Tennessee

A federal judge delivered a stinging rebuke to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Republican-controlled Legislature over rules and a new state law that banned minors from receiving “puberty blockers” and other types of gender-affirming care.

U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle on Tuesday blocked the state from applying the ban to three minors whose parents are part of an ongoing lawsuit, saying they would “suffer irreparable harm” if they were not allowed to continue access to hormones and other types of treatment.

Hinkle’s 44-page ruling called the decision to pursue the ban on puberty blockers and hormonal treatment a political decision and not a “legitimate state interest.” Several states — including Texas — have also recently enacted bans on gender affirming care.

“Nothing could have motivated this remarkable intrusion into parental prerogatives other than opposition to transgender status itself,” wrote Hinkle, who was appointed by former President Bill Clinton.

Hinkle also added that “the statute and the rules were an exercise in politics, not good medicine. This is a politically fraught area. There has long been, and still is, substantial bigotry directed at transgender individuals. Common experience confirms this, as does a Florida legislator’s remarkable reference to transgender witnesses at a committee hearing as ‘mutants’ and ‘demons.’ And even when not based on bigotry, there are those who incorrectly but sincerely believe that gender identity is not real but instead just a choice.”

Hinkle’s “mutant” and “demons” comment is a reference to state Rep. Webster Barnaby (R-Deltona), who in April disparaged transgender people during a Florida hearing on a bill, eventually signed into law, that makes it a misdemeanor offense for someone to use a bathroom that doesn’t align with the sex they were assigned at birth.

Hinkle also rejected the assertion, made by DeSantis and Republicans, that Florida was following the lead of European countries, saying that the state ban goes far beyond what is in place abroad.

It’s a good first step. Texas’ ban goes into effect in September, and I expect there will be a lawsuit filed here shortly thereafter. A couple of weeks ago the Department of Justice sued the state of Tennessee over their ban. I’m less worried about what a district court judge may do – it’s what the appellate courts and SCOTUS do that will really matter – but you have to start somewhere. This was a good start. Reuters and the Associated Press have more.

DOJ sues Tennessee over its ban on gender affirming care for minors

Apr 28th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

There will be more of these to come, including and especially in Texas.

The Department of Justice filed a lawsuit Wednesday challenging Tennessee’s recently passed law that bans gender-affirming care for minors, emphasizing it “denies necessary medical care to youth based solely on who they are.”

The DOJ argues that the bill, known as SB 1, violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, discriminating against individuals on the basis of sex and transgender status, according to the complaint.

“By denying only transgender youth access to these forms of medically necessary care while allowing non-transgender minors access to the same or similar procedures, SB 1 discriminates against transgender youth,” a DOJ press release said.

The Justice Department has asked the court to issue an immediate order to block the Tennessee law from taking effect on July 1.

“No person should be denied access to necessary medical care just because of their transgender status,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a statement. “The right to consider your health and medically-approved treatment options with your family and doctors is a right that everyone should have, including transgender children, who are especially vulnerable to serious risks of depression, anxiety and suicide. The Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department will continue to aggressively challenge all forms of discrimination and unlawful barriers faced by the LGBTQI+ community.”

SB 1 — which was signed into law last month by Republican Gov. Bill Lee — prohibits health care providers from prescribing medications, like puberty blockers and hormone treatments for minors who identify as transgender or nonbinary, or performing surgeries and medical procedures “if the performance or administration of the procedure is for the purpose of enabling a minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex.”

Health care providers who violate the ban could be sued by the state attorney general or private parties, according to the new law.

[…]

Last week, three transgender children and their families also sued Tennessee, claiming “the law violates the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause because it allows the banned medical treatments when they are used to treat conditions other than gender dysphoria.”

There’s a copy of the DOJ complaint embedded in the story. More than a dozen states have passed laws like this already, and Texas will do the same, or possibly something worse, in the near future. A likely scenario for when a lawsuit is filed against Texas’ future law is that a federal district court judge issues a temporary restraining order against it pending a ruling on the merits, and the Fifth Circuit lifts that to allow the law to be enforced. On the also-likely assumption that a different federal appeals court upholds a ruling against another state’s law, this will be on the SCOTUS docket in, I don’t know, a year or so. And then we’ll find out, as I said before, whether there’s still such a thing as civil rights in this country any more. I’ll keep an eye on it as we go.

Winter storm 2023

Feb 3rd, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

5 comments

I don’t know if this one will get a name, but I can imagine what a lot of folks are calling it.

Thousands of frustrated Texans shivered in their homes Thursday after more than a day without power, including many in the state capital, as an icy winter storm that has been blamed for at least 10 traffic deaths lingered across much of the southern U.S.

Even as temperatures finally pushed above freezing in Austin — and were expected to climb past 50 degrees (10 Celsius) on Friday — the relief will be just in time for an Arctic front to drop from Canada and threaten northern states. New England in particular is forecast to see the coldest weather in decades, with wind chills that could dive lower than minus 50.

Across Texas, 430,000 customers lacked power Thursday, according to PowerOutage.us. But the failures were most widespread in Austin, where frustration mounted among more than 156,000 customers over 24 hours after their electricity went out, which for many also meant their heat. Power failures have affected about 30% of customers in the city of nearly a million at any given time since Wednesday.

[…]

For many Texans, it was the second time in three years that a February freeze — temperatures were in the 30s Thursday with wind chills below freezing — caused prolonged outages and uncertainty over when the lights would come back on.

As outages dragged on, city officials came under mounting criticism for not providing estimates of when power would be restored and for neglecting to hold a news conference until Thursday. Mayor Kirk Watson said Thursday the city would review communication protocols for future disasters.

