Public Approval of Supreme Court Falls to All-Time Low

The U.S. Supreme Court finished its term with big decisions on voting rights, affirmative action and same-sex marriage. Following those rulings, public approval of the court has fallen to the lowest level ever recorded in more than nine years of polling.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 28% believe the Supreme Court is doing a good or an excellent job. At the same time, 30% rate its performance as poor. That’s the highest-ever poor rating. It’s also the first time ever that the poor ratings have topped the positive assessments. Thirty-nine percent (39%) give the court middling reviews and rate its performance as fair. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

These numbers are even weaker than the numbers recorded following the Supreme Court ruling upholding the president’s health care law last year. Just before the court heard arguments on the health care law, 28% gave the justices good or excellent marks. However, disapproval was far lower than it is today. Then, following those arguments, many thought the court was likely to overturn the law. At that point, positive ratings for the court shot up to 41%, the highest level in years. However, when the court eventually upheld the health care law, the numbers fell again. Just 29% offered a positive review early that September. Read more >>

Supreme Court rules human genes cannot be patented

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that human genes cannot be patented, a decision with both immediate benefits for some breast and ovarian cancer patients and long-lasting repercussions for biotechnology research.

The decision represents a victory for cancer patients, researchers and geneticists who claimed that a single company's patent raised costs, restricted research and sometimes forced women to have breasts or ovaries removed without sufficient facts or second opinions.

But the court held out a lifeline to Myriad Genetics, the company with an exclusive patent on the isolated form of genes that can foretell an increased genetic risk of cancer. The justices said it can patent a type of DNA that goes beyond extracting the genes from the body.

Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the decision for a unanimous court. "Myriad did not create anything," Thomas said. "To be sure, it found an important and useful gene, but separating that gene from its surrounding genetic material is not an act of invention."

The compromise will not stop other scientists from providing genetic diagnostic testing now that the patent on the two genes themselves has been lifted. That should lead to lower costs and greater access. Read more >>

Unaffordable Cost Seen for Some Under Affordable Care Act

To Megan Hildebrandt, President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act means she can no longer be denied health insurance because of her lymphatic cancer.

There’s a big catch: Coverage for the 28-year-old artist and many other Americans without insurance will come at a potentially unaffordable cost.

Hildebrandt, who relies on hospital charity, will face more than $1,000 in annual premiums, by one estimate, and probably more in out-of-pocket expenses even with new federal subsidies. She and her husband have a combined income of $25,000.

“It’s great that I’m not going to have to pay some hugely impossible amount,” said Hildebrandt, who lives in Austin, Texas. “Though now I’m in the health-care system and still have to pay money that we can’t really afford.”

The landmark health-care law, which survived the threats of repeal and a Supreme Court review, now confronts another hurdle: living up to expectations. As the administration spells out the details, many uninsured will be surprised at how much they will have to pay. It may involve “very substantial amounts,” and “there still will be a significant number of people who can’t afford health coverage,” said Ron Pollack, head of Families USA, a consumer group that backs the law. Read more >>

Obama administration: cellphone location data is not ‘constitutionally protected’

In a federal court Tuesday, the Obama administration claimed that Americans have absolutely no “reasonable expectation of privacy” concerning cellphone location data, thus enabling law enforcement to acquire detailed records of a user’s movements without even obtaining probable cause warrant.

This is just one of the many cases of the Obama administration fighting to hold on to unconstitutional powers such as warrantless wiretapping, the power to indefinitely detain Americans without charge or trial, and even their supposed right to refuse to explain why they believe they have the authority to assassinate Americans.

In court the administration cited a 1976 Supreme Court decision in the case United States v. Miller which essentially stated that documents like banking records are actually “third-party records,” thus removing any right to privacy. Read more >>

High Court Health Ruling to Increase Uninsured, CBO Says

About 3 million fewer low-income Americans will have health insurance as a result of the Supreme Court decision that threw out part of President Barack Obama’s health-care overhaul, the Congressional Budget Office said.

The cost of expanding coverage will shrink by $84 billion to $1.168 trillion under the court decision, which voided a requirement that states expand Medicaid coverage for the poor in 2014, the nonpartisan agency said in a report today. At the same time, the report said the per-person cost of expanding aid will increase because some who would have been covered by Medicaid will instead receive more-expensive subsidies to buy private health insurance.

