Milwaukee DA Office Riddled with Anti-Walker Activists

Wow. From Media Trackers.

Media Trackers is able to confirm that 43 current employees of the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s office signed the petition to recall Governor Scott Walker. A total of 70 names on iverifytherecall.com matched the names of current employees at the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s office, but not all could be completely confirmed at the time of publication. The employees signing the Walker recall petition range in stature from a Deputy District Attorney, to at least 19 Assistant District Attorneys, and a host of support staff.

Highest ranking among the officials signing the Walker recall petition was Deputy District Attorney Lovell Johnson Jr. Johnson is one of five Deputy District Attorney’s who report directly to DA John Chisholm.

AG Likely to Appeal Redistricting Ruling

This seems utterly stupid.

Madison - The state is likely to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court a decision last month that found two election maps on Milwaukee’s south side violated federal law, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Justice said Tuesday.

The comment came the same day the state and groups suing it filed competing proposals to fix Assembly Districts 8 and 9. A panel of three federal judges in Milwaukee must now decide how to draw those lines.

Once the panel renders its decision, the state will likely appeal the case, said Dana Brueck, the Justice Department spokeswoman. All federal redistricting appeals go directly to the Supreme Court.

The plans for appeal come after Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen and other Republicans claimed victory for the three-judge panel’s March decision. That ruling found Assembly Districts 8 and 9 violated the federal Voting Rights Act, but threw out arguments against numerous other legislative and congressional maps.

An appeal by the Department of Justice would give the plaintiffs a chance to cross-appeal on a host of claims they lost. If the Supreme Court ruled in their favor on those arguments, wholesale changes to the maps could be made.

“If they actually do appeal, I think a cross-appeal is likely,” said Doug Poland, an attorney for a group of Democrats who sued over the maps.

The ruling was almost a complete win for the Justice Department. Let it lie.

Does Obama’s Administration Recognize Judicial Review?

One federal judge wants to know.

During oral arguments in Houston in a separate challenge to another aspect of the federal health care law, U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Jerry Smith said Obama’s comments troubled a number of people who have read them as a challenge to the authority of federal courts.

“I’m referring to statements by the president in the past few days to the effect, I’m sure you’ve heard about them, that it is somehow inappropriate for what he termed unelected judges to strike acts of Congress that have enjoyed, he was referring of course to Obamacare, to what he termed a broad consensus and majorities in both houses of Congress,” Smith told Dana Kaersvang, an attorney with the Justice Department in Washington, D.C.

On Monday, Obama issued a direct challenge to the Supreme Court, saying he didn’t believe the high court would take the “unprecedented” step of overturning a law passed by a strong majority of Congress.

“I want to be sure that you are telling us that the Attorney General and the Department of Justice do recognize the authority of the federal courts through unelected judges to strike acts of Congress or portions thereof in appropriate cases,” Smith said.

A somewhat surprised Kaersvang told Smith the Justice Department does recognize this power by the courts and made reference to a landmark 1803 case that formed the basis for judicial review.

However, Smith ordered Kaersvang to submit a letter to the appeals court by Thursday stating the position of U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and the Justice Department on the concept of judicial review.

“The letter needs to be at least three pages, single spaced, no less and it needs to be specific. It needs to make specific reference to the president’s statements,” Smith said.

Polling Huh?

I was reading this post at Althouse, and something about the poll numbers struck me as odd.  I can’t access the full results because they’re behind a paywall, but from what’s quoted by Althouse:

Presumably, that’s repeal if the Supreme Court doesn’t strike down the law, and 54% expect the Supreme Court to strike down the law, and 50% would like to see that happen. 37% would like the law upheld, and only 26% think that’s going to happen. Only 20% of voters think Congress has the constitutional authority to force everyone to buy health insurance.

So 20% think Congress was acting within its constitutional authority, but 37% would like to see the law upheld?  Does that mean 17% of the respondents want to see the law upheld despite the fact they think it’s unconstitutional?

Obama Gripes About SCOTUS

The president seems to be confused about how this whole judicial review thing works.

“I’m confident this will be upheld because it should be upheld,” the president said Monday afternoon at a White House press conference that included ‪Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Mexican President Felipe Calderon, who are attending the North American Leaders’ Summit. The president said overturning the law would be “an unprecedented and extraordinary step” and compared the court’s rejection of the law to “judicial activism.”

“For years what we’ve heard is the biggest problem on the bench was judicial activism,” the president said, baiting conservatives who have long complained about justices’ political agendas. The president stressed that the judges are “unelected” and noted that the law was passed by a democratically elected Congress.

Some of Act 10 Struck Down By Federal Judge

This is not unexpected and somewhat promising.

A federal judge on Friday upheld most of Gov. Scott Walker’s controversial collective bargaining law, but struck down key parts of it by ruling that the state cannot prevent public employee unions from collecting voluntary dues through payroll deductions and cannot require they recertify annually.

It was expected that some judge judge, in this case an Obama appointee, would decide to strike down part of the law. This decision will be appealed and I suspect likely overturned. The ruling even makes a point of saying that he held one injunction until May 31st to give time for the State to appeal and get a stay from the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals.

