Anglonautes > History > 2013 > USA

History > 2013 > USA > States (I)

U.S. Judge Upholds

Most New York Gun Limits

December 31, 2013
The New York Times
By THOMAS KAPLAN

A federal judge ruled on Tuesday that New York’s strict new gun laws, including an expanded ban on assault weapons, were constitutional, but struck down a provision forbidding gun owners to load more than seven rounds into a magazine.

The ruling offered a victory to gun control advocates at the end of a year in which efforts to pass new legislation on the federal level suffered a high-profile defeat in Congress, although some new restrictions were approved in state capitals.

The judge, William M. Skretny of Federal District Court in Buffalo, said expanded bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines were legally sound because they served to “further the state’s important interest in public safety.”

The new laws in New York, enacted in January 2013, are among the most restrictive in the country. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, a Democrat, pushed for the state to be the first to take action after the mass school shooting in Newtown, Conn.; gun rights groups accused him of ramming through new gun restrictions they called ill-conceived, poorly understood and unconstitutional.

In a 54-page ruling, Judge Skretny struck down a well-known but troubled portion of the law, which prohibited gun owners from loading more than seven rounds into a magazine. He called the limit “an arbitrary restriction” that violated the Second Amendment.

But, saying that “whether regulating firearms is wise or warranted is not a judicial question; it is a political one,” he found that Mr. Cuomo and lawmakers had acted within their bounds when they drafted the gun laws, and specifically cited the Bushmaster rifle and 30-round magazine used in the Newtown shooting.

“Of course, this is only one incident,” Judge Skretny wrote. “But it is nonetheless illustrative. Studies and data support New York’s view that assault weapons are often used to devastating effect in mass shootings.”

He said that the gun law “applies only to a subset of firearms with characteristics New York State has determined to be particularly dangerous and unnecessary for self-defense; it does not totally disarm New York’s citizens; and it does not meaningfully jeopardize their right to self-defense.”

Even after the Newtown shooting, states passed more legislation in the last year loosening gun laws than tightening them. But gun control advocates, who celebrated the New York measure as a leading success story, said the ruling confirmed their position that the government had the right to pass strict controls on firearms.

“A lot of states can take courage and take heart from this ruling, and maybe even Congress will take notice,” said Leah Gunn Barrett, the executive director of New Yorkers Against Gun Violence. “The Second Amendment does not preclude reasonable regulation. It doesn’t mean you can have guns that are extremely dangerous, like assault weapons.”

But the states that have passed new gun restrictions have seen a backlash. In Colorado, where there have been two highly publicized mass shootings — in Aurora and in Columbine — lawmakers voted to expand background checks and limit the capacity of ammunition magazines. The laws prompted recalls of two state senators in September; a third resigned in November rather than face a recall, and some sheriffs have declined to enforce the laws.

And in New York, the laws have damaged Mr. Cuomo’s standing upstate as he prepares to seek re-election in November; in a year-end progress report released on Friday, he only briefly mentioned the gun laws. A spokeswoman for the governor declined to comment on the judge’s ruling.

Thomas H. King, the president of the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association, which was among the lawsuit’s plaintiffs, said opponents of the law would appeal Judge Skretny’s ruling.

“Right from Day 1, I’ve been telling people that this is the first step,” he said. “This is going to the Supreme Court.”

Gun rights groups have responded with outrage to the new laws, holding demonstrations at the Capitol in Albany, denouncing politicians like Mr. Cuomo and questioning the laws’ legality. Some gun owners have said they will refuse to comply with a requirement that people who already own assault weapons register them with the state.

The seven-round limit on magazines, which Mr. Cuomo had highlighted when he signed the law, had run into problems before Tuesday’s ruling.

In March, in response to complaints that seven-round magazines were not available for sale, Mr. Cuomo and leaders of the State Legislature reached an agreement to modify that portion of the law so that 10-round magazines could still be bought.

But they kept the seven-round limit in effect, meaning that gun owners would still be forbidden to load more than seven rounds into a 10-round magazine, except at gun ranges, where they could load the full magazine.

In court papers, the plaintiffs argued that the seven-round limit threatened the ability of New Yorkers to defend themselves, while the state attorney general’s office said there was no evidence to support “fantastical scenarios involving multiple home invaders” that would necessitate a firearm loaded with more than seven rounds.

Judge Skretny sided with the gun owners, writing that the restriction could wind up “pitting the criminal with a fully-loaded magazine against the law-abiding citizen limited to seven rounds.”

    U.S. Judge Upholds Most New York Gun Limits, NYT, 31.12.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/01/nyregion/
    federal-judge-upholds-majority-of-new-york-gun-law.html

Texas Plan to Execute Mexican

May Harm U.S. Ties Abroad,

Kerry Says

December 11, 2013
The New York Times
By MANNY FERNANDEZ

HOUSTON — The scheduled execution next month of a Mexican national by the State of Texas threatens to damage relations between the United States and Mexico and complicate the ability of the United States to help Americans detained overseas, Secretary of State John F. Kerry has warned Texas officials.

The Mexican, Edgar Arias Tamayo, 46, was convicted of shooting and killing a Houston police officer who was taking him to jail after a robbery in 1994. Mr. Tamayo, who was in the nation illegally, was not notified of his right to contact the Mexican Consulate, in violation of an international treaty known as the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. That violation, an international tribunal’s order for his case to be reviewed and a judge’s recent decision to set Mr. Tamayo’s execution for Jan. 22, are now at the center of a controversy that has attracted the attention of the State Department and the Mexican government.

Despite Mr. Kerry’s involvement, there has been no sign that Texas officials plan to delay the execution. On Wednesday, Mr. Tamayo’s lawyers asked Gov. Rick Perry to grant him a 30-day reprieve and petitioned the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles to commute his death sentence to life in prison. They are using Mr. Kerry’s letter, sent to Texas officials in September, to highlight the international issues at stake.

In 2004, the top judicial body of the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, ordered the United States to review the convictions of Mr. Tamayo and 50 other Mexican nationals whose Vienna Convention rights, it said, were violated and who were sentenced to death in the United States. The international court, also known as the World Court, found that United States courts had to determine in each case whether the violation of consular rights harmed the defendant. In the nine years since the World Court’s decision, no United States court has reviewed the Vienna Convention issues in Mr. Tamayo’s case, said Maurie Levin, one of his lawyers.

In a letter sent to Mr. Perry and the Texas attorney general, Mr. Kerry took the unusual step of weighing in on a state death-penalty case, arguing that Mr. Tamayo’s execution would affect the ability of the United States to comply with the international court’s order in what is known as the Avena case. The World Court’s judgment is binding on the United States, Mr. Kerry wrote, and complying with it ensures that the federal government can rely on Vienna Convention protections when aiding Americans detained abroad.

“I have no reason to doubt the facts of Mr. Tamayo’s conviction, and as a former prosecutor, I have no sympathy for anyone who would murder a police officer,” Mr. Kerry wrote, describing his concern as a “process issue” that could impact the way Americans are treated overseas. “Our consular visits help ensure U.S. citizens detained overseas have access to food and appropriate medical care, if needed, as well as access to legal representation.”

Mr. Kerry also shared with Mr. Perry and the Texas attorney general, Greg Abbott, a letter sent to him earlier this year by Mexico’s ambassador to the United States, Eduardo Medina Mora, who wrote that “this issue has become and could continue to be a significant irritant in the relations between our two countries.”

Texas officials, including Mr. Perry, have argued that the state is not directly bound by the World Court’s decision and that it is a matter best handled by federal officials and Congress, where legislation ordering the states to comply with the tribunal’s judgment is pending. “It doesn’t matter where you’re from — if you commit a despicable crime like this in Texas, you are subject to our state laws, including a fair trial by jury and the ultimate penalty,” Lucy Nashed, a spokeswoman for Mr. Perry, said when asked to respond to Mr. Kerry’s letter.

In 2008, Texas executed another Mexican national, José E. Medellín, who was part of the Avena case and was convicted in the rape and murder of two teenage girls in Houston. Before Mr. Medellín’s execution, President Bush ordered Texas and other states to review the convictions of Mr. Medellín and the other Mexican nationals whose consular rights were violated. But the Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that the president had no authority to order state courts to abide by the World Court’s decision, agreeing with the arguments made by Texas’s then-solicitor general, Ted Cruz, now one of its senators in Washington.

Mr. Medellín was executed four months after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Hunstville, Tex., site of the state’s death chamber, the busiest in the country. In his 2010 book, “Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington,” Mr. Perry wrote that three justices did not agree with the state’s position, “perhaps believing instead that international law should trump the laws of Texas.”

    Texas Plan to Execute Mexican May Harm U.S. Ties Abroad, Kerry Says,
    NYT, 11.12.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/12
    /us/texas-plan-to-execute-mexican-may-harm-us-ties-abroad-kerry-says.html

Eastern States

Press Midwest to Improve Air

December 9, 2013
The New York Times
By CORAL DAVENPORT

WASHINGTON — In a battle that pits the East Coast against the Midwest over the winds that carry dirty air from coal plants, the governors of eight Northeastern states plan to petition the Environmental Protection Agency on Monday to force tighter air pollution regulations on nine Rust Belt and Appalachian states.

The East Coast states, including New York and Connecticut, have for more than 15 years been subject to stricter air pollution requirements than many other parts of the country. Their governors have long criticized the Appalachian and Rust Belt states, including Ohio, Kentucky and Michigan, for their more lenient rules on pollution from coal-fired power plants, factories and tailpipes — allowing those economies to profit from cheap energy while their belched soot and smog are carried on the prevailing winds that blow across the United States.

All the governors on the petition are Democrats. Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, a Republican and a potential presidential candidate in 2016, has not signed it.

The petition comes the day before the Supreme Court is to hear arguments to determine the fate of a related E.P.A. regulation known as the “good neighbor” rule. The regulation, officially called the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule, would force states with coal pollution that wafts across state lines to rein in soot and smog, either by installing costly pollution control technology or by shutting the power plants.

Even if the regulation is upheld, the Eastern governors are seeking stronger constraints on pollution from the Midwest and Rust Belt states.

The Obama administration issued the “good neighbor” rule, which would apply chiefly to power plants in 27 states east of Nebraska, half of the country, in 2011, but the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit struck it down, ruling that the E.P.A. had not followed the Clean Air Act when it calculated how to assign responsibility for cross-state air pollution. The rule is part of President Obama’s growing effort to use E.P.A. regulations to crack down on coal pollution.

In the case before the Supreme Court, the E.P.A. argues that the cross-state air rule, which it is required to issue under the Clean Air Act of 1990, is necessary to protect the health and environment of downwind states. The utilities and 15 states on the other side argue that the rule, as written by the Obama administration E.P.A., gives the agency too much regulatory authority and places an unfair economic burden on the states.

The Supreme Court is allowing 90 minutes to listen to arguments, rather than the traditional 60 minutes, signaling that the justices have a particularly keen interest in the case.

Like the petition from the Northeastern governors, the court case reflects the growing anger of East Coast officials against the Appalachian states that mine coal and the Rust Belt states that burn it to fuel their power plants and factories. Coal emissions are the chief cause of global warming and are linked to many health risks, including asthma and lung disease.

Gov. Dannel P. Malloy of Connecticut, who is leading the effort by East Coast governors to crack down on out-of-state pollution, called it a “front-burner issue” for his administration.

“I care about this because it’s put Connecticut at an economic disadvantage,” Mr. Malloy said in an interview. “We’re paying a lot of money to remove these compounds from the air. That money is reflected in higher energy costs. We’re more than willing to pay that, but the states we’re petitioning should have to follow the same rules.”

Mr. Malloy said that more than half the pollution in Connecticut was from outside the state and that it was lowering the life expectancy of Connecticut residents with heart disease or asthma. “They’re getting away with murder,” Mr. Malloy said of the Rust Belt and Appalachia. “Only it’s in our state, not theirs.”

Judging by history, environmental advocates said the governors’ petition had a good chance of success. In 2000, for example, the E.P.A. granted petitions from Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York and Pennsylvania to require 12 states, including Ohio and Indiana, to control nitrogen emissions from nearly 400 large coal- and gas-fired power plants.

In the last three years, Republicans and the coal industry have campaigned aggressively against the E.P.A. regulations as they have accused Mr. Obama of waging a “war on coal.”

Across the Midwest, many lawmakers see the regulations as a serious economic threat. Representative Fred Upton, the Michigan Republican who is chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, has said that the cross-state air rule will force families to face “the threat of higher power bills, less reliability and job losses.”

Murray Energy Corporation, an Ohio-based coal company, is among the parties suing the E.P.A. in the Supreme Court. Gary Broadbent, a spokesman for the company, called the cross-state air rule “absolutely irrational, exorbitantly expensive,” and said it “would kill thousands of jobs, with no environmental benefit whatsoever.”

The Northeast has long had some of the nation’s dirtiest air. In the 1970s and 1980s, East Coast pollution was produced largely by dense cities and busy highways, particularly Interstate 95. A 1990 clean-air law placed tight regional restrictions on pollution from ozone, a primary contributor to smog, on the New England states as well as on New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and the metropolitan area of Washington.

But East Coast governors say that after a decade of cleaning up their air — by, for example, putting “scrubbers” on smokestacks and requiring vehicle emissions tests, which are not mandatory in many other parts of the country — they have squeezed all the pollution they can out of their economies. While Northeastern air is often still so polluted that it violates federal law, the governors say that is because of a problem they cannot control: the wind pattern across the continental United States that typically blows from west to east.

At the same time, Midwestern states enjoy the benefits of fresh air blown in from the Mountain West. E.P.A. data cited in briefs for the Supreme Court case shows that in many parts of Eastern states, half or more of the smog and toxic air pollution originates from out of state. The briefs say, for example, that 93 percent of the ozone pollution in New Haven, Conn., originates from out of state.

The soot, smog and toxic chemicals like sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide that spew from smokestacks and tailpipes are linked to severe health risks. The E.P.A. estimates that the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule would prevent up to 34,000 premature deaths, 15,000 nonfatal heart attacks, 19,000 cases of acute bronchitis, 400,000 cases of aggravated asthma and 1.8 million sick days a year.

The E.P.A. also estimates that the rule would cost businesses $800 million annually because of the expense of installing smokestack scrubber technology and shutting the dirtiest coal plants. That burden would be borne disproportionately by the Rust Belt states, which would have to modify their coal plants. Ohio, for example, gets 78 percent of its electricity from burning coal. Coal is responsible for 83 percent of the electricity in Indiana and 93 percent of the electricity in Kentucky.

Coal industry advocates say that adding new regulations to those states would not make a difference to air quality on the East Coast.

“It’s been very convenient for Northeastern states to blame their ozone problem on Midwestern power plants, but they’re a very small part of the problem,” said Jeffrey Holmstead, an assistant administrator for the E.P.A. during the administration of George W. Bush who now lobbies on behalf of coal companies. “It mostly comes from all those vehicles and businesses along the Eastern Seaboard.”

    Eastern States Press Midwest to Improve Air, NYT, 9.12.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/09/us/
    politics/eastern-states-press-midwest-to-improve-air.html

Official Quits in Backlash

Over Colorado Gun Vote

November 27, 2013
The New York Times
By JACK HEALY

DENVER — A populist backlash against Colorado’s new gun-control laws claimed its third political casualty on Wednesday as a Democratic state senator resigned her seat rather than face a recall vote that could have cost her party control of the chamber.

For Democrats in this swing state, the resignation of the senator, Evie Hudak, was a sign of the growing political cost of their votes last winter to expand background checks and limit the size of ammunition magazines — measures once hailed as breakthrough victories in the effort to respond to mass shootings.

Polls show that voters embrace aspects of the new laws. But the measures have infuriated gun advocates and Republicans, and have become political liabilities in a state where the gun debate is shaped by traditions of hunting and sport-shooting, as well as by the shadows of mass shootings at Columbine High School and the Century 16 movie theater in Aurora.

In September, two prominent gun-control supporters were ousted in recall elections, reducing the Democrats’ edge in the State Senate to one seat. Ms. Hudak, who represents the suburbs northwest of Denver, would have been the third to face a recall vote, and she and state Democrats acknowledged that neither she nor the party’s 18-17 majority was likely to survive it.

“By resigning, I am protecting these important new laws for the good of Colorado,” she wrote in her resignation letter, referring to the slate of gun restrictions, including one she sponsored that seeks to keep guns away from domestic-violence offenders.

Ms. Hudak’s decision averts another potentially humiliating recall vote and allows a panel of county Democrats to choose her temporary successor, ensuring that Republicans cannot immediately take control of the Senate and force vulnerable Democrats into uncomfortable votes to repeal the gun laws or new regulations on rural electricity providers.

But Floyd Ciruli, a political analyst in Denver, said Ms. Hudak’s resignation amounted to a surrender before the fight began and was another sign of trouble for state Democrats. It comes weeks after voters overwhelmingly rejected a $1 billion tax increase to reform Colorado’s schools, a measure championed by Gov. John W. Hickenlooper and other prominent Democrats.

“When you add all that in together and stir in the collapse of the national brand, the congressional Democrats, the president and the Affordable Care Act, it’s close to panic,” Mr. Ciruli said.

In recent weeks, as the recall efforts against Ms. Hudak gained momentum, she discussed her options with supporters and Democratic leaders, according to Morgan Carroll, the incoming Senate president. It quickly became clear that resignation was the least bad choice.

“She really, really struggled with it,” Ms. Carroll said. “She felt this was a necessary sacrifice to protect these things that were so important to her.”

Such tactical surrenders are not uncommon, said Joshua Spivak, a senior fellow at the Hugh L. Carey Institute for Government Reform at Wagner College in New York who tracks recall elections. There were at least 168 recall elections nationwide last year, he said, and in 26 cases, officials resigned before the vote.

Democrats, gun-control supporters and gay-advocacy groups offered thanks to Ms. Hudak on Wednesday, while her opponents expressed a mix of elation and outrage that she had left office before a vote could take place. A pro-recall Facebook page stamped the word “Coward” on her photograph.

“We all know that this is about control and power and the gun-grabbing, citizen-ignoring Democrats elected to the Colorado State Legislature,” some opponents wrote on the “Recall Hudak Too” website.

In Ms. Hudak’s district, her critics said they were thrilled. For weeks, they have been gathering signatures to force a recall vote, putting up “Recall Hudak” lawn signs and writing blog posts outlining the case against her. Gordon Allison, who helped gather signatures, said that weeks of knocking on doors and chatting with neighbors had paid off.

“This is just a politician who needs to be gone,” he said.

But others felt shortchanged and said they were angry that Ms. Hudak’s successor was likely to share many of her views.

“She walks away, the Democrats get to appoint another Democrat,” said Dave Palm, who has helped circulate petitions and run the pro-recall website. “They saw the writing on the wall.”

Ms. Hudak, 62, a former teacher and member of Colorado’s Board of Education, faced an uphill fight against a passionate opposition in a low-turnout election. She was re-elected in 2012 by 584 votes. Her opponents failed to gather enough valid signatures to force a recall vote in their first effort this spring, but they believed they were within reach this time.

Colorado is one of 19 states that allow recalls of state officials, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Voters can oust officials for any reason if they collect enough signatures and win a special election.

Until this year, no state lawmaker here had been removed in a recall vote. That changed in September, when John Morse, the State Senate president, and Senator Angela Giron lost their seats in an election that was funded heavily by the National Rifle Association and by gun-control advocates like New York’s mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg.

On Wednesday, Ms. Hudak’s supporters gathered at a library to offer words of support and thanks. Her opponents attended, too, offering more criticism. Ms. Hudak did not attend.

    Official Quits in Backlash Over Colorado Gun Vote, NYT, 27.11.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/28/us/politics/
    official-quits-in-backlash-for-gun-vote-in-colorado.html

A Leap for Equality

November 15, 2013
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

On Wednesday, Gov. Neil Abercrombie of Hawaii signed a bill that will allow same-sex couples to marry in the state, starting Dec. 2. The measure, ending a two-decade legal and political battle, caps a remarkable year of progress toward ensuring the basic civil rights of gay Americans.

Before the election in November 2012, same-sex couples could marry in only six states. That election added three more states to the roll when Maine, Maryland and Washington approved same-sex marriage by a popular vote, the first states to do so. Counting Hawaii and the marriage equality bill that Gov. Pat Quinn of Illinois plans to sign on Nov. 20, the number of states and the District of Columbia that have come to recognize the freedom to marry through legislation, court rulings or voter approval now stands at 16 compared with just nine a year ago.

The Supreme Court has also done much to make America a more hospitable environment for same-sex marriage, striking down the Defense of Marriage Act’s denial of federal benefits to married same-sex couples and nullifying Proposition 8, California’s voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage. The justices stopped short of making marriage equality the law of the land, but it is not unusual for civil rights to advance in stages. Cases in the pipeline will provide the court with another chance to invalidate all remaining state restrictions preventing gay and lesbian Americans from marrying and denying full legal recognition of their relationship.

In a breakthrough beyond the marriage issue, the Senate has just approved the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, a long-sought measure to outlaw employment discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

The fight for equality is obviously far from over. Hawaii’s embrace of the freedom to marry is a sign of how far the nation has come in the struggle for fair treatment of gay people and their families. It is also a reminder of how much more remains to be done.

A Leap for Equality, NYT, 15.11.2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/16/opinion/a-leap-for-equality.html

Terry McAuliffe, Democrat,

Is Elected Governor of Virginia

in Tight Race

November 5, 2013
The New York Times
By TRIP GABRIEL

TYSONS CORNER, Va. — Terry McAuliffe, a longtime Democratic fund-raiser and ally of Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton, was elected governor of Virginia on Tuesday, narrowly defeating the state’s conservative attorney general, Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, and confirming Virginia’s evolution as a state increasingly dominated politically by the Democratic-leaning Washington suburbs.

Mr. McAuliffe, 56, ran as a social liberal and an economic moderate focused on job creation. Mr. Cuccinelli, a Republican who was the first attorney general to sue over President Obama’s health care law, ran as a hard-line social conservative and aimed his campaign almost exclusively at the Tea Party wing of his party.

Still, despite substantially outraising Mr. Cuccinelli, $34.4 million to $19.7 million, Mr. McAuliffe won by a margin — just over two percentage points — that was smaller than some pre-election polls had suggested.

Mr. McAuliffe benefited from an electorate that was less white and less Republican than it was four years ago. He drew about as large a percentage of African-Americans as Mr. Obama did last year. Blacks accounted for one in five voters, according to exit polls conducted by Edison Research. Mr. Cuccinelli’s strong anti-abortion views also brought out opponents, with 20 percent of voters naming abortion as their top issue; Mr. McAuliffe overwhelmingly won their support. The top issue for voters was the economy, cited by 45 percent in exit polls.

In a victory speech here, Mr. McAuliffe thanked the “historic number of Republicans who crossed party lines to support me” and invoked a tradition of bipartisanship in Richmond, the capital. In a checklist of recent governors who had moved the economy forward, he included the incumbent, Bob McDonnell, a Republican.

“Over the next four years, most Democrats and Republicans in Virginia want to make Virginia a model for pragmatic leadership that is friendly to job creation,” Mr. McAuliffe said.

His tone was notably more conciliatory than that of Mr. Cuccinelli, who struck a defiant note at a rally in Richmond, interpreting the closeness of the race to a rejection of Mr. Obama’s health care law. “Despite being outspent by an unprecedented $15 million, this race came down to the wire because of Obamacare,” Mr. Cuccinelli said, adding, “We were lied to by our own government.”

That Mr. McAuliffe was elected in a onetime Republican stronghold while unapologetically supporting gun restrictions, same-sex marriage and abortion rights will no doubt be scrutinized by both parties, particularly by Republicans concerned about the appeal of the Tea Party in swing states and districts ahead of the 2014 midterm elections. And Mr. Cuccinelli’s defeat in a Southern state will no doubt be contrasted with the Republicans’ great success of the day, the dominating re-election of Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who appeals to swaths of Democrats. But the close result, after a race in which Mr. Cuccinelli was substantially outspent, could make it difficult to draw firm conclusions.

Mr. Cuccinelli, 45, whose passionate base seemed to give him an early edge in a race between two flawed candidates, rattled business-oriented Republicans. A surprising roster of the party’s establishment — including Will Sessoms, the mayor of the largest city, Virginia Beach — endorsed Mr. McAuliffe.

Mr. McAuliffe’s career as a wealthy business investor yielded many unflattering and, critics said, possibly unethical details. But he neutralized the issue by arguing that Mr. Cuccinelli’s social agenda, which included hostile comments about homosexuality, staunch opposition to abortion and an attempt to discredit a climate scientist at the University of Virginia, would give the state a retrograde image that would deter businesses from moving here.

A key issue was Mr. McAuliffe’s embrace of a roads bill championed and signed by Mr. McDonnell, which Mr. Cuccinelli opposed because it raised taxes. In rapidly growing Northern Virginia, snarled traffic is the chief concern of chambers of commerce and Mr. McAuliffe was able to portray himself as pro-business and bipartisan.

Although a majority of female voters chose Mr. McDonnell four years ago, Mr. Cuccinelli trailed Mr. McAuliffe among women by nearly 10 percentage points. Nearly seven in 10 unmarried women supported Mr. McAuliffe.

Both Planned Parenthood and the Susan B. Anthony List, an anti-abortion group, poured money into the race. Abortion rights groups created graphic television ads linking the Republican ticket to a failed state bill in 2012 that would have required vaginal ultrasounds for women seeking abortions.

The McAuliffe campaign pounded on Mr. Cuccinelli’s support for failed “personhood” bills that could have banned some common forms of birth control, and for being one of only three attorneys general in the country to oppose the federal Violence Against Women Act.

Six months ago, the race seemed Mr. Cuccinelli’s to lose. He was a conservative of impeccable credentials and a national figure because of the lawsuit over the president’s health care law in 2010. Mr. McAuliffe had drawn an unserious self-portrait in his 2007 memoir, “What a Party!,” including a story about leaving his wife, Dorothy, in the car with their newborn child to duck into a Democratic fund-raiser.

Mr. McAuliffe’s previous bid for governor, in 2009, ended in a humiliating defeat in the primary after he was accused of being a carpetbagger. His effort to strengthen his business ties to Virginia through an electric car company, GreenTech, backfired when he set up production in Mississippi and news reports revealed the company was the target of federal investigators.

But Mr. Cuccinelli was unable to profit from the tarnishing of Mr. McAuliffe because the attorney general had his own problem with a political gifts scandal emanating from the governor. A benefactor of Mr. McDonnell’s who lavished him and his wife with a Rolex watch and other favors also gave Mr. Cuccinelli and his family vacations at a lake home.

Mr. Cuccinelli secured the Republican nomination in May by packing the state party with his supporters, who chose to skip a primary in favor of a nominating convention, ensuring a more ideological slate of candidates.

In the middle of the federal government shutdown, which hit hard in Virginia, with its many federal workers and its defense industry, Mr. Cuccinelli appeared at a family values rally with Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, the architect of the shutdown. In exit polls, about a third of voters said the shutdown had affected someone in their household, and most of them voted for Mr. McAuliffe.

Mr. Cuccinelli spent the final weeks of the campaign barnstorming with national Tea Party stars. He appeared on election eve with the former presidential candidate Ron Paul, meant to call home votes from a third-party candidate, Robert Sarvis, a libertarian.

Meanwhile, with money pouring into Mr. McAuliffe’s campaign, thanks to his ties to major donors, including supporters of the Clintons, he set off an avalanche of negative ads. Mr. McAuliffe outspent his opponent by nearly 75 percent, and beginning in late summer drove up Mr. Cuccinelli’s unfavorable ratings, where they remained.

Mr. McAuliffe ran a disciplined campaign, touring all 23 community colleges in the state to highlight work force development and keeping his message tightly on job creation.

