Labels: Assembly, budget, education, UW

Labels: Assembly, budget

If you ask the average Democrat about voting fraud, you’ll almost certainly be told it’s not a big problem.

Ask the same question to a Republican and chances are you’ll find out it’s a significant and prevalent concern.

Which side is right? I don’t know. Nor do I need to know, when contemplating the propriety of voter ID laws. Any voter fraud is a problem. The casting of a single fraudulent vote necessarily renders moot the casting of a legitimate one. Considering how fundamental a right voting is, don’t we owe it to ourselves to take steps to ensure the integrity of our elections?

Labels: guns, healthcare

Labels: caucus, primaries

Is there anything more transparent or absurd than our cheerleading warriors pretending to be concerned about gay Iranians? Mysteriously, they are silent about gays in Uganda, where homosexuality is a crime punishable with imprisonment, and silent about Zimbabwe, where President Robert Mugabe has called homosexuals "worse than dogs and pigs" and routinely imprisons them. Gay Africans are widely oppressed -- including arrests, beatings and governmental attacks -- in numerous sub-Saharan countries, and our brave warrior class says nothing.

Gays in many other Muslim countries, including U.S. allies such as Egypt and the UAE, are treated brutally and oppressively. In Iraq, the country we Liberated, the government we support is involved in numerous violent attacks on gay Iraqis, and our ally, Shiite Ayatollah Ali Sistani, issued a fatwa "forbidding homosexuality and declaring that gays and lesbians should be 'punished, in fact, killed.'"

He was given amble opportunity to deny that Iran was providing armaments to insurgents in Iraq and never did so. He made it clear that his version of peace will never come to the Middle East until Israel no longer exists as a state.

Columbia University, its students and faculty to be commended for opening its stage to this dictator, and for the dignity afforded him. Free speech ensures the advocate a platform. It ensures the rest of us that he is exposed.

Mr. Bush, asked about Columbia’s decision to invite Mr. Ahmadinejad, told Fox News that it was “O.K. with me,” but added that he might not have extended the invitation himself.

“When you really think about it,” Mr. Bush said, “he’s the head of a state sponsor of terror, he’s — and yet an institution in our country gives him a chance to express his point of view, which really speaks to the freedoms of the country. I’m not sure I’d have offered the same invitation.”

As a law clerk, Stevens reviewed cases involving liberty and security after World War II. The experience, he told me, shaped his views about the importance of judicial oversight of the president’s aggressive actions in terrorism cases after 9/11. Stevens worked with Rutledge on a dissent from a 1948 opinion upholding the right of the attorney general to deport German nationals considered to be Nazis without any review by federal courts. Rutledge objected to the idea that federal courts couldn’t issue writs of habeas corpus because the Germans were held on Ellis Island rather than falling within the jurisdiction of a federal district court. Stevens cited Rutledge’s dissent when he wrote a landmark majority opinion in the 2004 Rasul case, which allowed foreign nationals held at Guantánamo Bay to challenge their detention in U.S. courts. (A portrait of Rutledge hangs in Stevens’s chambers.)

Stevens was also influenced by Rutledge’s dissenting opinion in the Yamashita case in 1946, in which the court upheld the power of a military commission to try and to execute a Japanese general in the Philippines in violation of the Geneva Conventions. Emphasizing the dangers of denying anyone within American jurisdiction a fair trial, Stevens once again cited Rutledge’s dissent in his own opinion in the Hamdan case in 2006, which struck down President Bush’s military commissions because they were not specifically authorized by Congress. (Congress authorized them later that year.)

I recently asked Post and Siegel to identify a progressive vision for the next liberal justice that could mobilize Democratic voters as well as provide an effective counterweight to the four movement conservatives on the Roberts Court. They answered that the next truly liberal justice would have at least four qualities. First, in an age when the conservative justices are determined to cut off access to the courts in cases from civil rights to terrorism, the next liberal justice would interpret the Constitution to provide “access to the courts to enforce the rule of law” and would “understand that even the most powerful president is not a king.” Second, the justice would “interpret the Constitution in light of the entire history of the nation, and not just in light of the Constitution’s drafting history.” Third, the justice would “interpret the Constitution to create conditions of equal liberty to participate in the life of the nation” — in areas ranging from abortion and sex equality to affirmative action and campaign finance reform. Finally, instead of reading the Constitution in a cramped, legalistic fashion, the justice would “interpret the Constitution to create a partnership between courts and the popular branches,” encouraging Congress and the American people to debate and define constitutional values. They provided, in effect, a list of the very qualities that defined the mature vision of Justice Stevens.