Update: Late Friday afternoon, a federal judge blocked enforcement of Kansas's new regulations of abortion clinics, allowing all clinics to remain open until the case is resolved.
In April, the Idaho Legislature passed a bill with a strange provision attached: It provided money to defend the law in court. The fetal-pain law, which prohibited abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy with no exception for rape or incest, was blatantly illegal, and the legislature knew it would be challenged. The point of the bill was to pick a fight.
In his Times column last week, Ta-Nehisi Coateswondered about Rick Perry's record: "Should Gov. Rick Perry of Texas enter the 2012 presidential race, he would enjoy a strange and remarkable escort — the irrepressible ghost of Cameron Todd Willingham." As much as I'd like to see Rick Perry pay politically for sentencing an innocent man to death and then attempting to hide evidence of his innocence, it's unclear if this episode would be detrimental to a Perry campaign.
Scott's column today on how Monday's decision in Walmart v. Dukes does a nice job of putting Scalia's opinion into historical perspective. An important exercise because, as he writes, "The idea that discrimination will rarely coexist with policies that are neutral on their face only makes sense if you ignore much of American history…"
Not only does Scalia's opinion ignore American history, also flies in the face of accepted employment practices since the 1970s. Jooey Fishkin at Balkinization explains:
Today, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargasrevealed that he is in the country illegally in a New York Times piece. What makes the piece so incredible is that it's largely one-of-a-kind, and not because there aren't an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States, many of whom surely have experiences similar to that of Vargas, but because these stories rarely reach a broad audience. From Vargas's piece:
Yesterday's decision in Walmart v. Dukes, in which the five conservative justices ruled that Walmart was too big and diverse to be subject to a company-wide class-action suit, reminds me of this bit from British comedian Eddie Izzard on mass murderers getting away with, well, being mass murderers (the relevant part starts about 45 seconds in):
