to Hispanics. Several large demonstrations, for and against the law, have been held in Phoenix and other cities.

Legal action has been widely expected, given Mr. Obama’s repeated statements against it, as well as the concerns that Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has voiced in interviews and news conferences.

In late May, Justice Department lawyers traveled to Phoenix to speak with lawyers from the offices of the state attorney general, Terry Goddard, and Gov. Jan Brewer about the possibility of litigation. Mr. Goddard, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for governor, and Ms. Brewer, a Republican who is running for re-election, both say a federal lawsuit is unwarranted.

In a side drama, Mr. Goddard on Friday took his office off the case, bowing to the wishes of Ms. Brewer, who had said his opposition to the law would make it difficult for him to defend it. Mr. Goddard said his decision had nothing to do with the Justice Department’s plans.

Mrs. Clinton’s disclosure — which came to light after her interview was posted by a political blog, therightscoop.com — quickly became fodder for political campaigns in Arizona. Republicans, led by Ms. Brewer, seized on the notion of a domestic policy decision’s being disclosed on foreign soil.

“This is no way to treat the people of Arizona,” the governor said in a statement. “To learn of this lawsuit through an Ecuadorean interview with the secretary of state is just outrageous. If our own government intends to sue our state to prevent illegal immigration enforcement, the least it can do is inform us before it informs the citizens of another nation.”

The federal government from time to time has successfully brought claims against laws it deemed discriminatory or infringing on voter rights. It also has a history of suing states on issues related to prison conditions and school desegregation, said Erwin Chemerinsky, a constitutional scholar at the law school at the University of California, Irvine.

While Arizona’s law has drawn opposition from those who worry that Hispanic-Americans and legal residents will be mistaken for illegal immigrants, legal scholars say the case will more likely to turn on whether it intrudes on federal immigration authority.

In 2007, the Bush administration successfully sued Illinois after it passed a law barring employers from using a federal electronic system to verify the immigration status of would-be employees.

Racial profiling claims may be difficult to prove. The United States Supreme Court, in a 1975 case, ruled that immigration officers can include racial or ethnic identity among factors in deciding whether to check someone’s right to be in the country.

Still, the federal government could argue that the law, in effect, gives one state more regulatory power in immigration than another and raises thorny diplomatic problems abroad, said Jack Chin, a University of Arizona law professor.

The theory of this law, he said, is that Arizona is “borrowing federal regulatory authority to help carry out federal policy.” But he said, “If the federal government comes in and says you are interfering, I think that is going to be a problem for the state.”

Though not a legal issue, administration officials said the law, passed in April, has tarnished America’s image in Latin America. They point to a new poll conducted by the Pew Research Center, which found that only 44 percent of Mexicans viewed the United States favorably after Arizona enacted the law, compared with 62 percent before that.

On a four-day trip last week to Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, Mrs. Clinton was asked about the law at every stop. When she sat down with reporters from two local TV channels in Quito last week, it was the subject of the first question from both. One reporter suggested that the law might encourage violence against those suspected of being illegal immigrants.

Mrs. Clinton said that the administration was committed to changing immigration policy and that Mr. Obama had spoken out because he felt the law infringed on federal authority. Speaking to the NTN channel, she said flatly that he would challenge it.

Administration officials traveling with Mrs. Clinton did not immediately recognize she had made news. The process was slowed further because the State Department did not publish a transcript of her remarks until June 11, two days later, because of technical glitches.

While the crossed wires left people at the Justice Department shaking their heads, Mrs. Clinton’s aides were unapologetic. The State Department had urged the Justice Department to announce the suit earlier this week, so Mrs. Clinton would not steal her colleagues’ thunder, one official said.

And, as Mr. Crowley, the spokesman, pointed out, “There is clearly an international aspect to this.”


Jennifer Steinhauer contributed reporting.

    Justice Dept. Will Fight Arizona on Immigration, NYT, 18.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/19/us/politics/19arizona.html

Side by Side, but Divided Over Immigration

The New York Times
May 11, 2010
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD

ALBUQUERQUE — As the Arizona Legislature steamed ahead with the most stringent immigration enforcement bill in the country this year, this state’s House of Representatives was unanimously passing a resolution recognizing the economic benefits of illegal immigrants.

While the Arizona police will check driver’s licenses and other documents to root out illegal immigrants, New Mexico allows illegal residents to obtain driver’s licenses as a public safety measure.

And if Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona, a Republican, has become, for now, the public face of tough immigration enforcement, Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, a Democrat, has told any interviewer who will listen about his effort to “to integrate immigrants that are here and make them part of society and protect the values of our Hispanic and multiethnic communities.”

They may sit side by side on the border, they may share historical ties to Mexico; they may have once even been part of the same territory, but Arizona and New Mexico have grown up like distant siblings.

People on all sides of the immigration debate have taken notice.

“If a burglar breaks into your home, do you serve him dinner? That is pretty much what they do there with illegals,” said State Representative John Kavanagh of Arizona, a Republican. Mr. Kavanagh is one of the staunchest supporters of the new law there, which will give the local police broad power to check the legal status of people they stop and suspect are in the country illegally.

But Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, a liberal group in Washington that advocates reworking immigration law, offered New Mexico as a model of balancing a push for border security — Mr. Richardson once declared a state of emergency there — with coping with the illegal immigrants already in this country.

“Richardson has got it,” Mr. Sharry said.

Even supporters of Arizona’s law here — and there are some — agree that such a measure would never pass in New Mexico, given the outcry among legislators and immigrant advocates that the police in Arizona might detain and question Latinos who are legal residents and citizens but are mistaken for illegal immigrants.

Why the difference?

First, New Mexico (population two million) has the highest percentage of Hispanics of any state — 45 percent, compared with 30 percent in Arizona (population 6.5 million), and they historically have commanded far more political power than their neighbors do. The New Mexico Legislature is 44 percent Hispanic, a contrast to the 16 percent in Arizona, according to the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials.

Both were once part of Mexico and, later, the same United States territory. But since they became states in 1912, New Mexico has had five Hispanic governors (including Mr. Richardson, whose mother is Mexican), and Arizona has had one, according to the group.

New Mexico’s legislators embrace the civil rights protections in the state’s Constitution — including so-called unamendable provisions akin to a Bill of Rights that historically protected Spanish-speaking citizens of the former Mexican territory — and often mount a “protective stance” toward immigrants regardless of legal status, said Christine M. Sierra, a political science professor at the University of New Mexico.

“When the community at large feels threatened, folks close ranks and join in solidarity to protect the group,” Professor Sierra said, noting that Arizona Latinos have struggled to assume the same kind of a power in a state where a greater influx of Anglos (the general term for non-Hispanic whites) over the decades has diluted their strength.

The flow of drugs and illegal immigrants over the sparsely populated, remote border here, moreover, pales compared with that in Arizona, whose border, dotted with towns and roads facilitating trafficking, registers the highest number of drug seizures and arrests of illegal crossers of any state.

The estimated 460,000 illegal immigrants in Arizona, whose population explosion of the past few decades has been a magnet for low-wage work, is more than eight times that of the estimated 55,000 here in Albuquerque, where the economy turns more on government, military and high-skill jobs.

Though concerns about immigration and the border arise, particularly in the southern “boot heel” of New Mexico, the burner setting is low.

“It’s not that there isn’t social tension between Hispanics and non-Hispanics,” said Jose Z. Garcia, a political scientist at New Mexico State University. “We just have learned to tolerate each other and get along.”

Illegal immigrants here agree. Where fear and anxiety pervade their communities in Arizona to the point that some do not venture outside or have left the state, here they live more openly and are less guarded.

“People give us food, a place to sleep,” said Samuel Duran, 35, a day laborer looking for work in a Santa Fe park. “The police bother us when they have a reason, like a fight, but in general they leave us alone.”

Marta Nebarez, who manages a grocery store in a heavily immigrant neighborhood in Albuquerque, said that newly arriving illegal immigrants had an easier time here and that word was spreading. Some customers have told her that a few families from Arizona have moved here.

“This government helps people a lot more than over there,” she said, noting several measures, including a state law enacted in 2005 that allows illegal immigrants to pay the same tuition rate as legal, in-state residents.

In an interview, Mr. Richardson promoted that measure as only fair to children who had no choice in being raised here, and said that other measures improved public health, like the Department of Health’s cooperation in a health referral service run by the Mexican Consulate for Mexican citizens.

But New Mexico’s patience could be tested, and some fear that the Arizona law will push more illegal immigrants into the state, though they typically go where the most jobs are found.

Steve Wilmeth, a cattle rancher near Las Cruces, 30 miles north of the border, said he had grown frustrated with finding illegal immigrants crossing his property and recalled a harrowing confrontation a couple of years ago with a group of 20 near a watering tank. “SB 1070,” Mr. Wilmeth said, referring to the Arizona law, which he supports, “is a desperate attempt by the people of Arizona to do something about the onslaught they face.”

Violence on the Mexican side of the border — one of the bloodiest cities, Ciudad Juárez, is an hour’s drive from Las Cruces — has heightened anxiety. So, too, has the shooting death of a rancher in southern Arizona near the New Mexico border by someone the police theorize may have been connected to smuggling.

Mr. Richardson responded by sending 35 National Guard troops to the boot-heel area and repeating a call for more help from the federal government.

Border and immigration issues have spilled into political campaigns, but the issue has not topped residents’ concerns, said Brian Sanderoff, a veteran pollster here.

One Republican running in her party’s primary for governor this year, Susana Martinez, a southern New Mexico prosecutor, has filmed a commercial promoting border security and a promise to revoke the law granting driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants and deny taxpayer-supported scholarships to illegal immigrants.

Last year, the mayor of Albuquerque, Richard J. Berry, won office after a campaign that included a vow to give the city police more discretion to check the immigration status of offenders. Five months into office, Mr. Berry has said he is still reviewing the policy.

Mr. Richardson, who believes that illegal immigrants should pay back taxes, learn English and take other steps as a condition of getting legal status, makes no apologies for seeking to integrate them, calling them a net plus for the state.

