All Blog Posts from Crossroads

And the race is on--even earlier than some observers had expected.

Mitt Romney's announcement today that he's forming an exploratory committee may have caught some by surprise, but the timing is all about -- you guessed it -- money.

With President Obama poised to raise record amounts, Romney's camp realized it needed to start tapping into his network of supporters and raising money now, in the second quarter (which started April 1). They want this time to raise the kind of money the campaign is going to require.

Watch Romney's video below:

President Obama today approved the resumption of military trials at Guantanamo Bay for those detainees designated by the Justice Department for the military justice system. New military trials at Guantanamo were stopped in January 2009 by Defense Secretary Robert Gates pending a review of US detention policy.

It's worth taking a minute to stop and consider that this is coming from a President who, as a U.S. Senator, repeatedly blasted George Bush's detainee policies and referred to Guantanamo as a "legal black hole" that he said he'd close within a year of taking office. Today, he is in some ways preserving a system the Bush Administration created.

Senior administration officials this afternoon were going to great lengths to say these are NEW and IMPROVED policies that both protect national security and preserve American "values." And they do provide more protections for detainees. But the changes really are just tinkering with the margins of the system that Bush set up.

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Justice Samuel Alito was the sole dissenter in Wednesday's Supreme Court decision to protect the right of the Westboro Baptist Church to hold inflammatory, anti-gay protests outside of funerals, insisting the funeral protests did not deserve constitutional protection.

"Our profound national commitment to free and open debate is not a license for the vicious verbal assault that occurred in this case," Alito wrote in his dissent.

High court rules for military funeral protesters

The Westboro Baptist Church, an anti-gay fundamentalist group led by Rev. Fred Phelps, habitually protests high-profile events as a means to publicize its view that U.S. deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan are God's punishment for American "immorality" - particularly in regard to national tolerance of homosexuality.

The church is best known for protesting the funerals of military servicemen, and famously carries signs with such sayings as "Thank God for Dead Soldiers" and "Fags Doom Nations." (It has also, however, picketed such events as theater productions and high school graduations.)

The father of Matthew Snyder, who was killed in Iraq in 2006 and whose funeral was protested by Westboro Baptist Church, sued the group in 2006 and won $11 million in damages. (The figure was later reduced to $5 million by a judge.) But in the 8-1 ruling on Wednesday, the Court said the church could not be held liable for inflicting emotional distress on the families of deceased soldiers.

The justices said the speech was protected because the protests were on a matter of public concern, on public property and conducted in a peaceful manner.

"Speech is powerful. It can stir people to action, move them to tears of both joy and sorrow, and--as it did here--inflict great pain," Chief Justice Roberts wrote in the decision. "On the facts before us, we cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker. As a Nation, we have chosen a different course--to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate."

Alito noted in his dissent, however, that the father of the soldier was not a public figure, but "simply a parent" who wanted to "bury his son in peace."

Alito said the father suffered "severe and lasting emotional injury" as a result of the church's "malevolent verbal attack."

He added that such vicious verbal attacks that make "no contribution to public debate" are not protected when they inflict "severe emotional injury on private persons at a time of intense emotional sensitivity."

The massive, ongoing sweep of suspected Mexican drug cartel members in the United States, Latin America and Central America is a direct and calculated response to last week's killing of a U.S. law enforcement agent in Mexico.

Named "Operation Fallen Hero" or "Operation Bombardier," the sweep involves every federal law enforcement agency, as well as state and local agencies in all 50 states. And it started in the hours following Tuesday's funeral of Customs and Immigration Enforcement agent Jaime Zapata.

"We're sending a message. We're showing all the cartels that you're not going to bully us. You're not going to push us around. You're not going to murder or harm or pose a threat to a U.S. law enforcement officer," said Carl Pike the assistant special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Agency's special operations division. "We're saying, 'we know who you are. We are coming after you, and we will continue to come after you.'"

In the past two days, officers have arrested more than 200 people and seized more than $6 million, in addition to cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamine and more than 100 weapons, Pike said. Most of the arrests were of suspects who had been monitored in ongoing criminal investigations, and Pike said he expects many more as the raids continue through tomorrow and possibly through the weekend.

Pike said there was something like a "school yard mentality" to the ongoing raids.

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Aside from the Big Deal that DOJ no longer will defend a federal law (which historically has hardly ever happened) there's perhaps an even Bigger Deal in today's announcement that President Obama has decided the Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional.

In reaching that conclusion, the President and Justice Department have concluded that laws treating gays and straight people differently must get closer scrutiny from the courts--and should be upheld only if there is a very good reason for them. That's a tougher legal standard than the courts typically have used in evaluating discriminatory laws against gays and lesbians.

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In a decision described as "shocking" and "breathtaking," the Obama administration announced this afternoon that the Justice Department will no longer defend the Defense of Marriage Act, a federal law that defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman.

The highly unusual move hands gay rights advocates a major victory they have worked years to secure--but is also certain to provoke intense controversy and trigger a heated political battle with Congressional Republicans, who support the law and have refused to repeal it.

The Justice Department is tasked with defending laws passed by Congress--even those laws the sitting President may not like or have supported. Only a few times in history has a President decided his Justice Department will not defend an existing federal law. In those rare circumstances, the House of Representatives can step in and have its lawyers defend the law in court.

Obama administration will no longer defend DOMA
Gay Rights Groups Angered by Justice Department's DOMA Defense

President Obama decided the Justice Department no longer would defend DOMA after concluding the law was unconstitutional, administration officials said. Attorney General Eric Holder notified House Speaker John Boehner of the President's decision in a letter today, explaining that the administration believed the law violated equal protection principles, because it treats gays and lesbians differently than heterosexual couples. The government, he said, has no compelling reason for doing that.

