† States’ Rights Vs. The Feds: Tenth Amendment types are all for state’s rights when it comes to Second Amendment issues, such as who is permitted to carry a concealed weapon and under what circumstances, and on immigration issues, as with laws that AZ and other states enact to combat illegal immigration. But what about ERISA and gay marriage? Is the Supremacy Clause bad, except when it’s good?

 

The New York Times examines whether state’s rights proponents - who tend to be conservative – are flummoxed by a pair of rulings from the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. Judge Joseph Tauro held that Section 3 of the federal Defense of Marriage Act, signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1996, “violates the equal protection principles embodied in the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution” (Gill v. OPM) and “offends” the Tenth Amendment because “it is clearly within the authority of the Commonwealth to recognize same-sex marriages among its residents, and to afford those individuals in same-sex marriages any benefits, rights, and privileges to which they are entitled by virtue of their marital status” (Commonwealth of Massachusetts v. HHS).

 

The Times asserts that the Tenth Amendment ruling “created an awkward new debating point within the less-government movement about where social goals and government policy intersect, or perhaps collide”:

 

“The Constitution isn’t about political ideology,” said Michael Boldin, the founder of the Tenth Amendment Center, a group based in Los Angeles. “It’s about liberty, and limiting the government to certain divisive issues - I applaud what I consider a very rare ruling from the judiciary.”  …

 

Mr. Boldin … said the ruling, and how politicians in Washington and around the country react to it, would illuminate whether people were working to limit federal authority on Constitutional principle in all cases, or only for certain causes or partisan agendas.

 

The ruling “leaves the proper situation of each state being able to decide its own fate,” Mr. Boldin wrote in a blog on the group’s Web site.

 

“If the courts were trustworthy, they’d do the same for healthcare, education and all kinds of other powers that the federal government has usurped,” he wrote. “So would politicians - who seem to champion the 10th only when it’s in their partisan best interest.”

 

While agreeing that the judge ruled correctly that “[i]t’s unconstitutional for the federal government to pass laws superseding state authority,” States-rights.org founder Steve Moon, tells The Times, “I personally believe in the sanctity of marriage between a man and woman and support any state passing laws affirming the sanctity of marriage” – and those who favor gay marriage see the ruling as a double-edged sword. Evan Wolfson, executive director of Freedom to Marry, observes that “You don’t get married according to the laws in Congress, you get married according to the laws of New York or New Jersey or Connecticut.”

 

For their part, Tea Party Patriots – who are probably in line with many similar organizations – did not take the bait, reasserting that they are not concerned with divisive social issues.

 

Taken together, The Stiletto is hard pressed to find any collisions of worldviews here. Perhaps that’s why The Times used the adverb “perhaps” as a modifier, though it comes off as wishful thinking on the part of the reporter that the ruling gives conservatives brain freeze the way that, say, the staggering ecological damage to the Sonoran desert ecosystem done by the hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants crossing into AZ each year discombobulates environmentalists.  

 

Editorial Note: A groundbreaking med-mal lawsuit filed in CT by the surviving member of a 25-year same-sex couple - who joined together in a civil union in that state in 2005 three years before same-sex marriage became legal – seeks loss of consortium. The case is expected to get kicked all the way to the state Supreme Court.

 

† Honor Killing And Beheading: Stereotype Or True To Type?: What do Harry Potter and honor killings have in common? D.L. Adams, a contributing editor at Family Security Matters, explains in this Washington Times op-ed:

 

On July 2, CNN reported, "The father and brother of a Harry Potter actress will appear in court later this month in Manchester, England, on charges of threatening to kill the young star." The family is Muslim, and the suspected motives are clear - Afshan Azad, who played Harry's classmate Padma Patil in the popular movies - was dating a Hindu. …

 

While Miss Azad's case is receiving more attention than most of its predecessors, almost all of the reporting is missing a key component - the Islamic doctrinal basis for these horrific attacks on and murders of females by males within Muslim families for leaving Islam and/or not being "Islamic enough." These attacks are neither accident nor aberration. …

 

Islamic doctrine and law allow murder of family members and non-Muslims (kafirs). …

 

The barbaric assault against Miss Azad by her father and brother should be a catalyst for millions of Harry Potter fans across the world who know nothing about Islam to learn about this cruel and oppressive ideology.