In the last week, Mr. Cuccinelli seized the chance to pivot to the disastrous debut of the federal health insurance marketplace. The issue may have narrowed Mr. McAuliffe’s victory margin, but in the end it was not enough.

Mr. McAuliffe broke a 36-year pattern in which Virginia’s governor, picked the year after the presidential election, came from the party out of power in the White House. The political scientist who first remarked on the trend, Larry J. Sabato of the University of Virginia, ascribed it to a natural tendency toward buyer’s remorse. But this year, as unpopular as Mr. Obama and his health care law may be with many Virginians, “dislike of Cuccinelli is even stronger,” Mr. Sabato said.

Dalia Sussman contributed reporting from New York.

    Terry McAuliffe, Democrat, Is Elected Governor of Virginia in Tight Race,
    NYT, 5.11.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/06/us/politics/
    mcauliffe-is-elected-governor-in-virginia.html

Chris Christie

Re-elected Governor of New Jersey

November 5, 2013
The New York Times
By KATE ZERNIKE
and JONATHAN MARTIN

Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey won re-election by a crushing margin on Tuesday, a victory that vaulted him to the front ranks of Republican presidential contenders and made him his party’s foremost proponent of pragmatism over ideology.

Mr. Christie declared that his decisive win should be a lesson for the nation’s broken political system and his feuding party: In a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans by over 700,000, Mr. Christie won a majority of the votes of women and Hispanics and made impressive inroads among younger voters and blacks — groups that Republicans nationally have struggled to attract.

The governor prevailed despite holding positions contrary to those of many New Jersey voters on several key issues, including same-sex marriage, abortion rights and the minimum wage, and despite an economic recovery that has trailed the rest of the country.

He attracted a broad coalition by campaigning as a straight-talking, even swaggering, leader who could reach across the aisle to solve problems.

“I know that if we can do this in Trenton, N.J., then maybe the folks in Washington, D.C., should tune in their TVs right now and see how it’s done,” Mr. Christie told a packed crowd at Convention Hall in Asbury Park, where his musical idol, Bruce Springsteen, holds holiday concerts, and where red and blue lighting gave the gathering a presidential campaign-like glow.

The governor all but lectured Republicans about how to appeal to groups beyond their base. “We don’t just show up in the places where we’re comfortable, we show up in the places we’re uncomfortable,” he said, adding, “You don’t just show up 6 months before an election.”

Around the country, Republicans alarmed by the surging grass roots support for the Tea Party wing were cheered by Mr. Christie’s success, saying they hope their party will learn not only from the size of Mr. Christie’s margin over Barbara Buono, a Democratic state senator, but also from the makeup of his support.

“We’ll be led back by our governors, and Chris Christie is now at the forefront of that resurgence,” said Ed Gillespie, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee.

“He’s proved that a conservative Republican can get votes from Hispanics and African-Americans, that a pro-life governor can get votes from women. This means that those voters are available to us, that we’re not shut out demographically or geographically — that it’s worth the effort.”

Mr. Christie’s strategy of bipartisanship and outreach deliberately echoed that of another Republican governor who seized the White House after eight years of Democratic control: George W. Bush.

“We work together and they don’t,” Mr. Christie said in an interview on Tuesday morning, contrasting Trenton and Washington. “It’s not like we like each other any more than they do. I got plenty of Democrats I don’t like here and that don’t like me. But we’ve made the decision that we’re going to work together.”

In the interview, Mr. Christie said intelligent voices were being drowned out in Washington, and described the effort led by Senator Ted Cruz of Texas to cut off funding for President Obama’s health care program as “a monumental failure.”

The swell of national attention around Mr. Christie had grown in the run-up to Election Day, as network cameras filmed his every move — he had a CNN microphone clipped to his tie as he campaigned on Tuesday morning at the Peterpank Diner in Central New Jersey. His campaign bus had been swarmed by people seeking autographs on photos of the governor at the White House, on the cover of Time magazine, and even with his wife, Mary Pat, on their wedding day. Some clearly hoped to offer the souvenirs later for sale.

Mr. Christie’s national profile will only increase later this month as he assumes leadership of the Republican Governors Association, which gives him sway over which state candidates the party will support, allowing him to rack up favors with other Republicans and create relationships with local leaders in key presidential states.

In the interview, Mr. Christie said he would be appearing frequently in “places like Ohio and Michigan and Florida,” all states with incumbent Republican governors up for re-election next year. He has also told South Carolina Republicans that he wants to help Senator Lindsey Graham, who is facing a conservative primary challenge next year. And in New Hampshire, which has the country’s first presidential primary, the national committeeman, Stephen Duprey, said he was inviting Mr. Christie to the state to discuss policy and to raise money for the party.

Still, Mr. Christie has to be governor of New Jersey, and that may complicate his plans to run for the presidency.

He has benefited in his first term from having one of the most powerful governorships in the country. But in a campaign for the presidency, that power also puts him in conflict with rules forbidding him to raise money from Wall Street. His advisers think he could get around that rule by allowing independent political groups to raise the money. But he will also face challenges in running the state.

His signature accomplishment of his first term was working with Democrats, who have majorities in both houses of the State Legislature, to commit to a schedule to pay down pension costs. In his second term, he will have to actually make the payments, which balloon over the next three years. Numerous commissions, reports and ratings agencies have warned that he may be unable to do this without raising taxes or making deep cuts.

His in-your-face style has won over New Jersey so far, but not everyone is at ease with it. Over the weekend, Mr. Christie was caught on camera wagging his finger at a teacher who challenged his cuts to classrooms, a moment reminiscent of the presidential campaign of 2012, when Mitt Romney’s advisers were alarmed by a video of Mr. Christie shaking an ice cream cone at a critic he encountered on the Jersey Shore.

“I am who I am, and that’s why people react to me differently,” Mr. Christie said in the interview. ”I’m not going to be giving these sound-bite-type of answers.”

Mr. Christie’s gains among black and Hispanic voters at the polls are the result of an aggressive, years-long effort: He has held more than 100 town hall-style meetings, including several in predominantly black areas that he lost in 2009.

For example, he won over Michael Blunt, a black Democrat and mayor of Chesilhurst, a largely black borough in South Jersey, with relentless wooing. Mr. Blunt, who recalled how Mr. Christie held a town hall in his community, steered more municipal aid to it and invited him to a Juneteenth celebration, marking the end of slavery, at the State House, impressing him with his knowledge of the holiday. And the governor invited black elected officials to Drumthwacket, the governor’s mansion near Princeton, and told them how a black friend in college took him to a historically black campus to demonstrate how it felt to be in the minority.

“If a person has no problem going in enemy territory to explain his policies, that person we really need to look at,” said Mr. Blunt, who was a delegate for Mr. Obama last year.

Mr. Christie nominated a Hispanic justice to the State Supreme Court, and in recent weeks, he told Hispanic students that he might reverse himself to support allowing students who were brought to the United States as children to pay in-state tuition at the state’s colleges and universities.

He ended his final campaign swing with a rally in Union City, which has the highest Hispanic population in the state. He also spent his last day campaigning with Susana Martinez of New Mexico, the first Hispanic woman to be elected a governor.

Exit polls showed that those strategies paid off. Exit polling conducted by Edison Research showed that Mr. Christie won the Hispanic vote and won over a significantly higher proportion of black voters than in 2009.

Mr. Christie increased his margin to win among women, despite running against two women, Ms. Buono and her candidate for lieutenant governor, Milly Silva. (His running mate also is a woman, Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno.)

Unlike some ambitious politicians, Mr. Christie, who is 51, has not been coy about his interest in higher office, and New Jersey residents seem comfortable with it.

One man proclaimed to the governor on Tuesday morning that the next time they shook hands, “it will be Mr. President.” A woman was even blunter as the governor passed her at the diner. “We need a Jersey attitude in the White House,” said Irene Fulton, a retiree from Old Bridge, who added, “We don’t put up with any crap.”

During the governor’s victory speech at Convention Hall, an audience member screamed out, “Chris Christie for president!” setting off cheers. The governor deadpanned: “I guess there is an open bar tonight — welcome to New Jersey.”

Allison Kopicki contributed reporting.

    Chris Christie Re-elected Governor of New Jersey, NYT, 5.11.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/06/nyregion/
    chris-christie-re-elected-governor-of-new-jersey.html

Terry McAuliffe, Democrat,

Is Elected Governor of Virginia

in Tight Race

November 5, 2013
The New York Times
By TRIP GABRIEL

Dalia Sussman contributed reporting from New York.

    Terry McAuliffe, Democrat, Is Elected Governor of Virginia in Tight Race,
    NYT, 5.11.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/06/us/politics/
    mcauliffe-is-elected-governor-in-virginia.html

In Testimony,

Michigan Governor Says

Bankruptcy Was Right Call for Detroit

October 28, 2013
The New York Times
By BILL VLASIC

DETROIT — Gov. Rick Snyder of Michigan, in testimony on Monday, forcefully defended Detroit’s bankruptcy filing as a last-ditch effort to stem the city’s decades-long financial decline.

“This is a crisis,” the governor said in United States Bankruptcy Court. “It still is a crisis today.”

The governor’s highly anticipated testimony came at a pivotal point in the trial on whether Detroit met federal eligibility rules when it filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy in July.

Mr. Snyder had been subpoenaed by union lawyers trying to block the bankruptcy and its potential to undermine pension benefits for thousands of city workers and retirees.

The governor — a former venture capitalist and computer executive — approved the bankruptcy filing on July 18 on the recommendation of Kevyn Orr, whom Mr. Snyder had selected in March as Detroit’s emergency manager.

Mr. Orr also testified on Monday and gave a detailed description of Detroit’s mounting debts, substandard city services and lack of options for a turnaround other than bankruptcy.

But it is Mr. Snyder who is widely considered responsible for forcing the state’s largest city into the biggest municipal bankruptcy filing in American history.

During his nearly three hours on the stand, Mr. Snyder said he considered Detroit’s financial free fall among the most pressing problems he inherited when he took office in 2011.

“There are not many problems of this magnitude in our country,” he said.

According to its Chapter 9 filing, Detroit is an estimated $18 billion in debt, including billions of dollars in obligations to its 23,000 retirees. The city is also running a budget deficit of almost $1 million per day, and is unable to provide basic levels of police and fire protection for its 700,000 residents.

Mr. Snyder said he took several measures to address the city’s troubles over the past two years, including negotiating an agreement with its mayor, Dave Bing, under which the city would cut some of its losses and streamline operations in return for $137 million to pay its bills.

But the governor said the city’s failure to honor the agreement led him to declare a financial emergency under state law. He then appointed Mr. Orr to the powerful post of emergency manager, giving him nearly unilateral control of the city’s finances and operations.

Still, Mr. Snyder said he had no preconceived plan to steer Detroit into bankruptcy, and acted only after Mr. Orr recommended that the city file for Chapter 9 in mid-July. “It was a tremendously difficult decision to make, but the right one,” he said.

Lawyers for unions and retirees challenged Mr. Snyder on whether Mr. Orr had made good-faith attempts to negotiate concessions on pensions before recommending bankruptcy.

Peter DeChiara, a lawyer for some city workers, bristled when Mr. Snyder’s lawyer objected to questioning the governor on the impact of bankruptcy on retirees receiving pensions averaging about $18,000 a year.

“To say that the impact of these cuts on retirees is irrelevant is incorrect,” he said.

For his part, Mr. Snyder said he believed unions and retirees had an opportunity to bargain with Mr. Orr after he made a blanket proposal to reduce pensions at a meeting with creditors in June.

The governor avoided answering specific questions about what level of cuts might be sought during bankruptcy proceedings. “Any plan that comes out of this has to be a legal plan,” he said.

Union lawyers argue that public-employee pensions are expressly protected under the Michigan Constitution.

The issue will be decided by Judge Steven Rhodes as part of the trial. The city also has to meet several specific benchmarks for eligibility, including proving that it is technically insolvent and that it pursued good-faith negotiations with creditors before the filing.

The Republican governor’s appearance on the witness stand added drama to the case, and galvanized street protesters to call for Mr. Snyder’s defeat when he faces re-election next year.

While Mr. Snyder was characteristically soft-spoken in court, Mr. Orr was more demonstrative during his testimony. A veteran bankruptcy lawyer, Mr. Orr said he was “shocked” at the state of the city’s finances and services when he took over as emergency manager.

“I knew things were bad, but it was somewhat shocking just how dire it was,” he said.

He described a city so destitute that payroll checks were bouncing, and frightened children armed themselves with rocks and sticks to fight off assaults on their way to school. He said some of Detroit’s electric grids could not be fixed because conditions were too dangerous for repair crews.

Mr. Orr sparred with union lawyers who accused him of seeking concessions under the threat of bankruptcy. He also said he welcomed counterproposals from the unions about cost savings, but did not receive any after the initial creditors meeting.

At the end of his testimony, Mr. Orr offered a blunt opinion of what would happen to Detroit if Judge Rhodes rejected the city’s Chapter 9 filing.

“To put this city back to the status quo is clearly unacceptable,” he said. “If we do not go through Chapter 9 this city will continue to fail.”

The trial is expected to last several more days, with union leaders likely to testify that they had little opportunity to negotiate with Mr. Orr before the bankruptcy filing.

One legal expert said a decision by Judge Rhodes to reject the Chapter 9 filing would likely prompt an appeal. But even a final rejection would not necessarily end the protracted struggle over how to fix Detroit.

“The state’s emergency manager law for managing the city’s finances would still be the governing authority if that decision stands,” said Keith Mason of the law firm McKenna Long and Aldridge. “More negotiations and other alternatives would then be able to be explored.”

    In Testimony, Michigan Governor Says Bankruptcy Was Right Call for Detroit,
    NYT, 28.10.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/29/us/
    in-testimony-michigan-governor-says-bankruptcy-was-right-call-for-detroit.html

Intellectual Disability

and the Death Penalty

October 22, 2013
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Eleven years ago, the Supreme Court banned the execution of intellectually disabled people in Atkins v. Virginia. Ever since, some states have worked to circumvent that ruling by defining intellectual disability using unscientific standards or by making it nearly impossible to prove. On Monday, the justices indicated that they may at last be ready to clarify the Atkins decision by agreeing to consider whether a Florida law defines intellectual disability too narrowly.

Freddie Lee Hall was sentenced to death for the 1978 murder of a 21-year-old pregnant woman, Karol Hurst. The Florida trial court found that Mr. Hall had been “mentally retarded his entire life,” but capital punishment was not then prohibited in such cases.

Mr. Hall appealed his death sentence following the 2002 Atkins ruling, which held that people with intellectual disabilities are less culpable because of their “reduced capacity” for understanding, reasoning and impulse control. But the Florida Supreme Court ruled against him because he scored between 71 and 80 on recent I.Q. tests, and state law requires a score of 70 or lower for a finding of intellectual disability.

Such a “bright line” I.Q. cutoff has been roundly rejected by mental-health experts, who say that the diagnosis of intellectual disability is complex and I.Q. tests are approximate measures but do not provide a complete picture. There is no magic score above which intellectual disability doesn’t exist.

Florida is far from alone in its efforts to undermine the court’s ruling. In Texas, the state’s highest criminal court decides whether a defendant is disabled enough to be executed by using unscientific standards based on outdated stereotypes. And in Georgia, defendants must prove intellectual disability beyond a reasonable doubt — an arguably unconstitutional standard no other state uses. In a promising development, the Georgia Legislature agreed last week to reconsider that standard. Rich Golick, a Republican state representative, said, “When you’re an outlier, you really ought not to stick your head in the sand.”

The Supreme Court is right to revisit its 2002 ruling, which gave states too much leeway to define intellectual disability. It should take this opportunity to reaffirm the central principle of Atkins and require states to adhere to medical consensus in defining intellectual disability.

    Intellectual Disability and the Death Penalty, NYT, 22.10.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/23/opinion/
    intellectual-disability-and-the-death-penalty.html

At 12:01, Same-Sex Couples

in New Jersey Say ‘I Do’

October 20, 2013
The New York Times
By VIVIAN YEE

In Lambertville, N.J., the marriage certificate of Beth Asaro and Joanne Schailey allowed only for a “bride” and a “groom,” so Ms. Asaro — in a pink suit — was listed as the groom, and Ms. Schailey — in a black suit — as the bride.

The same went for the marriage license application that Karen and Marcye Nicholson-McFadden filed in Aberdeen a few hours before they were due to marry on the Boardwalk in Asbury Park a minute after midnight. “It’s just going to list one of us as groom and one of us as bride, and we’re just going to wing it,” Marcye Nicholson-McFadden said breathlessly.

And in Elizabeth, Marsha Shapiro’s walk down the aisle was only minutes away when she realized she had forgotten something very important — or two somethings. “We need a ring bearer,” she said, as bottles of Champagne popped around her. “And I need to put my lipstick on.”

So it went on Sunday night in towns across New Jersey, where a judge’s ruling that the state must allow same-sex couples to marry went into effect just after midnight on Monday, capping a weekend-long frenzy of flower-arranging, Champagne-spraying, hair-styling, ring-buying and cake-baking. The six women were some of hundreds of people who rushed to make wedding arrangements over the weekend, after the State Supreme Court denied on Friday a request from the administration of Gov. Chris Christie for a stay on marriages until an appeal was settled.

As friends at the gay rights group Garden State Equality and an event planner cobbled together their 12:01 a.m. ceremony, Ms. Shapiro, 59, and Louise Walpin, 60, spent a few joyful hours on Saturday picking out dresses, shoes and pantyhose from their local Lord & Taylor. But the biggest thrill for the couple, together 24 years and counting, was also the simplest one: just being able to tell the department store staff that they were, at long last, getting married.

“Everyone was helping us and congratulating us,” Ms. Walpin said. She and Ms. Shapiro were two of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit that resulted in the judge’s ruling in favor of same-sex marriage last month. “It makes us just like everyone else — they were excited like they would be for anyone who’s getting married.”

“We had a personal shopper,” Ms. Shapiro added, still marveling. “They wouldn’t have had a personal shopper for just a civil union!”

For many couples, however, Sunday was spent agonizing over whether they would be able to get married on Monday at all. City clerks across the state had not received instructions from the state Department of Health to issue marriage license applications to same-sex couples on Friday, though some were granting licenses on their own initiative, and a mandatory 72-hour waiting period between applying for a license and putting it to use meant those who did not receive licenses on Friday had to wait unless they could find a judge to waive the waiting period.

“I think all four of us have spent most of our wedding day just tracking down a judge that would do it,” said Amy Quinn, 37, a lawyer who was planning to marry her partner of 10 years, Heather Jensen, 43, alongside a pair of gay friends, on the Asbury Park Boardwalk. “I’m so happy to get married in my own state, in my own town.”

If Ms. Walpin and Ms. Shapiro had fewer than three days to plan their nuptials, the Nicholson-McFaddens had fewer than six hours. They were unable to obtain a license from the Aberdeen city clerk on Friday. Then, on Sunday afternoon, Troy Stevenson, the executive director of Garden State Equality, called with welcome news: he had found a judge in Newark willing to open the courthouse on Sunday evening to waive the waiting period, as well as a city clerk in Lambertville to issue the licenses.

When it turned out that the couple’s paperwork could not be processed by a clerk in another town, friends pitched in to find the mayor of Aberdeen, who opened the township building so Aberdeen’s city clerk could issue an eighth-hour license.

“We both burst into tears when Troy called,” said Marcye Nicholson-McFadden. “We’re honest-to-God willing to drive anywhere in the state to get this done.”

Ms. Walpin and Ms. Shapiro had their ceremony in the living room of State Senator Raymond J. Lesniak, a Democrat and one of the longest-standing sponsors of the State Legislature’s same-sex marriage bill, whose dining table had been scattered with pink rose petals and pastries. The ceremonies paused for 12 minutes while the crowd waited for the clock to strike 12:01.

“Now we have to wait,” Mr. Lesniak said. “But it’s only a short wait, considering we’ve waited for years.”

Then he counted down from 10, until midnight. The crowd cheered, and the brides kissed.

Jon Hurdle and Nate Schweber contributed reporting.

    At 12:01, Same-Sex Couples in New Jersey Say ‘I Do’, NYT, 20.10.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/21/nyregion/
    a-rush-to-the-altar-for-same-sex-couples-in-new-jersey.html

Court Rules

on ‘Stand Your Ground’ Costs

October 17, 2013
The New York Times
By KIRK JOHNSON

SEATTLE — A state appeals court here in Washington, in a major ruling on the “stand your ground” debate over personal safety, said Thursday that a defendant who successfully uses a self-defense claim is entitled to reimbursement for lost wages and other costs, as well as legal fees.

“The cost of a criminal defense often starts at arrest,” the court wrote in its decision, affirming a lower court’s award of nearly $49,000, including $10,000 in lost wages, to Tommy J. Villanueva.

Mr. Villanueva, 53, was fired from his job as an assembler in a manufacturing plant in Spokane after being arrested in 2010 and charged with assault, accused of stabbing two people in the neck at a party. He was acquitted in 2012 by a jury that agreed with his claim that he had acted in self-defense.

In a separate decision, the jury also agreed that under the law, Mr. Villanueva was entitled to reimbursement for the cost of bringing that defense.

Prosecutors asserted that the law allowed reimbursement only for legal expenses.

Mr. Villanueva’s lawyer, however, argued that his client would not have lost his job but for an arrest that kept him from going to work.

Many states in the last decade have adopted so-called Stand Your Ground laws, which codified the right of a person to use deadly force in self-defense even outside their homes. Washington’s self-defense law is much older, and has been interpreted by the courts — in cases dating back at least to the 1930s — as saying that a person has no obligation to retreat if he or she reasonably perceives a dire threat.

The three-judge Court of Appeals panel said that state law, in promising reimbursement for “all reasonable costs,” in a successful self-defense claim, was vaguely worded.

“There’s not a lot of case law on this issue,” said Mr. Villanueva’s lawyer, Timothy S. Note.

In its ruling, the appeals court leaned on an earlier Washington State Supreme Court case that said the reimbursement law was broadly meant to ensure that no “costs of defense” are borne by a person acting legally to protect his or her life. Thus, in Mr. Villanueva’s case, the Court of Appeals said, the lost wages “constituted lawful earnings he would have received but for being prosecuted.”

The court went on to rule that because Mr. Villanueva was also defending himself legally after the trial, through the appeals process on the monetary reimbursement question, he had piled up additional reimbursable defense costs since the verdict, the judges said.

“Therefore, we award him reasonable appellate costs,” the order said, in sending the case back to the trial court to determine what a reasonable added amount should be.

Court Rules on ‘Stand Your Ground’ Costs, NYT, 17.10.2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/18/us/court-rules-on-stand-your-ground-costs.html

False Equality in Michigan

October 13, 2013
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Can a state’s citizens amend the state constitution to ban affirmative action programs in public universities, even if the Supreme Court has approved those programs? That is the question the court is facing this week in the case of Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action.

The court last considered an affirmative action case out of Michigan in 2003, when it upheld the race-conscious admissions policy of the University of Michigan Law School. In response to that ruling, opponents of affirmative action put on the ballot an amendment to the State Constitution banning any consideration of race or sex in public education. Michigan voters approved the amendment in 2006, and since then black undergraduate enrollment at the University of Michigan is down 33 percent.

Advocates of affirmative action sued the state on grounds that the amendment violates the United States Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection. They argued that it impermissibly altered the political process that determines admissions policies in a way that places special burdens on racial minorities.

For instance, an applicant who wants alumni connections to be considered in admissions could ask the admissions committee to adopt that policy, or she could lobby the university administration or its popularly elected governing board. But an applicant who wants the university to consider race as a factor has only one path available: to work to pass a new amendment that repeals the anti-affirmative-action amendment — which a federal appeals court called “a lengthy, expensive and arduous process.”

Michigan argues that the amendment does not violate equal protection since it treats all races the same. Last year, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit rejected that claim, striking down the amendment because it especially harms racial minorities — the primary beneficiaries of affirmative-action programs — by prohibiting them from asking a public university to consider their race. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, in contrast, upheld a nearly identical 1996 amendment to the California Constitution; this conflict in the courts is one reason the justices are reviewing the issue.

This case is another reminder of the threat to minority rights posed by ballot initiatives, which can be prone to abuse. That was surely true in Michigan, where the process of gathering signatures to put the amendment on the ballot “was rife with fraud and deception,” according to the federal appeals court. In some cases, voters were tricked into believing that the measure actually supported affirmative action. The methods used by the amendment’s backers, the appeals court found, “undermine the integrity and fairness of our democratic processes.”

But even if the initiative process had been pure, the amendment would still be intolerable. The Supreme Court has repeatedly said that race-conscious admissions policies may further a compelling governmental interest in educational diversity. While the court does closely analyze how such policies are designed, it recognizes that universities have “experience and expertise” in judging the need for a diverse student body.

This is exactly what the court did when it upheld the University of Michigan Law School’s policy in 2003. The court should uphold the Sixth Circuit’s decision striking down the amendment, and send a message to other states that they may not rig the game at the expense of minorities, even if they cloak it in the language of equality.

False Equality in Michigan, NYT, 13.10.2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/14/opinion/false-equality-in-michigan.html

With New Abortion Restrictions,

Ohio Walks a Narrow Legal Line

October 9, 2013
The New York Times
By ERIK ECKHOLM

CLEVELAND — Angela H., married with two children, became pregnant accidentally and, after medical complications during her last pregnancy and severe postpartum depression, said neither she nor her family was ready for another child.

Under a law that took effect in Ohio this month, the Cleveland abortion clinic she visited had to offer her a chance not only to view an ultrasound of the fetus but also to watch its beating heart, which she said she resented.

“It’s a hard decision for anybody to make,” she said of abortion, asking that her surname not be published out of privacy concerns. “To make it more difficult by passing these laws and making women feel guilty is terrible.”

Ohio has become a laboratory for what anti-abortion leaders call the incremental strategy — passing a web of rules designed to push the hazy boundaries of Supreme Court guidelines without flagrantly violating them. Many of the rules, critics say, are designed to discourage women from getting abortions or to hamper clinic operations, even forcing some to close.

The mandated discussion of fetal heartbeats is one of a cascade of abortion restrictions adopted in Ohio over the years, from a waiting period to curbs on the medication-induced abortions preferred by many women. The pace has quickened since John R. Kasich became governor in 2011, cementing Republican domination of state politics. Avowedly anti-abortion, Mr. Kasich said through a spokesman that he considered the restrictions he signed this year “reasonable.”

These laws have passed without the national drama provoked by far-reaching abortion bans that were approved, then overturned in court, in states like Arkansas and North Dakota. But taken together, they affect patients and clinics in myriad ways — in the view of the laws’ proponents, rightly making women think twice before ending a pregnancy and ensuring clinic safety or, in the view of opponents, imposing heartless obstacles and guilt on women who are seeking a legal procedure.

“In Ohio, the last few years have been fantastic if you support the pro-life movement,” said Mike Gonidakis, the president of Ohio Right to Life. His group has even lobbied against a more sweeping ban on early-term abortions, incurring the wrath of more restless abortion foes. But he says, “We’ve been able to craft pro-life laws that can withstand court scrutiny.”

On Wednesday, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a challenge in state court to the heartbeat mandate and other new restrictions, asserting that they were adopted in violation of the Ohio Constitution’s “single subject” rule because they were part of an unrelated budget bill.

More broadly, abortion-rights advocates call the incremental strategy, which has been refined by several national groups and pursued in a number of states, an insidious way to limit access to abortion and shame women who in many cases already have to walk past shouting protesters to enter clinics.

“If you can’t outlaw abortion outright, just make it harder and harder to get,” said Chrisse France, the executive director of Preterm, a large nonprofit abortion clinic on the East Side of Cleveland that performs about 4,900 abortions a year, mainly for low-income women. “They say they’re doing this to protect women’s health, but some of the laws are actually harmful, and some are just cruel.”