Austin Energy at one point estimated that all power would be restored by Friday evening, then later stated Thursday that full restoration would now take “longer than initially anticipated.” Soon after, Watson tweeted, “This is a dynamic situation and change is inevitable but Austin Energy must give folks clear and accurate info so they can plan accordingly.”

Unlike the 2021 blackouts in Texas, when hundreds of people died after the state’s grid was pushed to the brink of total failure because of a lack of generation, the outages in Austin this time were largely the result of frozen equipment and ice-burdened trees and limbs falling on power lines. The city’s utility warned all power may not be restored until Friday as ice continued causing outages even as repairs were finished elsewhere.

“It feels like two steps forward and three steps back,” said Jackie Sargent, general manager of Austin Energy.

School systems in the Dallas and Austin area, plus many in Oklahoma, Arkansas and Memphis, Tennessee, closed Thursday as snow, sleet and freezing rain continued to push through. Public transportation in Dallas also experienced “major delays” early Thursday, according to a statement from Dallas Area Rapid Transit.

The weather has been lousy here in Houston, but it has not been freezing, so we have escaped the worst of this. I feel so bad for everyone in the affected areas. The story says that so far seven people have died on the roads as a result of this storm.

On Twitter, I’ve seen a lot of people talking about the trees on their streets and the sound they make as they collapse under the weight of the ice on them. The Trib covered this as well.

All day and all night after the ice storm struck, Austin residents listened for the cracks, splinters and crashes. Each crack of a falling limb could shut the power off — if their home hadn’t gone dark already.

“It’s a really, really thick layer of ice,” said Jonathan Motsinger, the Central Texas operations department head for Texas A&M Forest Service. “Trees can only support weight to a certain extent, and then they fail.”

Across the Texas Hill Country this week, trees snapped under the weight of ice that accumulated during multiple days of freezing rain. Some of the most iconic trees were among the most severely damaged: live oaks (some of them hundreds of years old), ashe junipers (the scourge of allergy sufferers during “cedar fever” season), cedar elms. As their branches gave way, they took neighboring power lines with them.

“The amount of weight that has accumulated on the vegetation is probably historic, extreme,” Austin Energy general manager Jackie Sargent said during a Thursday press conference.

Ice can increase the weight of tree branches up to 30 times, said Kerri Dunn, a communications manager for Oncor. The utility reported that almost 143,000 of its customers in North, Central and West Texas were without power Thursday afternoon.

“The amount of weight that has accumulated on the vegetation is probably historic, extreme,” Austin Energy general manager Jackie Sargent said during a Thursday press conference.

Ice can increase the weight of tree branches up to 30 times, said Kerri Dunn, a communications manager for Oncor. The utility reported that almost 143,000 of its customers in North, Central and West Texas were without power Thursday afternoon.

[…]

Austin has almost 34 million trees in the city, according to an online tree census maintained by Texas A&M Forest Service and the U.S. Forest Service.

“It’s a big point of pride,” said Keith Mars, who oversees the city of Austin’s Community Tree Preservation Division.

Mars said that shade from the trees saves Austin residents millions of dollars a year in energy costs by cooling homes during hot summer days.

“Trees are infrastructure,” Mars said. “How much maintenance and how much care we provide, so that [the trees] can continue providing those other benefits, is the kind of tradeoff that we all have.”

I don’t really have a point to make here. I hope everyone who has had to endure this week’s terrible weather has made it through all right, and that there are enough trees left over to keep things shaded. The Austi Chronicle has more.

Texas sues USDA over LGBTQ protections

Jul 28th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

Here’s the story, which I’ll get to in a minute. It might be best to try to summarize this more accurately, because this is one of those technical situations where it takes a lot of qualifiers to get at what’s actually at stake. So with that in mind:

.
There seems to be some confusion so just to clear this up–the guidance being challenged in the lawsuit above only impacts USDA programs. It has nothing to do with the participation of trans athletes or other policies. https://politico.com/news/2022/06/22/gop-senator-considering-blocking-school-meal-funding-deal-over-transgender-policy-fight-00041366

— Gillian Branstetter (@GBBranstetter) 1:34 PM – 27 July 2022

Clear enough? OK, on to the story:

Best mugshot ever

Attorney General Ken Paxton and more than 20 other attorneys general are challenging the federal Food and Nutrition Service’s new policy that recipients of food assistance funds update their nondiscrimination policies to protect LGBTQ people.

In May, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced it was expanding its interpretation of discrimination based on sex. As a result, state agencies and programs that receive funding from the Food and Nutrition Service were ordered to “investigate allegations of discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation” and to update their policies to specifically prohibit discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation.

Paxton and his counterparts claim the guidance issued by the USDA is “unlawful” because states were not consulted and did not have an opportunity to provide feedback, in accordance with the Administrative Procedure Act. They also argue that the USDA is misinterpreting the Supreme Court case Bostock v. Clayton County, which extended sexual discrimination in the workplace to include discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation.

“[It] will inevitably result in regulatory chaos that threatens essential nutritional services to some of the most vulnerable citizens,” Paxton’s office said in a press release.

And as we know, no one cares more about our most vulnerable citizens than Ken Paxton. TPM adds some details.

In their suit, the Republican attorneys general argued that, in its reasoning behind the new guidance, the USDA had misapplied Bostock v. Clayton. They also argued that the government hadn’t followed procedural notice-and-comment rules for the new guidance, as outlined in a federal law known as the Administrative Procedure Act.