"This is a rare case where the proper course is to forgo the defense of this statute," Holder said in the letter.

But the decision represents an about-face for the administration, which for two years had defended the statute against legal challenges by same-sex married couples. Holder said two new lawsuits had prompted the President and the Justice Department to "conduct a new examination" of the law, which blocks entitlement of federal benefits even in states where gays and lesbians have a right to marry.

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One of the big raps on the Roberts Court is that it's too sympathetic to Big Business. Today, we got a decision that counters that storyline.

Ever since the Supreme Court made a conservative turn in 2006, critics have pointed to rulings that shut the courthouse door to the little guy--especially the little guy who's trying to sue a giant corporation, such as a manufacturer of medical devices or drugs. In those cases, the Court has said product liability lawsuits are barred under federal law. The rationale is that since federal regulators had approved the devices and the drugs in the first place, the companies aren't liable for defective designs.

What critics don't mention is that some of the liberal justices have been on board with some of those decisions favoring the corporations. And today, the Court showed once again that simplistic narratives aren't always accurate. In a unanimous decision, the justices paved the way for a lawsuit against Mazda Motor Corp., rejecting the company's argument that it should not be subjected to lawsuits over its failure to install shoulder belts in the back seats of its minivans.

The case came about in 2002, when a Mazda minivan crashed and killed a passenger in the back seat. The girl was wearing a lap-only seat belt--the 1993 van didn't have shoulder belts for the back seat.

Her parents, who were in the front seat, were wearing lap AND shoulder belts, and they survived. They sued Mazda, saying the automaker should have put lap and shoulder belts in the back seat too, and that if the van had those seats, their daughter would have survived the crash.

Mazda fought the suit, saying its minivans met all federal safety regulations in effect at the time, and so the family's lawsuit could not go forward. A California appeals court agreed.

But the Supreme Court, in an opinion by Justice Breyer, said those federal safety regulations don't bar lawsuits over lap-only seat belts. Justice Breyer said there was no proof the government wanted to preempt these types of lawsuits back then or today--and he noted that the Administration had argued the lawsuits should go forward.

The regulations have changed since the 2002 crash, and new cars now have lap and shoulder belts in the back seats. But older vehicles on the roads--and the administration says there are about 1 million of them--have the lap-only belts.

Lots of people were flat-out incredulous when they heard New York City is banning smoking on beaches and in parks--including the vast expanse of Central Park. Here are a couple answers to some of the questions I heard today:

Q: Seriously. Can New York really ban smoking outside, away from building entrances--even in "windswept" Battery Park (as the NYT put it) or Central Park? I mean, bars and restaurants are one thing, but a park?

A: Yes. We don't have a constitutional right to smoke (or, for that matter, a constitutional right to wear a Green Bay Packers jersey to work after the NFC championship game). Right now, nearly 80 percent of the people in the US live under some type of smoking ban, whether it's in bars, restaurants, workplaces--or on public property. And courts across the country have repeatedly upheld those bans--saying smoking is not a fundamental right and the government has an interest in protecting public health.

So the New York law may sound extreme, but it isn't that unusual---or even as far-reaching as bans in other parts of the country. The county that includes Minneapolis, for example, is planning to ban smoking on any public property--even if smokers are in their own cars.

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The Supreme Court today gave vaccine manufacturers greater protection from lawsuits by parents who say vaccinations harmed their children, ruling that Congress had blocked those types of claims against drug makers.

In a 6-2 decision, the justices said Congress had effectively shut the courthouse door to these lawsuits in 1986, when it created a special vaccine court designed to compensate victims of vaccine injuries.

The decision immediately was hailed by the American Academy of Pediatrics, which said it would safeguard the nation's vaccine supply by protecting vaccine makers from potentially crippling legal liability--which could have driven manufacturers out of the vaccine market.

"Childhood vaccines are among the greatest medical breakthroughs of the last century," said the organization's president, Dr. O. Marion Burton. "Today's Supreme Court decision protects children by strengthening our national immunization system and ensuring that vaccines will continue to prevent the spread of infectious diseases in this country."

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Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has announced he's asking the Supreme Court to step in now and decide the constitutionality of health care reform--instead of waiting for the case run its normal course through the federal appeals court.

"Currently, state governments and private businesses are being forced to expend enormous amounts of resources to prepare to implement a law that, in the end, may be declared unconstitutional," he said in a statement. "Regardless of whether you believe the law is constitutional or not, we should all agree that a prompt resolution of this issue is in everyone's best interest."

Not to go out on a limb here, but I would rank the odds of success on this petition as, oh, zero. This is a highly unusual request, and the Court doesn't like highly unusual requests. It typically sticks to its traditions, which in this case would mean letting appeals run their course.

There are practical reasons for doing so: letting this case play out gives the justices the benefit of more opinions/dissents from the appellate courts as they weigh different sides of the issue.

Moreover, Cuccinelli is asking the Court to expedite a case he WON, not to block a ruling against him. If the Court were inclined to step into the case now, and there is no reason to think it is, the justices would be more likely to act on an appeal from DOJ in the Florida case--where the judge threw out the entire law.

But there is no motion for expedited review from DOJ in the Florida case. And in Virginia, DOJ pointedly refused to join Cuccinelli in asking the Supreme Court to jump in and skip the appeals courts, saying in a statement today that it's better to let the case proceed the normal way.

So why the rush from Cuccinelli?

Wait. A. Minute. Surely he's not trying to get the Court to take HIS case instead of the Florida case, so the landmark decision for the law books will be his litigation, not the group effort from Florida?

Nah. Surely not.