“I just have always felt that this is part of my heritage,” he said, noting his early years spent in Mexico City. “There is a decided positive in encouraging biculturalism and people working and living together instead of inciting tension. The worry I have about Arizona is it is going to spread. It arouses the nativist instinct in people.”

    Side by Side, but Divided Over Immigration, NYT, 11.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/12/us/12newmexico.html

Op-Ed Contributor

Why Arizona Drew a Line

April 29, 2010
The New York Times
By KRIS W. KOBACH

Kansas City, Kan.

ON Friday, Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona signed a law — SB 1070 — that prohibits the harboring of illegal aliens and makes it a state crime for an alien to commit certain federal immigration crimes. It also requires police officers who, in the course of a traffic stop or other law-enforcement action, come to a “reasonable suspicion” that a person is an illegal alien verify the person’s immigration status with the federal government.

Predictably, groups that favor relaxed enforcement of immigration laws, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, insist the law is unconstitutional. Less predictably, President Obama declared it “misguided” and said the Justice Department would take a look.

Presumably, the government lawyers who do so will actually read the law, something its critics don’t seem to have done. The arguments we’ve heard against it either misrepresent its text or are otherwise inaccurate. As someone who helped draft the statute, I will rebut the major criticisms individually:

It is unfair to demand that aliens carry their documents with them. It is true that the Arizona law makes it a misdemeanor for an alien to fail to carry certain documents. “Now, suddenly, if you don’t have your papers ... you’re going to be harassed,” the president said. “That’s not the right way to go.” But since 1940, it has been a federal crime for aliens to fail to keep such registration documents with them. The Arizona law simply adds a state penalty to what was already a federal crime. Moreover, as anyone who has traveled abroad knows, other nations have similar documentation requirements.

“Reasonable suspicion” is a meaningless term that will permit police misconduct. Over the past four decades, federal courts have issued hundreds of opinions defining those two words. The Arizona law didn’t invent the concept: Precedents list the factors that can contribute to reasonable suspicion; when several are combined, the “totality of circumstances” that results may create reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed.

For example, the Arizona law is most likely to come into play after a traffic stop. A police officer pulls a minivan over for speeding. A dozen passengers are crammed in. None has identification. The highway is a known alien-smuggling corridor. The driver is acting evasively. Those factors combine to create reasonable suspicion that the occupants are not in the country legally.

The law will allow police to engage in racial profiling. Actually, Section 2 provides that a law enforcement official “may not solely consider race, color or national origin” in making any stops or determining immigration status. In addition, all normal Fourth Amendment protections against profiling will continue to apply. In fact, the Arizona law actually reduces the likelihood of race-based harassment by compelling police officers to contact the federal government as soon as is practicable when they suspect a person is an illegal alien, as opposed to letting them make arrests on their own assessment.

It is unfair to demand that people carry a driver’s license. Arizona’s law does not require anyone, alien or otherwise, to carry a driver’s license. Rather, it gives any alien with a license a free pass if his immigration status is in doubt. Because Arizona allows only lawful residents to obtain licenses, an officer must presume that someone who produces one is legally in the country.

State governments aren’t allowed to get involved in immigration, which is a federal matter. While it is true that Washington holds primary authority in immigration, the Supreme Court since 1976 has recognized that states may enact laws to discourage illegal immigration without being pre-empted by federal law. As long as Congress hasn’t expressly forbidden the state law in question, the statute doesn’t conflict with federal law and Congress has not displaced all state laws from the field, it is permitted. That’s why Arizona’s 2007 law making it illegal to knowingly employ unauthorized aliens was sustained by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

In sum, the Arizona law hardly creates a police state. It takes a measured, reasonable step to give Arizona police officers another tool when they come into contact with illegal aliens during their normal law enforcement duties.

And it’s very necessary: Arizona is the ground zero of illegal immigration. Phoenix is the hub of human smuggling and the kidnapping capital of America, with more than 240 incidents reported in 2008. It’s no surprise that Arizona’s police associations favored the bill, along with 70 percent of Arizonans.

President Obama and the Beltway crowd feel these problems can be taken care of with “comprehensive immigration reform” — meaning amnesty and a few other new laws. But we already have plenty of federal immigration laws on the books, and the typical illegal alien is guilty of breaking many of them. What we need is for the executive branch to enforce the laws that we already have.

Unfortunately, the Obama administration has scaled back work-site enforcement and otherwise shown it does not consider immigration laws to be a high priority. It is any wonder the Arizona Legislature, at the front line of the immigration issue, sees things differently?

 

Kris W. Kobach, a law professor at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, was Attorney General John Ashcroft’s chief adviser on immigration law and border security from 2001 to 2003.

    Why Arizona Drew a Line, NYT, 29.4.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/29/opinion/29kobach.html

Welcome to Arizona, Outpost of Contradictions

April 28, 2010
The New York Times
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD and JENNIFER STEINHAUER

PHOENIX — Arizona is well accustomed to the derision of its countrymen.

The state resisted adopting Martin Luther King’s birthday as a holiday years after most other states embraced it. The sheriff in its largest county forces inmates to wear pink underwear, apparently to assault their masculinity. Residents may take guns almost anywhere, but they may not cut down a cactus. The rest of the nation may scoff or grumble, but Arizona, one of the last truly independent Western outposts, carries on.

Now, after passing the nation’s toughest immigration law, one that gives the police broad power to stop people on suspicion of being here illegally, the state finds itself in perhaps the harshest spotlight in a decade.

The law drew not only the threat of a challenge by the Justice Department and a rebuke from the president, but the snickers of late-night comedians. City councils elsewhere have called for a boycott of the resort-driven state; one trade group of immigration lawyers has canceled a conference planned for Scottsdale at a time when the state is broke and desperate for business. Meanwhile, a continuous protest is taking place at the State Capitol.

Bruce D. Merrill, a polling expert here, is tired of picking up his phone. “Usually it is somebody asking me, ‘What the hell is going on in Arizona?’ ” Mr. Merrill said.

But while Arizona may have become a cartoon of intolerance to much of America, the reality is much more complex, and at times contradictory. This state is a center of both law and order and of new age om. Red-meat-loving. Red-rock-climbing.

Arizona is home to some of the toughest prison sentencing laws in the country, and one of the cleanest campaign finance laws, too. Voters overwhelmingly re-elected Janet Napolitano, a Democrat, as governor the same year they returned the conservative senator Jon Kyl to Washington. The current Republican governor signed this law, but is also pushing for a tax increase.

Further, while Arizona may seem on the fringe with its immigration law, the measure mirrors the 1994 battle in California over a voter-approved law that Gov. Pete Wilson signed barring illegal immigrants from getting health care, public education and other services. Like California then, Arizona is taking its own tack instead of waiting on the federal government to change policies.

“The political and emotional landscape is almost identical,” said Dan Schnur, director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California, who served as an aide to Mr. Wilson. “History doesn’t repeat itself, it just moves east.”

The table was set for the passage of the new law by a confluence of factors, say residents, political scientists and businesspeople in Arizona. Those factors include shifting demographics, an embattled state economy and increased violence in Mexico, as well as the perception that the federal government has failed to act. Arizonans find that particularly irksome, given that Ms. Napolitano is now head of the Department of Homeland Security.

Hispanics make up 30 percent of the population here, up from roughly 25 percent in 2000, according to census data. As the state’s economy, largely dependent on construction and development, has slumped, hostility toward illegal immigrants has increased in recent years. “More people now seem to think Hispanics are taking jobs from Anglos,” said Mr. Merrill, the polling expert.

Further, laws like the immigration statute and another new law requiring political candidates to prove citizenship are generally written by the hard-right lawmakers who dominate the Legislature — with far-left-of-center minority members opposing them — but neither side reflects the relatively centrist political views of most residents.

More than 30 percent of registered voters here are independents, double the proportion in 2000. “People have been leaving both political parties, which leaves the remainders in the party much more ideological,” Mr. Merrill said.

Residents are unnerved by the violence in Mexico and the heavy drug trade and illegal immigrant trafficking in Arizona. Most studies have shown illegal immigrants do not commit crimes in a greater proportion than their share of the population, and Arizona’s violent crime rate has declined in recent years. But in this state any crime tied to illegal immigrants gets notice.

Half of the drugs seized along the United States-Mexico border are confiscated in Arizona, and it is a major hub for human smuggling. Last month, Robert Krentz, 58, a member of a prominent ranching family, was killed on his property 20 miles from the border, and the police said the gunman was probably connected to smuggling.

“People outside of Arizona are not living in this state and don’t understand the issue,” said Mona Stacey, a computer technician from Mesa. “Most of them coming across are mostly good, Catholic families getting over here. But you also have the drug lords and the smugglers. It makes the good guys look bad, and you don’t know who is who.”

Conversations here about the new law tend to begin or end with a reference to Ms. Napolitano, who personified the state’s blended politics. As governor, she backed the posting of National Guard troops on the border, expanded the use of the state police in antismuggling operations, and pressed Washington for an overhaul of immigration law.

When it came to the Maricopa County sheriff, Joe Arpaio, however — a staunch supporter of immigration enforcement and one of the highest profile figures on the issue — she took a largely hands-off approach.

Now, as Homeland Security secretary, she has played up the administration’s devotion of resources to the border, while resisting pressure to put National Guard troops there.

This, too, is an echo of California circa 1994. There, Proposition 187, the measure limiting services for illegal immigrants, was struck down by the courts (a possibility here, too, say legal experts). The Clinton administration responded with Operation Gatekeeper, an effort to strengthen the border in California. It ended up pushing trafficking east, and as a result, Arizona posts the highest number of people arrested for crossing along the 2,000-mile border.

The former director of Operation Gatekeeper has just been appointed President Obama’s Customs and Border Protection commissioner.

With more rallies opposing the law set for Thursday, Sheriff Arpaio has planned another of his controversial sweeps to net illegal immigrants.

“Arizona is the most unpredictable political patch of earth I’ve ever seen,” said Chip Scutari, a former political reporter who now runs a Phoenix public relations firm. “It’s the land of Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s tough-as-nails Tent City, and super-liberal Congressman Raul Grijalva calling for a boycott of his own state. That’s Arizona.”