It is the first official estimate of the effects of the June 28 court decision upholding the core requirement in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that most Americans carry health insurance or pay a penalty. The court threw out a provision requiring states that don’t comply with the Medicaid expansion to lose existing federal Medicaid funding. The court said Congress can require states to meet conditions to receive new Medicaid money. Read more >>

Obamacare leaves many of the poorest Americans at risk of remaining uninsured

The Supreme Court may have upheld health care reform, but the ruling has left many of the poorest Americans at risk of remaining uninsured. The justices' decision Thursday kept in place nearly all of the Affordable Care Act's provisions, including the mandate that all consumers buy health insurance by 2014 or pay a tax. Also upheld was a provision that expands Medicaid coverage to include all adults with annual incomes at or below 133% of the federal poverty level, which is currently $14,404 for an individual.

The federal government will pick up the total cost of the expensive expansion for the first three years, after which the funding will phase down to 90%. The expansion could reduce the number of uninsured adults with incomes under 133% of poverty by more than 11 million by 2019, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation estimate.

But here's the catch: The states can opt out of the Medicaid expansion program, since the court said the federal government can't penalize them by withholding all Medicaid funding. Instead, these states wouldn't get the additional Medicaid money to cover newly eligible enrollees. And that could mean trouble for many poor adults who are not eligible for Medicaid under the current system but would have qualified under the expansion. Read more >>

CBS/New York Times poll: Most want Supreme Court to overturn individual health care mandate

A new CBS News/New York Times poll reveals that nearly seven in ten Americans want the Supreme Court to overturn either all or President Obama's health care law or strike down just the individual mandate. In the poll released on Thursday, 41 percent of those polled think Mr. Obama's health care law should be overturned completely by the Supreme Court, with another 27 percent of respondents saying they want the court to keep the law but overturn the mandate.

Nearly one-quarter - twenty-four percent - of respondents want the entire law upheld. The margin of error is three percentage points. The percentage that wants to see the entire law abolished is up slightly since April, when 37 percent said they wanted the court to overturn the full law, 29 percent said only the mandate should be overturned and 23 percent wanted the whole law upheld.

As the Supreme Court decision on the health care law is expected this month, the new poll shows that Republicans are much more likely to want the entire law overturned than Democrats, with 67 percent wanting the law to be overturned compared to 20 percent of Democrats. While 42 percent of Democrats say they want the entire law to be upheld, 42 percent of Independent respondents say they want the Supreme Court to overturn the whole law. Tea Party supporters are especially likely to want the entire law to be overturned -- 70 percent support that. Read more >>

Iceland Lenders May Lose $4.3 Billion on Court Ruling

Omar R. Valdimarsson
Iceland’s lenders may lose as much as $4.3 billion, equivalent to a third of the economy, after a court last month found that some foreign loans were illegal, said Finance Minister Steingrimur J. Sigfusson.

“This is the largest single loan category of the banks, with a value of between 800 billion kronur and 900 billion kronur ($7.2 billion),” Sigfusson said today. “If the capital on all these loans is written down by 40 percent to 60 percent, we’re talking about enormous amounts.”

The Supreme Court ruled June 16 that loans indexed to foreign-currency rates were illegal in three cases involving private car loans and a corporate property loan. The decisions may mean that borrowers with such loans are only obliged to repay the principal in kronur, making the lenders liable for currency losses on about $28 billion in debt after a third of the krona’s value against the Japanese yen and Swiss franc was erased since September 2008.

There’s a “considerable chance” that the ruling will be applied to many foreign-currency indexed loans issued by Icelandic banks, Sigfusson told radio station Bylgjan yesterday. “I’m referring to this not only applying to car loans, but also mortgages, and a considerable amount of loans to companies and other parties.”More...

Corporations are pitching a bizarre product -- a radical vision of the 1st Amendment.

Monica Youn
Giving corporations an outsized voice in elections
Corporations are pitching a bizarre product -- a radical vision of the 1st Amendment. It would give corporations rather than voters a central role in our electoral process by treating corporate political spending as protected speech. If this vision becomes reality, businesses and other big-money players will spend billions either hyping their preferred candidates or running attack ads against elected officials who don't support their preferred agenda. Voters will be forced into a couch-potato role, mere viewers of the electoral spectacle bought and paid for by wealthy companies.