Conversations with patients at Preterm revealed diverse reactions to the mandated waiting period and counseling, but no sign that any women were changing course.

Madelyn Puterbaugh, 23, said that her birth control had failed and that it was “not the right time” for her to bear a child. She said she had turned down the chance to view the fetal heartbeat. “I didn’t look,” she said. “I thought I’d be too sad.”

She went ahead with the abortion, but said she had not minded the required 24-hour wait between the counseling and the procedure. “They gave me a lot to think about,” she said, “but it’s my choice.”

Ohio has long required abortion clinics to have a formal transfer agreement with a nearby hospital for emergency care, something physicians say is medically unnecessary because hospitals are required to treat emergency patients. Now, a new measure bars public hospitals from signing such agreements — a shift that could force two or three of the state’s remaining 11 clinics to close because they cannot find willing partners.

Other measures wrapped into the state budget bill this year, and signed by Governor Kasich, include a requirement that women seeking an abortion be told the probable odds that their pregnancy would go to full term if they changed their minds; a diversion of federal welfare money to so-called crisis pregnancy centers; new financing for rape-crisis centers on the condition that they provide no abortion referrals; and a tightening of parental consent requirements for minors.

To avoid passing money to Planned Parenthood, the state also ended competitive bidding for federal family planning grants, giving priority to public agencies. As a result, some nonprofit women’s health centers that have no connection to Planned Parenthood or abortion also face drastic cuts.

The newest rules follow a flurry of changes in 2011, when, among other things, the state banned abortions, except to save the mother’s life, once the fetus is viable. Fearing potential criminal charges, clinic doctors around the state have stopped performing abortions beyond the 22nd week of pregnancy, even in cases involving severe birth defects or serious medical conditions.

Since a federal court allowed it here in 2011 after years of litigation, Ohio has been the only state to require what doctors call an outdated, less safe and less effective regimen for medication abortions.

The law mandates adherence to the original Food and Drug Administration approval, which called for three times the drug dosage now standard and authorized the method only through seven weeks of pregnancy. As a result, while later studies showed them to be safe through nine weeks, medication abortions can no longer be offered in the eighth and ninth weeks of pregnancy.

Similar restrictions on medication abortion were passed this year in Texas and are under court challenge; they have been voided as unconstitutional barriers in North Dakota and in Oklahoma, which is seeking a review by the Supreme Court.

At Preterm, the annual number of nonsurgical abortions plummeted to 90 in 2012 from more than 600 in earlier years. But “there’s no evidence that this cut down on abortion,” said Ms. France, the clinic director. “Women just said, ‘Never mind, I’ll get a surgical abortion.’ ”

In Ohio, as elsewhere, abortions have declined over all in recent years, although there was a slight uptick to 25,473 reported procedures in 2012, with black women accounting for a growing share. Whether the new laws have significantly reduced the numbers or simply made abortions more fraught is disputed.

Mr. Gonidakis, of Ohio Right to Life, said he felt sure the measures had persuaded many women to change their minds and predicted that even more, when confronted with the fetal heartbeat and other information, would do so in the future.

“There are so many families waiting to adopt,” he added, offering an alternative that crisis pregnancy centers and others are increasingly promoting.

In the coming months, Mr. Gonidakis said, his organization plans to focus its lobbying on the easing of state adoption rules and an increase in tax breaks for adoptive parents.

But other anti-abortion groups and conservative legislators are pressing ahead with a proposal to ban abortion altogether once a fetal heartbeat is detectable, as early as six weeks into pregnancy.

    With New Abortion Restrictions, Ohio Walks a Narrow Legal Line,
    NYT, 9.10.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/10/us/
    with-new-abortion-restrictions-ohio-walks-fine-line.html

California Expands Availability of Abortions

October 9, 2013
The New York Times
By IAN LOVETT

LOS ANGELES — Gov. Jerry Brown on Wednesday expanded access to abortion in California, signing a bill to allow nurse practitioners, midwives and physician assistants to perform a common type of the procedure, an aspiration abortion, during the first trimester.

Washington, Montana, Vermont and New Hampshire allow nurse practitioners to perform such abortions, which use a tube and suction, while several other states, including California, permit nonphysicians to provide drugs to terminate pregnancy.

But the new California law goes further, allowing a wider range of nonphysician practitioners to perform surgical abortions. While other states have passed a tide of laws restricting abortion access, California has gone against the political tide.

“We are trending in a different direction, and we’re very proud of it,” said Toni Atkins, the state assemblywoman who wrote the bill. “California has a strong history of support for reproductive health care for women.” She said women in rural parts of the state had trouble finding an abortion provider.

“This is an issue of accessibility,” Ms. Atkins said. “California is a very large state, and more than half the counties don’t have an abortion provider.”

Abortion opponents said the new law would endanger women’s health.

“This bill trivializes what is taking place with abortion,” said Brian Johnston, director of the National Right to Life’s Western regional office. “It will massively expand the number of abortions and at the same time reduce safety. For those who say they care about women’s health, they’re doing the opposite, reducing the medical standards for abortion.”

This is not the first time in recent years that California — where Democrats control all statewide offices and both houses of the State Legislature — has bucked national trends. Last year, while conservative state governments were enacting tougher qualifications for voting, Democrats passed a series of laws intended to make registration and voting easier than ever.

But on the issue of abortion, California is the only state this year to have expanded access to the procedure.

By contrast, 68 restrictions on abortion have been passed by states so far this year, according to Elizabeth Nash, the state issues manager for the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that studies reproductive health issues.

“California is moving in a direction to protect reproductive health, as other states across the country are passing abortion restrictions,” Ms. Nash said. Supporters of the bill pointed to a state pilot program at the University of California, San Francisco, which found that nurse practitioners, certified midwife nurses and physician assistants were able to provide the procedure just as safely as surgeons.

During the pilot program, which began in 2007, some 8,000 aspiration abortions were provided by nondoctors. Complications rates for doctors and nondoctors were similar, below 2 percent in both cases.

“This is a very safe procedure, and we now have a very large study to show that this does not compromise safety,” said Dr. Tracy Weitz, who led the study. “Most people saying it compromises safety actually have an agenda to make abortion illegal, which we know from decades of experience actually makes abortion unsafe.”

“Hopefully this will give women more options early in their first trimesters, when we know abortion is safest,” Dr. Weitz added. “And the second trimester, when it is more complicated, will remain in the domain of physicians.”

Governor Brown announced his approval of the bill along with several others related to women’s health care, including one that brings construction standards for clinics that perform abortions in line with those of other primary-care clinics.

    California Expands Availability of Abortions, NYT, 9.10.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/10/us/
    california-expands-availability-of-abortions.html

A Population Betrayed

October 3, 2013
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

It is outrageous that millions of the poorest people in the country will be denied health insurance because of decisions made mostly by Republican governors and legislators. These people will neither qualify for their state’s Medicaid program for the poor nor for subsidized coverage on new insurance exchanges that are being established in every state by the health care reform law.

Their plight is a result of the Supreme Court’s decision last year that struck down the reform law’s mandatory expansion of Medicaid and made expansion optional. Every state in the Deep South except Arkansas has rejected expansion, as have Republican-led states elsewhere. These 26 states would rather turn down incredibly generous federal funds that would finance 100 percent of the expansion costs for three years and at least 90 percent thereafter than offer a helping hand to their most vulnerable residents.

As Sabrina Tavernise and Robert Gebeloff reported in The Times on Thursday, two-thirds of the country’s poor, uninsured blacks and single mothers and more than half of the uninsured low-wage workers live in those states. The reform law originally sought to help poor and middle-income people through two parallel mechanisms. One was a mandatory expansion of Medicaid (which in most states cover primarily children and their parents with incomes well below the poverty level) to cover childless adults and to help people with income levels above the poverty line. Those with slightly higher incomes would be eligible for federal subsidies to buy private policies on the new insurance exchanges.

That approach fell apart when 26 states decided not to expand Medicaid, at least for now. There is no provision in the law to provide health insurance subsidies for anyone below the poverty line because those people are supposed to be covered by Medicaid.

The Times report, based on an analysis of census data, found that eight million Americans who are impoverished and uninsured will be ineligible for help of either kind. To add to the insanity, people whose incomes initially qualify them for subsidies on the exchanges could — if their income fell because they lost a job — end up with no coverage at all.

There are no easy solutions to the difficulties wrought by the Supreme Court decision and the callousness of state officials who seized on that opening to victimize the poor.

States like New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Tennessee that are still flirting with the idea of expansion should do the right thing and expand. States that have adamantly refused to expand should relent and take the generous federal funds. And if Congressional Republicans ever give up on their obsession to destroy the health reform law, Congress could surely find ways to make certain that the people most in need of help get it.

A Population Betrayed, NYT, 3.10.2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/04/opinion/a-population-betrayed.html

Guns at School?

If There’s a Will, There Are Ways

September 27, 2013
The New York Times
By KIM SEVERSON

CLARKSVILLE, Ark. — The slim, black 9-millimeter handguns that the school superintendent David Hopkins selected for his teachers here weigh about a pound and slip easily into a pocket. Sixteen people, including the janitor and a kindergarten teacher, wear them to school every day.

Although state law prohibits guns on campus, Mr. Hopkins found a way around it.

Like rural educators who are quietly doing the same thing in a handful of other states, Mr. Hopkins has formulated a security plan that relies on a patchwork of concealed-weapons laws, special law enforcement regulations and local school board policies to arm teachers.

Without money to hire security guards for the five schools he oversees, giving teachers nearly 60 hours of training and their own guns seemed like the only reasonable, economical way to protect the 2,500 public school students in this small town in the Ozark foothills.

“Realistically, when you look at a person coming to your door right there with a firearm, you’ve got to have a plan,” Mr. Hopkins said. “If you have a better one, tell me.”

After the Newtown, Conn., rampage last December, 33 states considered new legislation aimed at arming teachers and administrators, according to an analysis by the National Conference of State Legislatures. Only 5 enacted laws that expanded the ability for public educators to arm themselves at school.

Still, some teachers and administrators around the country have carried guns for years under state or local laws that impose few restrictions on where concealed weapons can be carried.

“It’s a fairly common practice among the schools that do not have sworn officers,” said Asa Hutchinson, a former congressman and a candidate for governor in Arkansas. He recently led the National Rifle Association’s school safety initiative, which produced a 225-page report that advocated armed security officers or, in some cases, armed teachers in every public school.

Mr. Hutchinson said he recently spoke with a superintendent in Arkansas who had been carrying a firearm for 10 years. The district was among 13 in the state, including Clarksville, that have special permission to use rules designed for private security firms to arm their staff members.

Just before the school year began, the state suspended the practice temporarily after Attorney General Dustin McDaniel issued an opinion that school districts could not act as private security companies. This month, however, a state board voted to allow the districts to continue using the law until the legislature reconsiders the issue in two years.

The number of teachers who carry guns in the nation’s 99,000 public schools is impossible to calculate, school security experts, education officials and people on both sides of the gun debate agree. It is likely 10 percent or less, by some estimates, but the number is growing.

“It’s been creeping up on us without a lot of fanfare,” said Bill Bond, a school safety specialist for the National Association of Secondary School Principals.

Mr. Bond was the principal of a Paducah, Ky., high school in 1997, when a 14-year-old boy shot and killed three students and wounded five others.

Like many others, Mr. Bond says arming teachers is the wrong approach to preventing school shootings. But some educators, especially in rural districts, have been quietly carrying guns to school for years by making use of permissive state gun laws.

In Georgia and Missouri, guns can be on campus as long as they are in a locked car. In Massachusetts, Louisiana and Nevada, a teacher can carry a gun on campus with written permission from school officials.

Hawaii and New Hampshire do not have any prohibition against weapons on school property for those with concealed-carry permits

And for more than a dozen years in Utah, anyone with a permit to carry a concealed weapon can take a loaded gun to school without even telling the principal.

This year, for the first time, dozens of states have considered more formal approaches to regulating the ways educators may arm themselves. Only a few have moved ahead.

In Kansas, a law that took effect in July allows school districts to select employees with concealed-carry permits to bring guns to school. But Denise Kahler, a spokeswoman for the Kansas State Department of Education, said she was not aware of any districts that were pursuing it.

In Tennessee, where a similar law passed, insurance concerns stopped some districts from arming teachers. Lee Harrell, director of government relations, labor relations and policy for the Tennessee School Boards Association, said this week that he was not aware of any districts that were arming teachers.

The most sweeping new law is in Texas, where the Protection of Texas Children Act went into effect on Sept. 1. Teachers who want to serve as armed school marshals must have a license to carry a concealed weapon, pass a mental health evaluation and be trained specifically to respond when someone with a gun is inside a school shooting students.

The program is still being developed, and unlike the Arkansas effort, teachers would have to keep the guns under lock and key and only one school marshal would be allowed for each 400 students.

Meanwhile, in states where the laws do not prohibit teachers from carrying guns, teachers and other school personnel are seeking private training in increasing numbers.

“I think the number would shock people,” said Jim Irvine, a firearms trainer in Ohio who has taught 168 teachers to carry guns in school since he began a program specifically for educators this year.

Mr. Irvine said he knew of several districts whose teachers and administrators were armed or training to be.

“Our law has always been that it’s up to the individual school district,” he said. “It’s not new, but it’s new in popularity.”

One is the Newcomerstown Exempted Village School District, in rural eastern Ohio, where the school board in June approved a policy that allows employees who have a concealed-weapon permit and specialized training to go to school with a gun.

Part of the strategy is to keep the identities of which teachers have guns under wraps so neither students nor potential attackers will know where the guns are, so Jeff Staggs, the superintendent there, is not talking much about it.

But, he said in a recent interview, “the community feels over all that their kids are safer in the district this school year.”

Still, in Arkansas and other states, the notion of arming teachers is meeting strong resistance.

“The idea that a single relatively untrained teacher is going to bring this person who is heavily armed down is a stretch,” said Mark Glaze, the director of Mayors Against Illegal Guns. “The idea is to keep the guns from the hands of the shooter.”

Those who have spent their lives in the classroom have similar concerns.

“No teacher that I know of could ever receive enough training,” said Steve Gunter, a retired history teacher in Bentonville, Ark.

“If I had a gun in my room with some of these students where I taught? They’d get it from me and shoot me,” he said. “They’d say, ‘Mr. Gunter, you gave me an F? Here’s your F.’ ”

Alan Blinder contributed reporting from Atlanta.

    Guns at School? If There’s a Will, There Are Ways, NYT, 27.9.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/28/us/
    guns-at-school-if-theres-a-will-there-are-ways.html

Philadelphia Raises Stakes With Plan

to Reverse Blight

September 22, 2013
The New York Times
By JON HURDLE

PHILADELPHIA — With an estimated 40,000 abandoned houses, lots and commercial buildings, Philadelphia wants to consolidate its inventory of distressed real estate by creating a “land bank” to make purchase more attractive to potential buyers.

If the City Council votes this fall, as expected, to establish the land bank, Philadelphia will join Syracuse, Macon, Ga., and a number of other cities that have adopted plans like it to encourage buyers who are committed to making improvements, instead of speculators, to acquire tax-delinquent properties.

“There are new tools to allow government to acquire tax-delinquent properties without putting them out on the market to the highest bidder,” said Rick Sauer, executive director of the Philadelphia Association of Community Development Corporations, which is helping to lead the land-bank initiative.

To keep property from speculators who might sit on it for years without improving it, he said, the land bank would insist that buyers were current on taxes, had no history of code violations and had the resources to make promised changes.

“You want to put it into the hands of a responsible property owner who is going to put it back into productive use sooner rather than later,” Mr. Sauer said. A city ordinance “would provide a means for the land bank to go in and pull those properties out before they are exposed to the private market.”

Philadelphia’s neighborhoods, like those of some other older cities, are pockmarked with derelict buildings and overgrown lots that have been abandoned because of foreclosure, unemployment or the decline of manufacturing. The vacant properties cost the city millions of dollars to maintain, and they reduce the tax revenue that could come with occupancy. About 75 percent are privately owned, officials say, and many of those are tax delinquent.

If Philadelphia’s proposed land bank succeeds, its scope will become an example for other cities, like Detroit and New Orleans, that are struggling with large numbers of vacant properties and multiple city agencies that are responsible for them, said Frank Alexander, a professor of real estate law at Emory University and an author of many land-bank laws in other cities.

“If Philadelphia moves forward with this, it will be a very good model for Detroit,” which has an estimated 50,000 to 60,000 vacant properties, he said.

The proposal would take advantage of a 2012 Pennsylvania law that has already been put into effect elsewhere in the state.

In Philadelphia, many individuals are deterred from buying tax-delinquent properties by having to deal with a maze of public agencies or with difficulties in finding the private owners. The land bank would take control of vacant, publicly owned properties from four city agencies, leaving the city in a better position to combine them with private real estate that it would acquire to create blocks more likely to attract developers.

The land bank would also be able to acquire specific properties that threaten to bring down an otherwise healthy block.

“Otherwise, you have a cancer that begins to form, and one vacancy leads to another, and people stop investing in their homes and businesses,” Mr. Sauer said.

Advocates for land banks envision a variety of uses for the abandoned properties, including market-rate and affordable housing, commercial development, and open space.

Other uses could include community gardens or urban farms. For the last 17 years, a project known as Greensgrow has been growing vegetables and making compost on the site of a former galvanizing factory in a low-income area of North Philadelphia.

This month, Mary Seton Corboy, a co-founder of Greensgrow, gave a tour of the farm to delegates attending a conference in Philadelphia sponsored by the Center for Community Progress, a national nonprofit organization that works to revitalize abandoned and blighted real estate. She said the land, once designated by the Environmental Protection Agency as a Superfund cleanup site, showed how abandoned property could be revived for the benefit of the surrounding low-income community.

Reducing the number of blighted properties also helps maintain the value of surrounding real estate and saves money on maintenance to prevent further deterioration, land-bank managers say.

Currently, Philadelphia sells 150 to 200 vacant properties per year, said Mr. Sauer, who argued that sales would not significantly increase without a land bank.

“The status quo doesn’t work,” he said.

    Philadelphia Raises Stakes With Plan to Reverse Blight, NYT, 22.9.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/23/us/
    philadephia-hopes-a-land-bank-will-combat-urban-blight.html

California Gives

Expanded Rights to Noncitizens

September 20, 2013
The New York Times
By JENNIFER MEDINA

LOS ANGELES — California is challenging the historic status of American citizenship with measures to permit noncitizens to sit on juries and monitor polls for elections in which they cannot vote and to open the practice of law even to those here illegally. It is the leading edge of a national trend that includes granting drivers’ licenses and in-state tuition to illegal immigrants in some states and that suggests legal residency could evolve into an appealing option should immigration legislation fail to produce a path to citizenship.

With 3.5 million noncitizens who are legal permanent residents in California, some view the changes as an acknowledgment of who is living here and the need to require some public service of them. But the new laws raise profound questions about which rights and responsibilities rightly belong to citizens over residents.

“What is more basic to our society than being able to judge your fellow citizens?” asked Jessica A. Levinson, a professor at Loyola Law School, referring to jury service. “We’re absolutely going to the bedrock of things here and stretching what we used to think of as limits.”

One new state law allows legal permanent residents to monitor polls during elections, help translate instructions and offer other assistance to voting citizens. And immigrants who were brought into the country illegally by their parents will be able to practice law here, something no other states allow.

In many ways, the new measures underscore the lock Democrats have over the State Capitol, where they hold an overwhelming majority in both houses. Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, signed the poll worker legislation this month and has indicated his approval of the other bills. Many of the changes, including granting drivers’ licenses to unauthorized immigrants, passed with overwhelming support and the backing of several Republicans.

State legislatures across the country approved a host of new immigrant-friendly measures this year, a striking change from just three years ago, when many states appeared poised to follow Arizona’s lead to enact strict laws aimed at curbing illegal immigration. More than a dozen states now grant illegal immigrants in-state college tuition, and nine states and the District of Columbia also allow them to obtain drivers’ licenses.

With an estimated 2.5 million illegal immigrants living in California — more than in any other state in the country — some say the state has no choice but to find additional ways to integrate immigrants.

“It’s a recognition that how people are living and working in their community might trump their formal legal status,” said Hiroshi Motomura, an immigration law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. “There is an argument that in parts of California a jury without a legal permanent resident is not really a jury of peers. Some view citizenship as the final consecration of complete integration, but this says, ‘Let’s take who we have and get them to participate in our civil institutions.’ ”

Early this month, the State Supreme Court suggested during a hearing that lawmakers could create a law to address the case of Sergio Garcia, who was brought to the United States illegally as a child. Mr. Garcia had met every other requirement to become a licensed lawyer. Within days, legislation was approved to allow immigrants who were brought here illegally as minors to obtain law licenses, with just three opposing votes.

But the bill to allow noncitizens to sit on juries has proved more controversial. Several newspaper editorials have urged Mr. Brown to veto it.

Rocky Chávez, a Republican assemblyman from northern San Diego County, said that allowing noncitizens to serve on a jury would make it harder to uphold American standards of law.

“What we call domestic violence is appropriate in other countries, so the question becomes, ‘How do we enforce our own social norms?’ ” Mr. Chávez said. He added that granting more privileges would weaken immigrants’ desires to become citizens. “Once we erase all these distinctions, what’s next? What is going to convince someone it is essential to get citizenship?”

Departing from their role regarding other bills affecting immigrants, advocacy groups largely stayed out of the debate over the jury duty bill, which was sponsored by Assemblyman Bob Wieckowski, a Bay Area Democrat who is chairman of the Judiciary Committee.

“Being a juror really has nothing to do with being a citizen,” Mr. Wieckowski said. “You don’t release your prejudices or histories just because you take an oath of citizenship, and you don’t lose the ability to listen to testimony impartially just because you haven’t taken that oath either.”

He said that roughly 15 percent of people who received a jury duty summons never showed up and that the legislation would make it easier to impanel juries. Mr. Wieckowski said that he expected the governor to sign the bill and that the changes would quickly become accepted.

“It’s the same thing that happened with gay marriage: people got past their initial prejudices and realized it was just discrimination,” he said.

Supporters say that expanding the pool of those eligible to serve on juries and work the polls would serve citizens as well as immigrants. Several counties in California are required to print ballots and voting instructions in languages other than English. In Los Angeles County, ballots are available in Spanish, Mandarin, Arabic, Armenian, Tagalog and Vietnamese.

But advocates say that the printed instructions are often insufficient and that many people are turned away from the polls because they simply cannot communicate. Expanding the pool of potential poll workers to include legal permanent residents will allow more citizens to vote, they say.

Critics say that the Legislature is going too far and that the legislation will probably face legal challenges.

“It seems they stay up late dreaming up ways they can reward illegal immigration and create either new benefits or new protections for illegal immigrants,” said Ira Mehlman, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which backs stricter federal laws. “The overriding objective of the California Legislature is to further blur the distinction between citizen and immigrant, legal and not.”

State legislators and advocates had for years sought a law to allow unauthorized immigrants to obtain drivers’ licenses. Earlier legislation to create licenses for them had been vetoed by the previous governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Governor Brown signaled during his 2010 election that he would do the same.

But this year, a Republican co-sponsor signed on to the bill, and Mr. Brown quietly assured supporters that he would sign it as long as it included a marking to distinguish such a license from the existing driver’s license.

Assemblyman Luis A. Alejo, a Democrat and a sponsor of the bill, traced his involvement back to protests against the 1994 state ballot initiative that would have strictly limited access to public services for immigrants here illegally.

“Twenty years ago, that drove activists like me to get serious about school, and now we’re able to lead these pro-immigrant rights legislation, which is the total opposite of what was happening then,” Mr. Alejo said. “What was really controversial then is the reality now.”

    California Gives Expanded Rights to Noncitizens, NYT, 20.9.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/21/us/
    california-leads-in-expanding-noncitizens-rights.html

At Alabama,

a Renewed Stand for Integration

September 18, 2013
The New York Times
By ALAN BLINDER

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — For this rendition of Stand in the Schoolhouse Door, there were no National Guard troops or presidential edicts.

But on Wednesday, several hundred University of Alabama students and faculty members invoked Gov. George Wallace’s 1963 attempt to block the enrollment of black students here as they demanded an end to segregation in the university’s fraternities and sororities. Together, the mostly white group marched within sight of the President’s Mansion, one of the only structures on the campus dating to before the Civil War.

Tracey Gholston, a black woman who is pursuing a doctorate in American literature at Alabama, said Mr. Wallace’s legacy continued to permeate the university, which has nearly 35,000 students, about 12 percent of them black, and 45 percent from out of state.

“It shows a thread. It’s not just something that was resolved 50 years ago,” said Ms. Gholston, who has a master’s degree from the university. “You can’t say, ‘We’re integrated. We’re fine.’ We’re not fine.”

The demonstration came one week after the campus newspaper, The Crimson White, published the account of a member of the university’s Alpha Gamma Delta chapter.

The student, Melanie Gotz, said the sorority had bowed to alumnae influence and considered race when it evaluated potential new members earlier this year. Other sorority members shared similar stories.

Racial biases in Alabama’s Greek system, which has a membership of nearly one-quarter of the university’s undergraduate enrollment, have been an open secret for decades.

It is not an issue unique to Alabama, and it is complicated by an era in which blacks and whites on many campuses often gravitate to fraternities and sororities that are segregated in practice, although many national Greek organizations say they have banned discrimination.

Still, many feel systemic discrimination has been tolerated at Alabama, and Ms. Gotz’s public revelations led to widespread demands for reform.

University officials repeatedly had said the responsibility for membership standards rested with the sororities and fraternities, which are private groups. But on Sunday night, the university’s president, Judy L. Bonner, summoned advisers of traditionally white sororities and told them she was ordering an extended admissions process.

And in a videotaped statement released on Tuesday, she acknowledged that the university’s “Greek system remains segregated,” which students and professors described as a historic admission.

But the demonstration, which Dr. Bonner greeted when it arrived at the Rose Administration Building, focused on a sweeping demand for the president and her lieutenants: don’t stop restructuring the campus.

“We are holding the administration accountable and hoping that they hold us accountable, as well, to improve it in a sustained way and not just in a Band-Aid approach,” said Khortlan Patterson, a sophomore. “This was a great success today, but it’s just one step in the process.”

Ms. Patterson, who has considered joining one of the campus’s predominantly black sororities, has plenty of allies. Protesters at the 7:15 a.m. rally included dozens of blue-shirted members of the Mallet Assembly, a residential program founded in 1961 with a history of urging social change at Alabama. (The only black president of Alabama’s student government, elected in 1976, was a member of the organization.)

Since Dr. Bonner’s order, those sororities have opened hurried efforts to bring black women into their ranks by extending bids to an unknown number of minority students. It remains unclear whether any of those women will accept the offers.

The university’s fraternity system, founded in 1847, also remains largely segregated, and people here said they would like to see Alabama broaden its diversity initiative to include those organizations, one of which drew attention in 2009 for staging a parade with its members dressed in Confederate uniforms.

Most Greek organizations have barred their members from speaking to reporters, but Sam Creden, a demonstrator who is also a member of Delta Sigma Phi, said there was some unease about the ferment.

“A lot of my fraternity brothers are actually worried that this will be supporting sort of forced integration,” said Mr. Creden, a junior from Chicago.

Those who marched, he said, are hoping for a deeper, systemic change.

“We don’t want this to be the facade of integration,” Mr. Creden said. “We want people to truly accept people of all backgrounds and races.”

Caroline Bechtel, a member of Phi Mu, said Greeks were largely relieved by the events of recent days.

“The conversations have been happening, but there’s been no real action,” said Ms. Bechtel, a junior.

“Finally, it feels like something might change, and I think that is refreshing. We don’t have to be scared anymore to want a better community.”

