Tag: Supreme Court

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Opinion The Last Word

The Rant: Glue guns and godliness should not go hand-in-hand.

CREDIT: Aleksandras Naryskin | Dreamstime.com

Well, I was all set to throw my annual summertime bandana bash in my backyard, but now it looks like I’m going to have to boycott Hobby Lobby since they aren’t going to offer insurance to their female employees that pays for certain types of contraception. Dang. No, I’m not going to be able to make hats, skirts, neckties, scarves, shirts, belts, headbands, vests, tablecloths, diapers, whimsically wrapped candleholders, or anything else made from a variety of colorful and versatile bandanas sold at Hobby Lobby with instructions. And it’s too bad because, as Hobby Lobby’s website boasts, these creations are “Sew cute!” Especially when you make all that stuff and have it on little kids and every surface they encounter — all at the same time. It’s like a bandana nightmare.

Aleksandras Naryskin | Dreamstime.com

Whimsically wrapped candleholders that dangle in the air? I kid you “knot!”

All reproductive rights, privacy issues, discrimination, religious zealotry, Supreme Court madness, and hullabaloo in general over the court’s recent ruling to allow employers to pick and choose contraception options for its female employees aside, the question that keeps nagging me is this: Why did it have to be Hobby Lobby? Why did the United States Supreme Court have to potentially amend the constitution for a grotesque chain of stores that sells grotesque fabrics and grotesque glue guns so people can glue grotesque fabrics to grotesque objects to make them even more grotesque?

It seems like these discriminatory issues are always with companies that are, well, less than dripping with class. Remember the squabble about Cracker Barrel agreeing to an $8.7 million settlement to resolve all the lawsuits filed against them for segregating their African-American customers in the smoking section and denying them service? Again with the icky company. Cracker Barrel. I think I would rather eat some felt food from Hobby Lobby than even walk into a Cracker Barrel. I just can’t stand all that backwoods Americana. Why can’t the Supreme Court rule on companies like Saks or Bergdorf-Goodman so there might be a little splash of panache?

And because this new ruling by the Supreme Court allows this kind of discrimination based on Christian religious beliefs, the LGBT community is upset that it is opening the door for discrimination toward gay people. I hate to break it to you, world, but no self-respecting homosexual worth his or her weight in bandana patch wonderment would go to Hobby Lobby and create the store’s 49-step, do-it-yourself, felt animal farm unless it was for a very, very unusual occasion. At least I hope not. Same with their “Moss that Cross!” decorative crucifix, which, I gather, is made from stacking wooden crosses on top of each other and, for reasons known only to them, applying moss to them with a glue gun. Who thinks these things up? Does moss on a cross have some meaning to which I am not privy? Bendable “Oh, deer me!” foam antlers on a wall mount? Someone would risk falling on a pair of scissors for this? And you thought Armageddon was a myth.

Now, to backtrack just a bit and make a public confession that I’m not sure I’ve ever made: I, too, was once a “crafter.” Yes, during my youth, I became obsessed with candle making. But not just any candles. Mine were wax replicas of jarred food items for the most part. Yes, jelly jars, pickle jars, peanut butter jars, mustard jars — no glass vessel containing food in our refrigerator or pantry was safe from this process. The way it worked was that I would soak the label off the jar while keeping it intact and then fill the jar with the appropriately colored wax, then break the glass from around the hardened wax and place the label back on it and stick a wick in the top. I don’t even know what I did with these works of art, and it is as inexplicable to me now as to why anyone would go to Hobby Lobby and wrap a gourd with yarn and hang costume jewelry from it as a Thanksgiving decoration. What the hell was I thinking? No wonder I spent so much time alone as a kid. That middle school-aged hobby morphed into my more hippie-era crafting phase in high school, when sand candles were the rage. You took a big bucket of sand and dug a freeform hole in it with your hands and then filled the little crater with melted wax. Once cooled, you removed it from the sand and out came a very far-out, amoeba-shaped candle with a sandy surface and you hung them from the ceiling with macramé beaded sling-like holders. They were right there with the glow-in-the-dark music posters and incense burners, and the avocado-green shag carpet in my bedroom had so much sand in it that it was like being at the beach. I even used to dabble in the art of decoupage. Yes, that photo of Leon Russell wearing a big American flag hat was glued right onto my wastebasket and shellacked over until it was all but laminated. I could go on and on but I think that’s enough humiliation for now.