The Supreme Court's decision in the hotly anticipated campaign finance reform case Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission -- which may be announced as early as Tuesday -- will show whether a majority of the Roberts court is buying their argument.

The case may be the turning point in a concerted, decades-long ideological campaign -- the "corporate free speech movement," as Robert L. Kerr and other scholars have chronicled. As far back as 1971, Lewis F. Powell Jr. (whom President Nixon would shortly nominate to the Supreme Court) sent a confidential memorandum to his friend Eugene Sydnor Jr. at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce arguing that corporate interests needed to take advantage of a "neglected opportunity in the courts." Because "the judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic and political change," the memo said, the chamber and other corporate interests should develop a cadre of constitutional lawyers to file lawsuits and amicus briefs to push a corporate-friendly legal agenda in the Supreme Court.

Corporations heeded this call to arms, generously funding the chamber's litigation arm and founding other think tanks. In hundreds of lawsuits and briefs, the chamber and corporations such as Exxon-Mobil and Nike have drilled in the pro-business party line that 1st Amendment protection should extend to corporate political spending -- such as the corporate-funded movie about Hillary Rodham Clinton that is at issue in Citizens United. The case, which began on narrow grounds (did restrictions on corporate campaign ads apply to this film?) has become a test of whether restrictions on political speech by corporations should be ended altogether.

Only five years after Powell sent his memo, the Supreme Court in Buckley vs. Valeo struck down campaign spending limits on 1st Amendment grounds, with the rationale that such limits "impose direct and substantial restraints on the quantity of political speech." Two years later, in First National Bank of Boston vs. Bellotti, the court held -- for the first time -- that the 1st Amendment extends to corporate political spending, striking down a law that had prevented business corporations from spending shareholder funds to influence the outcome of state ballot measures. By then Powell was on the court, and he wrote the controlling opinion in Bellotti and was in the majority in both cases.

As 1st Amendment expert Linda Berger has pointed out, the Buckley and Bellotti cases planted the seeds of three new metaphors in election law: that money is speech; that corporations are people; and that elections are marketplaces. To equate corporate campaign spending with 1st Amendment-protected speech, you must accept all three. Each, however, is problematic.

First, although spending money may, in some circumstances, have some expressive value (such as clicking a web link to give $10 to a candidate), it does not follow that money is speech or that the 1st Amendment should shield such spending from regulation. After all, I can drive my car in a way that conveys a message -- disapproval of a tailgating fellow driver, for example -- but that doesn't mean that driving is speech, nor that the 1st Amendment renders traffic laws unconstitutional. When corporations and other monied interests spend vast sums to influence the outcome of an election, they're not trying to communicate an idea but simply to wield economic power and to bid for influence.

Second, as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg pointed out at the Citizens United oral argument, a corporation "is not endowed by its creator with inalienable rights." After all, corporations are legal entities created for doing business and given special advantages that aren't available to individuals or even other business entities, including limited liability and favorable tax treatment.

Thus, although corporations have certain economic rights -- to enable them to conduct business -- a corporation has no claim to the fundamental constitutional rights held by "We the People." Corporations already have ample means to express their "viewpoints" -- by lobbying, testifying in Congress and conducting public education on issues -- and those corporate employees who wish to advance the corporation's political agenda can contribute to the corporation's political action committee.

Third, and finally, one should not simply import economic free-market principles wholesale into the "free market of ideas." The operating assumption of free-market theory is that, in the long term, buyers' preferences will steer money to the best outcomes, so that those firms that offer the best goods and services will be rewarded with the greatest market success. However, this "invisible hand" assumption -- that money follows or represents merit -- has no application to elections, especially when corporations are involved. The amount of money a corporation can spend lacks even a theoretical connection to the intrinsic worth -- or popular support -- of its political agenda.

For decades, the Supreme Court stopped short of fully endorsing any of the three metaphors, heeding former Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist's warning that to treat corporate spending as the 1st Amendment equivalent of individual free speech is "to confuse metaphor with reality." Instead, as campaign finance law developed, the court struck a balance between the rights of campaigners -- candidates, parties, PACs and corporations -- on the one hand and the rights of the electorate to a representative, participatory and accountable government on the other.