Or, as ACLU communications strategist Gillian Branstetter put it, “The AGs argue schools have the right to deny queer and trans kids lunch money.”

Tuesday’s suit asserted “the States do not deny benefits based on a household member’s sexual orientation or gender identity.” But it challenged the “unlawful and unnecessary new obligations and liabilities” it alleged were associated with the guidance.

The lawsuit cited existing red state laws that “at least arguably conflict” with the USDA guidance, such as rules prohibiting transgender students from participating in sports programs that align with their gender identity, rather than the gender they were assigned at birth.

The Republicans’ suit comes two weeks after 20 Republican attorneys general won a preliminary injunction in the same federal court district — the Eastern District of Tennessee — against similar guidance from the Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. A federal judge found the federal directive clashed with state laws regarding gender-based laws being applicable to, for example, bathrooms and sports teams.

I don’t know enough to say what the likely effect of this might be if these homophobic AGs get their way, but we can all be sure it won’t be good. If Ken Paxton can sue to force hospitals to let women die, then a few gay kids going hungry won’t bother him.

Feds officially investigating Texas mask mandate ban

Sep 22nd, 2021

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Good.

The U.S. Department of Education on Tuesday launched a civil rights investigation into Gov. Greg Abbott’s ban on mask mandates in schools, making Texas the sixth state to face a federal inquiry over mask rules.

The investigation will focus on whether Abbott’s order prevents students with disabilities who are at heightened risk for severe illness from COVID-19 from safely returning to in-person education, in violation of federal law, Suzanne B. Goldberg, the acting assistant secretary for civil rights wrote in a letter to Texas Commissioner of Education Mike Morath.

The investigation comes after the Texas Education Agency released guidance saying public school systems cannot require students or staff to wear masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in light of Abbott’s ban on mask mandates.

[…]

Goldberg wrote that the Office for Civil Rights will examine whether TEA “may be preventing school districts in the state from considering or meeting the individual educational needs of students with disabilities or otherwise enabling discrimination based on disability.”

The department previously opened similar investigations into mask policies in Iowa, South Carolina, Utah, Oklahoma and Tennessee. But the agency had not done so in Texas because of court orders preventing the state from enforcing Abbott’s order. The new TEA guidance changed that, however.

See here and here for the background. The TEA’s new directive made me scratch my head.

In newly released guidance, the Texas Education Agency says public school systems cannot require students or staff to wear masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

A statement released by the agency Friday says Gov. Greg Abbott’s May executive order banning mask mandates precludes districts from requiring face coverings.

“Per GA-38, school systems cannot require students or staff to wear a mask. GA-38 addresses government-mandated face coverings in response to the COVID-19 pandemic,” the statement reads. “Other authority to require protective equipment, including masks, in an employment setting is not necessarily affected by GA-38.”

The agency previously had said it would not enforce the governor’s ban until the issue was resolved in the courts.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has sued several school districts for imposing mask requirements on students and teachers, and some districts have sued the state over the governor’s order. The lawsuits have produced mixed results with some courts upholding districts’ mask mandates and some siding with the attorney general.

TEA officials on Tuesday did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the new guidelines and questions about how the agency would enforce the ban on mask mandates. The agency has not yet clarified what prompted the new guidelines, given that the legal battles regarding the order are ongoing.

Hard to know exactly what motivated this, but “pressure from Greg Abbott and Dan Patrick and Ken Paxton” would be high on my list of suspects. If I were to advise school districts that currently have mask mandates, as HISD does, or are thinking about imposing one, I would say go right ahead, and keep the mandates you have. This is a toothless threat, and the courts have not yet weighed in on the issue in a meaningful way. We know that having the mask mandates promotes safety, and if that isn’t the highest priority I don’t know what is. Do not waver.

Anyway. The Trib has an explainer about the state of mask mandates and lawsuits around them, but it doesn’t indicate when the legal cases may be having hearings, which admittedly would be a big task to track. The federal lawsuit will have a hearing on October 6, and we may get some clarity out of that. In the meantime, keep the mask mandates. We need them, and (a couple of district court judges aside) no one is stopping school districts from having them. The Trib has more.

Feds take first steps in the mask mandate fight

Sep 2nd, 2021

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

Coming attractions.

The U.S. Department of Education is opening civil rights investigations to determine whether five states that have banned schools from requiring masks are discriminating against students with disabilities, the agency said on Monday.

The department is targeting Iowa, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee and Utah, all Republican-led states, in its investigations. It said it was concerned that their bans on mandatory masking could leave students with disabilities and underlying health conditions more vulnerable to COVID-19, limiting their access to in-person learning opportunities.

“It’s simply unacceptable that state leaders are putting politics over the health and education of the students they took an oath to serve,” U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in a statement.

“The Department will fight to protect every student’s right to access in-person learning safely and the rights of local educators to put in place policies that allow all students to return to the classroom full-time in-person safely this fall.”

[…]

Florida, Texas, Arkansas and Arizona are four other Republican-led states that have banned mandatory masking orders in schools. The Education Department left those states out of its inquiry because court orders or other actions have paused their enforcement, it said in a news release.

The department says it is monitoring those states and would take action if local mask-wearing policies are later barred from going into effect.

See here for the background, and here for the press release. It’s too early to say how this might go, and that’s before we get a resolution in the reams of mask mandate-related lawsuits that are still working their way through our system. Suffice it to say that the good guys have a lot of fight left in them.

Where the outbreaks are the worst

Jul 16th, 2021

by Charles Kuffner.