So, yes, the Supreme Court sided with Hobby Lobby on letting them decide women’s reproductive rights for them and that is no laughing matter. I just hope they don’t take their hot glue guns and do anything crazy with them. Glue guns and godliness should not go hand-in-hand.

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Politics Politics Feature

Fields, Accused “Snake” in Anti-Herenton Plot, Censured by State Supreme Court Board

CREDIT: jb

Lawyer Richard Fields, accused by Mayor Willie Herenton of masterminding a blackmail plot against him last year, has been censured by the state Supreme Court’s Board of Professional Responsibility on two counts unrelated to the conspiracy charge, including one for “conduct prejudicial to the administration of justice.”

In an action that so far has gone almost unnoticed, Fields’ censure this spring was formalized by the Board in an April 25 statement.

The statement noted that Fields had not requested a hearing on its original censure notice against him, dated March 17, and that therefore the censure finding was made final.

The Board ’s statement said in part:

“The censure was based on two complaints. In the first complaint, Mr. Fields informed the Court that he would dismiss a case but failed to do so as promised. This resulted in a show cause Order. In the same matter, he failed to inform his client that he was dismissing the case and made misrepresentations to his client about the disposition. Finally, he neglected to provide the file to his client until the disciplinary complaint was filed.

“In the second complaint, Mr. Fields neglected a case and failed to respond to his client in a regular and timely manner. Further, he failed to withdraw at the client’s request and failed to provide the file to the client until the disciplinary complaint was filed.”

At least one of the cases was that of a Memphis schoolteacher, Florida Garmon, who had engaged Fields to assist her in litigation against the Memphis City Schools. Garmon declined to elaborate on the particulars of the case “because I am still involved in the lawsuit …”

Upholding the complaints, the Board ruled against Fields in the areas of “adequate attorney-client communication” and “conduct prejudicial to the administration of justice.” The censure, said the Board, should be regarded as “a rebuke and warning” to Fields but did not prohibit his right to practice law.

In June of last year, Fields, a former political associate of Herenton, was accused by the mayor of attempting to arrange a sexual liaison between himself and cocktail waitress Gwen Smith. The point, said Herenton, citing statements made to him by Smith, was to create grounds for blackmail so as to force the mayor not to run for reelection.

Joe Baugh, a special prosecutor who investigated Herenton’s complaint, later issued a statement corroborating the “veracity” of Smith but said “Although a request may have been made of Ms. Smith to gain information concerning embarrassing material about you, it was apparent from the interviews that she never intended to even attempt such action.”

Accordingly, Baugh did not recommend submitting the case to a grand jury for prosecution. Herenton objected at the time and did so again in a June 6 letter to Baugh which states “…that justice will be served in the end by a thorough investigation and examination of this matter with a grand jury.”

Herenton’s letter also upbraids a justice system “…that routinely turns a blind eye to blatant criminal conduct if it has its origin in the white community.”

jb

Richard Fields

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Editorial Opinion

The Eavesdropping Case

Shelby County has figured more than once in judicial decisions of momentous national importance. Arguably, the most influential Supreme Court decision of the last century was Baker v. Carr (1962), which struck down legislative gerrymandering of the crude rural-vs.-urban kind.

The lead plaintiff in Baker v. Carr was the late Charles Baker, longtime chairman of the Shelby County Court, who sued to force state government (Joe Carr was the Tennessee secretary of state) to give equal representation to urban counties in the apportionment of the state’s legislative districts. The fallout from Baker v. Carr has affected all reaches of American government — local, state, and federal.

What Baker sought was simple justice, and his manner of radical revisionism was to insist on fidelity to immutable constitutional principles of fairness. He was a “strict constructionist,” we are tempted to say.