    At Alabama, a Renewed Stand for Integration, NYT, 18.9.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/19/us/
    at-alabama-a-renewed-stand-for-integration.html

What Really Ails Detroit

August 15, 2013
The New York Times
By STEPHAN RICHTER

IS Detroit’s collapse the story of one American city gone awry? Or is it indicative of a more profound nationwide problem? The facts point to the latter.

Though Detroit’s bankruptcy is exceptional in many ways — notably, its size and its disproportionate impact on African-Americans — the overall decline of America’s manufacturing centers is evident in the deterioration of many smaller cities and towns throughout the Midwest and Northeast.

What accounts for this sad turn of events?

The traditional narrative holds that globalization, outsourcing and, after 2007, the recession have been responsible for devastating American manufacturing by moving jobs out of the country in enormous numbers. But at best, that is a convenient half-truth.

American manufacturing has been in trouble even since its heyday, in the 1950s and 1960s, when the United States was the global economic powerhouse and American assembly-line workers earned very decent middle-class wages.

That era of prosperity was not, as is so often claimed, the manifestation of the American dream. Rather, it was, or should have been, a warning sign that America was riding a fleeting wave of progress. Almost nobody was looking hard enough to the future and asking what it would take to sustain success.

The reason so many manufacturing-sector workers in the United States received such high pay at that time was not that they had exceptional skills or had received superior training; it was that the corporations for which they worked were unsurpassed in their dominance and generated huge revenues.

But that dominance was, to a considerable degree, a momentary quirk of history: the absence, in the wake of World War II, of any real competition from other nations. Once foreign competition was re-established, in Europe and Asia, only the superior skills of a nation’s workers and a focus on long-term workers’ training would allow a country to stay ahead.

For the United States, the day of reckoning came as other nations recovered from the war. In the 1970s, for example, American car manufacturers began facing competition on their home soil for the first time. Belittling the Japanese and their funny little cars was not an effective competitive response, though not for want of trying.

In that moment, American companies, communities and employees should have started taking the competition seriously. That did not happen. Companies like General Motors continued to shower blue-collar workers with handsome pay and benefits.

Who was to blame for this? Not the unions. They did what they were supposed to do: ask for higher pay and more benefits. No, the fault lay with the top corporate managers: it was their job, as capitalists, to deny such increases if they were not justified by productivity trends.

But with a fatal arrogance, executives at American manufacturing companies did allow those increases, in part to maintain a society of contented, trouble-free workers, though executives would also use those increases as cover for their own rapidly swelling compensation. In the 1960s, the average compensation of an American C.E.O. was about 25 times the average compensation of a production worker. That ratio rose to about 70 times by the end of the 1980s, and to around 250 times these days.

It is tragic to hear voices from Detroit declaring themselves ready for a resuscitation of the city. Revival is a question not just of will but also of the available skills base, which unfortunately has deteriorated as a result of a failure to invest in training.

That skills deteriorated is, to a considerable extent, the fault of the unions. Unfortunately, they shared the management class’s shortsighted focus on extracting the maximum amount of compensation from companies, even in the face of the underlying businesses’ failing strength.

Developing the necessary skills base is not a short-term project. It requires decades of concerted effort on many fronts, by many national, regional and local actors, including collaboration among companies, government, trade associations, schools, colleges and universities.

This kind of common purpose, however, is not something that American society, with its ethos of individualism and personal independence, seems capable of undertaking. Doing the right thing for the long haul is typically put off for a later time, if it ever happens.

That such a “strategy” is self-defeating ought to be obvious. Sadly, it is not — not in an instant-gratification world.

Globalization, in many ways, serves as an early warning system for the changes required in a domestic society. No society should have been better prepared to utilize this tool than the United States, given its traditional — but at least for now largely lost — proclivity to embrace change. That it didn’t work out that way is a tragedy of the nation’s own making.

Stephan Richter is publisher of The Globalist,

an online magazine.

What Really Ails Detroit, NYT, 15.8.2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/16/opinion/what-really-ails-detroit.html

California’s Continuing Prison Crisis

August 10, 2013
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

California has long been held up as the land of innovation and fresh starts, but on criminal justice and incarceration, the Golden State remains stubbornly behind the curve.

Over the past quarter-century, multiple lawsuits have challenged California’s state prisons as dangerously overcrowded. In 2011, the United States Supreme Court found that the overcrowding had gotten so bad — close to double the prisons’ designed capacity — that inmates’ health and safety were unconstitutionally compromised. The court ordered the state to reduce its prison population by tens of thousands of inmates, to 110,000, or to 137.5 percent of capacity.

In January, the number of inmates was down to about 120,000, and Gov. Jerry Brown declared that “the prison emergency is over in California.” He implored the Supreme Court to delay a federal court order to release nearly 10,000 more inmates. On Aug. 2, the court said no. Over the furious dissent of Justice Antonin Scalia, who reiterated his warning two years ago of “the terrible things sure to happen as a consequence of this outrageous order,” six members of the court stood by its earlier ruling. California has to meet its goal by the end of 2013.

The state claims that releasing any more inmates would be a threat to public safety, as if the problem were too little prison space. In fact, California’s problem is not excessive crime, but excessive punishment.

This was obvious years before the Supreme Court weighed in. Since the mid-1970s, California’s prison population has grown by 750 percent, driven by sentencing laws based largely on fear, ignorance and vengeance. The state’s notorious three-strikes law, passed in 1994, is only the most well-known example. Because of it, 9,000 offenders are serving life in prison, including many whose “third strike” was a nonserious, nonviolent offense — in one case, attempting to steal a pair of work gloves from a Home Depot.

Californians have made clear that they no longer accept traditional justifications for extreme sentencing. Last November, voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 36, which restricted the use of the three-strikes law for nonviolent offenses, even for current prisoners. It wasn’t just about saving money; exit polls showed that nearly three-quarters of those who supported the proposition said they felt the law was too harsh.

The measure has already resulted in the release of around 900 prisoners whose third strike was neither serious nor violent, and it could lead to the release of up to 2,500 more. A risk assessment by California’s corrections department suggests that these three-strikes inmates are among the least likely to re-offend. Preliminary research on those who have been released under Proposition 36 is bearing that out.

In addition, the state has begun to take steps to repair what former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger described as a prison system “collapsing under its own weight.” A two-year-old package of reforms, enacted into law and known as “realignment,” is changing the type of sentences prisoners receive, where they are housed and the sort of post-release supervision they get. While this has led to some important improvements, such as eliminating prison terms for technical parole violations, it does not adequately address many entrenched problems, like disproportionately long sentences, that add to prison overcrowding. (Nor does it deal with the widespread use of long-term solitary confinement, which has led hundreds of state prisoners to go on hunger strikes in recent months.)

If California wants to avoid another legal battle over its overcrowded prisons, there are two things it can do right away.

First, it should establish a sentencing commission to bring consistency, proportionality and data-based assessments to its laws. Twenty-one states, the District of Columbia and the federal government already have such commissions, and they make a difference. In Virginia and North Carolina, both of which had prison overcrowding, sentencing commissions helped focus scarce resources on housing the most violent offenders, limiting prison growth without jeopardizing public safety.

Criminal justice reform advocates have unsuccessfully pushed for such a commission in California. If the state is to get away from its irrational and complicated sentencing, it needs a commission, and it needs to insulate it as much as possible from the political actors who have contributed so much to the state’s current crisis.

Second, the state must do more to help released prisoners get the re-entry and rehabilitation services that already exist across California. Inmates are often released with no warning to friends or family, with no money, no means of transportation and no clothes other than the jumpsuits on their backs. It is no wonder a 2012 report showed that 47 percent of California prisoners returned to prison within a year of their release, a significantly higher rate than the national average.

People coming out of prison need many things, but the critical ones are safe housing, drug treatment and job opportunities. Theoretically, the $2 billion being spent over the first two years of realignment was to provide more resources toward such re-entry and rehabilitation programs; in reality, much of that money has gone to county jails, which have seen their own overcrowding only get worse as they have absorbed thousands of inmates from state prisons. So far, counties have allocated an average of just 12 percent of their realignment funds to re-entry programs.

California’s prison population is consistently among the largest in the country. While it presents an extreme case, its problems are representative of what is happening in prisons and jails in other states. If California would redirect its energy from battling the federal courts to making the needed long-term reforms, it could once again call itself a leader.

    California’s Continuing Prison Crisis, NYT, 10.8.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/11/opinion/sunday/
    californias-continuing-prison-crisis.html

Justices Rule

California Must Free Some Inmates

August 2, 2013
The New York Times
By JENNIFER MEDINA

LOS ANGELES — The United States Supreme Court on Friday rejected California’s attempt to stop the release of nearly 10,000 inmates from state prisons to relieve overcrowding, dealing a blow to Gov. Jerry Brown’s efforts to fight federal court orders to reduce the prison population.

The decision is the latest in a long line of federal rulings demanding that the state drastically reduce its prison population. In 2011, the Supreme Court ruled that the overcrowding created conditions that amounted to cruel and unusual punishment, with inmates unable to receive proper health care, and some inmates dying while under the care of the state.

Mr. Brown has spent several months arguing that the prisons have greatly improved, and that the state should no longer be subjected to federal oversight. State officials were appealing to the Supreme Court for a full review of an order from a three judge-panel of the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

The justices were split 6 to 3, and Justice Samuel A. Alito said that he would grant a stay of release. Justice Antonin G. Scalia wrote a bitter dissent — calling the lower court’s order a “terrible injunction” — that was signed by Justice Clarence Thomas.

“California must now release upon the public nearly 10,000 inmates convicted of serious crimes,” Justice Scalia wrote. He said the population reduction mandate goes “beyond the power of the courts.”

The court’s ruling on Friday appeared to leave the governor with no choice but to reduce the prison population to 110,000, 137.5 percent of design capacity, by the end of this year, as the court ruled in its 5-to-4 decision in 2011.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs in the case, which has gone on for more than two decades, hailed the ruling as extraordinary and said it would compel the state to act or Mr. Brown could be held in contempt of court, as a lower court panel has threatened.

“Their hope to be rescued in the process is gone,” Michael Bien, a lawyer for the plaintiffs — the prisoners and their advocates — said of Mr. Brown and state corrections officials. “This was a Hail Mary pass to the end zone and the ball was dropped. We fully expect them to comply with the courts, and we will make sure they do so.”

Along with three former governors, Mr. Brown argued to the Supreme Court that the early release of thousands of prisoners would endanger the public with offenders who have “a history of serious or violent offenses who are very likely to commit more serious crimes, impacting already stretched law enforcement, social service, mental health and substance use treatment resources of counties.”

Justice Scalia wrote that the state had shown evidence it had “made meaningful progress” in serious overcrowding in its 33 prisons, and that additional releases were not necessary.

While it has protested doing so, the State Corrections Department has already begun preparing to expand some parole programs, and release inmates it deems have the lowest risk of committing new crimes. In court filings, the state said it could identify only 1,205 inmates who had less than a year left on sentences for nonviolent crimes. The current state plan calls for the release of nearly 4,200 additional prisoners, but the state could also increase the time taken off sentences for completing rehabilitation programs in prison.

For nearly two years, the state began requiring that county jails take in low-level felons and parole violators, which has reduced the state prison population by about 25,000. Mr. Brown has repeatedly argued that the change, along with other shifts in the state system, has resulted in constitutional care and conditions for the remaining 132,000 inmates.

State officials said Friday they planned to continue to press for a hearing for a full appeal from the Supreme Court “so that the merits of the case can be considered without delay,” but would move forward with a plan to comply with the lower court order.

It is unclear precisely how many prisoners will be released. The state could also move to put more prisoners in private out-of-state facilities or contract with county jails that have open beds.

The ruling comes as hundreds of prisoners continue a hunger strike to protest solitary confinement policies. State officials said 477 inmates in six prisons were participating on Friday, down from more than 30,000 when the strike began last month.

    Justices Rule California Must Free Some Inmates, NYT, 2.8.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/03/us/
    justices-rule-california-must-free-some-inmates.html

Judge Blocks

North Dakota Abortion Restrictions

July 22, 2013
The New York Times
By ERIK ECKHOLM

A federal judge on Monday blocked enforcement of North Dakota’s recently enacted ban on most abortions, calling it “invalid and unconstitutional.”

The law under challenge, which was set to take effect Aug. 1, would have imposed by far the country’s most stringent limit on abortions. With few exceptions, it would bar the procedure once a fetal heartbeat is detected, often about six weeks into pregnancy — a point when many women are not aware they are pregnant.

From the moment in March when it was adopted, most legal experts said that the law would not survive because it posed a direct challenge to Supreme Court guidelines, which state that a woman has a right to an abortion until the fetus is viable outside the womb. Viability must be determined by a physician and often occurs around 24 weeks into pregnancy.

Some anti-abortion leaders and politicians argued that the presence of a heartbeat is in itself a form of viability. They expressed hope that the Supreme Court would revisit the issue.

When he signed the bill, Gov. Jack Dalrymple, a Republican, called it “a legitimate attempt by a state legislature to discover the boundaries of Roe v. Wade.”

In a withering opinion issued on Monday, Judge Daniel L. Hovland of Federal District Court in North Dakota said he had no choice but to block the law. He described it as “in direct contradiction to a litany of United States Supreme Court cases addressing restraints on abortion.”

“The State has extended an invitation to an expensive court battle over a law restricting abortions that is a blatant violation of the constitutional guarantees afforded to all women,” Judge Hovland wrote. His decision on Monday imposed a temporary injunction, until the issue is decided at a trial.

The Center for Reproductive Rights, a group based in New York, brought the suit to block the law on behalf of the Red River Women’s Clinic in Fargo, the state’s only abortion clinic.

North Dakota’s law is the most far-reaching among scores of restrictive abortion statutes, many of them under court challenge, that have been passed by state governments in recent years.

An Arkansas law to bar abortions at 12 weeks of pregnancy, which, like North Dakota’s, was tied to detection of a fetal heartbeat, was blocked in May by a federal judge in Little Rock.

A dozen states, most recently Texas, have adopted laws barring abortions at 20 weeks after conception on the theory that the fetus can feel pain at that point. This approach, too, is inconsistent with Supreme Court doctrine and in the three states where it has been challenged in court so far — Arizona, Idaho and Georgia — it has been blocked.

In a different line of attack, anti-abortion groups have promoted stricter rules for abortion facilities, requiring clinics in certain states to meet costly building standards and requiring that abortion doctors have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals.

Medical groups call these measures unnecessary for patient safety. The Red River clinic, which relies on a doctor who flies in weekly, says it will be forced to close if the state’s admitting privileges law takes effect. The clinic’s court challenge to the rule is pending.

    Judge Blocks North Dakota Abortion Restrictions, NYT, 22.7.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/23/us/
    judge-blocks-north-dakota-abortion-restrictions.html

New Jersey Supreme Court

Restricts Police Searches of Phone Data

July 18, 2013
The New York Times
By KATE ZERNIKE

Staking out new ground in the noisy debate about technology and privacy in law enforcement, the New Jersey Supreme Court on Thursday ordered that the police will now have to get a search warrant before obtaining tracking information from cellphone providers.

The ruling puts the state at the forefront of efforts to define the boundaries around a law enforcement practice that a national survey last year showed was routine, and typically done without court oversight or public awareness. With lower courts divided on the use of cellphone tracking data, legal experts say, the issue is likely to end up before the United States Supreme Court.

The New Jersey decision also underscores the extent of the battles over government intrusion into personal data in a quickly advancing digital age, from small town police departments to the National Security Agency’s surveillance of e-mail and cellphone conversations.

Several states and Congress are considering legislation to require that warrants based on probable cause be obtained before investigators can get cellphone data. Montana recently became the first state to pass such a measure into law. The California Legislature approved a similar bill in 2012, but Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed it, saying it did not “strike the right balance” between the needs of law enforcement and the rights of citizens.

The Florida Supreme Court ruled in May that the police could seize a cellphone without a warrant, but needed a warrant to search it. And a case before the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va., is weighing whether investigators acted legally when they got a court order, but not a warrant, to obtain 221 days of cellphone location data for suspects in an armed robbery case in Maryland.

“This type of issue will play out in many jurisdictions for the simple reason that cellphones are so prevalent in daily life,” said Peter G. Verniero, a former New Jersey attorney general and State Supreme Court justice. “The decision affects just about everybody.”

“Law enforcement is trying to keep up with technology, as well they should,” he added. “It’s very legitimate for law enforcement to use technology, but this court decision is a strong reminder that constitutional standards still apply. The courts have to adapt, and law enforcement has to adapt.”

The ruling involved a case that began with a string of burglaries in homes in Middletown, N.J. A court ordered the tracing of a cellphone that had been stolen from one home, which led to a man in a bar in nearby Asbury Park, who said his cousin had sold him the phone, and had been involved in burglaries. The police then used data they got from T-Mobile to locate the suspect, Thomas W. Earls, at three points on a subsequent evening, tracking him to a motel room where he was found with a television and suitcases full of stolen goods.

In a unanimous decision, the State Supreme Court said that when people entered cellphone contracts, “they can reasonably expect that their personal information will remain private.”

The justices recognized that this departed somewhat from federal case law. But they relied in part on a United States Supreme Court decision last year that the police could not attach a Global Positioning System to a suspect’s car without a warrant. A cellphone, the New Jersey justices said, was like a GPS device.

“Using a cellphone to determine the location of its owner can be far more revealing than acquiring toll billing, bank, or Internet subscriber records,” said the opinion, written by Chief Justice Stuart Rabner. “Details about the location of a cellphone can provide an intimate picture of one’s daily life and reveal not just where people go — which doctors, religious services and stores they visit — but also the people and groups they choose to affiliate with. That information cuts across a broad range of personal ties with family, friends, political groups, health care providers and others.”

Besides establishing a firmer legal bar for the police to obtain cellphone data, the Supreme Court also remanded the case to the appeals court to determine whether the evidence collected using the cellphone records could be admitted in court under an “emergency aid exception” to the requirement for a warrant.

Last year, the American Civil Liberties Union reviewed records from more than 200 local police departments, large and small, and found that they were aggressively using cellphone tracking data, so much so that some cellphone companies were marketing a catalog of “surveillance fees” to police departments, to track suspects or even to download text messages sent to a phone that had been turned off. Departments were using the information for emergency and nonemergency cases.

Some departments had manuals advising officers not to reveal the practice to the public. Others defended its use. The police in Grand Rapids, Mich., for example, had used a cellphone locator to find a stabbing victim who was in a basement hiding from his attacker.

The law has been slow to keep up. The Florida decision in May rejected the reasoning of a lower court that had based its approval of cellphone tracking on a 1973 United States Supreme Court case that allowed heroin found in a suspect’s cigarette pack to be introduced as evidence. “Attempting to correlate a crumpled package of cigarettes to the cellphones of today is like comparing a one-cell organism to a human being,” the decision said.

Nationally, court decisions about cellphone tracking have considered whether it comports with the Fourth Amendment, which guards against unreasonable searches and seizures. But the justices in New Jersey based their decision on the State Constitution, which affords greater privacy protection. The state court has previously ruled in favor of electronic privacy. In 2008, it said that police had to obtain a subpoena from a grand jury to obtain Internet provider records.

“The inescapable logic of this decision should be influential beyond New Jersey because it makes complete sense as to an individual’s reasonable expectation of privacy,” said Rubin Sinins, who filed a friend of the court brief on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union and the New Jersey Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

    New Jersey Supreme Court Restricts Police Searches of Phone Data,
    NYT, 18.7.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/19/nyregion/
    new-jersey-supreme-court-restricts-police-searches-of-phone-data.html

Texas Senate Vote

Puts Bill Restricting Abortion

Over Final Hurdle

July 13, 2013
The New York Times
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

AUSTIN, Tex. — The Texas Senate gave final passage on Friday to one of the strictest anti-abortion measures in the country, legislation championed by Gov. Rick Perry, who rallied the Republican-controlled Legislature late last month after a Democratic filibuster blocked the bill and intensified already passionate resistance by abortion-rights supporters.

The bill, which Mr. Perry is expected to sign, bans abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy and holds abortion clinics to the same standards as hospital-style surgical centers, among other requirements. Its supporters say that the strengthened requirements for the structures and doctors will protect women’s health; opponents argue that the restrictions are actually intended to put financial pressure on the clinics that perform abortions and will force many of them to shut their doors.

Debate over the bill has ignited fierce exchanges between lawmakers, and tense confrontations between opponents of the bill, who have worn orange, and supporters of the bill wearing blue. Signs and slogans have been everywhere, bearing long, impassioned arguments or the simple scrawl on a young man’s orange shirt, a Twitter-esque “@TXLEGE: U R dumb.”

The bill had come nearly this far before: a version had been brought to the Senate in the previous session of the Legislature, in June, and was killed by State Senator Wendy Davis, a Democrat from Fort Worth, with an 11-hour filibuster that stalled the bill until after the deadline for ending the session. The filibuster became an overnight sensation on Twitter and other forms of social media, with more than 180,000 people viewing the filibuster live online.

Almost immediately, however, Governor Perry called for another special session to reconsider the bill. When the bill passed the House of Representatives after a contentious day and a half of proposed amendments and floor debate, Mr. Perry said he looked forward to the next step of the process, as “the Senate continues its important work in support of women’s health and protecting the lives of our most vulnerable Texans.”

The fight has been heavy with symbols. The House bill’s author, Representative Jodie Laubenberg, a Republican from Parker, dangled a pair of baby shoes before her as she spoke on Tuesday; Representative Senfronia Thompson, who offered an early amendment to the bill, was flanked by colleagues holding wire hangers, representing the brutal abortion methods they said would return if legitimate clinics were run out of business.

Ms. Laubenberg has said that the bill would close no facilities, adding, “It is time these clinics put patients ahead of profits.”

Supporters of the bill in the Legislature have been angered by the language of their opponents. During floor debate on Tuesday, Representative Jason Villalba, a Republican of Dallas, said that “I shall stand with Texas women, but I shall stand here no longer and be accused of conducting a ‘war on women.' ” He said “we care for and we fight for human baby lives,” and he showed a sonogram of his own child at 13 weeks. “I will fight, and I will fight, and I will fight to protect my baby,” he said.

The bill is opposed by many doctors, including leaders of the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the Texas Medical Association; the gynecologists’ group has run advertisements locally that question the scientific underpinnings of the legislation and tell legislators to “Get out of our exam rooms.”

The Senate took up the bill on Friday afternoon, but people had begun lining up for seats in the third-floor Senate gallery early in the morning, a line that stretched from that floor into the basement of the Capitol. Department of Public Safety officers, their numbers swelled in anticipation of crowds and tumult, searched every bag and confiscated anything that could be thrown — including, for part of the day and until the practice became an object of derision online, tampons. But Department of Public Safety officials stated that the searches had turned up jars “suspected to contain” urine, feces and paint, along with glitter and confetti.

Senators worked through the evening surrounded by tumult and ruckus. Shouts, chants and singing could be heard outside of the chamber, and as the final amendment was voted down protesters tried to chain themselves to the railing of the Senate gallery and were taken out.

Though defeated in the Legislature, State Senator Royce West, a Democrat who represents Dallas, said the next step was clear: the ink from Mr. Perry’s signature on the bill is not likely to be dry for long before a lawsuit is filed.

“I’m a lawyer,” Mr. West said. “The reality is, I’m used to being in court. We believe the whole thing is unconstitutional.”

Mr. West would not comment on any specific legal strategy, but the many amendments and discussion of them during deliberations over the bill were clearly intended to build a record that could eventually be reviewed by the courts.

The Democrats who opposed the bill never had the votes to defeat it — Mr. West, during discussion of proposed amendments, said, “We know the bill is going to pass.” But State Senator Kirk Watson, the chairman of the Senate Democratic caucus, posted a Facebook photo on Wednesday of an orange T-shirt with a slogan about why the fight has continued. It read: “A foregone conclusion has never stopped a group of citizens committed to ideals of democracy and liberty from taking a stand and fighting with everything they’ve got. This is Texas, baby. Remember the Alamo.”

    Texas Senate Vote Puts Bill Restricting Abortion Over Final Hurdle,
    NYT, 13.7.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/14/us/texas-abortion-bill.html

The Decline of North Carolina

July 9, 2013
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Every Monday since April, thousands of North Carolina residents have gathered at the State Capitol to protest the grotesque damage that a new Republican majority has been doing to a tradition of caring for the least fortunate. Nearly 700 people have been arrested in the “Moral Monday” demonstrations, as they are known. But the bad news keeps on coming from the Legislature, and pretty soon a single day of the week may not be enough to contain the outrage.

In January, after the election of Pat McCrory as governor, Republicans took control of both the executive and legislative branches for the first time since Reconstruction. Since then, state government has become a demolition derby, tearing down years of progress in public education, tax policy, racial equality in the courtroom and access to the ballot.

The cruelest decision by lawmakers went into effect last week: ending federal unemployment benefits for 70,000 residents. Another 100,000 will lose their checks in a few months. Those still receiving benefits will find that they have been cut by a third, to a maximum of $350 weekly from $535, and the length of time they can receive benefits has been slashed from 26 weeks to as few as 12 weeks.

The state has the fifth-highest unemployment rate in the country, and many Republicans insulted workers by blaming their joblessness on generous benefits. In fact, though, North Carolina is the only state that has lost long-term federal benefits, because it did not want to pay back $2.5 billion it owed to Washington for the program. The State Chamber of Commerce argued that cutting weekly benefits would be better than forcing businesses to pay more in taxes to pay off the debt, and lawmakers blindly went along, dropping out of the federal program.

At the same time, the state is also making it harder for future generations of workers to get jobs, cutting back sharply on spending for public schools. Though North Carolina has been growing rapidly, it is spending less on schools now than it did in 2007, ranking 46th in the nation in per-capita education dollars. Teacher pay is falling, 10,000 prekindergarten slots are scheduled to be removed, and even services to disabled children are being chopped.

“We are losing ground,” Superintendent June Atkinson said recently, warning of a teacher exodus after lawmakers proposed ending extra pay for teachers with master’s degrees, cutting teacher assistants and removing limits on class sizes.

Republicans repealed the Racial Justice Act, a 2009 law that was the first in the country to give death-row inmates a chance to prove they were victims of discrimination. They have refused to expand Medicaid and want to cut income taxes for the rich while raising sales taxes on everyone else. The Senate passed a bill that would close most of the state’s abortion clinics.

And, naturally, the Legislature is rushing to impose voter ID requirements and cut back on early voting and Sunday voting, which have been popular among Democratic voters. One particularly transparent move would end a tax deduction for dependents if students vote at college instead of their hometowns, a blatant effort to reduce Democratic voting strength in college towns like Chapel Hill and Durham.

North Carolina was once considered a beacon of farsightedness in the South, an exception in a region of poor education, intolerance and tightfistedness. In a few short months, Republicans have begun to dismantle a reputation that took years to build.

The Decline of North Carolina, NYT, 9.7.2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/10/opinion/the-decline-of-north-carolina.html

In Conservative Wyoming,

Signs of a Thaw on Same-Sex Marriage

June 30, 2013
The New York Times
By JACK HEALY

LARAMIE, Wyo. — For State Representative Cathy Connolly, Wyoming’s only openly gay legislator, this winter brought a rare moment of promise: her bill to create domestic partnerships advanced further than anything like it in the history of this deep red state — sailing through committee and onto the floor of the full House. Victory seemed possible. But when a crucial vote came, the bill failed.

Afterward, a colleague who had voted against the measure hugged Ms. Connolly, a Democrat from Laramie, and told her that it was nothing personal. “I had to say, ‘Yes it is,’ ” Ms. Connolly said, recalling the conversation several months later.

Being gay in Wyoming, known as the Equality State, has never been simple, and last week’s Supreme Court rulings, hailed as a victory for same-sex marriage, did little to change that. While many gay couples here cheered the decisions, they also said they woke up the next morning not feeling much more equal than they had the day before.