    Welcome to Arizona, Outpost of Contradictions, NYT, 28.4.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/29/us/29arizona.html

Letters

A Storm Over Arizona and Immigrants

April 27, 2010
The New York Times

To the Editor:

Re “Arizona Enacts Stringent Law on Immigration” (front page, April 24):

Arizona’s new law giving local law enforcement the power to stop and arrest anybody suspected of being in the country illegally is a direct, frustrated response to a broken system.

The State Legislature has effectively changed the political debate on immigration, making it nastier and meaner. Now it is personal.

“Arrest them all and send them home” seems to be the law’s mantra.

The law will encourage national discourse on illegal immigration, which on the surface seems to be a positive outcome, forcing the federal government to listen and take action.

But it is naïve to believe that specific groups will not be targeted in the enforcement of the new law. What constitutes probable cause to detain and question someone about his or her legal status? Would speaking Chicano English or having an accent render someone a “suspected illegal alien”? If so, our country’s commitment to diversity is at stake.

Mauricio Pantoja
Claremont, Calif., April 24, 2010

•

To the Editor:

It is difficult for me to understand how the same political party that considers it to be anti-American meddling when the government gets involved in providing a badly needed service like health care has now pressured the governor of Arizona into signing a law that requires people (or some people) to carry identity papers.

Whenever I am abroad, I find the idea that the police can stop me at any time and demand identity papers to be very oppressive, and I am reminded to be grateful for our own freedom from such laws. I can’t believe we could let this freedom slip away so lightly.

Andrea Gara
Mount Kisco, N.Y., April 24, 2010

•

To the Editor:

As a 20-year resident of Arizona, I am appalled and embarrassed by the new anti-immigrant law. It is the latest in a series of Arizona laws that have historical parallels with measures enacted by other societies to make life as difficult as possible for despised minorities.

As I looked at my Arizona license plate today, it occurred to me that “Arizona: The Grand Canyon State” no longer communicates what the state is about. “Arizona: The Hate State” says it better.

Len Borucki
Mesa, Ariz., April 24, 2010

•

To the Editor:

“Come Back, John McCain” (editorial, April 23) says that Arizona’s new immigration enforcement law plays “the rancid, dangerous game of portraying Latinos as criminals.” Actually, the bill is colorblind, applying to all illegal aliens.

And, as Title 8, Section 1325(a) of the United States Code tells us, entry without inspection is a misdemeanor the first time (six months maximum incarceration) and a felony if repeated (two years). In short, illegal immigration is a crime.

Paul Nachman
Bozeman, Mont., April 24, 2010

•

To the Editor:

Of course Arizona’s governor, Jan Brewer, signed the state’s anti-immigrant bill (front page, April 24). Why? The majority of Arizona residents wanted her to. Immigrants, undocumented and legal, are blamed for crime, unemployment, crowded emergency rooms, pet overpopulation and every other social ill that comes to mind.

It reminds me of Germany in the 1930s and how Jews were held culpable for Europe’s problems. Arizona’s Legislature shamelessly panders to the radical fringe in our state and snickers at those of us who seek common ground.

For the first time since moving here from New York City in 1997, I am ashamed to call myself an Arizonan.

Debra J. White
Tempe, Ariz., April 24, 2010

•

To the Editor:

When my husband and I adopted our Colombian-born daughter as a newborn in 1989 (naturalized as an American citizen in 1991), we never imagined that on the eve of her turning 21 we would ever caution her against travel to any American state. How could we now not warn her off Arizona?

Absent foresight to carry her American passport at all times, she might be detained and arrested on the basis of her appearance alone, despite Gov. Jan Brewer’s disingenuous assurances to the contrary. I am ashamed that any state governor has threatened the safety and well-being of our daughter, however indirectly, and hope that national immigration reform assumes the immediate priority it deserves.

Susan R. Bryan-Brown
New York, April 24, 2010

•

To the Editor:

The simple question is, Will the law be equally applied? Brewer, hmm, sounds Canadian, maybe British. Would you please produce proof of citizenship, ma’am? (said in the most courteous law-enforcement tone of voice).

Paul Turpin
Stockton, Calif., April 25, 2010

    A Storm Over Arizona and Immigrants, NYT, 27.4.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/opinion/l27arizona.html

Growing Split in Arizona Over Immigration

April 25, 2010
The New York Times
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD

MESA, Ariz. — They stood a few miles from each other, but as far apart as heat and cold.

Clutching a copy of a Spanish-language article on the tough new law making it a state crime for illegal immigrants to be in Arizona and requiring those suspected of being violators to show proof of legal status, Eric Ramirez, 29, still waited on a corner for work. He nervously kept watch for the police and wondered what his future held.

“We were already afraid, and I was thinking of leaving for California,” Mr. Ramirez said as he waited on the corner in a heavily Latino enclave already drained of people by the recession and the fear of police harassment. “We shop in their stores, we clean their yards, but they want us out and the police will be on us.”

In a nearby neighborhood, Ron White, 52, said he felt a sense of relief that something was finally being done about “the illegals” — whom he blames for ills like congregating on the streets, breaking into homes in his neighborhood, draining tax dollars and taking jobs from Americans.

“I sure hope it does have an effect,” Mr. White said of the new law as he packed his car with groceries. “I wouldn’t want to show proof of citizenship, but I also don’t feel it is racial profiling. You are going to look different if you are an alien, and cops know.”

Immigration has always polarized residents of Arizona, a major gateway for illegal immigrants. But the new law signed by Gov. Jan Brewer on Friday has widened the chasm in a way few here can remember.

The law — barring expected legal challenges before it takes effect this summer — also gives the local police broad powers to check documentation “when practicable” of anyone they reasonably suspect is an illegal immigrant.

It has already shaken up politics in the state, and it sets the stage for a rematch on a national debate between the punitive and the practical solutions to the nation’s illegal immigration issue.

But the arguments are less abstract in Arizona, home to an estimated 450,000 illegal immigrants and to the busiest stretch of illegal crossings along the Mexican border.

While demonstrators massed at the Capitol, including a few thousand Sunday afternoon denouncing the law as unconstitutional and an open invitation for racial profiling, the undercurrents that gave rise to the bill pushed as strong as ever.

The sponsor of the bill, a state senator and retired sheriff’s deputy whose passion is to drive out the state’s illegal immigrants and deter more from coming, lives here in Mesa, a Phoenix suburb that is the state’s third-largest city.

It has landed in the cauldron of debate, with a former police chief publicly warring with the county sheriff over the merits of his “crime suppression” sweeps a couple of years ago that focused on illegal immigrants.

Mesa has grown blisteringly fast in the last few decades, to about 450,000 residents from 63,000 in 1970, with Southern California-style walled subdivisions and gated communities blanketing former farmland.

The economy soared until recently, but the blitz of development proved unsettling to some.

Illegal immigrants flowed in, too, to tend the yards, fix the roofs and commit their share of crimes, though police officials have said at no greater rate than the rest of the population.

About a fifth of the residents are Hispanic. But they live mainly in enclaves like Reed Park, a stretch of boxy apartment buildings dotted with “for rent” signs, bodegas blaring Mexican music and older homes.

This is Rosalia Miñon’s Mesa, and she fears it. Even before the new law, she and her fellow illegal immigrant neighbors did not venture out often for fear of being stopped by the police or immigration agents.

Ms. Miñon is struggling to make ends meet, because more employers than ever are asking for Social Security cards and checking their validity under a heretofore rarely enforced 2007 state law that provides penalties for employers who do not check. She prays every morning as she steps out the door, “because we go out and we do not know if we are coming back.”

Alfredo Hernández-García, 22, who is not a legal resident but is married to a woman who is, already lies low, fearing he will be deported and separated from his wife, who will soon give birth.

“This is going to tear apart families, and what good does that do?” he said, relaxing at an apartment building near a park he rarely ventures into. “What is the government here going to do if we all go and it affects the economy?”

Like others, Mr. Hernández-García said the wait for legal authorization to immigrate from Mexico runs several years, sometimes even a decade or more.

“And all the jobs are here,” he said. “There is nothing in Mexico, and now it is so violent. Who wants to go back?”

The businesses catering to Latinos are suffering. At Mi Amigos, a bodega, the manager, Rigoberto Magaña, glanced at the emptiness of the store at midday and said it was typical.

“Our business is way, way down, and so is everybody else’s here,” Mr. Magaña said. “Nobody comes out.”

Just a short drive away, a subdivision encircles a golf course.

This is Kent Lowis’s Mesa, and he fears for it.

“This law might kick some of these immigrants out,” said Mr. Lowis, 76, a retiree who has lived here for more than 30 years and does not like all the change. “They vandalize the golf course, throwing flags in the ponds. Burglaries. There are too many immigrants. I get tired of seeing all these people standing on the corner.”

Such sentiments propelled the bill through the Republican-controlled Legislature, with supporters listing well-publicized cases in which illegal immigrants committed rapes and shot and killed police officers.

The sponsor, State Senator Russell K. Pearce, a Republican, said it would give the police a tool to weed out criminals before they act and help foster a climate of toughness that would discourage more immigrants from coming.

Governor Brewer, a Republican, said as she signed the bill into law on Friday that she believed that a majority of Arizonans supported it, though there is no independent assessment of the assertion. A poll released two days before said that a majority of likely voters in Arizona supported the bill, but it used an automated telephone query that some pollsters find questionable and it was conducted before the heavy onslaught of news media coverage.

No Democrats in the Legislature supported the bill, and only one Republican voted against it.

While those opposed to the law are making the most noise, the quiet support can be found here, though some people are uneasy about being cast as anti-Hispanic and several people interviewed declined to be named out of concern they would be thought of as prejudiced.

“I don’t want people to be afraid to come,” said Pam Sutherland, who is a window manufacturer and a fan of the crime sweeps but is also concerned about the state’s image. “I just want them to do it legally.”

For many, though, support for the law comes down to a way to vent frustration that, in their view, the federal government has not done enough to control immigration — particularly in a state on the border where reports of drug busts, houses overcrowded with illegal immigrants and people dying in the desert trying to get here fill the airwaves.