That point is relevant to the outcome of a ruling issued last Friday by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals concerning the legality of the domestic warrantless-search procedures of President George W. Bush. The administration had appealed a 2006 decision by federal judge Anna Diggs Taylor of Detroit in favor of plaintiffs, including the American Civil Liberties Union, which had challenged the administration’s ongoing program of arbitrary domestic eavesdropping.

Of the three appeals judges who heard the case, two — Julia Gibbons, a Bush appointee, and Ron Gilman, a Clinton appointee — hailed from Memphis. Gibbons and a fellow judge, appointed by the senior President Bush, constituted a majority of two. They reversed Judge Taylor’s prior ruling, on the grounds that the plaintiffs in the case lacked proper standing.

In essence, what the appeals court majority held was that unless the plaintiffs could demonstrate that they had themselves been subject to the kind of surveillance under challenge, they could not sue to challenge it. The bottom line was that the administration, which has claimed the inherent authority for such eavesdropping under the Military Authorization Act that followed the 9/11 attacks, was free to continue.

We believe, along with Judge Gilman, that the perfectly legitimate principle of “standing” was misapplied or applied over-literally in the eavesdropping case.

In finding, as had Judge Taylor, that the eavesdropping procedures were explicitly prohibited by the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, Gilman went on to note that summary judgment had been asked by both sides to the dispute, “[b]ut the government did not contest the plaintiffs’ statement of undisputed facts or provide its own statement of undisputed facts. … If the adverse party does not so respond, summary judgment, if appropriate, shall be entered against the adverse party.”

In short, even on the technical issue, the previous ruling should have been upheld. We await the inevitable Supreme Court ruling on this case, which we expect to be as momentous for this century as Baker v. Carr was for the previous one.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Courting Justice

It is an old story. To progressives and genuine conservatives, it confirms the viability of the American system of government, but among denizens of the far right, it causes heartburn and worse.

That is the tendency of federal judges, once appointed, to move away from the extremes of their prior political conviction toward some constitutional center where true consensus — and, more often than not, real justice — has a chance of emerging. The clearest case in point was that of Chief Justice Earl Warren, appointed in the mid-1950s by President Eisenhower after having served as a conservative Republican governor of California. The term “Warren Court” has long since become a synonym for an activist judiciary determined to extend constitutional guarantees to wider and wider circles of the population.

Even after two appointments by George W. Bush, the current court has proved able to achieve a consensus in favor of constitutional guarantees, as manifested in a number of recent decisions against presidential over-reaching in matters of privacy. Justice Anthony Kennedy, a legacy from the Reagan era, has become the moderate swing force in such cases, succeeding the recently departed Sandra Day O’Connor.

Sooner or later, the court will be asked to decide on two issues of high constitutional importance. One will be the government’s appeal of District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor’s recent judgment striking down the administration’s wiretapping abuses. Another issue concerns the question of whether and to what extent the erstwhile Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq might be regarded as having been an arm of the U.S. government for purposes of litigation.

This week, District Judge T.S. Ellis III overturned a $10 million jury verdict against a Rhode Island military contractor accused of defrauding the U.S. government in the initial months of the Iraq war. Back in March, a jury had found the company guilty of cooking its books to cheat the fledgling Iraqi authority, which was then under the direct guidance of an indisputably American civilian/military mission.

Judge Ellis decided that the CPA was governed by “multinational consent” and therefore beyond the jurisdiction of U.S. courts, thereby disallowing the verdict. In effect, his ruling left intact the very thing that made the CPA such a ripe target for war profiteers and simultaneously girded potential criminals against legal action.

It is true enough that the CPA was presented to the public as a multinational endeavor, but in fact it was both American-controlled and almost exclusively underwritten by billions of American dollars. Any money bilked from the CPA was ponied up by U.S. taxpayers — yet another cost of President Bush’s misbegotten Iraqi venture.

Beyond the question of properly penalizing the commercial malefactors in this affair, a restoration of the original judgment against them by higher judicial authority would continue the recent tendency of the federal courts to rein in the rogue activities of the current administration and make it responsible once again to We the People.

We’ve got our fingers crossed that the Supreme Court, if things get that far, still has a potential majority to render the justice required by these new situations.