3 comments

We talk a lot about the vaccination rate in Texas, but that number by itself is misleading. Some parts of the state are very well vaccinated. Others, very much not so. That matters, because the Delta variant is just ripping through the unvaccinated population. There are breakthrough infections among folks who have had the shot – even the Pfizer and Moderna doses are not as effective against the Delta variant as they were against others – but the vast majority of new cases, hospitalizations, and deaths are among the unvaxxed.

So with that in mind, here are the places to watch out for.

Five low-vaccinated clusters — including two in Texas — could put the entire country at risk for spreading new variants of COVID-19, according to a new analysis out of Georgetown University.

The areas with concentrations of unvaccinated residents 12 and older encompass Texas’ western Panhandle and eastern Piney Woods regions — and are a major cause for concern for health experts. Dallas County, where officials this week said herd immunity has been reached, is not in either.

Georgetown researchers, who have been tracking vaccination rates since December, found that there are about 30 clusters across the U.S. that have lower vaccination rates than the national average of 47.8%. The five they have identified as most vulnerable are scattered across eight states concentrated in the southeastern part of the country, touching Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas.

The two clusters in Texas together encompass around 141 counties out of 254, said Dr. Shweta Bansal, an associate professor of biology at Georgetown who headed the project. Although that’s a significant portion of the state, the clusters do not include many of the highest-density cities, which have had greater success with vaccination.

Texas’ overall vaccination rate does not paint an accurate picture of the state’s danger level, Bansal said. From a glance, Texas appears to be in good shape, with 50.4% of the population 12 and older — or 12 million people — reported as fully vaccinated, according to data provided by the Texas Department of State Health Services. And nearly 14 million people in Texas, or 58%, have received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine.

But the Georgetown analysis raises a number of troubling concerns. For one, nearly all COVID-19 deaths in the country were people who weren’t vaccinated, according to The Associated Press.

And unvaccinated clusters pose greater threats because each interaction with an unvaccinated individual risks a new transmission of COVID-19, Bansal said. With every new case of the virus, there is another chance for a new variant to emerge. Already, the highly contagious delta variant that was first found in India in December has become the dominant strain in all new identified cases of the coronavirus in the U.S.

In other words, it’s no time to let our guard down, she cautioned.

If a new variant surfaces that is resistant to current vaccines, “it would mean rewinding the clock back to 2020 for all of us, even those of us that are vaccinated,” Bansal said.

Here’s another news link if you have trouble with that DMN story. I can’t find a copy of the actual report, but I was referred to this web page in my searches for it.

We’ve talked about this before, and I’m going to say this again: It doesn’t matter how bad the Delta variant is going to get, there is zero chance that the state of Texas under Greg Abbott takes any action to mitigate a future outbreak. There will be no mask mandates or limitations on businesses or crowds, and no allowance for local governments to impose them. The unvaccinated will be coddled and catered to in every way, and the rest of us, including and especially health care workers, can suck it. You’re on your own, and my advice to you is to not get too far out of the habit of wearing your face masks. You’ll be needing them again, probably in the winter.

How fast was too fast?

Mar 24th, 2021

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

When it came to COVID vaccine eligibility, states that took their time expanding the pool of people who could get the shots have done a better job actually getting shots into arms than the states who rushed to broaden their list.

Despite the clamor to speed up the U.S. vaccination drive against COVID-19 and get the country back to normal, the first three months of the rollout suggest faster is not necessarily better.

A surprising new analysis found that states such as South Carolina, Florida and Missouri that raced ahead of others to offer the vaccine to ever-larger groups of people have vaccinated smaller shares of their population than those that moved more slowly and methodically, such as Hawaii and Connecticut.

The explanation, as experts see it, is that the rapid expansion of eligibility caused a surge in demand too big for some states to handle and led to serious disarray. Vaccine supplies proved insufficient or unpredictable, websites crashed and phone lines became jammed, spreading confusion, frustration and resignation among many people.

“The infrastructure just wasn’t ready. It kind of backfired,” said Dr. Rebecca Wurtz, an infectious disease physician and health data specialist at the University of Minnesota’s School of Public Health. She added: “In the rush to satisfy everyone, governors satisfied few and frustrated many.”

The findings could contain an important go-slow lesson for the nation’s governors, many of whom have announced dramatic expansions in their rollouts over the past few days after being challenged by President Joe Biden to make all adults eligible for vaccination by May 1.

[…]

In retrospect, health workers and nursing home residents were the easy groups to vaccinate. Doses could be delivered to them where they lived and worked.

“We knew where they were and we knew who they were,” Wurtz said. As soon as states went beyond those populations, it got harder to find the right people. Nursing home residents live in nursing homes. People 65 and older live everywhere.

West Virginia bucked the trend with both high numbers of eligible residents and high vaccination rates in early March, but the state started slow and built its capacity before expanding eligibility.

Similarly, Alaska maintained a high vaccination rate with a smaller eligible population, then threw shots open to everyone 16 and older March 9. This big increase in eligible adults near the end of the period studied led the AP and Surgo Ventures to omit Alaska from the analysis.

The analysis found that as of March 10, Hawaii had the lowest percentage of its adult population eligible for vaccination, at about 26%. Yet Hawaii had administered 42,614 doses per 100,000 adults, the eighth-highest rate in the country.

Thirty percent of Connecticut’s adult population was eligible as of the same date, and it had administered doses at the fourth-highest rate in the country.

In contrast, Missouri had the largest percentage of its adult population eligible at about 92%. Yet Missouri had dispensed 35,341 doses per 100,000 adults, ranking 41st among the states.