“We can see Washington isn’t going to do anything,” Mr. White said. “So why not Arizona? I think Arizona is the one state with the bigger problem with it.”

    Growing Split in Arizona Over Immigration, NYT, 25.4.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/26/us/26immig.html

In Wake of Immigration Law, Calls for an Economic Boycott of Arizona

April 26, 2010
The New York Times
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD

A spreading call for an economic boycott of Arizona after its adoption of a tough immigration law that opponents consider racially discriminatory worried business leaders on Monday and angered the governor.

Several immigrant advocates and civil rights groups, joined by members of the San Francisco government, said the state should pay economic consequences for the new law, which gives the police broad power to detain people they reasonably suspect are illegal immigrants and arrest them on state charges if they do not have legal status.

Critics say the law will lead to widespread ethnic and racial profiling and will be used to harass legal residents and Latino citizens.

La Opinión, the nation’s largest Spanish-language newspaper, urged a boycott in an editorial Monday, as did the Rev. Al Sharpton, and calls for such action spread to social media sites. The San Francisco city attorney and members of the Board of Supervisors said they would propose that the city not do business with the state.

They followed the lead of Representative Raúl M. Grijalva, Democrat of Arizona, who had urged conventions to skip the state, though other Democrats who oppose the law, including Mayor Phil Gordon of Phoenix, pleaded for people not to punish the entire state.

Tourism and convention managers, struggling to rebound from the recession, said it was too soon to tell if the effort would have an impact, but some businesses said people were turning away from the state.

At the Arizona Inn in Tucson, the manager, Will Conroy, said that over the weekend 12 customers canceled reservations or said they would not return to the state because of the law.

“This is a very scary situation that the police can now just come up to you for no reason and ask for papers,” Joy Mann, a prospective guest who had previously stayed at the inn, wrote him in an e-mail message. “My son is a construction worker and is very suntanned. I cannot ask him to join us there now, as I would fear for him.”

Tourism officials said such accounts were not widespread, but they were concerned that the rancor was tarnishing the state’s image and were mindful of the boycott in the 1980s that led to Arizona’s officially observing Martin Luther King’s Birthday after initially rejecting it as a holiday.

“Arizona tourism is currently in a very fragile state of recovery, and the negative perceptions surrounding this legislation are tarnishing Arizona’s image and could easily have a devastating effect on visitation to our state,” the Valley Hotel and Resort Association in Phoenix said in a statement.

Gov. Jan Brewer, a Republican, signed the bill on Friday, calling it an important step toward public safety that would help control immigration and give the police a tool to root out criminals.

She criticized opponents for not offering more solutions to problems related to illegal immigration and called the idea of a boycott “disappointing and unfortunate” at a time when the state is reeling from the recession and suffering from border-related crime that “continues to harm our economy and stifle trade.”

    In Wake of Immigration Law, Calls for an Economic Boycott of Arizona, NYT, 26.4.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/us/27arizona.html

Arizona Enacts Stringent Law on Immigration

April 23, 2010
The New York Times
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD

PHOENIX — Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona signed the nation’s toughest bill on illegal immigration into law on Friday. Its aim is to identify, prosecute and deport illegal immigrants.

The move unleashed immediate protests and reignited the divisive battle over immigration reform nationally.

Even before she signed the bill at an afternoon news conference here, President Obama strongly criticized it.

Speaking at a naturalization ceremony for 24 active-duty service members in the Rose Garden, he called for a federal overhaul of immigration laws, which Congressional leaders signaled they were preparing to take up soon, to avoid “irresponsibility by others.”

The Arizona law, he added, threatened “to undermine basic notions of fairness that we cherish as Americans, as well as the trust between police and our communities that is so crucial to keeping us safe.”

The law, which proponents and critics alike said was the broadest and strictest immigration measure in generations, would make the failure to carry immigration documents a crime and give the police broad power to detain anyone suspected of being in the country illegally. Opponents have called it an open invitation for harassment and discrimination against Hispanics regardless of their citizenship status.

The political debate leading up to Ms. Brewer’s decision, and Mr. Obama’s criticism of the law — presidents very rarely weigh in on state legislation — underscored the power of the immigration debate in states along the Mexican border. It presaged the polarizing arguments that await the president and Congress as they take up the issue nationally.

Mexico’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement that it was worried about the rights of its citizens and relations with Arizona. Cardinal Roger M. Mahony of Los Angeles said the authorities’ ability to demand documents was like “Nazism.”

As hundreds of demonstrators massed, mostly peacefully, at the capitol plaza, the governor, speaking at a state building a few miles away, said the law “represents another tool for our state to use as we work to solve a crisis we did not create and the federal government has refused to fix.”

The law was to take effect 90 days after the legislative session ends, meaning by August. Court challenges were expected immediately.

Hispanics, in particular, who were not long ago courted by the Republican Party as a swing voting bloc, railed against the law as a recipe for racial and ethnic profiling. “Governor Brewer caved to the radical fringe,” a statement by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund said, predicting that the law would create “a spiral of pervasive fear, community distrust, increased crime and costly litigation, with nationwide repercussions.”

While police demands of documents are common on subways, highways and in public places in some countries, including France, Arizona is the first state to demand that immigrants meet federal requirements to carry identity documents legitimizing their presence on American soil.

Ms. Brewer acknowledged critics’ concerns, saying she would work to ensure that the police have proper training to carry out the law. But she sided with arguments by the law’s sponsors that it provides an indispensable tool for the police in a border state that is a leading magnet of illegal immigration. She said racial profiling would not be tolerated, adding, “We have to trust our law enforcement.”

Ms. Brewer and other elected leaders have come under intense political pressure here, made worse by the killing of a rancher in southern Arizona by a suspected smuggler a couple of weeks before the State Legislature voted on the bill. His death was invoked Thursday by Ms. Brewer herself, as she announced a plan urging the federal government to post National Guard troops at the border.

President George W. Bush had attempted comprehensive reform but failed when his own party split over the issue. Once again, Republicans facing primary challenges from the right, including Ms. Brewer and Senator John McCain, have come under tremendous pressure to support the Arizona law, known as SB 1070.

Mr. McCain, locked in a primary with a challenger campaigning on immigration, only came out in support of the law hours before the State Senate passed it Monday afternoon.

Governor Brewer, even after the Senate passed the bill, had been silent on whether she would sign it. Though she was widely expected to, given her primary challenge, she refused to state her position even at a dinner on Thursday for a Hispanic social service organization, Chicanos Por La Causa, where several audience members called out “Veto!”

Among other things, the Arizona measure is an extraordinary rebuke to former Gov. Janet Napolitano, who had vetoed similar legislation repeatedly as a Democratic governor of the state before being appointed Homeland Security secretary by Mr. Obama.

The law opens a deep fissure in Arizona, with a majority of the thousands of callers to the governor’s office urging her to reject it.

In the days leading up to Ms. Brewer’s decision, Representative Raúl M. Grijalva, a Democrat, called for a convention boycott of his state.

The bill, sponsored by Russell Pearce, a state senator and a firebrand on immigration issues, has several provisions.

It requires police officers, “when practicable,” to detain people they reasonably suspect are in the country without authorization and to verify their status with federal officials, unless doing so would hinder an investigation or emergency medical treatment.

It also makes it a state crime — a misdemeanor — to not carry immigration papers. In addition, it allows people to sue local government or agencies if they believe federal or state immigration law is not being enforced.

States across the country have proposed or enacted hundreds of bills addressing immigration since 2007, the last time a federal effort to reform immigration law collapsed. Last year, there were a record number of laws enacted (222) and resolutions (131) in 48 states, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

The prospect of plunging into a national immigration debate is being increasingly talked about on Capitol Hill, spurred in part by recent statements by Senator Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, the majority leader, that he intends to bring legislation to the Senate floor after Memorial Day.

But while an immigration debate could help energize Hispanic voters and provide political benefits to embattled Democrats seeking re-election in November — like Mr. Reid — it could also energize conservative voters.

It could also take time from other Democratic priorities, including an energy measure that Speaker Nancy Pelosi has described as her flagship issue.

Mr. Reid declined Thursday to say that immigration would take precedence over an energy measure. But he called it an imperative: “The system is broken,” he said.

Ms. Pelosi and Representative Steny H. Hoyer, Democrat of Maryland and the majority leader, have said that the House would be willing to take up immigration policy only if the Senate produces a bill first.


Helene Cooper and Carl Hulse contributed reporting from Washington.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 23, 2010

A earlier version of this article misspelled the last name of the Arizona state senator who sponsored several provisions of the bill. He is Russell Pearce, not Pierce.

    Arizona Enacts Stringent Law on Immigration, NYT, 23.4.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/24/us/politics/24immig.html

Utah Bill Would Criminalize Illegal Abortions

February 28, 2010
The New York Times
By KIRK JOHNSON

DENVER — The origins of Utah State House Bill 12 lie in an act of dark and desperate violence.

Last May in a small town in eastern Utah, a 17-year-old girl, seven months pregnant, paid a man she had just met $150 to beat her up in hopes of inducing a miscarriage that would resolve her crisis. He obliged, taking her to a basement and kicking her repeatedly in the stomach.

The fetus survived the assault and was born in August. The attacker went to jail. And the girl, whose name was never released because she was under age, became the center of a legal debate — and the piece of legislation now awaiting the governor’s signature or veto. The bill would formally criminalize what she did, that is, to seek an illegal abortion.

If it is signed into law by Gov. Gary R. Herbert, a Republican, who has said he agrees generally with its goals but is still studying the particulars, Utah would still allow legal abortions performed by a doctor. But it would go further than any other state, several legal experts said, in mapping out a much murkier question: when is a woman criminally liable for trying to end a pregnancy through other means or self-infliction?

The bill’s sponsor, Representative Carl D. Wimmer, a Republican and former police officer from the suburbs of Salt Lake City, said the beating case, and the decision by a judge last fall that the girl had committed no crime because seeking an abortion is not illegal, revealed “a loophole” in the law.

“A woman going out to seek any way to kill her unborn child, no matter how heinous or brutal, couldn’t be held liable,” Mr. Wimmer said.

