Enter the voter initiative (whole thing here via ):

…Proposition A wouldn’t repeal the tax, but it would give residents in the two cities a chance to vote every five years starting in 2011 on whether to continue the tax. If voters approved a repeal of the tax, it would be phased out over 10 years, at one-tenth of a percent each year.

The measure also bans any other cities from enacting an earnings tax….

Seems pretty benign, though I’m sure legal challenges will surface if Prop A passes…. assuming of course Missourians are allowed to vote at all.

Enter Kansas City government with union backing:

KANSAS CITY (AP) — Kansas City’s city attorney has filed a lawsuit seeking to block a November ballot measure that would allow residents of Kansas City and St. Louis decide whether to keep their cities’ earnings tax….

A group called Let Voters Decide submitted the ballot measure after the petition drive. The suit was filed on behalf of acting Kansas City city manager Troy Schulte and Pat Dujakovich, president of the Greater Kansas City AFL-CIO, both as private citizens….

What’s their main complaint?

…The lawsuit argues that the required elections would cost both St. Louis and Kansas City about $500,000, and neither city would be compensated for the cost.

According to the suit, Proposition A “becomes a de facto appropriation by voters statewide on Kansas City funds for the purpose of this (local) election.”…

But…

…Let Voters Decide spokesman Marc Ellinger said the measure wouldn’t require either city to pay for a local election if they just wanted to skip the vote and let the tax phase out automatically….

Please don’t get me wrong here, Kansas City might have a good legal basis for their arguments, but I’m unsure we should be living in a government which chooses to sue the state in order to specifically prevent voters from casting their ballots.

Maybe I’m off here, but I always thought for a law to be challenged it had to exist first, then harm would have to exist to give any client standing.

Of course don’t tell that to the President or Arizona either, but I’m digressing.

The point is only that when the government seeks to actively prevent your voice from being heard through ballot initiatives, people should be concerned.

Arizona’s tough new immigration law was just hours away from taking effect when a federal judge issued an injunction today blocking key portions of the law from being enforced.

Among the provisions U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton put on hold are the “reasonable suspicion” section that would allow police to arrest and detain suspected illegal immigrants without a warrant and a provision making it illegal for undocumented day laborers to solicit or perform work.

Bolton also stayed part of the Arizona law requiring immigrants to carry federal immigration documents.

Based upon the likelihood that these provisions could be used by officers to wrongly detain legal residents.

Next steps? Arizona will likely appeal and lose that appeal at the 9th Circuit Court.  The final arbiter of course being SCOTUS if they decide to take the case upon any further appeals.

Legally speaking, it’s an interesting question.  Basically, one of the powers the federal government holds is over immigration status and therefore it can be legally argued that Arizona has overstepped its authority (regardless of whether legal citizens will be wrongly detained).  However, does this mean a state has no resource against illegal aliens if the federal government is doing a poor job at the very responsibility they are stating they have absolute authority over.

More interesting I think will be the upcoming round of debates on a continuing question:  What is judicial activism and who is and isn’t exactly against it?

& the question isn’t an easy one.   Two fairly recent decisions can illustrate the complexity.  For most of recent memory, conservatives have been leading the charge against judicial activism.  But take a case like Kelo v New London where conservative outrage notwithstanding, the court followed the restraint pattern by enforcing prior precedence.

Move forward to McDonald v the City of Chicago and whether conservatives think so or not, a federal decision has invalidated a law the citizens of Chicago seemed to agree (based upon the fact they have recourse through voting)…. this would be judicial activism.

In most people’s minds it seems judicial activism is only wrong when a law your side has passed met its end through the legal system, otherwise it’s always wise restraint or cautious interference.

But let’s call it what it is:  judicial activism is when the court system invalidates the will of the voters.  This is true whether they invalidate gun laws, marriage statutes or amendments, immigration laws, sodomy laws, marijuana laws, and on and on and on.