 

† The Keystone Kops Are Enforcing U.S. Immigration Laws: Canadian-born Sylvie Nelson, a naturalized citizen who is married to an American and lives with him and their two children in Saranac Lake, NY, crosses the border “several times a month to visit relatives, friends and her family's second home, using her Canadian passport to leave the country and her U.S. passport to get back in,” reports The Associated Press, but finds the return trip is often fraught with peril:

 

Customs agents sometimes order her out of her car. Twice, they handcuffed her in front of her young children. Once, agents swarmed her car and handcuffed her husband, too.

 

She tells them: It's not me you want, it's a man with the same birth date and a similar name. Agents always confirm that and let her go.

 

Then it happens again. And again.

 

"I can understand one missed identification," Nelson said. "But over and over and over again?"

 

Nelson, a 44-year-old white woman, keeps getting snared at the Canadian border because she apparently shares some key identifying information with a black man, possibly from Georgia, who is in trouble with the law. While such cases of mistaken identity at border points and airports are not unique, Nelson's case is unusual in that only some of her crossings set off an alarm and because federal officials have not fixed the problem after almost two years. …

 

"They never apologize," Nelson said. "They basically tell you that they're doing their job for the better good of the world."

 

Nelson has struggled to get information from Homeland Security officials. They will not tell her who she is being confused with or why the problem persists. She doesn't know why her passport triggers alarms some days but not others.

 

The Stiletto will hazard a guess. Two, actually: Either on the days she isn’t hassled the border agents are too “preoccupied” to follow the standard protocol of checking whatever database(s) she is on, or they are so hellbent on not being accused of racial profiling that they perform their duties as though a white woman and a black man could be the exact same person.

 

† Life Imitates “A Law Abiding Citizen”: Lonnie Franklin Jr. (AKA the "Grim Sleeper"), the 57-year-old man charged with 10 murders in LA had been arrested at least 15 times during the past 40 years for such crimes as burglary, car theft, firearms possession and assaults but was never sent to state prison despite the recommendation of probation officers, reports The Associated Press:

 

[H]is crimes never were considered serious enough to send him to state prison or to warrant his entry in the state's DNA database, authorities said.

 

"He's danced to the raindrops for a long time without getting wet," Detective Dennis Kilcoyne, head of the task force investigating the killings, told the Los Angeles Times.

 

Franklin was arrested Wednesday on 10 counts of murder and other charges in the deaths of young black women that started in the 1980s, then suddenly stopped, only to resume again 14 years later - sparking the nickname Grim Sleeper. …

 

One of the victims was killed in July 2003, when records show Franklin should have been in county jail but was released early because of overcrowding. …

 

Franklin made a first court appearance Thursday on the murder counts as well as one count of attempted murder and special-circumstance allegations of multiple murder that could lead to the death penalty or life in prison without possibility of parole.

 

Editorial Note: Maurice Dubois and Carrie McGonigle, the parents of 14-year-old Amber Dubois, who was kidnapped, raped and murdered by John Albert Gardner III in February 2009 on her way to school (fifth item), have filed a suit against the state of CA, reports The Associated Press:

 

The DuBois family's damage claims were made public the same day state lawmakers approved a $20 million payment to the family of Jaycee Dugard, who was kidnapped as a girl and held captive in Northern California for 18 years by a paroled sex offender, Phillip Garrido. The state agreed to pay the money to Dugard and her two daughters.

 

The allegations by Amber's parents are similar, alleging that parole agents failed to do their job.

 

Gardner "violated his parole at least five times while on probation (sic) for molesting and beating a teenage girl in 2000, and each time he was left on the street," said the claims filed by attorney Robin Sax. "Our claim follows the meeting (of the) California Sex Offender Management Board which questioned why John was not sent back to prison for parole violations in 2007 and 2008. Had he been returned to prison, he would have been evaluated for commitment to a state mental hospital as a sexually violent predator."

 

The parents of Chelsea King, another of Gardner’s victims may file their own lawsuit against the state.