Seven states in the bottom 10 for overall vaccination performance — Georgia, Tennessee, Texas, Florida, Mississippi, South Carolina and Missouri — had larger-than-average shares of their residents eligible for shots.

Among high-performing states, five in the top 10 for high vaccination rates — New Mexico, North Dakota, Connecticut, Wyoming and Hawaii — stuck with more restrictive eligibility. Another two high-performing states from the top 10 — South Dakota and Massachusetts — were about average in how many residents were eligible for vaccine.

I’m sure we’re all shocked to see Texas at the wrong end of the list. Focusing on older people made sense in that they are at a higher risk of death, but a lot of them also had issues with the online tools they had to use to get an appointment. I still think that an approach of putting grocery workers and restaurant employees and school staff in Group 1B would not only have been a better prioritization of the risks, but also would have resulted in a higher percentage of people getting vaccinated, for the same reason as with the health care workers and nursing home patients: We know where they are, and we can deliver it to them via their workplace. That’s not the approach that Texas and many other states took, and the end result was that people with better Internet skills and/or more robust health care providers wound up getting ahead of everyone else. Not much we can do about what has already happened, but we really should keep it in mind as we move forward. Otherwise, we’ll just get more of the same.

The difference a week makes

Mar 27th, 2020

by Charles Kuffner.

6 comments

Imposing a stay-at-home order sooner rather than later ha a profound effect on how many people come down with coronavirus.

The person-to-person spread of the coronavirus in the Houston region would peak in two weeks and burn out by mid-May if the stay-at-home order invoked Tuesday is continued until then, according to modeling by local scientists.

The modeling, which informed Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo’s order, considered the effect on the spread of COVID-19, the illness caused by the virus, if she’d taken the stringent intervention immediately or waited a week or two weeks to act. Spread would increase exponentially had she waited, it found.

“From our modeling, it was clear that waiting is not a good thing,” said Eric Boerwinkle, dean of the University of Texas School of Public Health, who conducted the study with a biostatistician at that Houston institution. “The numbers are sobering, but the message is clear: early intervention is better than late intervention and more stringent intervention is better than less stringent.”

UTHealth released the modeling data as the city of Houston began gearing up — scouting sites that easily can be converted into medical centers, looking for hotel rooms for COVID-19 patients who cannot isolate at home or in a hospital — for what’s expected to be the next, worse phase of the pandemic: the exponential increase in disease numbers.

[…]

The UTHealth modeling, shared with city and county officials Monday, provided data backing the warnings. It found that intervening immediately would limit the number of cases in the region to a peak at about 150 a day around April 7 and stop the spread around May 12. In that time, the cumulative total of cases would reach nearly 3,500, it found.

Cases would peak at more than 1,000 a day on April 15 if Hidalgo had waited a week and more than 6,600 a day on April 22 if she’d waited two weeks. Transmission would last until May 29 under the first scenario and June 16 under the second.

All three of the scenarios are based on the premise the restrictions would continue until mid-May. Hidalgo’s order is scheduled to expire April 3.

This is what “exponential growth” means. The basic idea is that if everyone is out there living their normal lives, anyone who has coronavirus – remember, it takes about a week for people to become symptomatic, so you can be walking around for quite some time not knowing you have it, infecting people wherever you go – will be spreading the disease to a larger number of people, who will then do the same thing, than if everyone were at home where they will encounter far fewer people. This is one of the reasons why South Korea was as successful as it was at stopping the spread in that country – they jumped on this kind of action right away. (They also did a crapload of testing and were able to aggressively track people’s movements, but never mind that for now.) For that matter, look at the difference between Kentucky and Tennessee. Which outcome would you prefer?

Point is, putting the stay-at-home restrictions in place now, or even later, after the disease has had time to spread even if the known number of infections is still low, would mean we’ve given it an unfettered head start. That’s the scenario we need to avoid, and it’s the reason why the death wish cultists aren’t just wrong, they’re deeply dangerous. Listen to the experts. The fondest hope we have right now is that in a few weeks, when we can think about beginning to go back to normal, we can say it wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been. We have a chance for that now.

UPDATE: Read this. Look at the chart. Consider this excerpt: “It means that on average, every infected person infects three other people, not 2.5 other people—which makes the spread of the virus much wider and faster. Without any control measures, for example, it means that after ten generations a single person will be responsible for 80,000 infections instead of 10,000 infections.” That’s what we’re talking about here.

Who gets to perform marriages?

Aug 27th, 2019

by Charles Kuffner.

3 comments

In Texas, the answer to that question is quite limited, and a lawsuit to change that just suffered a legal setback.

Texas couples who hope to marry — and leave religion completely out of it — suffered a setback last week.

A Texas judge ruled on Friday to dismiss a civil suit challenging the state’s long-standing law that says only government officials and clergy can perform marriages in the state.

The Center for Inquiry, a New York-based nonprofit that promotes secular values, filed the suit last year against Dallas County Clerk John Warren. In its complaint — brought on behalf of two Texas members of the nonprofit group who want to officiate weddings — the center charged that the law is unconstitutional because it violates nonreligious Americans’ rights as spelled out in the First and 14th amendments, as well as the establishment clause.

In her decision, U.S. District Judge Jane Boyle conceded that the Texas statute may provide a “benefit to religious groups and their adherents over nonreligious ones” but said no “constitutional rights are violated” by the law.

She wrote that “the state has an interest in … ensuring the respect, solemnity, and gravity of marriage ceremonies” and that the “Statute in this case rationally serves that purpose.” Only judges and religious leaders can “reasonably be expected” to maintain the appropriate ceremonial dignity, Boyle wrote.