“It’s remarkably frustrating,” said Carl Oleson, who lives with his partner of 16 years, Rob Johnston, in Casper, near the center of Wyoming’s oil and gas boom. “There are no protections here. None.”

Nationwide, the movement to legalize same-sex marriage may be bolstered by court rulings, growing political support and shifting public opinion. But for gay couples who live in the conservative rural heartland, like Mr. Oleson and Mr. Johnston, any changes in the landscape feel as slow as the upwelling of mountain ranges.

Like 36 other states, Wyoming limits marriage to a man and a woman. State lawmakers have voted down attempts to include gay and transgender people in Wyoming’s antidiscrimination laws. There are no hate-crime laws on the books, according to the Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights advocacy group.

For gay couples, life can be a delicate balance. The closest gay bar is often a long drive south to Colorado. Some couples said they introduce their partners as friends or roommates and shy away from holding hands or kissing in public.

“You have to balance between so many things here,” said Mr. Oleson, who said he manages a retail store but declined to be more specific. “I still have to be a little bit discreet.”

Wyoming has never been easy to pigeonhole when it comes to gay rights. Republicans dominate state and local politics, and support for gun rights, low taxes and small government runs as deep as groundwater. But so does a cowboy libertarian streak, residents say, rooted in ranches, homesteads and a notion of “You live your life, and I’ll live mine.”

Wyoming repealed its sodomy law in 1977, a generation before the Supreme Court declared such laws unconstitutional. Several times in recent years, Republican lawmakers have rejected efforts by social conservatives to ban the recognition of same-sex marriages from other states or to add “defense of marriage” amendments to the State Constitution.

Eight years ago, an openly gay 27-year-old named Guy Padgett served a term as the mayor of Casper. People who would never support same-sex marriage nonetheless gave him a fair shake, he said. In a state where many voters are on a first-name basis with the governor and see their elected officials in church or cafes, it is harder to vilify people you disagree with, residents said.

“I’ve never felt uncomfortable or threatened or out of place,” said Mr. Padgett, a Democrat who now lives in Denver. “There is a strong streak in the Republican Party in Wyoming to let people live their lives — that sort of respect for space.”

In some more conservative quarters, the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down the federal Defense of Marriage Act felt like an attack on that let-live ethos. Mark Baker, a Republican state representative from Rock Springs, said Wyoming was comfortable with marriage as it stood in the state. He said he had considered the arguments for allowing everyone to marry — his half sister is a lesbian, he said — but called same-sex marriage the first step on a “slippery slope.”

“Once you go down that path, where do you stop?” Mr. Baker said. “Is it going to be legal for four or five people to marry because they love one another?”

Ms. Connolly said she was aware of that argument when she introduced her bill last winter to create domestic partnerships for gay couples — the latest of several failed attempts to cajole her conservative colleagues.

Ms. Connolly, a professor of women’s studies at the University of Wyoming, had forged friendships and close working relationships with many Republican colleagues, but to at least a few of them she was still a source of discomfort.

This year, one legislator approached Ms. Connolly and told her, “I love you, but I don’t want to know anything about your personal life,” which that legislator called “offensive.”

“I had to walk away,” Ms. Connolly said, “and say, ‘I am not offensive.’ ”

Ms. Connolly found allies among several moderate Republicans — critical support in a chamber with 52 Republicans and eight Democrats. The two biggest newspapers in the state endorsed the measure. And it passed a committee vote, 7 to 2.

When it came time to argue the measure on the floor of the Wyoming House, the bill’s supporters decided that their best hope was to let its Republican supporters do the talking. Ms. Connolly and the other Democrats sat quietly.

It was defeated by a vote of 35 to 24.

Despite the loss, to some it was a sign that things were changing. Slowly, but changing.

The Rev. Dee Lundberg, the openly gay pastor of the United Church of Christ in Casper, has been called Satan’s spawn at least once since coming to Wyoming in 2008, and she said she had been treated coldly at times by the city’s ministerial groups. But during last summer’s rodeo parade, the church flew a big rainbow flag on the back of its trailer and, Ms. Lundberg said, “only got flipped off once.”

“It’s a slow crawl,” she said. “But every year there’s been a teeny tiny bit of progress. A generation from now, it’ll be a nonissue.”

    In Conservative Wyoming, Signs of a Thaw on Same-Sex Marriage,
    NYT, 20.6.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/01/us/
    in-conservative-wyoming-signs-of-a-thaw-on-same-sex-marriage.html

Delaware, Continuing a Trend,

Becomes the 11th State

to Allow Same-Sex Unions

May 7, 2013
The New York Times
By ERIK ECKHOLM

Delaware on Tuesday became the 11th state to permit same-sex marriage, the latest in a string of victories for those working to extend marital rights to gay and lesbian couples.

The marriage bill passed the State Senate by a vote of 12 to 9 Tuesday afternoon.

“It’s a great day in Delaware,” said Gov. Jack Markell, a Democrat, who signed it within minutes of passage before an overjoyed crowd of activists. “I am signing this bill now because I do not intend to make any of you wait one moment longer.”

Same-sex couples will be eligible for marriage licenses on July 1.

Delaware adopted same-sex marriage just five days after a similar decision in Rhode Island and after ballot-box victories last fall in Maine, Maryland and Washington.

During three hours of emotional debate before the vote Tuesday, State Senator Karen Peterson, a Democrat, said she had lived with a female partner for 24 years, and she challenged opponents of extending marriage to gay couples. “If my happiness somehow demeans or diminishes your marriage, then you need to work on your marriage,” she said, eliciting cheers and laughter.

A Republican opponent of the bill, Senator Greg Lavelle, said before the vote, “We won’t fully understand the impact of this legislation for years to come.” Mr. Lavelle, the minority whip, said it was “strange” to “have to defend traditional marriage that we have known for thousands of years.”

In Maine, Maryland and Washington in November, same-sex marriage won in state referendums for the first time. In eight other states, now including Delaware, and in the District of Columbia it has been adopted by legislatures or required by court decisions.

Public opinion on the issue is shifting quickly, with polls showing that a majority of Americans support allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry.

“The momentum continues,” said Evan Wolfson, president of Freedom to Marry, a New York-based advocacy group that aided the campaign in Delaware.

Gay rights groups are hopeful that same-sex marriage will pass soon in Minnesota, where House members are expected to consider it this week, and in Illinois, where the Senate has approved a bill but a vote has not been scheduled in the House.

Short of a sweeping decision by the Supreme Court that same-sex marriage is a right, change could come more slowly in the coming years. Thirty states have adopted constitutional amendments limiting marriage to a man and a woman — measures that can be reversed only with public ballots.

“We’re not discouraged,” said Brian Brown, president of the National Organization for Marriage, which has helped finance opposition to same-sex marriage proposals across the country.

“The states that have passed same-sex marriage are deep-blue liberal states,” Mr. Brown said, arguing that his opponents usually find it easier to win in legislatures than in popular votes.

Both sides are waiting for the Supreme Court to announce two decisions in June that could alter the marriage landscape.

In one case, the court will decide whether the federal government should recognize same-sex marriage in states where it is legal. In the other, it will decide the fate of California’s Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage in the state after a court had declared it a legal right.

Rita K. Farrell contributed reporting from Dover, Del.

    Delaware, Continuing a Trend, Becomes the 11th State to Allow Same-Sex Unions,
    NYT, 7.5.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/08/us/delaware-to-allow-same-sex-marriage.html

Why I Am Signing Marriage Equality Into Law

May 1, 2013
The New York Times
By LINCOLN CHAFEE

PROVIDENCE, R.I.

ON Thursday, the Rhode Island House of Representatives is expected to approve legislation to extend the right to marry to all Rhode Islanders, regardless of sexual orientation. I plan to sign the Marriage Equality Act into law immediately after the vote, on the steps of the Rhode Island State House, overlooking downtown Providence. This is the same spot where, in my 2011 inaugural address, I called for Rhode Island to embrace marriage equality.

Signing the bill will be gratifying for many reasons. When I first defended gay marriage in 2004, as a Republican United States senator, most of my party colleagues were extreme in their opposition. In fact, to draw a line in the sand, they scheduled a vote on a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage in June 2006 — just before the height of a campaign season.

In the end, only six Republican senators joined me in opposing the amendment: Susan Collins, Judd Gregg, John McCain, Olympia Snowe, Arlen Specter and John E. Sununu. Of those, only Mr. McCain and Ms. Collins remain in the Senate. Even many of those Republicans opposing a constitutional ban avoided taking a position on gay marriage by saying it was an issue best left to the states. But I went further and announced my support for full marriage equality.

I was one of only four members of the entire Senate to take that stand, along with Senators Ron Wyden, Edward M. Kennedy and Russell Feingold — three of the most socially liberal members of the chamber at the time. Hardly common company for a Republican.

As it turned out, I did lose office in 2006, as part of the general rejection of Republican leadership that year. But I was elected governor as an independent in 2010, and I was proud to see that my stand on gay marriage stood up well over the years.

A historic realignment is happening all around us, as Americans from all walks of life realize that this is the right thing to do. It is occurring both inside and outside of politics, through conversations at the office and over kitchen tables, and at different speeds in different parts of the country. But once the people have spoken, politics should do its part to make the change efficient and constructive.

Much of the argument for and against gay marriage has revolved around the morality of the issue. Each side feels intensely that its position is more righteous than the other side’s. I personally feel that Rhode Island is a better state, and America is a better country, when we are as inclusive as possible.

But over the last few years, as governor, I have been impressed by another argument, one that is less connected to convictions of personal morality, and one that ought to unite all Rhode Islanders. No issue is more important to my state than job creation. Rhode Island was badly battered by the recession of 2008, but we are moving in the right direction. Jobs are the only way forward — we need to keep the ones we have, and we need to create new ones.

There are good signs — our unemployment rate has just undergone the largest yearly drop since 1985 — but one needless obstacle to our recovery remains. Rhode Island is part of a highly regional economy, with the other New England states and New York in constant competition with us for innovative companies, and particularly for the young, open-minded individuals who are close to the heartbeat of the new digital economy. In our small cluster of states, it is relatively easy for a company or a person to cross a border seeking a more favorable climate. And in recent years Rhode Island has been an outlier among our surrounding states: we are the only one prohibiting same-sex couples from marrying.

Many experts have found evidence of a strong correlation between tolerance and prosperity, particularly in high-tech sectors. One of them, the author Richard Florida, has identified the “three T’s” — talent, technology and tolerance — as the fundamental basis for the growth of new economies.

With a high concentration of outstanding colleges and universities, Rhode Island certainly has the talent. The technology is there as well, with our state’s broadband speed and coverage ranked among the nation’s best. The Beacon Hill Institute’s most recent State Competitiveness Report also placed Rhode Island fifth among all states in the technology category. Now we are poised to adopt the third and final T: tolerance.

The point is not simply that we are welcoming to gay people, though we are. It is that we want to welcome everyone. The talented workers who are driving the new economy — young, educated and forward-looking — want to live in a place that reflects their values. They want diversity, not simply out of a sense of justice, but because diversity makes life more fun. Why would any state turn away the people who are most likely to create the economies of the 21st century?

I have been heartened in recent months to see members of my old party coming around on marriage equality, including the entire Republican caucus in the Rhode Island Senate — the first time a caucus of either party has been unanimous in its support. That reflects sound political judgment, and some values that are at least as Republican as they are Democratic, including a belief in marriage as an institution and a desire to keep government out of our personal lives.

The push for equality will continue to grow stronger in statehouses, courthouses and polling places in every state in America. This is, by and large, a generational issue, not a geographic one. Even in the reddest states, the rising generations are far more tolerant than their parents and grandparents. As this shift continues, marriage equality will inevitably become law in more and more states. The states that cling to their old prohibitions will then be viewed as the outliers. Like Rhode Island in recent years, they will be seen as islands of old thinking.

This is also true, more broadly, at the national level. The United States is at a competitive disadvantage in attracting skilled workers to fill high-level jobs in technology, finance and health care, as noted by industry leaders and Wall Street executives at Monday’s annual “Out on the Street” conference. It is my hope that the Supreme Court will choose to overturn the Defense of Marriage Act, and that my fellow governors will lobby their Congressional delegations to address our country’s discriminatory policies at the federal level.

So tomorrow, when I sign the Marriage Equality Act into law, I will be thinking of the Rhode Islanders who have fought for decades simply to be able to marry the person they love. I will be thinking of how Rhode Island is upholding its legacy as a place founded on the principles of tolerance and diversity. But I will also be thinking, as all governors must, about the economy. With marriage equality becoming law tomorrow night in Rhode Island, we are sending a clear message that we are open for business, and that all are welcome. I hope that leaders in capitals across the country — including Washington — will soon realize that marriage equality is an issue where doing the right thing and the smart thing are one and the same.

Lincoln Chafee, an independent, is the governor of Rhode Island

and was a United States senator from 1999 to 2007.

    Why I Am Signing Marriage Equality Into Law, NYT, 1.5.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/01/opinion/
    why-i-am-signing-marriage-equality-into-law-in-rhode-island.html

Rhode Island Senate Passes Gay Marriage Bill

April 24, 2013
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — Rhode Island is on a path to becoming the 10th state to allow gay and lesbian couples to marry after a landmark vote in the state's Senate on Wednesday.

The Senate passed gay marriage legislation by a comfortable 26-12 margin, following a House vote of approval in January. The bill must now return to the House for a largely procedural vote, likely next week, but the celebration began Wednesday.

Hundreds of people filled the Statehouse with cheers following the vote.

"I grew up in Rhode Island and I'd like to retire in Rhode Island," said Annie Silvia, 61, who now lives with her partner of 30 years just across the border in North Attleboro, Mass. "No. 10 is a nice round number, but I'd like it to be bigger. Fifty sounds good to me."

Heavily Catholic Rhode Island is the last remaining New England state without gay marriage. Marriage legislation has been introduced in the state for nearly two decades, only to languish on the legislative agenda.

Supporters mounted a renewed push this year, and the Senate vote was seen as the critical test after the House easily passed the bill. Gov. Lincoln Chafee, an independent, called Wednesday's vote historic.

"I'm very much looking forward to signing this," he told The Associated Press as he congratulated supporters.

The first gay marriages in Rhode Island could take place Aug. 1, when the legislation would take effect. Civil unions would no longer be available to same-sex couples as of that date, though the state would continue to recognize existing civil unions. Lawmakers approved civil unions two years ago, though few couples have sought them.

Hundreds of opponents also gathered at the Statehouse for the vote, singing hymns and holding signs as the Senate deliberated. Rev. David Rodriguez, a Providence minister, said he was disappointed by the vote. He said he planned to continue to stand up for traditional marriage.

"Marriage between a man and a woman is what God wanted," he said. "We will continue to do what we know how to do: Keep praying and preaching."

The Roman Catholic Church was the bill's most significant opponent. During the Senate's emotional debate several senators said they struggled mightily, weighing their personal religious beliefs against stories they heard from gay constituents or their families.

Sen. Maryellen Goodwin, D-Providence, said she lost sleep over her vote but decided, despite opposition from the Catholic Church, to vote "on the side of love."

"I'm a practicing Catholic. I'm proud to be a Catholic," she said, adding that it was the personal stories of gays, lesbians and their families in her district who convinced her. "I struggled with this for days, for weeks. It's certainly not an easy vote."

Opponents to the bill tried unsuccessfully to send the question to the voters as a ballot referendum. After that failed, Sen. Harold Metts, D-Providence, told his colleagues that he couldn't go against his religious convictions and that residents in his community are more concerned about other matters.

"My constituents are more concerned with bread-and-butter issues," he said. "They want food on the table. They want their kids to get a good education."

The Rhode Island legislation states that religious institutions may set their own rules regarding who is eligible to marry within the faith and specifies that no religious leader is obligated to officiate at any marriage ceremony and no religious group is required to provide facilities or services related to a gay marriage.

While ministers already cannot be forced to marry anyone, the exemption helped assuage some senators' concerns and ease the bill's passage this year.

Delaware could be the next state to approve gay marriage. Legislation legalizing same-sex marriage narrowly passed the Delaware House on Tuesday and now heads to that state's Senate for consideration.

Two years after gay marriage legislation foundered in Rhode Island, supporters regrouped and this year mounted an aggressive and coordinated campaign that included organized labor, religious leaders, business owners and leaders including Chafee and Providence Mayor Angel Taveras.

The bill's chances improved further when Senate President Teresa Paiva Weed said she would allow the bill to move forward, despite her opposition to gay marriage. The Newport Democrat voted no on Wednesday.

Earlier this week, the Senate's five Republicans announced they would support the measure. Senate Minority Leader Dennis Algiere, R-Westerly, said the decision came down to core Republican principles.

"This is an issue of fairness, equality and civil rights," Algiere said. "Those are our values, and we stand by them."

House Speaker Gordon Fox, D-Providence, who is gay, had vowed to hold a vote on gay marriage early in the session. He said his chamber will hold a Tuesday hearing on the small changes made to the bill in the Senate. A final vote is tentatively scheduled for Thursday.

Rep. Frank Ferri, D-Warwick, who also is gay and lobbied for gay marriage before becoming a lawmaker himself, said it will be a vote to savor.

"After all these years, all these setbacks, all the hearings, we kept at it and we got closer and closer each year," he said. "I'm pumped. I'm excited. I'm thrilled. It's almost surreal."

Gay marriage is legal in nine states and Washington, D.C.

Rhode Island Senate Passes Gay Marriage Bill, NYT, 24.4.2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2013/04/24/us/ap-us-xgr-gay-marriage-ri.html

Alabama Legislature Passes

New Limits on Abortion Clinics

April 3, 2013
The New York Times
By ERIK ECKHOLM

The Alabama Legislature late Tuesday adopted stringent new regulations for abortion clinics that supporters called a step to protect women but that others called medically unnecessary and a disguised effort to force the closing of the state’s five abortion clinics.

The bill, like measures passed last year in Mississippi and Tennessee and last month in North Dakota, would require that doctors performing abortions have admitting privileges at local hospitals. Several of Alabama’s clinics rely on doctors who fly in from out of state, and given the hostile political climate it appears unlikely that nearby hospitals would grant them such privileges, said Nikema Williams, vice president for public policy of Planned Parenthood Southeast, which runs two of the clinics.

A similar admissions requirement passed last year in Mississippi would shut down that state’s only abortion clinic, but enforcement is stayed while a federal court decides whether the law amounts to an unjustified infringement on access to abortion.

Another clause in the Alabama bill would require clinics to meet the building, equipment and staffing standards of ambulatory surgery centers, which would require some clinics to spend millions of dollars altering buildings, and buying beds and monitoring equipment, for what they say is no relevant medical purpose.

The bill will be sent to Gov. Robert Bentley, a Republican, who previously said he planned to sign it. The American Civil Liberties Union said that if the bill becomes law it is likely to sue to block it.

The Alabama measure is part of a spreading effort by anti-abortion groups to tighten the regulation of abortion clinics. Such laws seldom receive the attention of more sweeping bans on early abortions, like those recently adopted in Arkansas and North Dakota to protect the fetus once a heartbeat is detected, but are increasingly disruptive, said Carole Joffe, a sociologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who studies abortion laws and support abortion rights.

“Those other laws may sound more drastic,” she said of the bans on early abortions, “but one assumes the Supreme Court will not uphold them.”

“It’s the more reasonable-sounding things like hallway width, or requiring a doctor to have local admitting privileges, that some courts will possibly approve,” Dr. Joffe said. “These have the capacity to be much more devastating to the ability to provide abortion care.”

Dan McConchie, vice president for legislative affairs of Americans United for Life, said stricter regulations of doctors and facilities represented a genuine effort “to ensure that if clinics are going to operate, they operate to high standards that protect women’s health and safety.”

His organization, with headquarters in Washington, has offered sample regulatory laws to state legislators, including those in Alabama.

“If you’re genuinely concerned about women’s health, then you want the doctor to have the ability to care for complications,” he said of the proposed rules.

Abortion rights supporters said that the endangered clinics in Mississippi and elsewhere had arrangements with local doctors and hospitals to handle emergencies, and that requiring the visiting doctor to have admitting privileges offered no extra safety.

Mr. McConchie replied, “These are the doctors performing the procedure, they are the ones with greatest knowledge of what happened” in an emergency.

Admitting-privilege requirements have been adopted so far in Arizona, Kansas, Mississippi, Tennessee, Utah and North Dakota, according to Elizabeth Nash, state issues manager with the Guttmacher Institute, a research group in Washington that supports abortion rights. The rule in Tennessee forced the closing last year of one of Knoxville’s two clinics.

Mr. Bentley, as he praised the proposed clinic and physician regulations on March 5, spoke of more than medical safety, saying, “We need to remember we are dealing with human life and this is what God expects us to do,” according to The Associated Press.

Ms. Williams of Planned Parenthood said, in an interview on Wednesday, “If the politicians really cared about the health and welfare of women, they’d be working with us to address the poor health outcomes for women in Alabama.”

Alabama Legislature Passes New Limits on Abortion Clinics, NYT, 3.4.2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/04/us/alabama-legislature-approves-abortion-clinic-limits.html

New Mexico Farmers Seek ‘Priority Call’

as Drought Persists

March 26, 2013
The New York Times
By FELICITY BARRINGER

CARLSBAD, N.M. — Just after the local water board announced this month that its farmers would get only one-tenth of their normal water allotment this year, Ronnie Walterscheid, 53, stood up and called on his elected representatives to declare a water war on their upstream neighbors.

“It’s always been about us giving up,” Mr. Walterscheid said, to nods. “I say we push back hard right now.”

The drought-fueled anger of southeastern New Mexico’s farmers and ranchers is boiling, and there is nowhere near enough water in the desiccated Pecos River to cool it down. Roswell, about 75 miles to the north, has somewhat more water available and so is the focus of intense resentment here. Mr. Walterscheid and others believe that Roswell’s artesian wells reduce Carlsbad’s surface water.

For decades, the regional status quo meant the northerners pumped groundwater and the southerners piped surface water. Now, amid the worst drought on record, some in Carlsbad say they must upend the status quo to survive. They want to make what is known as a priority call on the Pecos River.

A priority call, an exceedingly rare maneuver, is the nuclear option in the world of water. Such a call would try to force the state to return to what had been the basic principle of water distribution in the West: the lands whose owners first used the water — in most cases farmland — get first call on it in times of scarcity. Big industries can be losers; small farmers winners.

The threat of such a move reflects the political impact of the droughts that are becoming the new normal in the West. “A call on the river is a call for a shakeout,” explained Daniel McCool, a University of Utah political scientist and author of “River Republic: The Fall and Rise of America’s Rivers.”

“It’s not going to be farmers versus environmentalists or liberals versus conservatives,” he said. “It’s going to be the people who have water versus the people who don’t.” And, he said, the have-nots will outnumber the haves.

Dudley Jones, the manager for the Carlsbad Irrigation District said that water law and allocation practice have long diverged. “We have it in the state Constitution: First in time, first in right. But that’s not how it’s practiced.” In New Mexico’s political pecking order, his alfalfa farmers, despite senior priority rights dating back 100 years, have little clout. The state water authorities, he said, “are not going to cut out the city.”

“They’re not going to cut out the dairy industry,” he added. “They’re not going to cut off the oil and gas industry, because that’s economic development. So we’re left with a dilemma — the New Mexico water dilemma.”

A priority call, said Dr. McCool, “will glaringly demonstrate how unfair, how anachronistic the whole water law edifice is.”

He added, “The all-or-nothing dynamic of prior appropriation instantly sets up conflict. I get all of mine, and you get nothing.”

Despite the support Mr. Walterscheid got from two of the Carlsbad Irrigation District’s five members, however, the March 12 meeting produced not a priority call, but an ultimatum: The Legislature should give Carlsbad $2.5 million to tide it over, or the water district will make the call and start a traumatic legal and scientific battle.

The prior appropriation system on the Pecos has its beginnings in the late 19th century. Its waters flow about 925 miles from the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in northern New Mexico, ending up in the Rio Grande in Texas. It has been a focus of conflict. Texas, saying upstream users were taking its share, won a 1987 Supreme Court ruling guaranteeing deliveries under the Pecos River Compact.

After the ruling, which was signed by the feuding water districts, Roswell took steps to conserve water, including putting meters on wells, limiting withdrawals, allowing five-year averaging of water use and buying out some farmers. At the Pecos Valley Artesian Conservancy District in Roswell, officials take pride in this foresight and maintain that they are not cheating Carlsbad.

“If we turned off every one of our pumps today, they wouldn’t see any more water,” said Aron Balok, the district’s manager. Nonetheless, the bounty of the Roswell-Artesia aquifer, which has produced a robust economy, including abundant dairies, an oil refinery and the West’s biggest mozzarella plant, gives rise to “just plain jealousy” in Carlsbad, he said.

“If the priority call were executed today,” Mr. Balok said, “the refinery would shut down. The cheese plant would shut down. The dairies would shut down. To what end? It wouldn’t make water appear.” The agreement made to settle the dispute with Texas was supposed to stop such brinkmanship. But, he said, “Nobody ever foresaw it being this dry for this long.”

How dry is it? In 2012, parts of the riverbed were dry for 77 days, said Mike Hamman, the area manager for the federal Bureau of Reclamation in Albuquerque. In 2011, with the drought sending feed prices up, the Clovis Livestock auction house, the region’s biggest, sold 144,000 head of cattle, 20 percent above average. “Some herds have sold out,” said the president, Charlie Rogers. Most ranchers have reduced their herds to 25 percent of their previous size, he said. Hay, he said, costs too much.

Higher prices, however, did not offset the losses that hay farmers like Mark Weems and Billy Grandi in Carlsbad suffered when they could not water their fields. Mr. Weems said he had to sell 22 acres to make payments on his farm and equipment. The buyer: an oil-related company that wanted the water rights.

As for Brantley Lake, the nearest reservoir, “Two months ago it looked like you could drive a four-wheeler across it,” Mr. Weems said. Mr. Grandi added, “If the drought continues, a lot of farmers will just have to sell out.”

Mr. Hamman understands that fear. “If indeed we are moving into a new climate regime that is going to limit the ability to continue the status quo,” he said “we may have to do something different — reallocate the system, or make adjustments to existing settlements.”

The climate and the economy on which existing compacts were based may have fundamentally changed. In the West, “the 1 percent of the economy that is farming takes close to 80 percent of the water,” Dr. McCool said. The Pecos feud, he said, is a prelude to wars on rivers like the Colorado, which provides water to more than 20 million people. A recent federal study showed that the Colorado will not have enough water to satisfy existing claims.

In a shakeout, farmers cannot prevail, Dr. McCool argued. “Let’s see, we could dry up some hay farms or we could dry up Las Vegas. Which one is it going to be? It’s going to be the new economy of the West with the focus on recreation and tourism and hunting.”

“There will be farming ghost towns,” he said.

    New Mexico Farmers Seek ‘Priority Call’ as Drought Persists, NYT, 26.3.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/27/us/
    new-mexico-farmers-push-to-be-made-a-priority-in-drought.html

States Gone Wild

March 24, 2013
The New York Times
By BILL KELLER

NO sooner had Arkansas adopted the country’s most regressive abortion law earlier this month — a ban after about 12 weeks of pregnancy — than North Dakota lowered its limit to as early as six weeks. Both measures are expected to be ruled unconstitutional, but here’s my question: Is North Dakota that much more conservative than, say, South Dakota, where abortions are permitted up to 24 weeks?

Colorado has now decriminalized possession of small amounts of marijuana. Is Colorado really more libertarian than neighboring Wyoming, where possession can still get you a year in prison?

Pennsylvania allows same-sex couples to adopt children. Are Pennsylvanians so much more enlightened than the citizens of Ohio, where gay parents have hardly any rights?