But since Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel Alito have replaced Rehnquist and Justice Sandra Day O'Connor on the court, concern for the 1st Amendment interests of the electorate seems to have been jettisoned. Since they joined the court, it has struck down campaign finance regulations in each of the three relevant cases it has heard, championing a 1st Amendment right to spend money freely in political campaigns without regard to the voter's right to a meaningful role in the electoral process.

With Citizens United due to be decided as campaigns for this year's elections get off the ground, political players are keenly aware that the court could open the floodgates to corporate cash. "We the People" can only hope the court steps back from the brink and instead recognizes that in a democracy, voters, not corporations, should be at the center of the political process.

Monica Youn directs the Money in Politics Project of the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law.

Obama delcares torturers immune from prosecution

Image by Rosie O'Beirne via Flickr

Shocked and Unnerved

Everywhere and anywhere, those seen as rejecting even a small measure of an America-centric perspective will be labeled undesirables, subversives, and even “enemy combatants,” whether or not evidence supports the assertion.
--Chapter 11, "Social," Financial Armageddon

Although I predicted as much in my 2007 book, even I am shocked and unnerved at how quickly the U.S. is abandoning principles that once defined our nation as "the land of the free and the home of the brave." In "Supreme Court Guts Due Process Protection," Naked Capitalism highlights a recent development that should frighten the wits out of any American who is still capable of thinking:

Reader Walter passed along this distressing sighting from Chris Floyd’s blog. American civil liberties were gutted last week, and the media failed to take note of it.

The development? If the president or one of his subordinates declares someone to be an “enemy combatant” (the 21st century version of “enemy of the state”) he is denied any protection of the law. So any trouble-maker (which means anyone) can be whisked away, incarcerated, tortured, “disappeared,” you name it. Floyd’s commentary:

After hearing passionate arguments from the Obama Administration, the Supreme Court acquiesced to the president’s fervent request and, in a one-line ruling, let stand a lower court decision that declared torture an ordinary, expected consequence of military detention, while introducing a shocking new precedent for all future courts to follow: anyone who is arbitrarily declared a “suspected enemy combatant” by the president or his designated minions is no longer a “person.” They will simply cease to exist as a legal entity. They will have no inherent rights, no human rights, no legal standing whatsoever — save whatever modicum of process the government arbitrarily deigns to grant them from time to time, with its ever-shifting tribunals and show trials.

It is hard to overstate the significance of this horrid decision. The fact that the Supreme Court authorized this land grab says we no longer have an independent judiciary, that the Supreme Court itself is gutting the protections supposedly provided by the legal system. Per Floyd:

In fact, our most august defenders of the Constitution did not have to exert themselves in the slightest to eviscerate not merely 220 years of Constitutional jurisprudence but also centuries of agonizing effort to lift civilization a few inches out of the blood-soaked mire that is our common human legacy. They just had to write a single sentence.

Now Floyd saw this mainly as an issue of the treatment of enemy combatants and Obama hypocrisy about torture, which is bad enough:

The Constitution is clear: no person can be held without due process; no person can be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment. And the U.S. law on torture of any kind is crystal clear: it is forbidden, categorically, even in time of “national emergency.” And the instigation of torture is, under U.S. law, a capital crime. No person can be tortured, at any time, for any reason, and there are no immunities whatsoever for torture offered anywhere in the law.

And yet this is what Barack Obama — who, we are told incessantly, is a super-brilliant Constitutional lawyer — has been arguing in case after case since becoming president: Torturers are immune from prosecution; those who ordered torture are immune from prosecution….let’s be absolutely clear: Barack Obama has taken the freely chosen, public, formal stand — in court — that there is nothing wrong with any of these activities.

Yves here. The implications are FAR worse. Anyone can be stripped, with NO RECOURSE, of all their legal rights on a Presidential say so. Readers in the US no longer have any security under the law.

Roman citizens enjoyed a right to a trial, a right of appeal, and could not be tortured, whipped, or executed except if found guilty of treason, and anyone charged with treason could demand a trial in Rome. We have regressed more than 2000 years with this appalling ruling.