The center, which has forced two other states to allow secular officiants through similar lawsuits over the past decade, said it would appeal the ruling. Warren’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Nicholas Little, the center’s vice president and general counsel, said he was shocked by the judge’s ruling, which he called “ridiculous.”

“What business is it of the state of Texas what the level of solemnity in your marriage ceremony is?” Little asked in an interview. “What if you want to get married by an Elvis impersonator? That’s not the state’s business!”

Many years ago – circa 1991, as best I can recall – I attended the wedding of a friend of mine and her then-boss at the We’ve Only Just Begun Chapel of Love in (of course) Las Vegas. This was, as the proprietors of said chapel took pains to note, including via a document acknowledging such, a 100% legally binding marriage. That didn’t deter my friend or her soon-to-be-legally-wedded-husband, who were in Vegas and thought “hey! we should get married at one of these silly chapels! won’t that be fun!”, because they were a couple of dumbasses. My friend later got another friend, a lawyer who specialized in maritime law, to help her get this marriage annulled. My point here is that the level of solemnity has never had anything to do with how legal a marriage is.

(For the record, we were all in town to attend COMDEX, and the “let’s get married!” idea sprung from having too much free time after the exhibition halls closed. My friend and her boss had traveled in from California, and I had happened to run into them one evening, the evening they decided to do this dumb stunt. My main regret from all this is that I didn’t have a camera.)

“It’s obviously unconstitutional because it gives a benefit to religious groups and denies that same benefit to comparable secular groups,” said Noah Feldman, a Harvard professor of constitutional law. “However — and this is a big ‘however’ — this is also an exemplar of the kind of law that might well survive judicial scrutiny.”

Courts may not want to declare state marriage laws like Texas’s unconstitutional because “it’s such a well-established tradition” and they “don’t want to rock the boat,” Feldman said. Laycock agreed, noting he was “pleasantly surprised” to learn of the center’s lawsuit.

“This hasn’t come up very often before because everyone is so used to it and because it just seemed the natural order of things,” Laycock said.

Little said the center, which began authorizing nonreligious Americans to perform weddings in 2009, wants to “fight this battle now” because the country’s shifting religious demographics demand action. He pointed to statistics suggesting that the United States is increasingly less religious — including in a recent Gallup poll that found the number of Americans belonging to a church, synagogue or mosque hit an all-time low of 50 percent in 2018.

The center plans to file more lawsuits against a range of states in the coming months, Little said.

“There’s this growing number of secular people, of agnostic or atheistic people who follow no particular religion, who want to have their wedding reflect their values,” Little said. “So we’re saying, ‘Hey! Add an extra category of people who can solemnize marriages!’ ”

[…]

That’s another reason Little is determined to advocate for the legalization of secular wedding officiants across the country. He said that there aren’t enough paths for nonreligious men and women to wed in the United States, and that Internet ordination, which is legal in Texas but was recently barred in Tennessee, isn’t a fair alternative. Little called it ludicrous that some nonreligious people must profess false sentiments online to earn a possibly bizarre religious affiliation — all in pursuit of the wedding they want.

That’s another reason Little is determined to advocate for the legalization of secular wedding officiants across the country. He said that there aren’t enough paths for nonreligious men and women to wed in the United States, and that Internet ordination, which is legal in Texas but was recently barred in Tennessee, isn’t a fair alternative. Little called it ludicrous that some nonreligious people must profess false sentiments online to earn a possibly bizarre religious affiliation — all in pursuit of the wedding they want.

Another wedding I once attended was in 1992, in Arizona, in which two dear friends were married by another dear friend, who had written off to some mail-order church in which one could get quickly ordained, for the express purpose of being able to perform this ceremony. This was the opposite of the Vegas wedding in that it was planned and involved many family and friends who came in for the celebration; the happy couple remains wedded to this day. It was the celebrant, who achieved ordination via an outfit that ran ads in the back of magazines and comic books (this was 1992, the Internet wasn’t a thing yet), and was legally empowered by the state of Arizona to join them or any other couple together as husband and wife as a result. The wedding was beautiful and solemn and if you didn’t know any better you’d have had no idea that the celebrant was performing her first (and as far as I know, only) marriage. It’s just that this was not exactly what one would call traditional.

All of this is my typically long-winded way of saying that I support the Center for Inquiry in their quest, and I agree that this ruling was ridiculous and built on an extremely shaky foundation. I wish them well in their appeal and in their other lawsuits on this topic around the country. See here and here for more.

Paxton goes after DACA

Jul 1st, 2017

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

I have no words.

Best mugshot ever

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and officials from nine other states on Thursday urged the Trump administration to end an Obama-era program that’s allowed hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants to live and work in the country without fear of being deported.

In a letter to U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Paxton urged the White House to rescind the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program. DACA applies to undocumented immigrants that came to the country before they were 16 years old and were 30 or younger as of June 2012. It awards recipients a renewable, two-year work permit and a reprieve from deportation proceedings.

As of August 2016, more than 220,000 undocumented immigrants in Texas had applied for a permit or a renewal of one under the program, and nearly 200,000 of those have been approved, according to government statistics. It’s the second-highest total behind California’s estimated 387,000 applications and 359,000 approvals during the same time frame.

“We respectfully request that the Secretary of Homeland Security phase out the DACA program,” Paxton wrote. He was joined by the attorneys general of Arkansas, Alabama, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Nebraska, South Carolina, Tennessee and West Virginia, as well as Idaho Gov. C.L. Otter.

“Specifically, we request that the Secretary of Homeland Security rescind the June 15, 2012 DACA memorandum and order that the Executive Branch will not renew or issue any new DACA or Expanded DACA permits in the future,” Paxton wrote.