 

† Garbage In, Garbage Out: Part II: The New York Times reports on yet another pedagogic fad that turns out to be worthless – giving disadvantaged or minority students home computers (“test scores often decline after the machine arrives”) - based on studies of low income students in Romania who were given government vouchers in 2009 to offset the cost of a home computer (“[w]hat they were used for - daily - was playing games”); a Duke University study found that the negative effect on middle school test scores coinciding with increasing availability of broadband service in NC between 2000 and 2005 “was largely confined to lower-income households”; and a state-level review of the effect of a four-year experiment in “technology immersion” that used $20 million in federal grants to provide laptops for students in 21 middle schools to take home found that they were not used for self-directed learning or to do homework as school officials had hoped they would be.

 

† Obama Is Just About Every U.S. President All Rolled Into One!: Another comparison between Presidents Barack Hussein Obama and Richard Milhous Nixon, this time from NBC News chief White House correspondent Chuck Todd, speaking at the just-concluded Aspen Ideas Festival: “He [President Obama] lets the media get under his skin. I talked to someone who’s been covering presidents a lot longer than I have, and they said they can’t remember any president complaining as much publicly about the media in general since Richard Nixon. Bush and Clinton hated the media. They just never talked about it in public all the time.” 

† Updates To Previous Posts (last item, Nationalized Healthcare Always Leads To Rationing): Three medical doctors currently serving in the House of Representatives - Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-GA), Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) and Rep. Charles Boustany (R-LA) – co-authored a Washington Times op-ed in which they argue that Dr. Donald Berwick, President Barack Hussein Obama’s "recess appointee" as administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will be a "rationer-in-chief":  

 

[H]is appointment circumvents the normal Senate confirmation process and the president is simply able to hand Dr. Berwick the post. Making matters worse, this decision to appoint Dr. Berwick was not a last-resort effort by the administration after weeks of unresolved Senate debate. Truth be told, there has been no confirmation hearing before the committee of jurisdiction or even the opportunity for a single member of Congress - Democrat or Republican - to question Dr. Berwick publicly. …

 

Democrats have a majority capable of passing any nominee through the committee process if their fellow Democrats support that nominee. It appears the president was more worried that a full vetting of Dr. Berwick would cause some in his own party to vote against his nominee. …

 

Berwick has been one of the most prominent advocates of denied care. He has praised England's health care system and its rationing board, which limits patients' access to needed care based on cost. In his book on health care reform, Dr. Berwick argued that patients' access to heart surgeons should be restricted according to where they live and medication costs should be reduced by limiting access to needed drugs. …

 

The president has put himself in an unenviable predicament. He plans to add millions of new patients to the government health care rolls, which inevitably will cause costs to skyrocket unless he can find a way to limit health care expenditures. Hence the impetus to put Dr. Berwick - an avid promoter of rationed care - in a position of power.

 

† Updates To Previous Posts (third item, Employers Hiring Forged Documented Aliens Are Lawbreakers In Other Ways, Too): The subtext of this New York Times article is “Obama is too doing something about illegal immigration!” But since the illegals themselves are not being arrested or deported, The Stiletto has to say, “Is not!” But, you be the judge: 

 

The Obama administration has replaced immigration raids at factories and farms with a quieter enforcement strategy: sending federal agents to scour companies’ records for illegal immigrant workers.

 

While the sweeps of the past commonly led to the deportation of such workers, the “silent raids,” as employers call the audits, usually result in the workers being fired, but in many cases they are not deported.

 

Over the past year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has conducted audits of employee files at more than 2,900 companies. The agency has levied a record $3 million in civil fines so far this year on businesses that hired unauthorized immigrants, according to official figures. Thousands of those workers have been fired, immigrant groups estimate.

 

Employers say the audits reach more companies than the work-site roundups of the administration of President George W. Bush. The audits force businesses to fire every suspected illegal immigrant on the payroll— not just those who happened to be on duty at the time of a raid — and make it much harder to hire other unauthorized workers as replacements. …

 

“Even if discovered, illegal aliens are allowed to walk free and seek employment elsewhere” said Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the senior Republican on the Judiciary Committee. “This lax approach is particularly troubling,” he said, “at a time when so many American citizens are struggling to find jobs.”