On the bright side, Act 10 was a big act that did a lot of things and these are the only two items that even this judge could find fault with. If the ruling ends up standing, it will be annoying for the taxpayers to remain the collection agent for the unions and whatnot, but the benefit of the rest of Act 10 outweigh those two things by far.

SCOTUS To Vote Today

Today the die will be cast.

WASHINGTON (AP) — While the rest of us have to wait until June, the justices of the Supreme Court will know the likely outcome of the historic health care case by the time they go home this weekend.

After months of anticipation, thousands of pages of briefs and more than six hours of arguments, the justices will vote on the fate of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul in under an hour Friday morning. They will meet in a wood-paneled conference room on the court’s main floor. No one else will be present.

In the weeks after this meeting, individual votes can change. Even who wins can change, as the justices read each other’s draft opinions and dissents.

But Friday’s vote, which each justice probably will record and many will keep for posterity, will be followed soon after by the assignment of a single justice to write a majority opinion, or in a case this complex, perhaps two or more justices to tackle different issues. That’s where the hard work begins, with the clock ticking toward the end of the court’s work in early summer.

Voter ID Sent to Supreme Court

Good.

Appeals courts sent two lawsuits challenging Wisconsin’s blocked new voter ID law directly to the state Supreme Court on Wednesday, determining it was imperative to resolve the cases quickly given the slate of important upcoming elections, including the state’s presidential primaries next week.

If the Supreme Court agrees to take the cases, it could reinstate the state’s new requirement that voters show photo identification at the polls just days before Tuesday’s election. However, attorneys challenging the law said it is unlikely a decision would come that quickly.

Federal Court Steps in on Redistricting

Excellent.

A federal court this morning agreed to fix the redistricting maps Republicans created last year to create a majority-minority Latino Assembly district in Milwaukee.

It also made clear in its order that it was looking only at changes to Assembly Districts 8 and 9 after Dems suggested to the court over the weekend that additional seats may have to be altered to meet the court’s concerns.

This is a complete win for the Republicans. First, it is affirmed by the federal panel that every district except two were perfectly legal - and those two were only a little bit off (I disagree with their reasoning, but that’s immaterial). Second, politically speaking, the two districts in question are Democratic districts anyway, so no matter how they redraw the line between them, it has no impact on Republican political considerations.

Union Sues Library Board Over Union Contract

This is an interesting legal quandry.

Before the law was enacted in 2010, the bargaining unit for library employees and the library board signed two consecutive contracts, one covering 2010-2011 and the other 2012-2013.

When the first contract expired on Dec. 31, the city stopped withholding union dues and wouldn’t honor other contract provisions, according to the lawsuit filed in Dane County Circuit Court.

Monona officials believe that under state law, they can’t honor the second contract, said city administrator Patrick Marsh.

Court Orders Google to Stop Autocomplete

OK, now I REALLY want to know the guy’s name.

A Tokyo court has ordered that Google suspend its autocomplete search function after a Japanese man claimed it violated his privacy and cost him his job.

The case is a first involving the search function, which instantly suggests words or phrases a person may want to look for before the user has finished typing.

So far, Google, headquartered in California, has refused to halt the feature, saying it will not be regulated by Japanese law and did not violate any privacy policies, according to the Kyodo news agency.

The man at the center of the legal case has not come out publicly, but his lawyer, Hiroyuki Tomita, says his client decided to seek a court injunction after he lost his job and failed at several attempts to land a new one. Tomita said Google searches of his client’s name suggested words involving criminal acts, and included 10,000 items that defamed or disparaged him. The man, whose name was not made public, believes that’s what led to his firing and derailed his efforts to find new opportunities.

Hopper Not Guilty of Drunk Driving

Wow. This hardly ever happens. I wonder what the reasoning is.

A jury found former state senator Randy Hopper not guilty Friday on a charge of drunken driving stemming from his October arrest in Fond du Lac County.

It’s About Our Relationship With Government

This is perhaps the best article written about this issue. It frames the issues at hand perfectly. From the Wall Street Journal:

Few legal cases in the modern era are as consequential, or as defining, as the challenges to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that the Supreme Court hears beginning Monday. The powers that the Obama Administration is claiming change the structure of the American government as it has existed for 225 years. Thus has the health-care law provoked an unprecedented and unnecessary constitutional showdown that endangers individual liberty.

It is a remarkable moment. The High Court has scheduled the longest oral arguments in nearly a half-century: five and a half hours, spread over three days. Yet Democrats, the liberal legal establishment and the press corps spent most of 2010 and 2011 deriding the government of limited and enumerated powers of Article I as a quaint artifact of the 18th century. Now even President Obama and his staff seem to grasp their constitutional gamble.

Consider a White House strategy memo that leaked this month, revealing that senior Administration officials are coordinating with liberal advocacy groups to pressure the Court. “Frame the Supreme Court oral arguments in terms of real people and real benefits that would be lost if the law were overturned,” the memo notes, rather than “the individual responsibility piece of the law and the legal precedence [sic].” Those nonpolitical details are merely what “lawyers will be talking about.”