[…]

The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, or MALDEF, blasted the move and warned the signatories they’ll be remembered for being on the wrong side of history.

“Their evident xenophobia is not remotely consistent with the trajectory of our nation’s history and future progress,” MALDEF president and general counsel Thomas Saenz said in a statement. “Their political careers and each of their states will suffer from their mean-spirited stupidity.”

I don’t even know what to say about this. It’s cruel, it’s stupid, and I can’t think of a meaningful definition of “Christian” that would allow for it. The one sure to be effective thing we can do about this is to elect an Attorney General who won’t pull this crap. Nothing will change until we change who we elect. The Press, the Current, and Daily Kos have more.

“Let’s just be real” about charter schools

Jul 26th, 2015

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

Very interesting.

Chirs Barbic

“Let’s just be real,” Chris Barbic wrote last week when announcing his resignation as superintendent of Tennessee’s Achievement School District.

Then Barbic admitted what skeptics of charter schools have preached for years — “achieving results in neighborhood schools is harder than in a choice environment.”

Barbic, as founder of the highly acclaimed YES Prep charter school network in Houston, was used to starting schools from scratch, enrolling students whose parents chose to send them there instead of to their zoned school. Charter schools in Texas are supposed to be open-enrollment, meaning they can’t set admission criteria, but some people argue that charters benefit simply from enrolling children with more motivated parents.

Tennessee presented a different challenge for Barbic. There, he was charged with launching a special school district that included the state’s lowest-performing schools. A key part of Barbic’s mission was to recruit charter networks to step in and improve the schools. However, he ran into some trouble as most charter operators have a start-from-scratch model, rather than taking over existing schools. Even YES Prep withdrew from the experiment.

“As a charter school founder,” Barbic wrote in his resignation letter, “I did my fair share of chest pounding over great results. I’ve learned that getting these same results in a zoned neighborhood school environment is much harder.”

Houston ISD Superintendent Terry Grier picked up on Barbic’s comments and tweeted, “Chris Barbic — courage to tell truth!”

The Houston advocacy group Community Voices for Public Education also weighed in, taking Barbic’s statement as an admission that his success was “due more to smoke and mirrors.”

In fact, Barbic’s resignation letter does not go that far. He stands by his philosophy that good teachers and principals can make a significant difference in improving student achievement, despite the challenges of poverty.

“The ‘poverty trumps education’ argument sells our educators, and more importantly, our kids way too short,” Barbic wrote. “And it is perhaps one of the most dangerous propositions that exists in our country today.”

Read the whole thing, and be sure to read Barbic’s letter of resignation. Barbic is still very much an advocate for the charter model, but his words about the challenges of replicating the kind of success that some charters have had should be heeded. Tennessee’s Achievement School District experiment is one of only a couple like it around the country, but it’s an idea that has attracted attention, including here in Texas. There was a bill by Sen. Larry Taylor, chair of the Senate Education Committee, to establish Achievement School Districts, also called “Opportunity School Districts” here, in Texas, but it didn’t get anywhere. A “parent trigger” bill that would have allowed “parents of students at underperforming public schools to demand fixes from the state commissioner of education including hiring new staff, contracting with a charter school operator to take over management or closing the school altogether” did clear the Senate but did not get a vote in the House. I feel confident that Dan Patrick isn’t going to give up on either of these ideas in 2017, and Greg Abbott is a fan as well. Barbic himself defended the ASD concept in response to a Lisa Falkenberg column that was critical of an Abbott plan for some form of ASDs in Texas. I trust Barbic’s more recent words will come up when this idea inevitably comes up again in two years.

SCOTUS will take up same sex marriage

Jan 17th, 2015

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

This is it.

The Supreme Court announced on Friday that it will take up four cases challenging state bans on same-sex couples’ marriages — a long anticipated move that could lead to nationwide marriage equality.

The cases ask the justices whether Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee bans on same-sex couples’ marriages and bans on recognition of same-sex couples’ marriages from out of state violate the Constitution’s due process and equal protection guarantees.

The two questions granted by the court for argument are: 1) “Does the Fourteenth Amendment require a state to license a marriage between two people of the same sex?” and 2) “Does the Fourteenth Amendment require a state to recognize a marriage between two people of the same sex when their marriage was lawfully licensed and performed out-of-state?”

There will be 90 minutes of argument on the marriage question and 60 minutes of argument on the marriage recognition question, per the court’s order.

The coming showdown before the justices over same-sex couples’ marriage rights has quickly become seen as inevitable following the Nov. 6, 2014, decision of the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals to uphold the bans in Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee. The ruling set up a disagreement with other appeals courts to have considered the issue; the 4th Circuit, 7th Circuit, 9th Circuit, and 10th Circuit courts of appeals all have struck down such bans on various grounds.

[…]

The same-sex couples plaintiffs’ briefs will be due by 2 p.m. Friday, Feb. 27. The states’ briefs will be due by 2 p.m. Friday, March 27. The reply briefs from the plaintiffs will be due by 2 p.m. Friday, April 17.

Then, likely in late April, the justices will hold arguments over the issue — which would mean a decision, and possible nationwide resolution of the issue, would be expected by late June.