 

† Updates To Previous Posts (second item, A To Z Approach On Illegal Immigration In AZ): A recent Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of 500 likely voters in AZ finds that 64 percent agree that children born to illegals should not automatically become U.S. citizens. Nationwide, 58 percent of voters agree. In contrast, 26 percent of Arizonans and 33 percent of voters across the nation agree with the current law that a child born to a woman in the U.S. illegally is a U.S. citizen the moment it pops out of the womb. 
 

 

The law stripping anchor babies of their American citizenship is still on the drawing board, but meanwhile police are wrestling with how to enforce AZ’s new law allowing them to ask about the immigration status of people who have committed an infraction of the law that necessitated police intervention – driving erratically, for instance, or being the aggressor in a physical altercation (not the victim) – without the DOJ, ACLU and others taking them to court on charges of racial profiling.

 

Here’s a pop quiz:

 

You’re a police officer responding to a call from the security office at Chandler Fashion Center, where three women are being detained for boosting more than $5000 goods from several stores (hey, it could happen). They were all caught red-handed holding several bulging shopping bags with anti-theft tags still attached to the goods and no receipts. You notice that the women speak ungrammatical English, and with a heavy accent. Can you ask them to show proof of citizenship?

 

Or, while you’re patrolling I-10 one evening, you stop a van heading towards Phoenix with a broken tail light and find a dozen adults crammed into it. It’s still 95-degrees outside, but they are all wearing several layers of clothing, and look increasingly nervous as you ask the driver for his license and proof of insurance. Can you ask the passengers for their papers?

 

According to training materials developed by the Arizona Peace Officer Standards and Training Board and issued to 15,000 police officers in AZ to ensure that racial profiling is not used as a basis to apply the law, you cannot question the women on their immigration status based on the fact that they speak broken English, but you can - and should – ask the passengers in the van for documentation based on their suspicious behavior.

 

But that’s not good enough for the League of United Latin American Citizens, which filed a suit challenging the guidelines as being based on "vague and ill-defined factors" that will result in "widespread" racial profiling of Hispanics, reports The Associated Press:

 

"It's like having a law that tells police to go out and arrest all children but to not use the fact that a person looks like a child," Los Angeles-based attorney Peter Schey, lead counsel for the plaintiffs who filed the lawsuit, said Saturday.

 

"Rather than training police officers about who is and who is not really deportable, the training materials focus on vague and ambiguous factors, such as a person's dress or limited ability to speak English or demeanor, whatever that means," Schey said. "An average law enforcement officer using those standards is inevitably going to focus on a person's physical appearance or race while being sure not to say that in his or her report."

 

The AZ anti-illegal immigration law has prompted seven lawsuits to date.

 

† Updates To Previous Posts (ninth item, Extradite Polanski To Poland): In a stunning denouement to a case that spanned three decades, the Swiss government is refusing to extradite film director Roman Polanski to the U.S. and has set him free, reports The Associated Press:

 

The Swiss government said it had sought confidential testimony given on Jan. 26 by Roger Gunson, the Los Angeles attorney in charge of the original prosecution against Polanski. Washington rejected the request. …

 

The Oscar-winning director of "Rosemary's Baby," ''Chinatown" and "The Pianist" was accused of plying his victim with champagne and part of a Quaalude during a 1977 modeling shoot and raping her. He was initially indicted on six felony counts, including rape by use of drugs, child molesting and sodomy, but pleaded guilty to one count of unlawful sexual intercourse.

 

In exchange, the judge agreed to drop the remaining charges and sentence him to prison for a 90-day psychiatric evaluation. However, he was released after 42 days by an evaluator who deemed him mentally sound and unlikely to offend again. The judge responded by saying he was going to send Polanski back to jail for the remainder of the 90 days and that afterward he would ask Polanski to agree to a "voluntary deportation." Polanski then fled the country on the eve of his Feb. 1, 1978, sentencing.

 

Based on references to Gunson's testimony in U.S. courts, the Swiss said it "should prove" that Polanski served his sentence after undergoing 42 days of diagnostic study, the statement said.

 

"If this were the case, Roman Polanski would actually have already served his sentence and therefore both the proceedings on which the U.S. extradition request is founded and the request itself would have no foundation," the ministry said.