Let’s further assume no one is really against all judicial activism.  I think most reasonable people can agree that say if judges were to invalidate the intermittent of Japanese-Americans during WWII, it would’ve been both activist and morally correct.  Even if most people couldn’t agree on that, we can all envision unjust laws which should not stand.

If we can allow for that definition, the maybe we can change the question as well.  Instead of – are you for or against judicial activism – to – how and when should judges be activist; we might begin to move towards a more reasoned debate.

So let’s call this one what it is – judicial activism and ask, should it have been used?  Why/why not?

I for one want to see judicial activism to always err on the side of individual rights and freedoms, not collections, groups, NOGs, nor government agencies.  This case gives me pause either as I am supporting of Arizona’s rights, the freedom of those individual voters to enact the laws they wish, but also am against current immigration policy.  For now, the voters spoke and I would err on the side of those individuals.

Others of course will draw the line in different places.

What’s important however is that we understand the line exists, instead of continuing to pretend it moves based upon our wishes.

more here on the debate: Reason’s July Cover Story Conservatives v. Libertarians

For such a prestigious and life long appointment, we should expect much better (via Cato here):

Elena Kagan, President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, seemed to shock many people when she dodged questions about the Declaration of Independence during her testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee…

DA posts here & here

Via Freakanomics here, which will hopefully put to rest the idea that nurses go on strike to “help” patients, from the NBER paper:

…Controlling for hospital-specific heterogeneity, patient demographics and disease severity, the results show that nurses’ strikes increase in-hospital mortality by 19.4% and 30-day readmission by 6.5% for patients admitted during a strike, with little change in patient demographics, disease severity or treatment intensity….

Robert Reich via Salon.com here demonstrates once again how much politics effects his economic analysis.  According to him, this whole economic mess, including a potential backslide can be blamed solely on deregulation:

…starting in the late 1970s, and with increasing fervor over the next three decades, government did just the opposite. It deregulated and privatized. It increased the cost of public higher education and cut public transportation. It shredded safety nets…

Which he believes is causing greater wage disparities:

…We’re back to the same ominous trend as before the Great Recession: a larger and larger share of total income going to the very top while the vast middle class continues to lose ground….

Because with deregulation, of course, companies can become EVIL:

…Companies were allowed to slash jobs and wages, cut benefits and shift risks to employees (from you-can-count-on-it pensions to do-it-yourself 401(k)s, from good health coverage to soaring premiums and deductibles)….

I submit what Mr. Reich fears is freedom – freedom of business owners to hire and fire as they wish, freedom of employees to change jobs easily (401K allows this, pension does not), just freedom.

Secondarily, you can see in his writing that the only thing the government has ever done wrong, is by not getting involved enough.  He doesn’t mention government meddling, deficit spending, enormous new health care expenses, entirely new federal agencies which more money will be needed, idiotic regulations like a moratorium on all oil drilling due to one company’s failure….

Nope, for Mr. Reich, it’s all because the government hasn’t taken enough control over the little people.

Via Cato here, more news on the Obama Administration’s transparency:

The Social Security’s trustees’ annual report is, by law, supposed to be published by April 1. This year, however, the trustees have postponed its release indefinitely. The program’s financial condition continues to remain hidden from public view — and by many accounts will continue to be so until the end of the fiscal year….

Wonder if Reich views this as an issue?

The 9th

SAN FRANCISCO — A sharply divided federal appeals court in California on Monday exposed Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to billions of dollars in legal damages when it ruled a massive class action lawsuit alleging gender discrimination over pay for female workers can go to trial….

Now I don’t claim to be a lawyer and haven’t even played one on tv, but part of the dissent seems obvious to me:

…Judge Sandra Ikuta wrote a blistering dissent, joined by four of her colleagues.

“No court has ever certified a class like this one, until now. And with good reason,” Ikuta wrote. “In this case, six women who have worked in thirteen of Wal-Mart’s 3,400 stores seek to represent every woman who has worked in those stores over the course of the last decade — a class estimated in 2001 to include more than 1.5 million women.”…

Maybe they like being overturned (here from 2007)?