Maryland has just decided to repeal the death penalty. Good for Maryland. But why not Delaware, next door, where the 17 inmates on death row are still biding time until their lethal injections?

And don’t get me started on gun laws. South Dakota is currently leading the race to the bottom by arming teachers in their classrooms, but just wait; the pandering to the gun lobby is ferociously competitive.

There is nothing especially new about states going their own way. We fought a civil war, after all. And we have become accustomed to categorizing states as red or blue, based on their electoral choices. But it feels as if every news cycle brings another seemingly random example of a state veering off the mainstream, especially on these issues of personal liberty. What’s up with that?

In recent years our disjointed political system has gotten considerable attention from journalists and academics seeking to explain why our supposedly indivisible nation seems so intractably divided. At the level of Congress, the diagnosis is pretty well understood: gerrymandering of Congressional districts makes incumbents safe in general elections but vulnerable in party primaries, where the most passionate voters decide the outcome. So the incumbents (these days, especially the Republicans) avoid any sign of reasonableness that could be used against them in a primary. The same thing is happening to some extent at the state level, but none of this fully explains the wild disparities.

Bill Bishop’s 2008 book “The Big Sort” attracted high-profile attention (Bill Clinton touted it) with its hypothesis that like-minded Americans were clustering in communities where they reinforced one another’s prejudices. According to this theory, Americans choose neighborhoods they find compatible: “pockets of like-minded citizens that have become so ideologically inbred that we don’t know, can’t understand, and can barely conceive of ‘those people’ who live just a few miles away.”

Bishop’s book was provocative, and was pummeled by some political scientists for relying too much on data from presidential elections. Because they offer voters a stark either-or choice, presidential elections overstate the partisan divide. When you look at voter registration or opinion polling, the fastest-growing political allegiance is not red or blue but “independent.” And while there are anecdotal accounts of, for example, gay couples choosing homes in communities that respect their rights, there’s not much evidence that deliberate ideological self-segregation is a widespread phenomenon.

Dante Chinni and James Gimpel, in a 2010 book called “Our Patchwork Nation,” subdivided America into a dozen categories, with special emphasis on the urban-rural divide, to explain why different places go in such different directions. Gimpel, who teaches at the University of Maryland, told me that rural and small-town residents feel belittled by “what they perceive as the cultural imperialism of big cities.” They hunker around their Fox News, which feeds their resentment.

He is surely right about rural alienation, but, as Gimpel acknowledges, America is increasingly neither urban nor rural; it is suburban, or urban-ish. The Patchwork formula doesn’t fully explain why Iowa, one of our least urbanized states, has accepted same-sex marriage, or why voters in the most urbanized state, California, voted to reject it.

I heard a more satisfying if somewhat depressing explanation for the seemingly random eruptions of political idiosyncrasy from Samuel Abrams, who teaches politics at Sarah Lawrence and Stanford. Abrams, who has spent the last decade or so researching our political habits, begins with the evidence that most Americans are simply not engaged in local politics, except perhaps on pocketbook issues. In the absence of public attention, motivated, well-financed and sometimes extreme elites have captured the lawmaking process in many state capitals. Legislatures are vulnerable to (and often populated by) the most ardent believers in a cause, the ones who care enough to take the time, raise the money, turn out on Election Day and lobby relentlessly.

“People who participate in state and local government tend not to be representative of the masses at all,” Abrams told me. “They tend to be highly engaged political elites — 15 percent of the population who think they’re fighting this culture war. They’ll see an opening. They’ll see a judge, they’ll see a legislature that looks amenable to something, and they’ll try to push it through and build a groundswell around that.”

This dynamic applies to both liberals and conservatives, by the way, although a variety of studies show Republicans have pulled much further to the right than Democrats have to the left.

To this mix of public indifference and activist opportunism, people who study our odd political folkways add several other contributing factors:

Bill Bishop of “Big Sort” fame pointed out to me that there are fewer divided state legislatures — one house Republican, one house Democratic — than at any time in decades. State legislatures are increasingly partisan monocultures, given to herd-like behavior. “Mixed company moderates,” he said. (Except when, as in today’s Washington, it paralyzes.)

Morris Fiorina of Stanford says that state legislatures change hands more often than they used to, so lawmakers “believe that they may have one shot to accomplish their policy goals before they lose power. They go for it.”

Michael Dimock of Pew Research adds that the drastic downsizing of statehouse news coverage means state lawmakers operate with less accountability.

So in Arkansas the amendment outlawing abortion at 12 weeks was not the product of a popular groundswell, but largely the triumph of a single, entrepreneurial Tea Party state senator, who whisked the measure through a newly Republican, mostly inexperienced Legislature with virtually no debate. As Jay Barth, a politics professor at Hendrix College in Arkansas, notes, thanks to strict term limits the Legislature in Little Rock doesn’t develop strong leadership and discipline; it is susceptible to populist charisma — from right and left, but these days mostly right.

Of course, it helps if those with an agenda have money behind them. In Colorado, liberals like billionaire Peter Lewis sensed an opportunity, outspent opponents 10 to 1, and got an amendment to legalize marijuana.

Sometimes, as in the growing momentum for gay marriage, states catch a changing national tide. Sometimes, as in Arizona’s reactionary anti-immigrant laws, states seem to be gasping the last gasp of a waning trend.

When we disapprove of the outcome — in my case, those extremist anti-abortion laws — we call it opportunism or special-interest politics. When legislatures bypass public opinion and do something we admire — in my case, Gov. Martin O’Malley’s successful push to abolish the death penalty in Maryland, where 60 percent of voters favor executions — we call it leadership.

Does all of this make for a healthy democracy? If 80 percent of the electorate is sitting on the sidelines, that’s a recipe for demagogy and cynicism. But maybe what we’re seeing is states performing a useful role as laboratories of policy. These experiments may produce smart ideas that deserve to be replicated at the national level: the Massachusetts health care law, for example, which inspired Obamacare. Or the state labs may cook up poisons — Arizona’s anti-immigrant statutes, or those new, restrictive abortion laws — and you pray that Congress or the courts will find an antidote.

States Gone Wild, NYT, 24.3.2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/25/opinion/keller-states-gone-wild.html

Colorado Reels

After Killing of Top Official Over Prisons

March 20, 2013
The New York Times
By JACK HEALY

DENVER — As Colorado’s governor signed a hard-won package of gun control measures on Wednesday, officials across the state were reeling from the seemingly inexplicable shooting death of the state’s prisons chief, who was gunned down at the front door of his home.

The killing of Tom Clements, a man described by friends and colleagues as a dedicated and thoughtful public servant, left state officials shaken and grasping for answers on Wednesday. State troopers increased security around the State Capitol, and some state workers said Mr. Clements’s death had put them on edge.

The state police said they had known of no specific threats against Mr. Clements before 8:30 p.m. Tuesday, when someone approached his house in the pine-fringed hills of the town of Monument, near Colorado Springs, and shot him as he answered the door. Into Wednesday night, investigators were still searching for any trace of his killer, but said they had no suspects or motive.

Officials with the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office said they were looking for a “boxy” two-door car that had been spotted Tuesday night in the neighborhood, its engine running but with nobody inside.

They said Mr. Clements’s post, overseeing more than 20,000 inmates in Colorado’s prisons and parole system, might have made him a target.

Among his most prominent recent decisions, he denied a request this month from a prominent Saudi-born prisoner convicted of sexually abusing his housekeeper to serve the duration of his sentence in Saudi Arabia.

Mr. Clements’s death came just hours before Colorado’s governor, John W. Hickenlooper, signed a bitterly divisive package of gun-control measures into law, capping weeks of tumultuous and emotional debate about gun ownership and violence in a state scarred by two mass shootings.

The news about Mr. Clements rippled through the Capitol, where lawmakers and crime victims had gathered to watch Mr. Hickenlooper sign the gun bills. Staff members asked one another, “Are you O.K.?” Tearful elected officials hugged and shared memories of Mr. Clements, 58, recalling his dedication in serving Colorado after a career with Missouri’s Department of Corrections.

Mr. Hickenlooper’s voice cracked as he spoke about Mr. Clements’s death. He called the shooting “an act of intimidation” that had cut down a thoughtful and deliberative man who had tried to reform Colorado’s prisons by reducing the number of inmates in solitary confinement.

“He did his job quietly and intently,” Mr. Hickenlooper said, joined by his cabinet and elected officials. “We are all grieving.” During his two years as head of Colorado’s prison system, Mr. Clements won praise from nearly everyone he met, from the governor to corrections officers, defense lawyers to former gang members.

The Rev. Leon Kelly, an antigang advocate who works to keep parolees from returning to prison, said Mr. Clements had embraced programs intended to prevent recidivism. Mr. Clements charmed Mr. Kelly’s 84-year-old mother so much that she put a photograph of him and her son on her dresser.

“He knew the job that needed to be done,” Mr. Kelly said. “He just jumped in with both feet hitting the ground.”

Mr. Clements held town-hall-style meetings with prison staffs. He tried to address the grievances of working long hours in a sometimes dangerous job. After he was seriously hurt in a bicycle accident, he climbed into a wheelchair last September to attend the funeral of a corrections officer who had been stabbed by an inmate.

Appointed by Mr. Hickenlooper in January 2011, Mr. Clements walked into a department facing budget cuts and a dwindling number of prisoners. He oversaw the closing of two prisons, a difficult process that can reverberate across communities that depend on the associated jobs and state money.

Mr. Hickenlooper said Mr. Clements had been supportive of the gun measures but was not “particularly active” during their emotional and contentious path toward passage.

The new laws require background checks for private gun sales in addition to the checks already mandated for purchases at shops and gun shows. They also ban ammunition magazines with more than 15 rounds, a feature that the governor said could turn “killers into killing machines.”

“If they’re slowed even for just a number of seconds, that allows someone to escape,” Mr. Hickenlooper said.

As he signed the bills, he was joined in his office by a handful of people who lost loved ones in shootings at Columbine High School in 1999, at an Aurora movie theater in July and at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in December.

“I started crying,” said Tom Mauser, who became a gun control advocate after his son Daniel was killed at Columbine.

Mr. Mauser wore a suit to the Capitol on Wednesday in a nod to the formality of the occasion. But on his feet were Daniel’s sneakers.

Dan Frosch contributed reporting.

Colorado Reels After Killing of Top Official Over Prisons, NYT, 20.3.2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/21/us/director-of-colorado-prisons-fatally-shot-at-home.html

Arizona’s Barrier to the Right to Vote

March 18, 2013
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Arizona’s Proposition 200, passed in 2004, prohibits local officials from registering any would-be voter who does not provide “satisfactory evidence of United States citizenship.” That requirement conflicts with the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, also known as the Motor Voter Act, which set up a national registration system for federal elections.

On Monday, the Supreme Court heard arguments about whether states have the power under the federal law to add restrictions to voter registration. They clearly do not. The justices should reject Arizona’s law as invalid and avoid recreating the problem that the federal law was intended to fix.

Congress sought to remedy the “complicated maze of laws and procedures” passed by state and local governments that kept 40 percent of eligible voters from registering. The 1993 law allows voters to sign up to vote in federal elections when they apply for a driver’s license or by mailing in a federal form on which they swear they are citizens under penalty of perjury. The law also says that a state must “accept and use the mail voter registration application form prescribed.” Arizona’s statute directly conflicts with the federal law by imposing the additional requirement of proof of citizenship.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit struck down the statute as being pre-empted by the federal law. Proposition 200’s purpose is to combat undocumented immigration, but the state produced no evidence of undocumented immigrants registering or voting in Arizona. As a brief from a group of state and local elections officials from around the country said, “Efforts by noncitizens to register and vote are exceedingly rare” and do not justify making it harder for voters to register. Arizona produced evidence that in 2005 and 2007, only 19 noncitizens registered to vote — out of 2,734,108 registered state voters.

In the same period, Arizona rejected the registrations of 31,550 people. Most of them — 87 percent of the Hispanics, 93 percent of the others — listed the United States as their birthplace. The recorder’s office in Arizona’s largest county said that most of those it rejected were citizens who lacked required identification.

The Constitution’s elections clause says that states shall prescribe “the times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives,” but that “Congress may at any time by law make or alter” those regulations. As long as Congress has acted within “the ample limits of the election clause’s grant of authority,” the Supreme Court has said, what Congress does in the realm of voting is paramount because “the framers envisioned a uniform national system.”

Congress’s explicit purpose was to strengthen this voting system by streamlining the process for registering to vote. The Supreme Court should strike down the unwarranted and conflicting Arizona law, which eviscerates the federal effort to extend the Constitution’s fundamental right to every eligible voter.

Arizona’s Barrier to the Right to Vote, NYT, 18.3.2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/19/opinion/arizonas-barrier-to-the-right-to-vote.html

Bill in North Dakota Bans Abortion

After Heartbeat Is Found

March 15, 2013
The New York Times
By ERIK ECKHOLM

Little more than a week after Arkansas adopted the country’s most stringent abortion limits, banning the procedure at 12 weeks of pregnancy, the North Dakota Legislature on Friday passed a more restrictive bill that would ban most abortions as early as 6 weeks into pregnancy.

The Legislature, which is dominated by Republicans, also passed a second measure that would ban abortions sought because of a genetic abnormality or to select the sex of the child.

Both bills must be signed by Gov. Jack Dalrymple, a Republican, to become law. As of Friday afternoon, the governor had not said whether he would do so.

No other state has barred abortions because of evidence that a fetus has a genetic defect like Down syndrome, which rises in incidence with maternal age, leading many pregnant women to seek tests for the disorder. Pennsylvania, Oklahoma and Arizona have all banned abortions for the purpose of gender selection.

National abortion rights groups, including the Center for Reproductive Rights, Planned Parenthood and the American Civil Liberties Union, condemned the measures that passed the North Dakota Senate on Friday, after previous approval by the House. These groups warned that if adopted, both measures would be declared unconstitutional by federal courts.

Under Supreme Court rulings, women have a right to an abortion until the fetus is viable outside the womb, generally around 24 weeks into pregnancy.

“We urge the governor to veto all of these bills to ensure that this personal and private decision can be made by a woman and her family, not politicians sitting in the Capitol,” said Jennifer Dalven, the director of the A.C.L.U.’s Reproductive Freedom Project.

One of the newly passed North Dakota bills outlaws abortions when a fetal heartbeat is “detectable” using “standard medical practice.” Heartbeats are often detectable at about 6 weeks, using an intrusive transvaginal ultrasound, or at about 10 to 12 weeks when using abdominal ultrasounds.

The bill does not specify a time threshold or whether doctors with a patient in the initial weeks of pregnancy must use the transvaginal probe. A proposed law in Virginia last year that would have required use of the transvaginal ultrasound caused a national outcry, and the bill was ultimately shelved. Arkansas declared a 12-week limit specifically to avoid that controversy.

But some experts said that doctors in North Dakota, which has only one clinic performing abortions, in Fargo, could face prosecution if they did not use the vaginal ultrasound when necessary to detect a heartbeat. Doctors who knowingly perform abortions in violation of the measure, if it is adopted, could be charged with a felony that carries a five-year prison sentence; the patients would not face criminal charges.

The law makes exceptions for abortion to save the life of the mother or for other severe medical emergencies, but not in cases of rape or incest.

In 2011, according to state data, 1,247 abortions were performed in North Dakota. If the ban becomes law, more than 75 percent of the procedures could be outlawed, according to Elizabeth Nash, a state issues manager with the Guttmacher Institute in Washington, a research group that supports abortion rights.

The early abortion ban was sponsored by Representative Bette Grande, a Republican from Fargo.

“A heartbeat is accepted by everyone as a sign of life,” she said in a blog posting on Tuesday as she argued that it was time for the Supreme Court to revisit the definition of viability.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 15, 2013

Because of an editing error,

an earlier version of this article incorrectly stated

when a blog post by Rep. Bette Grande was published.

The post appeared Tuesday, not Wednesday.

    Bill in North Dakota Bans Abortion After Heartbeat Is Found, NYT, 15.3.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/16/us/
    north-dakota-approves-bill-to-ban-abortions-after-heartbeat-is-found.html

After Rancorous Debate,

Colorado Senate Advances

Strict New Measures on Gun Control

March 9, 2013
The New York Times
By JACK HEALY

DENVER — Colorado took a major step late Friday toward enacting some of the toughest new gun measures that have been introduced since the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut touched off a national debate about gun control.

After more than 12 hours of emotional and bitterly divided debate, the Democratic-controlled State Senate gave preliminary approval to a package of gun bills. At its heart are measures that would require universal background checks for private gun sales and limit ammunition magazines to 15 rounds.

Other measures would create a fee for background checks; require those convicted of domestic abuse to surrender their firearms; and require residents applying for permits to carry concealed weapons to take in-person training classes, outlawing the handful of online-only courses now offered in the state.

If the bills win final approval — they must now survive a recorded vote from lawmakers this week — they would be Colorado’s first new firearms restrictions in more than a decade. Their passage in a state with a deep history and culture of hunting, sport shooting and gun ownership would also represent a significant victory for gun control advocates.

To Democrats, who now control both chambers of the Statehouse as well as the governor’s office, the measures are moderate solutions intended to stem a tide of gun violence and mass shootings, like the massacres at Columbine High School in 1999 and at an Aurora movie theater in July. Some Democrats spoke of being gun owners and hunters and said the new restrictions would not ban weapons or amount to the “gun grab” opponents warn of.

Unlike lawmakers in New York, Democrats here did not pursue a ban on assault-style rifles. And on Friday, they withdrew two bills that faced wavering support from fellow Democrats and unified opposition from Republicans. Those would have banned concealed weapons from college campuses and would have made some gun makers and dealers liable for deaths and injuries involving their firearms.

Republicans called the effort misguided and futile, saying the bills strip law-abiding gun owners of their Second Amendment rights while doing little to keep guns and bullets away from criminals. In speech after speech, hour after hour, they warned that the measures would drive businesses away, keep hunters at bay and ultimately be a political millstone for Democrats.

“I really believe this will represent an Alamo for freedom-loving Coloradans,” said Senator Greg Brophy, a Republican. “This is an immediate threat to them, and the backlash will be severe.”

Gov. John W. Hickenlooper, a Democrat, has said he will support the package.

Among those absent from the drama inside the State Capitol on Friday was Dave Hoover, a police sergeant whose nephew, A. J. Boik, was among the 12 people killed in Aurora. Since the shooting, Mr. Hoover has spoken out for new gun laws.

On Saturday morning, his feelings were bittersweet.

“You have to realize that none of this will ever bring back our family,” Mr. Hoover said. “We may have some responsible gun laws in our state now, but that doesn’t change what our family goes through every day. It’s good to see some change, and it’s good to see some people paying attention. It’s not going to do us any good. We’ve already gone through so much.”

    After Rancorous Debate,
    Colorado Senate Advances Strict New Measures on Gun Control,
    NYT, 9.3.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/us/colorado-senate-advances-strict-gun-control-measures.html

A State Backs Guns in Class for Teachers

March 8, 2013
The New York Times
By JOHN ELIGON

South Dakota became the first state in the nation to enact a law explicitly authorizing school employees to carry guns on the job, under a measure signed into law on Friday by Gov. Dennis Daugaard.

Passage of the law comes amid a passionate nationwide debate over arming teachers, stoked after 20 first graders died in an elementary school shooting in Newtown, Conn., in December. Shortly afterward, the National Rifle Association proposed a plan for armed security officers in every school, and legislation to allow school personnel to carry guns was introduced in about two dozen states. All those measures had stalled until now.

Several other states already have provisions in their laws — or no legal restrictions — that make it possible for teachers to possess guns in the classroom. In fact, a handful of school districts nationwide do have teachers who carry firearms. But South Dakota is the only known state with a statute that specifically authorizes teachers to possess a firearm in a K-12 school, according to Lauren Heintz, a research analyst at the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Representative Scott Craig, a freshman Republican in the South Dakota House who sponsored the bill, said he hoped the measure would shift the country’s discourse on school safety.

“Given the national attention to safety in schools, specifically in response to tragedies like in Connecticut, this is huge,” he said. He added that, hopefully, “dominoes will start to fall, people will see it’s reasonable, it’s safer than they think, it’s proactive and it’s preventive.”

The law leaves it up to school districts to decide whether to allow armed teachers. It remains to be seen, however, if many schools will permit guns in classrooms and whether the measure will reverberate nationwide. Mr. Daugaard, a Republican, said he did not think that many schools would take advantage of the option, but that it was important for them to have the choice available.

While many gun control advocates are horrified by the notion of guns in schools, Laura Cutilletta, a senior staff lawyer with the San Francisco-based Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, said that what South Dakota did would not spark a national trend. “For South Dakota to do this is less of a concern than if we saw it in Colorado or somewhere else like that,” she said, referring to states that have advocated for gun-control legislation.

Andrew Arulanandam, a spokesman for the National Rifle Association, said the group supported the bill and lobbied for it in the South Dakota Legislature. “There’s certainly not a one-size-fits-all approach to keeping our children safe in schools,” he said. “It’s incumbent upon state and local governments to formulate and implement a plan to keep students safe.”

The law says that school districts may choose to allow a school employee, a hired security officer or a volunteer to serve as a “sentinel” who can carry a firearm in the school. The school district must receive the permission of its local law enforcement agency before carrying out the program. The law requires the sentinels to undergo training similar to what law enforcement officers receive.

“I think it does provide the same safety precautions that a citizen expects when a law enforcement officer enters onto a premises,” Mr. Daugaard said in an interview. He added that this law was more restrictive than those in other states that permit guns in schools.

South Dakota is a state with deep roots in hunting, where children start learning how to shoot BB guns when they are 8, skeet shoot with shotguns by age 14 and enter target shooting contests with .22-caliber semiautomatic rifles.

“Our kids start hunting here when they’re preteens,” said Kevin Jensen, who supports the bill and is the vice president of the Canton School Board in South Dakota. “We know guns. We respect guns.”

Opponents, which included state associations representing school boards and teachers, said the bill was rushed, did not make schools safer and ignored other approaches to safety.

Wade Pogany, the executive director of the Associated School Boards of South Dakota, said he believed more discussion was necessary before passing this bill. “If firearms are the best option that we have, I’ll stand down,” Dr. Pogany said. “But let’s not come into a heated, emotional debate about this and say this is the answer. This is premature.”

Supporters say the measure is important in a state where some schools are many miles away from emergency responders, who can take upward of 30 or 45 minutes to reach some areas.

But Don Kirkegaard, the superintendent of the Meade School District, which encompasses 11 schools over 3,200 square miles, said that although some of his institutions were isolated, he did not see any evidence to suggest that they would be safer if teachers were armed. Mr. Kirkegaard said that schools in more populated areas have been most affected by shootings.

“The likelihood of it happening in our rural attendant centers is not nearly as probable as it is in the urban city areas,” he said.

But his school district, like many others across the state and country, does employ an armed “resource officer” affiliated with the police who bounces between the schools. Opponents of the legislation said they would be more comfortable with providing resources to districts so they could hire law enforcement to protect the schools.

It is unclear how many school districts nationwide have teachers carrying guns. Hawaii and New Hampshire do not have any prohibition against carrying weapons on school property for those with concealed carry permits. Texas’s law against carrying weapons in school includes an exemption for people whom the school authorizes.

The Harrold Independent School District in Texas began allowing teachers to carry weapons in 2008. Utah is also said to have teachers who carry guns in the classroom, though they do not have to disclose it publicly. Supporters point out that there have been no accidents in states where teachers do carry guns.

But a couple of recent episodes could leave some people unsettled about firearms in schools.

A maintenance worker at an East Texas school that plans to allow its staff to carry guns accidentally shot himself during firearms safety training last month. And a police officer assigned to patrol a high school in a town north of New York City after the Newtown shooting was suspended this week because he accidentally fired his gun in the hallway during school hours.

A State Backs Guns in Class for Teachers, NYT, 8.3.2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/09/us/south-dakota-gun-law-classrooms.html

Arkansas Adopts a Ban

on Abortions After 12 Weeks

March 6, 2013
The New York Times
By ERIK ECKHOLM

Arkansas adopted what is by far the country’s most restrictive ban on abortion on Wednesday — at 12 weeks of pregnancy, when a fetal heartbeat can typically be detected by abdominal ultrasound.

The law, the sharpest challenge yet to Roe v. Wade, was passed by the newly Republican-controlled legislature over the veto of Gov. Mike Beebe, a Democrat, who called it “blatantly unconstitutional.” The State Senate voted Tuesday to override his veto and the House followed suit on Wednesday, with several Democrats joining the Republican majority.

The law contradicts the limit established by Supreme Court decisions, which give women a right to an abortion until the fetus is viable outside the womb, usually around 24 weeks into pregnancy, and abortion rights groups promised a quick lawsuit to block it. Even some anti-abortion leaders called the measure a futile gesture.

Adoption of the law, called the Human Heartbeat Protection Act, is the first statewide victory for a restless emerging faction within the anti-abortion movement that has lost patience with the incremental whittling away at abortion rights — a strategy used by groups like National Right to Life and the Catholic Church while they wait for a more sympathetic Supreme Court.

“When is enough enough?” asked the bill’s sponsor in the legislature, Senator Jason Rapert, a Republican, who compared the more than 50 million abortions in the United States since the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision to the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide. “It’s time to take a stand.”

But abortion rights groups and many legal experts, including some in the anti-abortion movement, say the law so deeply contradicts existing constitutional doctrine that it may quickly be voided.

“The 12-week ban actually bars abortion within the first trimester,” said Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights in New York. “It has no chance of surviving a court challenge.”

The center and the American Civil Liberties Union have vowed to bring a case in federal court, aiming to head off the law before it takes effect, 90 days after the legislature adjourns in the next month or so.

Senator Rapert, who cited strong backing for his bill from conservative evangelical groups like the Arkansas Family Council, hopes the law will start a groundswell of support. “We crafted a bill that apparently has the ability to stand the test in courts and change abortion policy in our nation coast to coast,” he said in an interview this week.

But so far, more radical measures elsewhere have fallen short. In Mississippi a so-called personhood amendment lost at the polls, while in Ohio a “fetal heartbeat” bill resembling that in Arkansas was defeated in the legislature, in part because it was opposed by one of the state’s leading anti-abortion groups, Ohio Right to Life.

Those proposals have caused soul-searching and dissension within some of the largest anti-abortion groups, with many traditional leaders expressing skepticism or opposition to such sweeping challenges to constitutional law until a more conservative Supreme Court seems ready to scrap the legacy of Roe v. Wade.

Much like Tea Party activists, who have caused exasperation among Republican leaders with demands to slash budgets almost indiscriminately, the abortion rebels feel there is little to lose by pushing for aggressive curbs and testing the courts. But other anti-abortion leaders say that strategy, exemplified by the Arkansas law, is likely to backfire, causing courts to endorse the current limits and wasting resources that could bring real, if smaller, gains.

“As much as we would like to protect the unborn at that point, it is futile and it won’t save any babies,” said James Bopp Jr., a prominent anti-abortion lawyer who opposed the Arkansas law. Mr. Bopp, who lives in Indiana, is general counsel of National Right to Life.

He said that lower courts are virtually certain to affirm existing Supreme Court rulings and, like many other legal experts, he predicted that the Supreme Court was very unlikely to agree to hear such a case.

Mr. Rapert originally proposed setting the Arkansas ban even earlier, at about six weeks after a woman’s last menstrual period. But the nascent fetal heartbeat can be detected at that point only by using intrusive technology like a trans-vaginal ultrasound.

Wary of the national firestorm that erupted last year after Virginia tried to require the intrusive procedure, Mr. Rapert and his allies revised the bill to specify that a fetal heartbeat should be detected by abdominal ultrasound or other external methods, which are not feasible at six weeks.

The strategy of incrementally narrowing abortion rights has yielded results, especially since 2010, when Republicans gained control of many more states. Measures have been adopted by the dozens in the past few years, including waiting periods, parental consent for minors, ultrasound requirements and stringent regulations aimed at making it harder for abortion clinics to operate.