But critics say legislation inspired by an unusual, perhaps even freakish criminal case, could open up a vast frontier around the question of intent and responsibility and give local prosecutors huge new powers to inquire about a woman’s intentions toward her unborn child.

For example, if a pregnant woman gets into a vehicle, goes on a wild ride way over the speed limit without wearing a seatbelt and crashes and the fetus is killed, is she a reckless driver? Or is she a reckless mother-to-be who criminally ignored the safety of her fetus?

Under the bill, a woman guilty of criminal homicide of her fetus could be punished by up to life in prison.

“So many things can happen, and it’s all in the eye of the beholder — that’s what’s very dangerous about this legislation,” said Marina Lowe, the legislative and policy counsel to the American Civil Liberties Union of Utah, which has urged Mr. Herbert to veto the bill.

Some women’s advocacy groups say the bill simply codifies what many states are already doing, using existing laws about the unborn to prosecute apparently errant mothers.

Just last month in Iowa, for example, a pregnant woman who fell down the stairs at home confided to emergency workers that she was not sure she really wanted to have her child. Though the woman did not immediately miscarry from the fall, she was arrested anyway under a state law that makes it a criminal act to harm a fetus. She was released after two days in jail, and the charges were dropped.

At least 38 states have laws against fetal homicide, generally intended to create additional penalties when a pregnant woman is assaulted or killed. And two states, Delaware and New York, also have laws specifically making self-abortion a crime. Both laws were passed before the United States Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade.

Some opponents of abortion also do not like the Utah bill because of the very fact that it does codify the language and limits of abortion law, with specific delineations about when ending a pregnancy in Utah is legal and when it is not.

“Well, it’s all right to kill a human being in this case, but not in this case,” said Jim Sedlak, vice president of the American Life League, a national group that works for what it calls “pro-life concerns.”

“I would urge him to not sign this law and to send it back,” Mr. Sedlak said, referring to Mr. Herbert. “He should ask the Legislature to address the real problem of personhood in the womb.”

Whether the bill, if it does become law, would be a rarely used symbolic declaration or a widely used law enforcement tool is part of the debate as well.

“Prosecutors have a lot of discretion, and miscarriage is a sad but common event in connection with pregnancy,” said Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, a nonprofit advocacy group for birth control and abortion rights. “This bill would cast suspicion, potentially, on every single miscarriage.”

Nonsense, said Mr. Wimmer, the sponsor. He said the language in the bill requiring “intentional, knowing or reckless” acts by a woman against her unborn child sets a high bar that would allow questions to be asked only in the most glaring of cases.

Behavior by a mother that might harm but not kill her fetus, including use of alcohol or tobacco, would not be covered by the bill, he said. But, he added, a mother who killed her fetus by taking illegal drugs might conceivably be charged.

The 17-year-old girl’s child, meanwhile, was adopted by a Utah couple.

Supporters of the bill said a letter from the baby’s adoptive mother, read aloud by Mr. Wimmer at a legislative hearing on the bill, was a powerful emotional moment that may have swung some votes.

The bill was ultimately approved by overwhelming majorities in the Republican-controlled Legislature: 59 to 12 in the House and 24 to 4 in the Senate.

“When Representative Wimmer read the letter, about the little girl playing with bubbles in the bathtub and learning to crawl and so full of life, you could have heard a pin drop,” said Laura Bunker, director of United Families Utah, a group that worked on behalf of the bill. “And all of a sudden people realized that there was a victim here, and the victim was alive and had a future.”

Lynn M. Paltrow, the executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, a nonprofit group based in New York, said the focus on the child obscured the bleak story of the teenager, who also deserves, she said, empathy from the world, and the law.

“Almost nobody is speaking for her,” Ms. Paltrow said. “Why would a young woman get to a point of such desperation that she would invite violence against herself? Anybody that desperate is not going to be deterred by this statute.”

    Utah Bill Would Criminalize Illegal Abortions, NYT, 1.3.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/01/us/01abortion.html

Fearing Obama Agenda, States Push to Loosen Gun Laws

February 23, 2010
The New York Times
By IAN URBINA

When President Obama took office, gun rights advocates sounded the alarm, warning that he intended to strip them of their arms and ammunition.

And yet the opposite is happening. Mr. Obama has been largely silent on the issue while states are engaged in a new and largely successful push for expanded gun rights, even passing measures that have been rejected in the past.

In Virginia, the General Assembly approved a bill last week that allows people to carry concealed weapons in bars and restaurants that serve alcohol, and the House of Delegates voted to repeal a 17-year-old ban on buying more than one handgun a month. The actions came less than three years after the shootings at Virginia Tech that claimed 33 lives and prompted a major national push for increased gun control.

Arizona and Wyoming lawmakers are considering nearly a half dozen pro-gun measures, including one that would allow residents to carry concealed weapons without a permit. And lawmakers in Montana and Tennessee passed measures last year — the first of their kind — to exempt their states from federal regulation of firearms and ammunition that are made, sold and used in state. Similar bills have been proposed in at least three other states.

In the meantime, gun control advocates say, Mr. Obama has failed to deliver on campaign promises to close a loophole that allows unlicensed dealers at gun shows to sell firearms without background checks; to revive the assault weapons ban; and to push states to release data about guns used in crimes.

He also signed bills last year allowing guns to be carried in national parks and in luggage on Amtrak trains.

“We expected a very different picture at this stage,” said Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, a gun control group that last month issued a report card failing the administration in all seven of the group’s major indicators.

Gun control advocates have had some successes recently, Mr. Helmke said. Proposed bills to allow students to carry guns on college campuses have been blocked in the 20 or so states where they have been proposed since the Virginia Tech shootings. Last year, New Jersey limited gun purchases to one a month, a law similar to the one Virginia may revoke.

But recent setbacks to gun control have been many.

Last month, the Indiana legislature passed bills that block private employers from forbidding workers to keep firearms in their vehicles on company property.

Gun rights supporters also showed their strength last year by blocking legislation to give District of Columbia residents a full vote in Congress by attaching an amendment to repeal Washington’s ban on handguns.

Asked by reporters about the Brady group’s critical report on the Obama administration, a White House spokesman, Ben LaBolt, pointed out that the latest F.B.I. statistics showed that violent crime dropped in the first half of 2009 to its lowest levels since the 1960s.

“The president supports and respects the Second Amendment,” Mr. LaBolt said, “and he believes we can take common-sense steps to keep our streets safe and to stem the flow of illegal guns to criminals.”

Still, gun rights groups remain skeptical of the administration.

“The watchword for gun owners is stay ready,” said Wayne LaPierre, chief executive of the National Rifle Association. “We have had some successes, but we know that the first chance Obama gets, he will pounce on us.”

That Mr. Obama signed legislation allowing guns in national parks and on Amtrak trains should not be seen as respect for the Second Amendment, Mr. LaPierre said. The two measures had been attached as amendments to larger pieces of legislation — a bill cracking down on credit card companies and a transportation appropriations bill, respectively — that the president wanted passed, Mr. LaPierre said.

Regardless of Mr. Obama’s agenda, gun dealers seem to be reaping the benefits of fears surrounding it.

Federal background checks for gun purchases rose to 14 million in 2009, up from 12.7 million in 2008 and 11.2 million in 2007. But from November 2009 to January 2010, the number of background checks fell 12 percent, compared with the same months a year earlier.

In Virginia, the success of new pro-gun laws is partly a result of the Republican Party’s taking the governor’s office after eight years of Democratic control.

A major setback for state gun control advocates was this week’s House vote repealing the one-gun-per-month law, which was passed in 1993 under Gov. L. Douglas Wilder, a Democrat, and has long been upheld as the state’s signature gun control restriction.

Supporters of limiting gun purchases to one a month said the law was important to avoid Virginia’s becoming the East Coast’s top gun-running hub. Opponents dismissed the concern.

“We shouldn’t get rid of our Second Amendment rights because some people in New York City want to abuse theirs,” Robert G. Marshall, a Republican delegate from Manassas who supported repeal of the one-gun-a-month limit, told reporters.

Gun control advocates hoped to win new restrictions after the Virginia Tech massacre on April 16, 2007, in which a student, Seung-Hui Cho, shot and killed 32 people before turning a gun on himself.

After the shooting, Gov. Tim Kaine, a Democrat, pushed for stronger gun control measures. But last year the legislature rejected a bill requiring background checks for private sales at gun shows and repealed a law that Mr. Kaine had supported to prohibit anyone from carrying concealed weapons into a club or restaurant where alcohol is served.

In previous years, the guns-in-bars bill cleared both chambers but was vetoed by Mr. Kaine. But the new governor, Robert F. McDonnell, has said he supports the measure.

Virginia is also considering a measure adopted in Montana and Tennessee that declares that firearms made and retained in-state are beyond the authority of Congress. The measure is primarily a challenge to Congress’s power to regulate commerce among the states.

The Montana law is being challenged in federal court, and the United States Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has sent a letter to Tennessee and Montana gun dealers stating that federal law supersedes the state measure.

    Fearing Obama Agenda, States Push to Loosen Gun Laws, NYT, 24.2.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/24/us/24guns.html

States Have Not Yet Seen the Worst of Economic Times, Governors at Meeting Say

February 21, 2010
The New York Times
By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON — Although the national economy has begun to bounce back, governors said Saturday that the worst was yet to come at the state level, where revenues are still falling short of projections.

“State revenues continue to deteriorate, as most states are witnessing monthly totals lower than their recent forecasts, which have been revised downward,” said Gov. Jim Douglas of Vermont, the chairman of the National Governors Association, which opened its winter meeting here on Saturday.

Mr. Douglas, a Republican, said the fiscal situation was “fairly poor for most states around the country.” And a report issued by the association predicted that the fiscal year starting July 1 would be “the most difficult to date.”

Health care was another pressing issue on the agenda. A number of the governors, some of them Democrats, were less than enthusiastic about elements of the sweeping health care legislation championed by President Obama and Democrats in Congress.

Governors said they needed more latitude to devise health insurance programs tailored to the needs, priorities and fiscal capacity of their states.

Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts, a Democrat, said his state was doing fine with its requirement for people to obtain health insurance.

