Judge Posner's smackdown

By now you may have heard that the appeals from WI and IN, defending their marriage bans  to the 7th circuit didn't go so well.  And the star of the hearing was Reagan appointee Judge Richard Posner.  The Advocate pulls some of the highlights from the transcript.

Fisher: The issue here is to deal with what may be a fleeting moment of passion that leads to a child that nobody contemplated…

Judge Posner: Do you criminalize fornication?

No, no longer.

Would you like to? 

No, it's not at issue here.

It sounds like a way of dealing with this unintended child problem. 

It's one thing to criminalize—

You don't seem to like adoption as a way of dealing with it. 

That is not true. …

So why do you prefer heterosexual adoption to homosexual adoption? 

We don't.

Of course you do. You give all kinds of benefits to the heterosexual adoptive parents. ...
The benefits that you're talking about are not triggered based on sexual orientation, they're based on marital status.

Come on now, you're going in circles. The question is, why do you want the children who are adopted by same sex couples … to be worse off? … 

Judge Hamilton got in some zingers too

Judge Hamilton: Both you and Indiana have argued that what you really want to do is promote child births in marriage, right?

Samuelson: Correct. 

And encourage parents to stick together and raise those children, right?

Correct. 

I assume you're familiar with how that's been working out in practice over the last 25 or 30 years? … The proportion of births to unmarried mothers have increased by 53 percent in Wisconsin. … It's sort of like trying to focus on the mote in someone else's eye while ignoring the beam in one's own. …

Go to the Advocate to read more.  Court watchers think this one goes our way.

Wisconsin Governor: financial martial law?

This already happened in Michigan. Now, Wisconsin's right wing governor continues his plans to eviscerate democracy in his state. From Forbes:

Reports are surfacing that Scott Walker is now preparing his next assault on the democratic political process in the State of Wisconsin.

Following the lead of Michigan GOP Governor Rick Snyder, Walker is said to be preparing a plan that would allow him to force local governments to submit to a financial stress test with an eye towards permitting the governor to take over municipalities that fail to meet with Walker’s approval.

According to the reports, should a locality’s financial position come up short, the Walker legislation would empower the governor to insert a financial manager of his choosing into local government with the ability to cancel union contracts, push aside duly elected local government officials and school board members and take control of Wisconsin cities and towns whenever he sees fit to do so.

Such a law would additionally give Walker unchallenged power to end municipal services of which he disapproves, including safety net assistance to those in need...

And given his history with cronyism, I doubt very much any good would come of giving him such martial powers.

I continue to be puzzled over the ostensible link between conservative Christians and this kind of politics. I'll bet you that Gov Walker considers himself a good Christian. These days, I doubt you can be a Republican if you aren't nominally Christian. So, how does Scott Walker justify his attacks on working people and the poor in Christian terms?

How do hard-core anti-tax conservatives justify it?

Well, apparently their love of money trumps their social contract.EJ Dionne writes,

At other moments in our history, the informal networks of the wealthy and powerful who often wield at least as much influence as our elected politicians accepted that their good fortune imposed an obligation: to reform and thus preserve the system that allowed them to do so well. They advocated social decency out of self-interest (reasonably fair societies are more stable) but also from an old-fashioned sense of civic duty. “Noblesse oblige” sounds bad until it doesn’t exist anymore..... a funny thing happened to the American ruling class: It stopped being concerned with the health of society as a whole and became almost entirely obsessed with money.

And the Koch Brothers are laughing all the way to the bank.

What Rule of Law?

The union-bashing Governor of Wisconsin and his Republican minions managed to pass a bill abolishing collective bargaining for public unions.

The State Supreme Court issued a restraining order.

The Republicans ignored it.

Wisconsin Republicans made up a new process because they felt like it: bill passes legislature, bill signed by governor, bill goes around by Secretary of State's office, bill published by some agency called the Legislative Reference Bureau, law is on the books.

The Legislative Reference Bureau itself said it can't publish measures into law and also can't take the place of the Secretary of State's office, but the Wisconsin GOP doesn't care. They're making up the rule of law as they go along.

Not surprisingly, the Judge issued another restraining order. Still, the GOP doesn't care. The rules only apply to the other people.

Almost immediately after Judge Sumi issued this new order, some Republicans said that as far as they're concerned, the union-busting measure is still the law, court order or no court order.....

The Walker administration's Department of Justice said, "Whether the Department of Administration or other state officers choose to comply with any direction issued by Judge Sumi is up to them."

Look, this is a Constitutional crisis. You don't get to ignore the court, regardless of your power-mad ideology. As the Judge said,

"Now that I've made my earlier order as clear as it possibly can be, I must state that those who act in open and willful defiance of the court order place not only themselves at peril of sanctions, they also jeopardize the financial and the governmental stability of the state of Wisconsin."

Still snorting at the scent of fascism?