President Obama signing the health care bill at the White House on March 23, 2010.
.The White House is even organizing demonstrations during the proceedings, including a “‘prayerful witness’ encircling the Supreme Court.” The executive branch is supposed to speak to the Court through the Solicitor General, not agitprop and crowds in the streets.

The Supreme Court will not be ruling about matters of partisan conviction, or the President’s re-election campaign, or even about health care at all. The lawsuit filed by 26 states and the National Federation of Independent Business is about the outer boundaries of federal power and the architecture of the U.S. political system.

Court Affirms Almost All of Wisconsin’s Redistricting Maps

Excellent.

A federal court this morning ruled Republicans failed to create a majority-minority Assembly seat for Milwaukee’s Latino community and offered lawmakers the chance to tweak those lines.

But the court otherwise left intact the maps the GOP created last summer, ruling that while more than a million Wisconsinites were moved needlessly, “the resulting population deviations are not large enough to permit judicial intervention under the Supreme Court’s precedents.”

The ruling enjoins the GAB from implementing the map in its current form.

The court stressed in the ruling that its ruling on Assembly districts 8 and 9 are not intended to affect any other seats. It added that re-drawing those lines must occur within the combined outer boundaries of those two seats to avoid impacting other districts.

As the AG siad,

All challenges to Act 44 were rejected and the newly drawn congressional boundaries were upheld as legal and constitutional. All challenges to the state senate districts created by Act 43 also were rejected and the newly-drawn state senate districts were upheld as legal and constitutional. With respect to the state assembly districts created by Act 43, the Court rejected all constitutional challenges and all other challenges with one exception. The Court held that the plaintiffs were entitled to limited relief under the Voting Rights Act with respect to assembly districts 8 and 9. Although it recognized that Act 43 created “two Latino influence districts,” it found this to be insufficient “because Act 43 fails to create a [single] majority-minority district for Milwaukee’s Latino community.” However, the Court stated that its “holding is not intended to affect any other district drawn by Act 43” and that any “redrawing of the lines for Districts 8 and 9 must occur within the combined outer boundaries of those two districts.”

Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen responded to the decision as follows: “The judgments made by the Wisconsin Legislature have largely been vindicated. No constitutional defects were found and what began as a scattershot attack on every aspect of these laws has come down to a single finding that one line between two districts should be adjusted. While the intent of the maps was to create two assembly districts where Latino voters were likely to be dominant, the Court concluded that it was better to draw the line so that Latino voters were more concentrated in one of the districts.”

No Charges in Slinger Shooting

This was the correct decision.

Washington County District Attorney Mark Bensen announced Wednesday that no charges will be filed in the fatal shooting 20-yearold Bo Morrison of West Bend.

  Morrison was shot by a homeowner in the early morning hours of March 3 following an underage drinking party in the 100 block of North Kettle Moraine Drive in Slinger. In a statement, Bensen said his investigation found that the homeowner had acted in self-defense and so would not be charged with a crime.

Looking at the facts of the incident, the D.A. made the correct decision. It is worth noting that the D.A. pointed out that Wisconsin’s new Castle Doctrine did not apply in this case. It was a plain old case of lawful self-defense.

According to the district attorney’s office’s report on the shooting and subsequent investigation, Morrison fled an underage drinking party and was likely trying to hide from police when he entered into what the district attorney’s office described as a “three season room/porch.” The area was completely inclosed and had to be accessed through two doors, including a white storm door/screen door, and a white insulated steel door. The three season room is approximately 11 feet by 7.5 feet and contained a refrigerator and dresser in the area where Morrison was found.

  “The homeowner stated that he thought he locked the second back door (the white, insulated steel door which separates the outside of the residence from the three season room/porch),” the report said.

  According to the district attorney’s office, the homeowner said he and his wife heard banging sounds coming from the back of his house. The homeowner told investigators that he was afraid that someone may have been trying to climb to the second story of the house, where his two children and their guest, all under age 10, were sleeping. He was also afraid of retaliation by the party-goers, since he had called police to complain about the party. Reportedly because of these concerns, the homeowner loaded his handgun and went to check his home.

  According to the report, when he reached the enclosed porch, the homeowner saw a person, Morrison, stand up from a crouch out of the corner of his eye. The homeowner “indicated that he said something like, ‘who are you?,’ ‘why?’ or ‘what are you doing?’ to the person in the three season room/porch of his residence,” the attorney’s office said.

  However, Morrison did not respond intelligibly but raised a hand and took a step toward the homeowner, who fired his gun, the report said. The homeowner immediately told his wife to call the police. Officers responded within five minutes.

  When emergency services arrived at the scene, they performed life-saving procedures but were unable save Morrison, who died at the scene of a single gunshot wound to the chest from a Colt 45 caliber revolver. Morrison had a blood alcohol content of .19 at the time, twice Wisconsin’s legal driving limit.

  The investigation confirmed that Morrison was mostly likely standing when he was shot.