But Gov. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, a Democrat who is vice chairman of the National Governors Association, criticized proposals that would require everyone to carry insurance with benefits specified by the federal government.

“One size does not fit all,” Mr. Manchin said. “We need flexibility to make sure our citizens are insured. I should not be mandated to take care of somebody who is having a hard time financially but is very healthy.”

With health legislation stalled in Congress, governors said they were moving ahead on their own to transform the health care system, improve the quality of care and hold down costs.

“To be perfectly honest,” Mr. Douglas said, “I had expected that we would be here today talking about implementation of a new national health plan enacted by Congress. But we cannot wait for the federal government. We are going to move forward. We will provide leadership with or without a federal health care bill.”

Michelle Obama, the first lady, received a warm welcome from the group as she made an impassioned plea for state efforts to reduce childhood obesity.

“We cannot solve our health care problems unless we address our childhood obesity problem, too,” Mrs. Obama said.

Mrs. Obama said health costs would continue to soar if children continued to stuff themselves with salty, high-fat foods that contributed to obesity — and to a higher risk of diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease.

Even as the governors debated ways to tackle their financial problems, some said the situation could have been worse. Governor Douglas said the recession might have been deeper and longer if Congress had not approved a $787 billion package to simulate the economy last year.

The new governor of New Jersey, Christopher J. Christie, a Republican, said that while the federal aid had helped states, “it really just put off difficult choices.”

Other governors said they were dismayed by the failure of Congress to pass legislation to help create jobs and resuscitate the economy. States, they said, were paying a price for the inaction on Capitol Hill.

“Because of the decline in state revenues,” Mr. Douglas said, “43 states cut $31 billion from their budgets in 2009. For fiscal year 2010, even with nearly $30 billion in new revenue, 36 states have been forced to cut $55 billion. Thirty states have cut elementary, secondary and higher education.”

Given these problems, governors of both parties expressed concern about plans by Democrats in Congress to expand Medicaid, the program for low-income people.

Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi, the chairman of the Republican Governors Association, said the health bills passed by the House and the Senate would impose “an enormous unfunded mandate on states,” forcing them to pick up $25 billion in new costs over 10 years.

Mr. Barbour explained what this would mean in Mississippi: “Either the state income tax or the state sales tax or both would have to be raised. We would add 300,000 people to the Medicaid rolls. It’s about a 50 percent increase.”

Gov. Christine Gregoire of Washington, a Democrat, said that despite such concerns, she was “a huge champion of national health care reform.”

“You can’t take little nibbles at health care reform,” Ms. Gregoire said. “It’s got to be comprehensive.”

Ms. Gregoire said she had told the top Democrats in Congress that they might want to delay the expansion of Medicaid if states were still in economic distress in a few years.

“If we don’t come out of this recession and if I have to absorb new costs, I don’t know how I would do it,” Ms. Gregoire said. “We would be hard-pressed to pick up the tab. But that’s not to say we should not move forward on health care reform. Doing nothing would be the biggest mistake.”

    States Have Not Yet Seen the Worst of Economic Times, Governors at Meeting Say, NYT, 21.2.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/21/us/21govs.html

Oregon Says Yes to Taxing Wealthy, Businesses

January 27, 2010
Filed at 3:33 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) -- Oregon has set aside its history of shooting down tax increases on statewide ballots, with voters endorsing higher taxes amid a brutal economic slump.

Democrats in the Oregon Legislature made it as easy as they could for the voters to raise taxes on somebody else, and the electorate responded Tuesday by approving Measures 66 and 67.

The increases approved Tuesday will hit people with taxable income upward of $125,000 -- estimated at fewer than 3 percent of filers. Many businesses who had been paying an annual $10 minimum will see that rise to at least $150.

With 91 percent of the vote counted, the vote was 54-46 on Measure 66 and 53-47 on Measure 67.

Oregon voters have consistently rebuffed legislative attempts to take more in tax revenue -- such as a cigarette tax to pay for health insurance for children three years ago, two previous income tax measures that would have hit most Oregonians and nine sales tax measures over the decades.

A Democratic legislative leader, Senate President Peter Courtney, said he was, just in case, preparing a statement acknowledging defeat just before the results were reported Tuesday.

''This is a tax vote?'' he exclaimed later when the victory was evident. ''This is indescribable ... It's Oregon being Oregon.''

The vote affirms the two-year budget the Legislature controlled by Democrats adopted last year, and spares it $727 million worth of budget cutting during a four-week session that begins Monday.

Courtney's counterpart in the House, Speaker Dave Hunt, says the session will focus on legislation to spur job creation and to help people hurt by the slump that has boosted the unemployment rate to 11 percent and driven record numbers of people to seek aid such as food stamps.

Oregon's Sherwood Forest, take-from-the-rich strategy might appeal to legislators in other states struggling to bandage their budgets, said Portland pollster Tim Hibbitts.

''The nature of the measure they crafted was very smart political strategy,'' he said. ''If you're going to take this to a red state, it's going to be a lot more difficult,'' he said. ''Other blue states that are feeling the pressure may say, 'Maybe we could craft a similar measure and win with that.'''

Business leaders and Republicans were glum. Hibbitts' polls suggested a closer vote, and for much of the voting period, liberal Multnomah County was slow to mail in and drop off ballots, raising the hopes of the tax opponents.

It was a victory for public employee unions who were the spearhead of the campaign for the taxes and raised enough money to outspend the opponents.

A Common Cause analysis put their fundraising advantage to date at $6.85 million to $4.55 million in one of the state's most expensive campaigns.

''The bottom line is the unions bought the election,'' said State Republican Chairman Bob Tiernan. ''It's going to be a sadder day as more businesses leave the state and more don't want to come here.''

    Oregon Says Yes to Taxing Wealthy, Businesses, NYT, 27.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/01/27/business/AP-US-Oregon-Tax-Vote.html

Oregon Voters Approve Tax Increase

January 27, 2010
The New York Times
By WILLIAM YARDLEY

Two ballot measures that would raise taxes on businesses and higher-income residents in Oregon appeared headed for approval late Tuesday.

The tax increases, which would raise about $727 million largely for public education and social services, were approved last year by the Legislature, but later put to a public referendum after opponents gathered signatures in a petition campaign.

The Legislature, controlled by Democrats, has already put the $727 million into the current budget. So if the ballot items, known as Measures 66 and 67, had been rejected, lawmakers would have been forced to hold a special session to find other ways to reduce spending or raise revenue.

Tax measures have frequently failed at the polls in Oregon, one of only five states without a state sales tax. The state depends largely on income and property taxes to raise revenue.

Experts noted that, given the broader recession and Oregon’s 11 percent unemployment rate, Measures 66 and 67 had been carefully drawn to focus on wealthier residents and businesses.

Measure 66 raises income taxes on individuals who earn more than $125,000 and on couples who earn more than $250,000, less than 3 percent of the state population. Measure 67 raises taxes and fees on most businesses.

While some large businesses could see taxes increase by tens of thousands of dollars per year, many would pay an extra $140 in state fees. Business groups opposed Measure 67 but they were outspent by unions for teachers and public employees.

    Oregon Voters Approve Tax Increase, NYT, 27.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/27/us/28oregon.html

24 States’ Laws Open to Attack After Campaign Finance Ruling

January 23, 2010
The New York Times
By IAN URBINA

In Wisconsin, conservative and pro-business groups said Friday that they were considering a lawsuit to block a proposed law that would ban corporate spending during political campaigns.

In Kentucky and Colorado, lawmakers looked for provisions in their state constitutions that may need to be rewritten. And in Texas, lawyers for Tom DeLay, the former House majority leader, said the pending state campaign finance case against him should be thrown out.

A day after the United States Supreme Court ruled that the federal government may not ban political spending by corporations or unions in candidate elections, officials across the country were rushing to cope with the fallout, as laws in 24 states were directly or indirectly called into question by the ruling.

“One day the Constitution of Colorado is the highest law of the state,” said Robert F. Williams, a law professor at Rutgers University. “The next day it’s wastepaper.”

The states that explicitly prohibit independent expenditures by unions and corporations will be most affected by the ruling. The decision, however, has consequences for all states, since they are now effectively prohibited from adopting restrictions on corporate and union spending on political campaigns.

In his dissent to the 5-to-4 ruling, Justice John Paul Stevens highlighted the burden placed on states.

“The court operates with a sledgehammer rather than a scalpel when it strikes down one of Congress’s most significant efforts to regulate the role that corporations and unions play in electoral politics,” he wrote. “It compounds the offense by implicitly striking down a great many state laws as well.”

For now, the decision does not overturn all the state laws in question, but it is only a matter of time, experts said, before the laws will be challenged in the courts or repealed by state legislatures. Since the state laws are vulnerable, it is unlikely that officials will continue enforcing them, experts said.

Montana is one of the states that will probably be affected. It has one of the nation’s oldest campaign finance laws, approved by voters in 1912 after a copper baron, William A. Clark of Butte, bribed members of the State Legislature to get a United States Senate seat.

Chris Gallus, a former lobbyist and a lawyer who represents business interests in Montana, said his clients would most likely challenge the statute if it were not stricken.

States that can expect to see the biggest and most sudden influx of money are those — like Ohio and Florida — where it is relatively expensive to run campaigns and where races are competitive, said Ray La Raja, a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He predicted corporate spending would increase in states where control of state governments hangs in the balance.

The ruling left many state lawmakers frustrated and uncertain how to proceed.

“It’s absolutely outrageous and we’ve got to find a way to deal with it,” said Michael E. Gronstal, the Senate majority leader in Iowa, where lawmakers were exploring how they might keep at least some of the restrictions on political expenditures in the current state law.

The decision could also affect pending trials, like that of Mr. DeLay, who was charged in 2005 with criminal violations of state campaign finance laws and money laundering.

“The money laundering and conspiracy to commit money laundering charges will definitely be undermined,” said Dick DeGuerin, Mr. DeLay’s lawyer. “The reason is that the foundation of the prosecution’s argument is that corporate donations are illegal in any part of the political process, but the Supreme Court just struck that idea down.”

But Carl Bryan Case, the director of the Appellate Division at the Travis County District Attorney’s Office, which is handling Mr. DeLay’s case, disagreed.