…The 9th Circuit also has a long-running streak as the most overturned, which went unbroken this year. The Supreme Court reviewed 22 cases from the 9th Circuit last term, and it reversed or vacated 19 times….

Via WSJ, The Big Brown Union Bailout

If you can’t beat ‘em, have Congress hobble ‘em. That’s the motto of some in corporate America, and Exhibit A might be United Parcel Service’s campaign to get Washington to impose its labor woes on rival Federal Express. This would be one more union bailout at the expense of business competition and economic efficiency….

This is a continuation of this administration’s policies to pay off unions at the expense of others (DA posts here).

Via Reason.com, GM’s Phony Bailout Payback

Uncle Sam gave GM $49.5 billion last summer in aid to finance its bankruptcy….  So when Whitacre publishes a column with the headline, “The GM Bailout: Paid Back in Full,” most ordinary mortals unfamiliar with bailout minutia would assume that he is alluding to the entire $49.5 billion. That, however, is far from the case….

I say if you want to buy American, buy Ford – no bailout money and still going strong.

& cool science news via e!Science (here):

…In a study published as an Advance Online Publication in the journal Nature Nanotechnology on Sunday, physicists at Ohio University and the University of Hamburg in Germany present the first images of spin in action….

NORTHAMPTON, Mass. — Insults and threats followed 15-year-old Phoebe Prince almost from her first day at South Hadley High School, targeting the Irish immigrant in the halls, library and in vicious cell phone text messages.

Phoebe, ostracized for having a brief relationship with a popular boy, reached her breaking point and hanged herself after one particularly hellish day in January — a day that, according to officials, included being hounded with slurs and pelted with a beverage container as she walked home from school.

Now, nine teenagers face charges in what a prosecutor called “unrelenting” bullying, including two teen boys charged with statutory rape and a clique of girls charged with stalking, criminal harassment and violating Phoebe’s civil rights….

Assuming the facts, this was criminal behavior with or without the heinous result:

…Northwestern District Attorney Elizabeth Scheibel, who announced the charges Monday, said the events before Phoebe’s death on Jan. 14 were “the culmination of a nearly three-month campaign of verbally assaultive behavior and threats of physical harm” widely known among the student body.

…At least four students and two faculty members intervened to try to stop it or report it to administrators, she said….

So far we seem to be good – charge those directly responsible.  Now what about those administrators who did nothing?

…School officials won’t be charged, even though authorities say they knew about the bullying and that Phoebe’s mother brought her concerns to at least two of them….

& here is the unspoken problem:  government imposed monopoly on schools for which no one is responsible.  Thanks to a strong union and forced funding of these failing institutions we end where the adults charged to protect her are not responsible at all.

Maybe it’s just me, but criminal charges seem consistent with the law.   Sure, a civil suit will likely exist and be successful.  But the end result is the taxpayers who have to support the idiots who allowed this to continue will have to pay for their mistakes.

I’m just saying – it’s possible a justice system which can’t or won’t hold these people accountable combined with a civil system that will punish taxpayers, not the administrators, doesn’t incent future administrators to do better next time.

Maybe there’s a reason they weren’t charged?

…No school officials are being charged because they had “a lack of understanding of harassment associated with teen dating relationships,” and the school’s code of conduct was interpreted and enforced in an “inconsistent” way, Scheibel said…

Oh…. now I get it.  They’re not responsible because they’re too stupid to understand kids their jobs.

It seems at least 4 children, 2 teachers and 1 parent knew enough to try to get help to intervene, but since the administrators just don’t understand kids these days – it’s not really criminal.

What would’ve been criminal would be for Phoebe’s parents to keep her home from school, without proving they were educating her consistent with state guidelines.

But what’s not criminal is doing nothing to prevent this little girl from being criminally harassed daily.

*Side note:  Bravo to the children that stood up against this behavior.  They should be celebrated for doing the right thing and will hopefully be secure in the knowledge that they at least tried.  While the adults did nothing, they tried.