In Mississippi, a rule requiring doctors performing abortions to have visiting privileges at local hospitals threatens to close down the state’s only remaining abortion clinic, which relies on traveling doctors. A court decision on the measure is expected any day.

Ten states have pushed time limits for abortions down to 20 weeks into pregnancy on the theory, disputed by most medical experts, that a fetus can feel pain by then. Such laws have wider support in the anti-abortion movement. Arkansas adopted a 20-week ban over the governor’s veto last week, and most who supported it went on to vote for Mr. Rapert’s more stringent bill as well.

The 20-week laws also violate the existing standard of fetal viability. They are under legal challenge in Arizona and Georgia, and on Wednesday, a federal judge ruled the 20-week ban in Idaho to be unconstitutional, Reuters reported. But the laws are in effect in seven other states. Very few abortions take place so late in pregnancy, and those are often for serious medical reasons that may be permitted in any case.

By contrast, a 12-week ban would affect an estimated 12 percent to 15 percent of abortions nationwide, said Elizabeth Nash, state issues manager with the Guttmacher Institute, a research group in Washington that supports abortion rights. In Arkansas in 2011, 4,033 abortions were performed; 815 of them, or 20 percent, were at 12 weeks or more after the last menstrual period, according to state data. How many of these later procedures involved medical emergencies or cases of rape or incest — exceptions allowed under the new law — is not known.

The state currently has only one clinic, in Little Rock, that performs surgical abortions; a second, run by Planned Parenthood, offers medicinal abortions, which are done only within the first eight weeks of pregnancy.

The final approval of the bill on Wednesday was a surprisingly unemotional event, with the House consideration of the override taking only moments — less time than it took just before to recognize a college volleyball team.

With the outcome, at 55 votes to 33, a foregone conclusion in a state that has turned steadily to the right in recent years, two House Republican leaders spoke briefly in favor of the bill, and not a single legislator spoke against it.

Representative Ann V. Clemmer, the bill’s House sponsor, called it “a statement consistent with what Arkansas voters want.”

“It will be tested,” she said. “I’m O.K. with that. That’s the job of the courts.”

Abortion rights advocates, however, watched the legislation with chagrin.

“It sets Arkansas back several decades in the eyes of the nation and the world,” said Rita Sklar, director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas. “It shows an utter disregard for women and their ability to make important personal decisions about their own reproductive health.”

Steve Barnes contributed reporting.

Arkansas Adopts a Ban on Abortions After 12 Weeks, NYT, 6.3.2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/07/us/arkansas-adopts-restrictive-abortion-law.html

Bleeding the Borrower Dry

March 3, 2013
The New York Times

New York is one of 15 states that have banned the predatory, high-interest loans that payday lenders commonly use to pillage low-income borrowers. But offshore lenders increasingly get around state laws by issuing predatory loans over the Internet. Worse still, as the Times’s Jessica Silver-Greenberg reported recently, banks in the state are profiting from the loans by allowing the Internet lenders to automatically withdraw payments from the borrower’s account, in some cases without his or her permission. When the borrowers — or their lenders — overdraw on the accounts, the banks get to collect fat overdraft fees.

About 12 million borrowers turn to payday lenders each year. The loan model that lures them in is based on deception. Customers are told, for example, that they can borrow small amounts, perhaps a few hundred dollars, which they are supposed to repay in full within a short period, typically two weeks. The promotional material does not let on that the loans, which carry annual interest rates of 500 percent or more, are structured in a way that inevitably turns a short-term obligation into long-term debt.

A new study by the Pew Charitable Trusts finds, for example, that only about 14 percent of borrowers can afford to take enough out of their monthly budget to repay the average payday loan. Instead, average borrowers carry a debt for five months, during which time they pay repeated fees to renew the loan. By the fifth month, someone who borrowed $375 will have paid about $520 in interest alone. Many also resort to borrowing from another payday lender. Not surprisingly, payday borrowers are more likely than others to default on credit card debt, to file for bankruptcy or to lose their bank accounts because of abuse of overdraft privileges.

New York State passed one of the strongest anti-usury laws in the nation in 1976, making it a felony for lenders to charge in excess of 25 percent interest. Even so, New Yorkers are still preyed upon by out-of-state payday lenders, which collect payments through an automatic withdrawal process.

Under federal law, bank customers have a right to revoke a creditor’s automatic withdrawal privileges. They can also simply close an account whenever they choose. A federal lawsuit brought against JPMorgan Chase Bank by two customers in New York shows how difficult exercising these rights can be.

One plaintiff was besieged by payday lenders that had charged her an annual interest rate of nearly 800 percent — clearly illegal in New York — and continually tried to debit her bank account, triggering $34 overdraft fees. She asked the bank in March 2012 to close her account, but it remained open for two months, during which the lenders attempted to debit her some 55 times, ringing up $1,523 in overdraft and other fees.

Chase has promised to revisit its policies. But judging from consumer complaints nationally, this problem is not unique to New York. Congress and state governments need to crack down on these practices.

A bill pending in the Senate, known as the Safe Lending Act, would require all online lenders to comply with state laws that provide stronger consumer protections than the federal statutes. It would establish once and for all that payday loan borrowers have the right to stop lenders from raiding their bank accounts. State and federal regulators also need to prohibit banks from giving payday lenders access to the automatic payment system in states where predatory, high-interest loans are illegal.

Bleeding the Borrower Dry, NYT, 3.3.2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/04/opinion/bleeding-the-borrower-dry.html

Arkansas Law Restricts When Abortion May Occur

February 28, 2013
The New York Times
By ROBBIE BROWN

Arkansas adopted new abortion limits Thursday, outlawing most abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, even as its State Senate approved a more restrictive bill that would ban abortions after 12 weeks of pregnancy.

Gov. Mike Beebe, a Democrat, had vetoed the 20-week limit on Tuesday, saying it was likely to be found unconstitutional, but the newly Republican-controlled Senate voted to override Mr. Beebe’s veto on Thursday; the House had already done so Wednesday. The measure is set to take effect immediately.

Arkansas is the 10th state to outlaw abortions after 20 weeks, in part based on the theory that fetuses can feel pain at that stage, a notion disputed by mainstream medical associations.

The 20-week limit also violates the legal threshold set by the Supreme Court, which has held that states cannot ban abortions before the fetus becomes viable. Such a limit has not yet been tested by the courts.

Doctors say viability, the ability to survive outside the womb, usually occurs after at least 24 weeks.

“We’re seeing a real defiance of what the Supreme Court has held,” said Elizabeth Nash, the state issues manager with the Guttmacher Institute, a research group in Washington. “The Supreme Court says viability is determined by a doctor.”

Jason Rapert, an Arkansas state senator who sponsored the 12-week limit, says the Supreme Court provides too little guidance on determining viability, but that a heartbeat is an early sign of life. His goal is to prevent what he described as “abortion being used as birth control.”

“When there is a heartbeat, there is life,” Mr. Rapert said. “We do not need to be killing little babies.”

The 12-week limit, which Governor Beebe is also expected to veto if it reaches him, would be an even greater challenge to existing constitutional standards.

The bill, which passed 26 to 8, includes exceptions for rape, incest and medical emergencies.

In a statement, Mr. Beebe said he had not made a decision on the 12-week ban but accepted the Legislature’s override of his earlier veto.

“This is the Legislature’s prerogative,” he said. “It’s part of the process, and we all know that. They did what they thought they should do and I did what I thought I should do.”

Nine other states have passed 20-week limits since 2010, when Nebraska became the first. In two states, Georgia and Arizona, the laws were blocked by legal challenges.

The American Civil Liberties Union has said it will challenge both of Arkansas’s laws. A Planned Parenthood statement called the 12-week ban “blatantly unconstitutional” and “a brazen affront to the needs of women.”

Many states, especially in the South, are weighing efforts to limit abortions. In Alabama, the Legislature will vote next week on tighter regulations for abortion clinics. In Mississippi, the state’s only abortion clinic is battling new regulations that its leader says could force it to close.

Last year, states across the country passed 43 bills restricting access to an abortion — the second-highest number of such measures ever passed in a single year, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

Arkansas Law Restricts When Abortion May Occur, NYT, 28.2.2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/01/us/arkansas-puts-new-limits-on-abortion.html

Major Banks Aid in Payday Loans

Banned by States

February 23, 2013
The New York Times
By JESSICA SILVER-GREENBERG

Major banks have quickly become behind-the-scenes allies of Internet-based payday lenders that offer short-term loans with interest rates sometimes exceeding 500 percent.

With 15 states banning payday loans, a growing number of the lenders have set up online operations in more hospitable states or far-flung locales like Belize, Malta and the West Indies to more easily evade statewide caps on interest rates.

While the banks, which include giants like JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo, do not make the loans, they are a critical link for the lenders, enabling the lenders to withdraw payments automatically from borrowers’ bank accounts, even in states where the loans are banned entirely. In some cases, the banks allow lenders to tap checking accounts even after the customers have begged them to stop the withdrawals.

“Without the assistance of the banks in processing and sending electronic funds, these lenders simply couldn’t operate,” said Josh Zinner, co-director of the Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project, which works with community groups in New York.

The banking industry says it is simply serving customers who have authorized the lenders to withdraw money from their accounts. “The industry is not in a position to monitor customer accounts to see where their payments are going,” said Virginia O’Neill, senior counsel with the American Bankers Association.

But state and federal officials are taking aim at the banks’ role at a time when authorities are increasing their efforts to clamp down on payday lending and its practice of providing quick money to borrowers who need cash.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are examining banks’ roles in the online loans, according to several people with direct knowledge of the matter. Benjamin M. Lawsky, who heads New York State’s Department of Financial Services, is investigating how banks enable the online lenders to skirt New York law and make loans to residents of the state, where interest rates are capped at 25 percent.

For the banks, it can be a lucrative partnership. At first blush, processing automatic withdrawals hardly seems like a source of profit. But many customers are already on shaky financial footing. The withdrawals often set off a cascade of fees from problems like overdrafts. Roughly 27 percent of payday loan borrowers say that the loans caused them to overdraw their accounts, according to a report released this month by the Pew Charitable Trusts. That fee income is coveted, given that financial regulations limiting fees on debit and credit cards have cost banks billions of dollars.

Some state and federal authorities say the banks’ role in enabling the lenders has frustrated government efforts to shield people from predatory loans — an issue that gained urgency after reckless mortgage lending helped precipitate the 2008 financial crisis.

Lawmakers, led by Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, introduced a bill in July aimed at reining in the lenders, in part, by forcing them to abide by the laws of the state where the borrower lives, rather than where the lender is. The legislation, pending in Congress, would also allow borrowers to cancel automatic withdrawals more easily. “Technology has taken a lot of these scams online, and it’s time to crack down,” Mr. Merkley said in a statement when the bill was introduced.

While the loans are simple to obtain — some online lenders promise approval in minutes with no credit check — they are tough to get rid of. Customers who want to repay their loan in full typically must contact the online lender at least three days before the next withdrawal. Otherwise, the lender automatically renews the loans at least monthly and withdraws only the interest owed. Under federal law, customers are allowed to stop authorized withdrawals from their account. Still, some borrowers say their banks do not heed requests to stop the loans.

Ivy Brodsky, 37, thought she had figured out a way to stop six payday lenders from taking money from her account when she visited her Chase branch in Brighton Beach in Brooklyn in March to close it. But Chase kept the account open and between April and May, the six Internet lenders tried to withdraw money from Ms. Brodsky’s account 55 times, according to bank records reviewed by The New York Times. Chase charged her $1,523 in fees — a combination of 44 insufficient fund fees, extended overdraft fees and service fees.

For Subrina Baptiste, 33, an educational assistant in Brooklyn, the overdraft fees levied by Chase cannibalized her child support income. She said she applied for a $400 loan from Loanshoponline.com and a $700 loan from Advancemetoday.com in 2011. The loans, with annual interest rates of 730 percent and 584 percent respectively, skirt New York law.

Ms. Baptiste said she asked Chase to revoke the automatic withdrawals in October 2011, but was told that she had to ask the lenders instead. In one month, her bank records show, the lenders tried to take money from her account at least six times. Chase charged her $812 in fees and deducted over $600 from her child-support payments to cover them.

“I don’t understand why my own bank just wouldn’t listen to me,” Ms. Baptiste said, adding that Chase ultimately closed her account last January, three months after she asked.

A spokeswoman for Bank of America said the bank always honored requests to stop automatic withdrawals. Wells Fargo declined to comment. Kristin Lemkau, a spokeswoman for Chase, said: “We are working with the customers to resolve these cases.” Online lenders say they work to abide by state laws.

Payday lenders have been dogged by controversy almost from their inception two decades ago from storefront check-cashing stores. In 2007, federal lawmakers restricted the lenders from focusing on military members. Across the country, states have steadily imposed caps on interest rates and fees that effectively ban the high-rate loans.

While there are no exact measures of how many lenders have migrated online, roughly three million Americans obtained an Internet payday loan in 2010, according to a July report by the Pew Charitable Trusts. By 2016, Internet loans will make up roughly 60 percent of the total payday loans, up from about 35 percent in 2011, according to John Hecht, an analyst with the investment bank Stephens Inc. As of 2011, he said, the volume of online payday loans was $13 billion, up more than 120 percent from $5.8 billion in 2006.

Facing increasingly inhospitable states, the lenders have also set up shop offshore. A former used-car dealership owner, who runs a series of online lenders through a shell corporation in Grenada, outlined the benefits of operating remotely in a 2005 deposition. Put simply, it was “lawsuit protection and tax reduction,” he said. Other lenders are based in Belize, Malta, the Isle of Man and the West Indies, according to federal court records.

At an industry conference last year, payday lenders discussed the benefits of heading offshore. Jer Ayler, president of the payday loan consultant Trihouse Inc., pinpointed Cancún, the Bahamas and Costa Rica as particularly fertile locales.

State prosecutors have been battling to keep online lenders from illegally making loans to residents where the loans are restricted. In December, Lori Swanson, Minnesota’s attorney general, settled with Sure Advance L.L.C. over claims that the online lender was operating without a license to make loans with interest rates of up to 1,564 percent. In Illinois, Attorney General Lisa Madigan is investigating a number of online lenders.

Arkansas’s attorney general, Dustin McDaniel, has been targeting lenders illegally making loans in his state, and says the Internet firms are tough to fight. “The Internet knows no borders,” he said. “There are layer upon layer of cyber-entities and some are difficult to trace.”

Last January, he sued the operator of a number of online lenders, claiming that the firms were breaking state law in Arkansas, which caps annual interest rates on loans at 17 percent.

Now the Online Lenders Alliance, a trade group, is backing legislation that would grant a federal charter for payday lenders. In supporting the bill, Lisa McGreevy, the group’s chief executive, said: “A federal charter, as opposed to the current conflicting state regulatory schemes, will establish one clear set of rules for lenders to follow.”

    Major Banks Aid in Payday Loans Banned by States, NYT, 23.2.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/
    business/major-banks-aid-in-payday-loans-banned-by-states.html

North Carolina Approves Steep Benefit Cuts

for Jobless in Bid to Reduce Debt

February 13, 2013
The New York Times
By ROBBIE BROWN

North Carolina lawmakers approved deep cuts to benefits for the jobless on Wednesday, in a state that has one of the nation’s highest unemployment rates.

In a debt-reducing effort, the Republican-controlled legislature voted to cut maximum weekly benefits to $350 from $535, a 35 percent drop; reduce the maximum number of weeks for collecting benefits to between 12 and 20 weeks from 26 weeks; and tighten requirements to qualify. The cuts would begin with new jobless claims on July 1.

If the bill is signed by Gov. Pat McCrory, as expected, North Carolina would be the eighth state to roll back jobless benefits under the growing financial burden of the recession.

The measure’s sponsors said it would spur job growth by paying down $2.5 billion in debt to the federal government. The bill passed the State Senate by a vote of 36 to 12.

“North Carolina owes the federal government $2.5 billion because of a broken unemployment insurance system,” said Mr. McCrory, a Republican. “We’re going to pay down that debt, make the system solvent and provide an economic climate that allows businesses, large and small, to put people back to work.

But critics warned of dangerous consequences. The state has the nation’s fifth-highest unemployment rate, at 9.2 percent, compared with the national average of 7.9 percent.

“We have a jobs crisis — there are about three unemployed workers for every job,” said Bill Rowe, the director of advocacy for the North Carolina Justice Center, which aids low income workers. “We’re turning down money to make cuts for what are not really legitimate reasons.”

The bill also disqualifies 170,000 unemployed people — 39 percent of the 438,000 jobless — from federal emergency extended benefits because it reduces the number of weeks people can receive benefits to below 26. The federal government has set 26 weeks as the national requirement for receiving federal funds.

“Families struggling to secure their place in the middle class will suffer a grievous blow, and the state’s economy will lose $780 million in federal funds that are vital to reducing North Carolina’s high unemployment rate,” said Seth D. Harris, the acting labor secretary.

Since the recession began, seven other states have reduced unemployment benefits: Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, Missouri and South Carolina. But North Carolina’s cuts would be the “harshest yet,” according to the National Employment Law Project, an employment-rights advocacy group, since the reduction in benefits is bigger than in other states.

North Carolina was forced to borrow $2.5 billion from the federal government starting in 2008, after its unemployment fund went bankrupt. The bill would allow the fund to be out of debt by 2015 instead of 2018.

North Carolina Approves Steep Benefit Cuts for Jobless in Bid to Reduce Debt, NYT, 13.2.2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/us/north-carolina-approves-benefit-cuts-for-unemployed.html

The States Confront Gun Violence

January 17, 2013
The New York Times

State lawmakers in Wyoming didn’t need to hear President Obama’s gun-control proposals on Wednesday in order to attack them. A week ago, before the White House had even decided what actions to take, Republicans introduced a bill in the Wyoming Legislature to block any federal limitation on firearms, such as an assault weapons ban. A federal agent seeking to enforce such a ban would be guilty of a felony and face five years in prison.

This ludicrous bill would be laughable if the idea weren’t spreading. A similar bill filed in Tennessee would also make federal gun enforcement a state crime, though it’s more “moderate” than Wyoming’s: federal agents doing their jobs would be charged only with Class A misdemeanors. Inevitably, a bill like Wyoming’s has been filed in Texas. And, in Mississippi, Gov. Phil Bryant announced that the state would block federal gun measures. A proposed law in the state would claim that Washington has no jurisdiction over weapons made in Mississippi.

There’s no point in telling these fanatics that federal gun restrictions are completely constitutional, even under the Supreme Court’s latest interpretation of the Second Amendment, or that federal law pre-empts state law. They already know these bills will be unenforceable. They are merely legislative fist-shaking, letting pro-gun voters know that lawmakers share their antipathy to the Obama administration, and signaling to the National Rifle Association and other gun-manufacturing lobbies that they are worthy recipients of rich political contributions.

Already, states like these have done enormous damage to public safety by acceding to the N.R.A.’s demands for laws that are anything but symbolic. The gun lobby hasn’t been content with the ability of Americans to lawfully possess hundreds of millions of handguns and assault rifles. It wants gun owners to be able to carry these weapons anywhere they want, even among children, concealed or displayed, and preferably without the annoyance of permits, background checks, or safety precautions.

After the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007, the N.R.A. defied logic and pushed a bill to allow guns on college campuses. Thanks to help from the American Legislative Exchange Council, the conservative organization of state lawmakers to which the N.R.A. contributes heavily, five states now allow campus guns. Only nine states prohibit guns at sporting events, and just 26 prohibit them where alcohol is served.

Wisconsin actually allows guns in the public gallery that looks down on the state assembly, and the N.R.A. pressured lawmakers last week to keep it that way. The N.R.A. and the American Legislative Exchange Council were behind the “stand your ground” laws that allow people to shoot others if they believe they are in danger, which has led to hundreds of deaths while allowing killers to walk free.

State gun laws matter. Of the 10 states with the most restrictive laws, seven also have the lowest gun death rates, according to a study by the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. Similarly, lax gun laws correlate to a high level of gun deaths.

That’s why it’s good to see several states step up to their responsibilities to prevent violence instead of following the southern and western states that appear to be encouraging it. New York was out front this week in passing a ban on assault weapons and large-capacity magazines, among other measures. A similar ban is moving ahead in Illinois. New Jersey and Connecticut are moving more slowly, appointing task forces to make recommendations, but are at least heading in the right direction.

California is considering legislation that would limit sales of ammunition, requiring background checks and permits for bullet buyers. Gov. John Hickenlooper of Colorado, the site of so much carnage, has reversed his opposition to new restrictions, proposing universal background checks as well as an overhaul of the state mental health system to identify those who should be kept away from weapons.

Still, too many states continue to put their citizens at risk as they pledge ever-greater fealty to the gun manufacturers. It’s time the states became laboratories for safety rather than violence.

•

This is part of a continuing series

on the epidemic of gun violence

and possible solutions.

Other editorials are at nytimes.com/gunchallenge.

The States Confront Gun Violence, NYT, 17.1.2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/18/opinion/the-states-confront-gun-violence.html

New York Leads on Gun Control

January 15, 2013
The New York Times

The broad gun control bill approved Tuesday by the New York Legislature substantially strengthens the state’s gun control laws and, if vigorously enforced, could make New York one of the toughest places in the country to buy, sell or own dangerous weapons. But the bill also contains troubling provisions involving mental health and public access to important records that should be revisited and reworked.

The bill was muscled through with disturbing speed after days of secret negotiations and a late-night vote Monday by state senators who had barely read the complicated measure before passing it. Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who signed it into law on Tuesday, obviously calculated that it was necessary to move quickly before gun advocates could marshal serious opposition. Even so, Albany’s customarily top-down and largely undemocratic legislative methods were inappropriate for such a complex bill.

The law has several strong provisions. It expands the current ban on assault weapons to include any semiautomatic weapon with a detachable magazine and one military-style feature (instead of two). It limits magazine clips to 7 rounds of ammunition instead of the current 10.

The law will require gun licenses to be renewed every five years; in some counties, a single license can last a lifetime. Background checks will be required at all gun sales, including most private ones, with an exception for immediate members of a gun-owner’s family. There will be a new electronic database for gun permits, and a new registry for ammunition sales that will allow the authorities to track people who are buying cartridges in unusually high volumes.

Some sections of the law, however, were not fully vetted in the rush. One provision asks health care professionals — physicians, psychologists, registered nurses or licensed clinical social workers — to report to local health care officials when they have reason to believe that patients could harm themselves or others. Such a report, after wending its way through other bureaucratic layers, and after crosschecking against a database of gun owners, could eventually authorize police to confiscate firearms owned by a dangerous patient.

The provision would seem to raise significant legal questions. It is not clear who has the final authority to order the seizure, or at what point in the process the gun owner can appeal. The concept would also threaten established norms about doctor-patient relationships.

In addition, the law unwisely restricts public access to gun license records, an overreaction to a suburban newspaper’s recent publication of names and addresses of licensees in Westchester and Rockland Counties. And the law requires safe storage of guns only if the house is being shared with a convicted criminal or someone else not authorized to have a gun license. Safe storage of guns should be a requirement for everyone.

Mr. Cuomo’s law is an important and timely step toward sane gun control. But it needs a few fixes before it can become a national model.

New York Leads on Gun Control, NYT, 15.1.2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/16/opinion/new-york-leads-on-gun-control.html

Colorado’s Marijuana Muddle

January 14, 2013
The New York Times
By FRANK BRUNI

DENVER

Colorado is going to pot. It’s just having a tough time figuring out how.

Although an Election Day referendum legalized marijuana for recreational use, it left questions unanswered. Like: how high can you be behind the wheel of a car? Lawmakers are debating a specific blood level, as with alcohol, above which a motorist is deemed an uneasy rider.

In a restaurant or private club, might the dessert choices someday include an upscale riff on the pot brownie and a double entendre of a pot de crème? One lawyer I spoke with lofted this possibility, but who knows. State officials still have many months to draft regulations for recreational pot’s retail sale, which should begin next January. The new law has already made recreational possession O.K.

Certainly, there will be a bigger workload for Denver’s Craig Claiborne of cannabis, who began reviewing Colorado’s medical marijuana dispensaries for the alternative newspaper Westword in 2009. Last month the critic, who writes under the pseudonym William Breathes, added a weekly advice column called “Ask a Stoner.”

For a while now, Colorado has been deeper in the weed than most other states. It permitted medical marijuana in 2000, and at dispensaries, of which there are now hundreds, a person with physician approval can choose among a dozen or more strains of pot, which vary in strength, hue, fragrance. A dispensary named Denver Relief stocks Durban Poison, which promises a fruity aroma “with undertones of milk chocolate,” and ChemDawgD, with its “strong smell of Pine-Sol and jet fuel.”

There are different delivery systems as well. If a patient doesn’t like to smoke, he or she can try marijuana cola, marijuana baklava, marijuana bath salts.

“The baklava is excellent,” said Breathes, who has a stomach condition for which he got a medical marijuana card. (The card has his real name; his nom de plume protects him from exposure when he presents it.)

But the referendum puts Colorado, along with the state of Washington, whose voters also opened the door to bong hits purely for pleasure, on new legal terrain.

“This will be a complicated process,” announced Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper shortly after the referendum passed. “Don’t break out the Cheetos or Goldfish too quickly.”

These were the words of a man who had inhaled in the past — he admits as much, though he says it was 15 years ago — and seems to know something about the munchies. And they pointed to another interesting wrinkle of the Colorado story: the marijuana muddle will be tackled by a politician who rose to local prominence in the intoxication business, as the owner of popular brewpubs.

When I caught up with him here recently, he volunteered that a paleontologist with whom he’s friendly believes that cannabis and hops, which are flowers used to make beer, have a shared horticultural ancestry.

“If you take hops, and you grind them up in your fingers, they smell just like what I’m told marijuana smells like,” said Hickenlooper, who is 60.

“That was a joke,” he added, meaning the “I’m told” part.

He actually opposed Amendment 64, the measure that legalized recreational pot, and didn’t greet its passage with reefer gladness. Although it applies only to adults, he worries that kids will feel emboldened and that frequent marijuana use could hurt them.

I shadowed him for a few days, including to Colorado Springs, where he disappeared into a meeting with a local newspaper’s editorial board. More of the questions he was asked touched on marijuana than on gun control, an aide said.

The next morning I arrived midway through a Q. and A. that he did with the Colorado Springs Regional Business Alliance, and what do you suppose he was discussing? Pot.

The alarm is confusing. For many years in many places, pot has been prevalent and its casual use often overlooked. Enforcement of laws against possession has been uneven, to a point where New York leaders want to move away from small-scale pot arrests.

Presidential candidates have felt free to allude or own up to past marijuana use. So why all the hand wringing over pot’s legalization, when its illegality isn’t always taken seriously? If we have a problem with pot, we sure haven’t behaved that way.

Colorado and Washington aren’t being experimental so much as honest. They’re acknowledging reality, and giving people the same chance with pot as with alcohol: to use it responsibly — or not. They’ll also pick up some tax revenue in the process.

And perhaps Breathes will need a co-critic. Patricia Calhoun, the editor of Westword, told me she gets applications. But, she added, they’re responses to the initial announcement she posted more than three years ago.

“A lot of potheads don’t move very fast,” she said.

Colorado’s Marijuana Muddle, NYT, 14.1.2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/15/opinion/bruni-colorados-marijuana-muddle.html

New York Has Gun Deal,

With Focus on Mental Ills

January 14, 2013
The New York Times
By THOMAS KAPLAN and DANNY HAKIM

ALBANY — Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and lawmakers agreed on Monday to a broad package of changes to gun laws that would expand the state’s ban on assault weapons and would include new measures to keep guns away from the mentally ill.