“The indictments against Mr. DeLay describe corporate contributions to a political campaign,” he said. “What the Supreme Court addressed was independent expenditures made by third parties on their own and without having to do with campaigns.”

Alan Schneider, the state prosecutor in Grand Traverse County, Mich., said he was concerned about his continuing criminal investigation of Meijer Inc.’s actions in a 2007 recall election. “We’re going to have to shift our focus entirely,” he said.

The court’s decision effectively overturns the section of the Michigan Campaign Finance Act that prohibits corporate financing of candidate campaigns, Mr. Schneider said. Meijer is accused of illegally funneling tens of thousands of dollars to groups to try to depose the township board in Acme Township in a 2007 recall election.

“Unfortunately, we now have to drop the felony charges we were pursuing and only go after the misdemeanors,” he said. “It’s frustrating.”

David Primo, a political science professor at the University of Rochester, counseled caution about predicting the impact of the Supreme Court decision. While it grants corporations and unions new access, it is also likely to spur state officials and campaign reform groups to push for new types of restrictions.

“This tug of war will continue as long as we have fundamental disagreements in the country over the role of money in politics,” he said.

The decision may galvanize reformers to push harder for public financing of elections.

It will also bring new pressure on states to improve their disclosure rules, experts said, since those rules will be one of the only ways left to regulate how corporations and other groups make expenditures in local races.

Joseph Birkenstock, the former chief counsel for the Democratic National Committee now with the law firm Caplin & Drysdale in Washington, said states that previously banned corporate expenditures would begin adapting disclosure rules so that the public can get the same information about corporate political advertisements that is currently available for advertisements paid for by individuals or political action committees.

Richard Hasen, an election law specialist at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, said he expected state judicial races to be especially affected by the Supreme Court decision.

In recent years, he said, the states where corporate contributions were permitted saw an explosion in spending in judicial races. With the new ruling, those states and others where such donations were limited or banned are likely to see more money spent on these races.

Between 2000 and 2009, spending on state supreme court races across 22 states that had competitive elections was about $207 million, up from $86 million between 1990 and 2000, according Justice at Stake, at watchdog group that monitors money in court races.

 

Dan Frosch and Kitty Bennett contributed reporting.

    24 States’ Laws Open to Attack After Campaign Finance Ruling, NYT, 22.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/23/us/politics/23states.html

G.O.P. Senate Victory Stuns Democrats

January 20, 2010
The New York Times
By MICHAEL COOPER

BOSTON — Scott Brown, a little-known Republican state senator, rode an old pickup truck and a growing sense of unease among independent voters to an extraordinary upset Tuesday night when he was elected to fill the Senate seat that was long held by Edward M. Kennedy in the overwhelmingly Democratic state of Massachusetts.

By a decisive margin, Mr. Brown defeated Martha Coakley, the state’s attorney general, who had been considered a prohibitive favorite to win just over a month ago after she easily won the Democratic primary.

With all precincts counted, Mr. Brown had 52 percent of the vote to Ms. Coakley’s 47 percent.

“Tonight the independent voice of Massachusetts has spoken,” Mr. Brown told his cheering supporters in a victory speech, standing in front of a backdrop that said “The People’s Seat.”

The election left Democrats in Congress scrambling to salvage a bill overhauling the nation’s health care system, which the late Mr. Kennedy had called “the cause of my life.” Mr. Brown has vowed to oppose the bill, and once he takes office the Democrats will no longer control the 60 votes in the Senate needed to overcome filibusters.

There were immediate signs that the bill had become imperiled. House members indicated they would not quickly pass the bill the Senate approved last month.

And after the results were announced, one centrist Democratic senator, Jim Webb of Virginia, called on Senate leaders to suspend any votes on the Democrats’ health care legislation until Mr. Brown is sworn into office. The election, he said, was a referendum on both health care and the integrity of the government process.

Beyond the bill, the election of a man supported by the Tea Party movement also represented an unexpected reproach by many voters to President Obama after his first year in office, and struck fear into the hearts of Democratic lawmakers, who are already worried about their prospects in the midterm elections later this year.

Mr. Brown was able to appeal to independents who were anxious about the economy and concerned about the direction taken by Democrats, now that they control both Beacon Hill and Washington. He rallied his supporters when he said, at the last debate, that he was not running for Mr. Kennedy’s seat but for “the people’s seat.”

That seat, held for nearly half a century by Mr. Kennedy, the liberal lion of the Senate, will now be held for the next two years by a Republican who has said he supports waterboarding as an interrogation technique for terrorism suspects, opposes a federal cap-and-trade program to reduce carbon emissions and opposes a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants unless they leave the country. It was a sharp swing of the pendulum, but even Democratic voters said they wanted the Obama administration to change direction.

“I’m hoping that it gives a message to the country,” said Marlene Connolly, 73, of North Andover, a lifelong Democrat who said she cast her first vote for a Republican on Tuesday. “I think if Massachusetts puts Brown in, it’s a message of ‘that’s enough.’ Let’s stop the giveaways and let’s get jobs going.”

Mr. Brown ran strongest in the suburbs of Boston, where the independent voters who make up a majority in Massachusetts turned out in large numbers. Ms. Coakley did best in urban areas, winning overwhelmingly in Boston and running ahead in Springfield, Worcester, Fall River and New Bedford, but her margins were not large enough to carry her to victory.

In a concession speech before cheering supporters, Ms. Coakley acknowledged that voters were angry and said she had hoped to deal with the concerns.

“Our mission continues, and our work goes on,” she said, echoing well-known remarks by Mr. Kennedy. “I am heartbroken at the result, as I know you are, and I know we will get up together tomorrow and continue this fight, even with this result tonight.”

The crowd at Mr. Brown’s victory rally, upset by reports that Democrats might try to vote on the health care bill before he takes office, chanted, “Seat him now!” Mr. Brown, for his part, noted that the interim senator holding the seat had finished his work, and that he was ready to go to Washington “without delay.” And he effusively praised Mr. Kennedy as a big-hearted, tireless worker, and said that he hoped to prove a worthy successor to him.

Ms. Coakley’s defeat, in a state that Mr. Obama won in 2008 with 62 percent of the vote, led to a round of finger-pointing among Democrats. Some criticized her tendency for gaffes — in a radio interview she offended Red Sox fans when she incorrectly suggested that Curt Schilling, a beloved former Red Sox pitcher, was a Yankee fan — while others criticized a lackluster, low-key campaign.

Mr. Brown presented himself as a Massachusetts Everyman, featuring the pickup truck he drives around the state in his speeches and one of his television commercials, calling in to talk radio shows and campaigning with popular local sports figures.

The implications of the election drew nationwide attention, and millions of dollars of outside spending, to the race. It transformed what many had expected to be a sleepy, low-turnout special election on a snowy day in January into a high-profile contest that appeared to draw more voters than expected to the polls. There were reports of traffic jams outside suburban polling stations, while other polling stations had to call for extra ballots.

The late surge by Mr. Brown appeared to catch Democrats by surprise, causing them to scramble in the last week and a half of the campaign and hastily schedule an appearance by Mr. Obama with Ms. Coakley on Sunday afternoon.

“Understand what’s at stake here, Massachusetts,” Mr. Obama said in his speech that day, repeatedly invoking Mr. Kennedy’s legacy. “It’s whether we’re going forwards or backwards.” He all but pleaded with voters to support Ms. Coakley, to preserve his agenda.

As voters went to the polls, Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, made it clear that the president was “not pleased” with the situation Ms. Coakley found herself in. “He was both surprised and frustrated,” Mr. Gibbs said.

Although the race has riveted the nation largely because it was seen as contributing to the success or defeat of the health care bill, the potency of the issue for voters here was difficult to gauge. That is because Massachusetts already has near-universal health coverage, thanks to a law passed when Mitt Romney, a Republican, was governor.

Thus Massachusetts is one of the few states where the benefits promised by the national bill were expected to have little effect on how many of its residents got coverage, making it an unlikely place for a referendum on the health care bill.

On Capitol Hill, the fate of the health care legislation was highly uncertain as Democratic leaders quickly gathered to plot strategy in the wake of the Republican victory.

Sentiment about how to proceed was mixed, with several lawmakers saying the House would not accept the Senate-passed plan. Top officials had said that approach was the party’s best alternative, and many members said they still believed it was crucial that Democrats pass a plan.

“It is important for us to pass legislation,” said Representative Baron P. Hill, a conservative Democrat from Indiana.

Reporting was contributed by Katie Zezima, Danielle Ossher and Bret Silverberg in Massachusetts, and Carl Hulse and David M. Herszenhorn in Washington.

    G.O.P. Senate Victory Stuns Democrats, NYT, 20.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/20/us/politics/20election.html

Political Memo

Massachusetts Race Tests Staying Power of Democrats

January 17, 2010
The New York Times
By ADAM NAGOURNEY

BOSTON — There may be no better place to measure the shifting fortunes of President Obama and the Democratic Party than in the race being fought here this weekend for the Senate seat that had been held by Edward M. Kennedy.

When Mr. Obama was inaugurated one year ago this week, he and his party had big majorities in the Senate and House, enjoyed the backing of much of the country and were confidently preparing to enact an ambitious legislative agenda. Republicans seemed directionless and the conservative movement exhausted.

This weekend, Democrats are struggling to hang on to a seat held by Mr. Kennedy for 46 years in one of the most enthusiastically Democratic states in the country. Conservatives are enjoying a grass-roots resurgence, and Republicans are talking about taking back the House in November.

As Mr. Obama prepares to come here on Sunday to campaign for the party’s beleaguered Senate candidate, Martha Coakley, Democrats across the country are starting to wonder aloud if they misjudged the electorate over the last year, with profound ramifications for the midterm elections this year and, potentially, for Mr. Obama’s presidency.

Win or lose in Massachusetts, that a contest between a conservative Republican and a liberal Democrat could appear so close is evidence of what even Democrats say is animosity directed at the administration and Congress. It has been fanned by Republicans who have portrayed Democrats as overreaching and out of touch with ordinary Americans.