The state Senate, controlled by a coalition of Republicans and a handful of Democrats, approved the legislative package just after 11 p.m. by a lopsided vote of 43 to 18. The Assembly, where Democrats who have been strongly supportive of gun control have an overwhelming majority, planned to vote on the measure Tuesday.

Approval of the legislation would make New York the first state to act in response to the mass shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., last month.

Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, had pressed lawmakers to move quickly in response to Newtown, saying, “the people of this state are crying out for help.” And the Legislature proceeded with unusual haste: Monday was the first full day of this year’s legislative session.

“We don’t need another tragedy to point out the problems in the system,” Mr. Cuomo said at a news conference.

“Enough people have lost their lives,” he added. “Let’s act.”

The expanded ban on assault weapons would broaden the definition of such weapons, banning semiautomatic pistols and rifles with detachable magazines and one military-style feature, as well as semiautomatic shotguns with one military-style feature. New Yorkers who already own such guns could keep them but would be required to register them with the state.

“The message out there is so clear after Newtown,” said the Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, a Democrat from Manhattan. “To basically eradicate assault weapons from our streets in New York as quickly as possible is something the people of this state want.”

In an acknowledgment that many people have suggested that part of the solution to gun violence is a better government response to mental illness, the legislation includes not only new restrictions on gun ownership, but also efforts to limit access to guns by the mentally ill.

The most significant new proposal would require mental health professionals to report to local mental health officials when they believe that patients are likely to harm themselves or others. Law enforcement would then be authorized to confiscate any firearm owned by a dangerous patient; therapists would not be sanctioned for a failure to report such patients if they acted “in good faith.”

“People who have mental health issues should not have guns,” Mr. Cuomo told reporters. “They could hurt themselves, they could hurt other people.”

But such a requirement “represents a major change in the presumption of confidentiality that has been inherent in mental health treatment,” said Dr. Paul S. Appelbaum, the director of the Division of Law, Ethics, and Psychiatry at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, who said the Legislature should hold hearings on possible consequences of the proposal.

“The prospect of being reported to the local authorities, even if they do not have weapons, may be enough to discourage patients with suicidal or homicidal thoughts from seeking treatment or from being honest about their impulses,” he said.

The legislation would extend and expand Kendra’s Law, which empowers judges to order mentally ill patients to receive outpatient treatment.

And it would require gun owners to keep weapons inaccessible in homes where a resident has been involuntarily committed, convicted of a crime or is the subject of an order of protection.

The legislative package, which Mr. Cuomo said he believed would be “the most comprehensive package in the nation,” would ban any gun magazine that can hold over 7 rounds of ammunition — the current limit is 10 rounds. It would also require background checks of ammunition buyers and automated alerts to law enforcement of high-volume purchases.

The legislation would increase penalties for multiple crimes committed with guns, would require background checks for most private gun sales, and create a statewide gun-registration database.

Senator Jeffrey D. Klein of the Bronx, the leader of an independent faction of Democrats who have allied with the Republicans to control the Senate, said the measure met the goals of many lawmakers.

“Republicans, it’s very clear, wanted harsher criminal penalties for illegal guns, which is something I agree with,” Mr. Klein added, “but on the other hand we’re also going to ban assault weapons and limit the number of rounds in a magazine. So I think putting those two things together makes it a better bill.”

Among the other elements of the proposed legislation were a so-called Webster provision, named for the shooting deaths of two firefighters in Webster, near Rochester, just before Christmas. The provision would mandate a life sentence without parole for anyone who murders a first responder.

And, in response to a controversy that erupted after The Journal News, a daily newspaper, published the names and addresses of handgun permit holders in Westchester and Rockland Counties, the legislation would prohibit disclosure of the names in the new statewide gun-registration database, and would allow individuals to exempt their own names and addresses from being disclosed by counties that have such databases.

The guns package was negotiated privately by the governor and legislative leaders over the last several weeks, but was only completed late Monday; rank-and-file Senators had only a few minutes to read the legislation before voting on it. Mr. Cuomo, saying, “If there is an issue that fits the definition of necessity, I believe it’s gun violence,” waived the normal three-day waiting period between introduction of new legislation and a vote.

The minority leader in the Assembly, Brian M. Kolb, a Republican from Canandaigua, objected to the move to expedite the process, saying, “I don’t think we should be rushing things just for the sake of headlines.”

By the time the Senate began to discuss the bill late Monday night, the galleries that overlook the chamber were mostly empty of spectators. A parade of Democrats, who have long pressed for new gun laws, rose to praise the bill as they explained their votes.

Senator Malcolm A. Smith, an independent Democrat from Queens, said provisions of the measure could be dedicated to the family members of New Yorkers who had been victims of gun violence.

“I think today we are setting the mark for the rest of the country,” he said.

Most of the senators who voted against the bill did not speak. One who did, Senator Kathleen A. Marchione, a Republican from Saratoga County, praised some parts of the measure, like the expansion of Kendra’s Law. But she said the new restrictions on guns would not get at the problem of gun violence.

“I truly believe that the Second Amendment constitutional freedoms of every New Yorker tonight has been weakened,” she said, adding, “Law-abiding citizens who own guns are not our problem. Law-abiding citizens understand and know how to take care of their guns, not to be a danger to others.”

    New York Has Gun Deal, With Focus on Mental Ills, NYT, 14.1.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/15/nyregion/
    new-york-legislators-hope-for-speedy-vote-on-gun-laws.html

Back From the Fiscal Abyss,

California Balances Its Budget

January 10, 2013
The New York Times
By ADAM NAGOURNEY

SACRAMENTO — California has been Exhibit A for the fiscal upheaval that has rocked states throughout the recession. Year after year, California officials reported bigger and bigger deficits and sought to respond with spending cuts that left the state reeling.

So it was something of a moment when a jaunty Gov. Jerry Brown strode before cameras here on Thursday to present his budget for 2013-14.

“The deficit is gone,” Mr. Brown proclaimed, standing in front of an array of that-was-then and this-is-now charts that illustrated what he said were dramatic changes in California’s fortunes.

“For the next four years we are talking about a balanced budget,” he said. “We are talking about living within our means. This is new. This is a breakthrough.”

Mr. Brown was not just talking about a balanced budget. He projected that the state would begin posting surpluses starting next year, leading to a projected surplus of $21.5 million by 2014, a dramatic turnaround from the deficit of $26 billion — billion, not million — he faced when he was elected in 2010.

The governor said California’s finances were strong enough that he wanted to put aside a $1 billion reserve fund to guard against future downturns, and included in the budget sharp increases in aid to public schools and the state university system, both targets of big spending cutbacks.

The change in fortunes reflected cuts that were imposed over the past two years, a temporary tax surcharge approved by voters in November that expires in seven years, and a general improvement in the state’s economy.

Mr. Brown’s balanced budget projection was more optimistic than one put out by an independent legislative watchdog in November, and he pointed to a series of factors, including severe cuts in federal assistance, that could push California back into difficulty.

Yet it was the latest indication that the state appeared to be turning around. Even the less upbeat report by the watchdog group, the Legislative Analyst’s Office, said the state was facing a deficit of just $1.9 billion, which seems almost pocket change after the $26 billion projected deficit the state once confronted.

Mr. Brown’s news was hailed on both sides of the political aisle. “This is a proposal that clearly shows California has turned the corner,” said John A. Pérez, a Democrat who is the State Assembly’s speaker.

Connie Conway, the Assembly’s Republican leader, said it was “good news for taxpayers that the state has made progress in getting our financial house in order.”

“But we haven’t fully solved our budget problems just yet,” she said.

The budgetary distress has meant that, for years, the Legislature has battled over what to cut or, in some cases, what kind of maneuvers might be appropriate to avoid cuts. Good news or not, the announcement means that more, albeit different, kinds of battles were in the offing, lawmakers and Mr. Brown said.

Democrats now control two-thirds of the Assembly and Senate, and some of them have talked about restoring at least some of the social service cuts, like dental care for the poor, that were imposed to bring the state to this point, Mr. Brown said he understood the impulse to repair broken social services, but he warned against returning to a boom-and-bust pattern of spending during the good years, only to later struggle through debt.

“We have to live within the means we have; otherwise we get to that situation where you get red ink and you go back to cuts,” he said. “I want to avoid the booms and the bust, the borrow and the spend, where we make the promise and then we take back.”

Mr. Brown, who has always presented himself as something of a moderate in his party, suggested that in the months ahead, he would be an enforcer.

“It’s very hard to say no,” Mr. Brown said. “And that basically is going to be my job.”

On that point, Mr. Brown found an unlikely ally in Ms. Conway. “Now is not the time to enact massive spending increases that will reverse the progress we’ve made in reducing the deficit,” she said.

On another contentious front, while Mr. Brown proposed a significant increase in school spending — $2.6 billion — he said he wanted a financing formula that would direct more money to poor students. Lawmakers said that could set off a fight between wealthier and poorer districts.

Mr. Brown, in presenting his budget, suggested that the turnaround should be a rebuke to “a couple of characters” who have “written off California as a failed state,” a reference to conservative commentators who have, for a year, questioned the state’s economic policies and its very future.

Now, Mr. Brown said, he wanted the nation to look to California, and to his example. He promised a combination of “fiscal discipline and imaginative investment” to complete the state’s restoration.

“I would like to do something that would make California a leader and an example of what America has to do,” he said.

Back From the Fiscal Abyss, California Balances Its Budget, NYT,10.1.2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/11/us/california-balances-its-budget.html

New York Is Moving Quickly

to Enact Tough Curbs on Guns

January 9, 2013
The New York Times
By DAVID M. HALBFINGER and THOMAS KAPLAN

New York State is nearing agreement on a proposal to put what would be some of the nation’s strictest gun-control laws into effect, including what Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo vowed on Wednesday would be an ironclad ban on assault weapons and large-capacity magazines, and new measures to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and mentally ill people.

Lawmakers in Albany, seeking to send a message to the nation that the recent mass shootings demand swift action, say they hope to vote on the package of legislation as soon as next week.

The Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, a Manhattan Democrat, told reporters on Wednesday that Mr. Cuomo and legislative leaders were “95 percent” of the way toward an agreement. Senate Republicans, considered the only possible obstacle to the governor’s proposal, indicated they did not intend to block a deal.

“When you hear about these issues all across the nation, whether it’s in the movie theater in Aurora, Colo., or Columbine, something needs to happen — something transformative,” said Senator Timothy M. Kennedy, a Democrat from Buffalo.

The dash to enact new gun controls made New York the first flash point in the battles over firearm restrictions that are expected to consume several state capitals this year.

But the debate also raged elsewhere on Wednesday, from Denver, where supporters of gun rights rallied to oppose weapon restrictions in the new legislative session, to Connecticut, whose governor, Dannel P. Malloy, in an emotional speech to lawmakers — he lost his composure talking about the mass killings at a Newtown elementary school last month — said, “More guns are not the answer.”

At the White House, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. met with gun-control advocates and said the Obama administration planned both to pass legislation and to use executive orders to try to reduce gun violence. “The president and I are determined to take action,” Mr. Biden said. “This is not an exercise in photo opportunities.”

Mr. Cuomo’s aides said the proposed legislation in New York would expand the definition of what is considered an assault weapon to match California’s law, currently the most restrictive in the nation. But the overall package would go further, they said, by limiting detachable ammunition magazines to 7 rounds from the current 10, and requiring background checks for purchases of ammunition, not just weapons.

Limiting magazines to seven rounds would give New York the toughest restrictions in the nation. Only around half a dozen states currently limit the size of magazines, and most of them allow magazines that contain up to 10 rounds, according to a survey by the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, which advocates gun control. The New York law would also close a loophole that has thwarted enforcement of limits on the size of magazines.

Even as Mr. Cuomo detailed his plans, gun-rights groups mobilized to oppose the new restrictions.

“We fully expect that New York state’s gun owners will be completely engaged in this debate and N.R.A. will be there to lead them,” said Chris W. Cox, the chief lobbyist for the National Rifle Association, which has donated more money to state politicians in New York than anywhere else, much of it to Senate Republicans.

And immediately afterward, Budd Schroeder, the chairman of the Shooters Committee on Political Education, a New York gun-rights group, said he planned to meet with every state senator he knew to ask them to stand up to the governor.

“The legislators are going to be getting a lot of phone calls in their district offices,” Mr. Schroeder said. “How is taking away my rights to own any type of firearm I choose going to change the attitude of a criminal?”

Yet Mr. Schroeder’s group, on its Web site, acknowledged the challenging terrain. “We can say with certainty,” it warned, “that anything short of overwhelming our legislators with calls, e-mails and letters, we have virtually no chance.”

Mr. Cuomo’s initiative drew praise from Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who has made gun control his signature cause. “I was particularly struck by his passionate leadership on gun violence,” Mr. Bloomberg said in a statement. “New York State has led the nation with strong, common-sense gun laws, and the governor’s new proposals will build on that tradition.”

Mr. Cuomo is a possible 2016 presidential contender who is seeking to elevate his stature among Democrats base nationally, after a much-praised victory on same-sex marriage in his first year in office. His push for enhanced gun control even drew praise from Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan of New York, in a letter that otherwise criticized Mr. Cuomo’s support for abortion rights.

Mr. Cuomo had already stirred up anxiety among gun rights groups by saying in a radio interview in December that “confiscation could be an option” for existing assault weapons.

But on Wednesday, Mr. Cuomo backed away from that statement. “This is not about taking away people’s guns,” he said in his State of the State address. “It is about ending the unnecessary risk of high-capacity assault rifles. That’s what this is about.”

The expectation from Senator Dean G. Skelos, the Republican leader, and his aides that the gun-control legislation would come to the Senate floor for a vote is significant; Senate Republicans have consistently rebuffed efforts by Democrats to pass more restrictive gun laws.

But Republicans now have partial control of the chamber because of a coalition they recently established to share power with a group of dissident Democrats who favor more gun control. And Democrats believe that Republican leaders would rather accept a deal than jeopardize their warm relationship with Mr. Cuomo or risk a public relations backlash.

Many Senate Republicans sought re-election in part by touting their bond with the governor, who remains popular with Republican voters as well as with Democrats; Mr. Cuomo, recognizing the extent of his political power, has vowed to travel the state blaming Senate Republicans if they do not back his efforts for gun control.

The gun-control debate had already flared up in other ways in New York State since the shootings last month in Newtown and in Webster, N.Y., where two firefighters were killed. A newspaper’s publication of a map showing the names and addresses of gun owners in suburban Westchester and Rockland Counties set off a wave of threats against and harassment of the paper’s employees.

In his State of the State address Wednesday, the governor told lawmakers it was their duty to “stop the madness” of violence.

“Forget the extremists — it’s simple,” Mr. Cuomo said to a crescendo of applause. “No one hunts with an assault rifle. No one needs 10 bullets to kill a deer.”

Michael Cooper and Michael D. Shear contributed reporting.

    New York Is Moving Quickly to Enact Tough Curbs on Guns, NYT, 9.1.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/10/nyregion/
    new-york-nears-gun-control-tightening-laws.html

Cuomo to Press for Wider Curbs

on Gun Access

January 8, 2013
The New York Times
By THOMAS KAPLAN

ALBANY — Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, pushing New York to become the first state to enact major new gun laws in the wake of the massacre in Newtown, Conn., plans on Wednesday to propose one of the country’s most restrictive bans on assault weapons.

New York is one of seven states that already ban at least some assault weapons. But Mr. Cuomo has described the existing law as having “more holes than Swiss cheese,” and he wants to broaden the number of guns and magazines covered by the law while also making it harder for gun makers to tweak their products to get around the ban.

Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, will outline his proposal in his State of the State address, but even before he speaks, he has incited anxiety among gun owners by acknowledging in a radio interview that “confiscation could be an option” for assault weapons owned by New Yorkers. Since that interview, Mr. Cuomo has not mentioned the idea, and his aides have acknowledged that it would be impractical.

But gun rights groups have seized on the comment, even promoting a petition on the Web site of the White House that declares, “We do not live in Nazi Germany,” and asks the Obama administration to block any effort at confiscation by Mr. Cuomo.

Since the shootings in Newtown, Mr. Cuomo has been trying to negotiate an agreement on gun laws with legislative leaders in Albany — he even contemplated calling them back into special session last month — and the talks continued into Tuesday, as the governor sought an agreement before his speech.

According to people briefed on the talks, the governor is considering not only rewriting the state’s assault weapons ban, but also proposing more expansive use of mental health records in background checks of gun buyers, lower limits on the capacity of magazines sold legally in New York and a new requirement that gun permits be subject to periodic recertification.

New York already has some of the toughest gun laws in the country, and the debate over new restrictions here reflects a significant change in the national conversation over guns, as states and the federal government grapple with whether and how to limit the possession of weapons that have been used in multiple mass killings in recent years.

Mr. Cuomo, a shotgun owner, has long spoken in favor of tougher gun control but has not used his considerable political muscle to make the issue a priority over his two years as governor. Now, citing the recent killings, he is seeking to strike a deal that could be used as a model in other statehouses.

“I think what the nation is saying now after Connecticut, what people in New York are saying is ‘Do something, please,’ ” Mr. Cuomo told reporters recently.

New York’s existing assault weapons ban was approved in the aftermath of another mass shooting, at Columbine High School in 1999. The next year, Gov. George E. Pataki surprised his fellow Republicans by pushing through the Legislature a package of tough new gun laws, including the measure to outlaw assault weapons. But many high-powered rifles now in production are exempt from the ban because, advocacy groups say, manufacturers have altered their products to circumvent the law.

“This is a singular moment in the history of the gun control movement,” said Richard M. Aborn, the president of the Citizens Crime Commission of New York City. “The governor has the opportunity to set the high-water mark and continue New York’s leadership position in having the most effective gun control laws in the country.”

The state’s District Attorneys Association sent a letter to the governor and legislative leaders on Tuesday calling for, among other things, the elimination of a grandfather clause that allows some high-capacity magazines. And nearly 100 lawmakers have endorsed a set of proposals that includes limiting handgun purchases to one per month, requiring a new form of ballistics identification and putting in place universal background checks.

But Mr. Cuomo faces a complicated political landscape in Albany. The Assembly is controlled by Democrats who are eager for more gun restrictions, while the Senate this year is to be controlled by an unusual coalition of Republicans, who have largely resisted new gun laws, and dissident Democrats, who support more gun control. Mr. Cuomo, during his first half of his term, assiduously courted Senate Republicans, even persuading them to allow the vote that legalized same-sex marriage, but he has indicated that he is now willing to challenge the Republicans over the gun issue.

On Saturday, after the Senate Republicans called for stiffening penalties for violations of existing gun laws, but not tightening the assault weapons ban, Mr. Cuomo’s spokesman said the Republican proposal “insults the common sense of New Yorkers.”

Gun rights advocates argue that Mr. Cuomo is wrong to focus his attention on assault weapons; of 769 homicides in New York State in 2011, only five were committed with rifles of any kind, according to the State Division of Criminal Justice Services.

“This issue is not about guns, and the reason they are pushing the gun issue is because it’s much easier for them to say, ‘Look what we did; we’re going to make people safer in New York. We passed more gun laws,’ ” said Thomas H. King, the president of the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association. Mr. King, echoing the recommendation of the National Rifle Association, said that instead of banning certain guns, New York should require armed security at all schools.

Senator Catharine Young, Republican of Olean, in western New York, said she had been receiving calls from constituents who were worried about what action the Legislature might take.

“The vast majority of people who own firearms in my district are law-abiding and extremely responsible,” Ms. Young said. “They aren’t the problem; it’s illegal guns and untreated mental illness that are the problems.”

Cracking down on high-powered weapons has long been a priority for many urban Democrats in the Legislature; to draw attention to the issue, one senator even went to a gun shop near Albany to buy ammunition for an AK-47 while the transaction was recorded with a hidden camera.

“A lot of people look at this as a battle between people who want to take away all the guns and people who want to have no restrictions on guns; but most members of the public and most members of the Legislature understand that reasonable restrictions on guns make sense,” said Assemblyman Brian Kavanagh, a Manhattan Democrat. Last weekend, he said, brought another reminder of the urgency at hand: a 16-year-old from Mr. Kavanagh’s district was shot dead on Friday.

    Cuomo to Press for Wider Curbs on Gun Access, NYT, 8.1.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/09/nyregion/
    cuomo-to-propose-more-expansive-ban-on-assault-weapons.html

12 States Get Failing Grades

on Public School Policies

From Advocacy Group

January 7, 2013
The New York Times
By MOTOKO RICH

In just a few short years, state legislatures and education agencies across the country have sought to transform American public education by passing a series of laws and policies overhauling teacher tenure, introducing the use of standardized test scores in performance evaluations and expanding charter schools.

Such policies are among those pushed by StudentsFirst, the advocacy group led by Michelle A. Rhee, the former schools chancellor in Washington. Ms. Rhee has generated debate in education circles for aggressive pursuit of her agenda and the financing of political candidates who support it.

In a report issued Monday, StudentsFirst ranks states based on how closely they follow the group’s platform, looking at policies related not only to tenure and evaluations but also to pensions and the governance of school districts. The group uses the classic academic grading system, awarding states A to F ratings.

With no states receiving an A, two states receiving B-minuses and 12 states branded with an F, StudentsFirst would seem to be building a reputation as a harsh grader.

Ms. Rhee said that the relatively weak showing reflected how recently statehouses had begun to address issues like tenure and performance evaluations. “We didn’t say in any way that we want to show people how bad it is,” she said in a telephone interview. “We wanted to show the progress that is being made, but in places where progress is slower to come, be very clear with leaders of that state what they could do to push the agenda forward and create a better environment in which educators, parents and kids can operate.”

The two highest-ranking states, Florida and Louisiana, received B-minus ratings. The states that were given F’s included Alabama, California, Iowa and New Hampshire. New Jersey and New York received D grades, and Connecticut a D-plus. The ratings, which focused purely on state laws and policies, did not take into account student test scores.

Some of the policies covered by the report card have been adopted by very few states. Only eight states, for example, require districts to base teacher pay on performance rather than on experience or the attainment of a master’s degree. StudentsFirst also recommends that districts make individual teacher evaluations available to parents and require that districts inform parents when their child is placed in the classroom of a teacher rated “ineffective.”

“What we strive to do through our policy agenda is put in place things that are very common-sense policies and take it down to the level of the regular Joe on the street,” Ms. Rhee said. “Do you believe that in a time of layoffs, quality should be looked at instead of straight seniority, or do you agree that if your child is being assigned to an ineffective teacher you should know about it?”

States that have adopted policies aligned with the StudentsFirst platform have in some cases met with public opposition. In Idaho, the Legislature passed a package in 2010 that eliminated tenure, introduced performance pay for teachers and based their evaluations on student test scores. Voters overturned the measures in a referendum in November. (The state received a D-minus grade from StudentsFirst.)

State officials who had seen their ratings reacted differently, with some viewing the StudentsFirst report as a kind of blueprint, others seeing it as an à la carte menu, and some spurning it outright.

Richard Zeiger, California’s chief deputy superintendent, called the state’s F rating a “badge of honor.”

“This is an organization that frankly makes its living by asserting that schools are failing,” Mr. Zeiger said of StudentsFirst. “I would have been surprised if we had got anything else.”

StudentsFirst gave California the low rating despite the fact that it has a so-called parent trigger law that the advocacy group favors. Such laws allow parents at underperforming schools to vote to change the leadership or faculty.

California was also denied a waiver last week by the federal Department of Education to the No Child Left Behind Law, in large part because the state has not passed a law requiring that districts use standardized test scores in evaluating teachers.

Although StudentsFirst’s report card does not explicitly state that standardized tests be used in teacher evaluations, the group says that “objective” measures of “student academic growth” must be a primary component.

“This group has focused on an extremely narrow, unproven method that they think will improve teaching,” Mr. Zeiger said. “And we just flat-out disagree with them.”

Officials from other states that received higher ratings have embraced evaluations that use student test scores as an important measure. Tony Bennett, the departing superintendent of schools in Indiana (StudentsFirst grade: C-plus), was voted out in the November election after introducing A-to-F ratings for schools as well as vouchers for students to use taxpayer dollars to attend private schools. He said he strongly supported using test scores to measure student learning and teacher performance.

But as he prepares to take over as Florida’s education commissioner next week, Dr. Bennett said that he and Gov. Rick Scott of Florida, a Republican, had discussed the public’s concerns about the state’s teacher evaluation law, including how much student test scores should figure into such ratings. “I believe evaluations should be multifaceted,” Dr. Bennett said. “I don’t believe it’s all one thing.”

In Louisiana, John White, the state superintendent, said that the state’s relatively high grade on the StudentsFirst report was an “indication of the boldness and the courage that our governor and our legislators and our people have shown in supporting policies that don’t accept the status quo.”

He added that Louisiana was focused on policy priorities, including reforming graduation requirements, strengthening prekindergarten programs and improving how teachers are trained and credentialed — measures not covered by StudentsFirst.

    12 States Get Failing Grades on Public School Policies From Advocacy Group,
    NYT, 7.1.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/07/
    education/studentsfirst-issues-low-ratings-on-school-policies.html

Same-Sex Marriage Ceremonies

Begin in Maryland

January 1, 2013
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

BALTIMORE (AP) — Same-sex couples in Maryland were greeted with cheers and noisemakers held over from New Year's Eve parties, as gay marriage became legal in the first state south of the Mason-Dixon Line on New Year's Day.

James Scales, 68, was married to William Tasker, 60, on Tuesday shortly after midnight by Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake inside City Hall.

"It's just so hard to believe it's happening," Scales said shortly before marrying his partner of 35 years.

Six other same-sex couples also were being married at City Hall. Ceremonies were taking place in other parts of the state as well.

The ceremonies follow a legislative fight that pitted Gov. Martin O'Malley against leaders of his Catholic faith. Voters in the state, founded by Catholics in the 17th century, sealed the change by approving a November ballot question.

"There is no human institution more sacred than that of the one that you are about to form," Rawlings-Blake said during the brief ceremony. "True marriage, true marriage, is the dearest of all earthly relationships."

Brigitte Ronnett, who also was married, said she hopes one day to see full federal recognition of same-sex marriage. Maryland, Maine and Washington state were the first states to approve same-sex marriage by popular vote, in November, a development Ronnett said was significant.

"I think it's a great sign when you see that popular opinion is now in favor of this," said Ronnett, 51, who married Lisa Walther, 51, at City Hall.

Same-sex couples in Maryland have been able to get marriage licenses since Dec. 6, but they did not take effect until Tuesday.

In 2011, same-sex marriage legislation passed in the state Senate but stalled in the House of Delegates. O'Malley hadn't made the issue a key part of his 2011 legislative agenda, but indicated that summer that he was considering backing a measure similar to New York's law, which includes exemptions for religious organizations.

Shortly after, Archbishop Edwin O'Brien of Baltimore wrote to O'Malley that same-sex marriage went against the governor's faith.

"As advocates for the truths we are compelled to uphold, we speak with equal intensity and urgency in opposition to your promoting a goal that so deeply conflicts with your faith, not to mention the best interests of our society," wrote O'Brien, who served as archbishop of the nation's first diocese from October 2007 to August 2011.

The governor was not persuaded. He held a news conference in July 2011 to announce that he would make same-sex marriage a priority in the 2012 legislative session. He wrote back to the archbishop that "when shortcomings in our laws bring about a result that is unjust, I have a public obligation to try to change that injustice."

The measure, with exemptions for religious organizations that choose not to marry gay couples, passed the House of Delegates in February in a close vote. O'Malley signed it in March. Opponents then gathered enough signatures to put the bill to a statewide vote, and it passed with 52 percent in favor.

In total, nine states and the District of Columbia have approved same-sex marriage. The other states are Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York and Vermont.

Same-Sex Marriage Ceremonies Begin in Maryland, NYT, 1.1.2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2013/01/01/us/ap-us-gay-marriage-maryland.html