“It comes from the fact that Obama as president has had to deal with all these major crises he inherited: the banks, fiscal stimulus,” said Senator Paul G. Kirk Jr., the Democrat who holds the Massachusetts seat on an interim basis pending the special election. “But for many people it was like, ‘Jeez, how much government are we getting here?’ That might have given them pause.”

Senator Evan Bayh, Democrat of Indiana, said the atmosphere was a serious threat to Democrats. “I do think there’s a chance that Congressional elites mistook their mandate,” Mr. Bayh said. “I don’t think the American people last year voted for higher taxes, higher deficits and a more intrusive government. But there’s a perception that that is what they are getting.”

Ms. Coakley, the state attorney general, could still defeat her Republican opponent, State Senator Scott Brown. Polls show the race as very close, and measuring public opinion in special elections is always difficult.

Support for the health care overhaul could grow if it is enacted into law and Americans decide that it has left them better off, as Mr. Obama says will happen. The economy could take a turn for the better by this summer, validating Mr. Obama’s policies in time to influence the midterm elections. And for all the national forces at play here, Ms. Coakley has, in the view of most Democrats, made things worse with a slow-starting and low-energy campaign marked by several high-profile errors.

Still, Mr. Obama’s decision to tear up his weekend schedule to come here reflects concern in the White House that a defeat of Ms. Coakley would be seen as a repudiation of the president’s first year. It would also raise the question of whether Mr. Obama squandered political capital by focusing so much on health care at a time of rising unemployment.

“If it works well, it was a good thing to do for the country here,” Mr. Bayh said. “But there’s definitely an opportunity cost. You could only spend political capital once; it now can’t be spent on other things.”

The Massachusetts campaign has neatly encapsulated the major themes that have come to deplete Mr. Obama’s popularity, themes that have fueled the rise of the Tea Party movement on the right and created an atmosphere where growing numbers of Democrats in conservative-leaning districts and states have decided not to run again.

Mr. Brown is running directly against the health care plan, and Ms. Coakley is standing by it. Should Mr. Brown win, it would undercut assurances Mr. Obama has been offering nervous Democrats that health care will ultimately lift them at the polls.

“This is Ted Kennedy’s state — why can any Republican be competitive here?” asked Dick Armey, a former congressman who leads a conservative grass-roots organization that has been active on behalf of Mr. Brown. “The reason is health care.”

Of course, Republicans holding statewide office are not unheard of. Though Massachusetts last had a Republican senator in 1979, Republicans held the governor’s office from 1991 to 2007. Former Gov. Mitt Romney, a moderate on issues like abortion and gay rights, went on to an unsuccessful bid for the presidency by moving to the right on some issues.

Mr. Brown has portrayed Ms. Coakley as an advocate of big government, big spending and big deficits; Obama advisers and other Democrats have worried that the expanding deficit, now at a level not seen since World War II, was hurting Mr. Obama with independents who lifted him to victory in 2008. Polls suggest that those voters have flocked to Mr. Brown, as they did to Republican candidates for governor in Virginia and New Jersey last year.

“I don’t know what else it would take to wake up the Democratic leadership about the unpopularity of their agenda across the country than losing a Senate race in Massachusetts,” said Senator John Cornyn of Texas, the chairman of the Senate Republican campaign committee.

Mr. Brown has also portrayed Ms. Coakley — and by inference, her party — as acting as if she were entitled to the Kennedy seat, a perception Ms. Coakley reinforced by at first running an extremely lackadaisical campaign. With populist anger running strong, anything that smacks of establishment entitlement is politically dangerous.

The risks to the White House are both immediate and long-term. A victory by Mr. Brown would mean losing the 60th vote Democrats need to stave off a filibuster in the Senate.

“If he’s running against 60 votes and wins, that is not good,” said Bob Kerrey, a former Democratic senator from Nebraska.

But most ominously for Democrats contemplating the midterm elections, the battle here suggests an emerging dangerous dynamic: that Mr. Obama has energized Republican activists who think he has overstepped with health care and the economic stimulus, while demoralizing Democrats who think he has not lived up to his promise.

“When Brown avails himself to the Tea Partiers and the Club for Growth members and all of that wing of the party, yes, they have a lot of intensity on their side,” said Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, who leads the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. But, Mr. Menendez said, Democrats would match that enthusiasm now that the party has made a greater effort to draw distinctions between the two candidates.

Mr. Obama may have had no less treacherous road to take, given the tangle of political problems and divisions within the Democratic Party that confronted him last year.

Still, some Democrats are wondering if Mr. Obama would be in a better position now if he had embraced a less ambitious health care proposal, as some aides urged, permitting him to pivot more quickly on the economy. Depending on what happens Tuesday, that is a debate that might be reverberating in the White House for a long time to come.

    Massachusetts Race Tests Staying Power of Democrats, NYT, 17.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/us/politics/17massachusetts.html

New Year but No Relief for Strapped States

January 6, 2010
The New York Times
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

SACRAMENTO — It is one of the bleakest new years that states have seen in over a decade.

On Wednesday, governors in California, Kentucky and New York kick off the season of addresses to state lawmakers as at least 36 states struggle to close budget shortfalls and also begin confronting the next fiscal year’s woes.

For many of the states, the new year spells the end to accounting maneuvers, one-off solutions, tax increases and service cuts that were as deep as lawmakers thought they could bear. And governors confront this situation in an election year in which dozens of their jobs are in play, and as many state legislators face their own election challenges.

“A budget gap of 5 percent or 10 percent in any given year is a tough problem,” said Corina Eckl, fiscal director at the National Conference of State Legislatures. “But we’re talking about gaps in excess of 20 percent over multiple years. The size of these gaps is staggering.”

California’s problems, including a projected budget deficit of $20 billion, are as outsized as the state itself.

In his state-of-the-state message here, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, will proclaim California close to incapable of paying for social services in the next fiscal year, which begins in July, unless the Obama administration greatly increases aid to the state. That will be just one of many bleak assessments — and far-from-slam-dunk prescriptions — that Mr. Schwarzenegger will proffer as he and nearly every other governor face another year of extraordinary fiscal distress.

High unemployment, continued reverberations from the foreclosure crisis and a severe drop in all forms of taxes have combined to leave states — which historically have lagged behind the private sector in recession recoveries by about two years — reeling.

State tax collections for the third quarter of 2009 showed a drop of 10.7 percent, the third consecutive quarter of double-digit revenue decline, according to the Rockefeller Institute, though the dip was smaller than the preceding two quarters.

While some states are showing modest improvement, others continue to set record lows. Revenues for Michigan, one of the nation’s most fiscally challenged states, are at a 45-year low, when adjusted for inflation. Many of the states that increased spending generally during the rosier years of the last decade are paying for it now.

Oklahoma’s projected budget gap of $1.3 billion for the next fiscal year is the largest since the Depression, said Scott Meacham, the state treasurer.

“Government is subject to a bit of mission creep over time,” Mr. Meacham said. “We do things that are great to do but not maybe the core mission of government. We need to look at some more fundamental shifts.”

Further, the federal stimulus dollars that helped keep many local governments afloat last year will begin to evaporate. Debt service — a Peter-Paul system for many states last year — has also grown. The cost of keeping citizens in government programs, like Medicaid, has also risen, as unemployment funds have teetered toward insolvency over the last 18 months.

Cost savings so far have included cuts to specific programs; Michigan and California both stopped offering dental services to some Medicaid recipients last year. But there have also been layoffs — Kentucky’s state work force has shrunk by 1,600 over the last two years — and symbolic moves, like Delaware’s decision last year to turn state-office thermostats down in the winter and up in the summer.

In many ways, states averted deeper cuts than anticipated last year because of the federal stimulus package. But those dollars will shrink over the next fiscal year, and unless jobs return and tax revenues rise, or Congress sends them more aid, states will most likely continue to be overextended.

“We are still cash positive,” said Ann Visalli, the director of Office of Management and Budget for Delaware, where two auto plants and a major oil refinery closed this year. “However, because of the drop-off in federal stimulus and state revenues not materializing, we do have to continue with budget cuts.”

Some governors will almost certainly be looking to the federal government for help. While proclaiming that the state is not seeking a bailout, according to a draft part of his speech on Wednesday, Mr. Schwarzenegger will say, “We need to work with the feds so that we can fix the flawed formula that demands that states spend money they do not have.”

Some states will most likely continue with across-the-board cuts, accounting moves like moving last payroll dates into the next fiscal year, as California has done in the past, and furloughs. But more states are expected to face an equally unpopular choice between eliminating services or raising taxes.

Last year nine states raised income taxes, and 15 states and the District of Columbia raised taxes on cigarettes.

“There is pressure for more tax increases in more states,” said Joseph Henchman, the director of state projects for the Tax Foundation, a research group. “It will be a hard sell in states where people think spending hasn’t been cut enough.”

One test of voter tolerance for new taxes will come next month in Oregon, where voters will be asked to consider two measures that would increase taxes on corporations and wealthy taxpayers to help balance the state’s budget, specifically for education, health care and public safety.

“This will be an indication on whether or not people are willing to invest in core areas of government right now,” said Jim Ross, a political consultant who has run Democratic campaigns in Oregon. “It is true in Oregon and most other places in the country.”

There are some signs of sunshine, and opportunity, in the budget problems. Over the past three months, coincident indexes — measures of current economic conditions in a state boiled down to a single statistic — have increased in 20 states, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, even as they decreased in 25 and remained unchanged in five. Unemployment has slowed in many states as well.

Further, states have had no trouble tapping the bond market; 2010 is expected to be a record year for municipal bonds, $450 billion compared with $409 billion in 2009. That is an indication that there remains investor interest and a willingness among state leaders to continue to invest in infrastructure, which can preserve or even create jobs.

States have also been forced to rethink how they do business, with examples like energy savings, new approaches to the management of prisons or the ways they manage gambling. Kentucky, for instance, wants video lottery terminals at race tracks.

“The good news is that there’s a target-rich environment for any states interested in new ideas,” said Robert B. Ward, the director of Fiscal Studies at the Rockefeller Institute, which is based in Albany.

    New Year but No Relief for Strapped States, NYT, 6.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/06/us/06states.html