Freedom to Marry has reactions from many of the people that have been directly involved in the litigation, while TPM reports that the Obama administration will formally ask SCOTUS to rule in favor of same sex marriage. This is what we’ve been waiting for, and while I suppose it could all go horribly wrong it’s hard not to feel optimistic. I look forward to seeing the analyses of the case as the briefs get filed and replied to and whatnot. In the meantime, I wonder if this will spur the Fifth Circuit to issue its ruling prior to SCOTUS, or if they’ll be happy to let the Supremes take that task out of their hands. The Trib lists some possibilities:

At the very least, the Supreme Court’s ruling — which will likely come in June — will make the 5th Circuit’s decision in the Texas case less consequential, said Aaron Bruhl, an associate law professor at the University of Houston. The 5th Circuit could issue its decision in the case in a few weeks.

The Supreme Court’s action on Friday could also delay the 5th Circuit’s decision in the Texas case. “It is possible that at this point [the 5th Circuit] could say, ‘Whatever we say, the authoritative decision is going to come not too much later than we would rule anyway. Maybe we should just wait,'” Bruhl said.

Lawyers for each side in the Texas case have said they hope the 5th Circuit rules before the U.S. Supreme Court. Bruhl said it’s possible the parties in the case will ask the court to issue a ruling even though the Supreme Court has taken up the issue again.

I also wonder what the backlash from the bad guys will look like. If all goes well, this ruling could do a lot of good for a lot of people in Texas, but as we have seen, marriage is only a piece of the puzzle. There’s a lot more to be done, and it’s not clear yet who will be more energized by a nationwide defenestration of anti-gay marriage laws. But that’s a thought for another day. For now, let’s celebrate coming this far. SCOTUSBlog and Hair Balls have more.

The bigger threat than the Plano petitions

Jan 16th, 2015

by Charles Kuffner.

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This could be a big problem.

Four Republican lawmakers from the Plano area plan to introduce legislation that would bar cities and counties from adopting ordinances prohibiting discrimination against LGBT people, the Observer has learned. The proposed legislation also threatens to nullify existing LGBT-inclusive nondiscrimination ordinances in cities that are home to roughly 7.5 million Texans—or more than one-quarter of the state’s population.

The bill comes in response to the Plano City Council’s passage last month of an equal rights ordinance banning discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in employment, housing and public accommodations.

“There is legislation that’s being worked on,” Rep. Matt Shaheen (R-Plano) told a group of pastors who gathered in mid-December at Plano’s Prestonwood Baptist Church in response to passage of the city’s equal rights ordinance, according to an audio recording obtained by the Observer.

[…]

Texas Pastor Council Executive Director David Welch, whose group is leading efforts to repeal equal rights ordinances in Plano and Houston, told the Observer the legislation would prohibit political subdivisions of the state from adding classes to nondiscrimination ordinances that aren’t protected under Texas or federal law—neither of which covers LGBT people.

“It should be a uniform standard statewide, and cities can’t just arbitrarily create new classes that criminalize a whole segment of the majority of the population,” Welch said. “It’s just self-evident that they’re going to try to do it city by city. We’re dealing with a broad public policy that creates criminal punishments. That’s a pretty serious issue, and when it’s based on a special agenda by a small, tiny fragment of the population … that’s a legitimate need and reason for the state Legislature to act.”

As I say, this as yet unfiled bill is a bigger threat than the petitions and the proposed constitutional amendments, since this would only need majority support to pass and would surely be signed into law by Greg “Local control means me in control” Abbott. I suppose we could hope that the business community, which is generally very favorable to municipal NDOs, might apply some pressure in Austin to stop this in its tracks. Given how effective they’ve been at dissuading their Republican buddies from doing other things they don’t like – you know, killing immigration reform, slashing funds for education and infrastructure, that sort of thing – it’s not a strategy I’d want to be dependent on.

Currently, the only state with a law prohibiting cities from enacting LGBT nondiscrimination ordinances is Tennessee. The Tennessee law, passed in 2011, prompted a lawsuit from the National Center for Lesbian Rights, but a state appeals court recently dismissed the case, saying plaintiffs didn’t have standing because they couldn’t show harm.

Shannon Minter, a Texas native who serves as legal director for the National Center for Lesbian Rights, said he now plans to file a federal lawsuit challenging the Tennessee ban.

Lawmakers in several other states have introduced proposals to ban local nondiscrimination ordinances, but none has passed. Minter said in the last few years anti-LGBT lawmakers have shifted to a religious freedom approach to counter local nondiscrimination ordinances because the strategy is more appealing politically.

“Because the Tennessee-style bill is so punitive toward all localities, I think that it’s so blatantly taking democratic power away from local governments that legislators just don’t have the stomach to do it,” Minter said.

The lawsuit challenging Tennessee’s law was based on the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1996 decision in Romer v. Evans, which struck down a Colorado law banning local protections based on sexual orientation. Authors of the Tennessee bill attempted to to get around Romer v. Evans by enacting a general prohibition on classes that aren’t covered under state law, rather than specifically targeting LGBT protections. However, Minter believes the law is still unconstitutional.

“Legislatures are not permitted to enact laws that are designed to disadvantage a particular group, and it’s as clear as it could possibly be that the purpose of these laws is to prevent gay and transgender people from gaining local anti-discrimination protections,” he said.

Tennessee lawmakers introduced the legislation in response to a nondiscrimination ordinance in one city, Nashville, and Minter said the Texas proposals broader impact would also make it more vulnerable to legal challenges.

Yes, there’s the courts. One can’t know how that might play out, and even if one felt confident that any such law would be unconstitutional on its face, these things take time and cost money and leave a lot of people in harm’s way in the interim. These are the consequences of not winning enough elections. Keep your state rep on speed dial, you’re going to need to let him or her know how you feel about this. Texas Leftist and Unfair Park have more.

Sixth Circuit stands up for inequality

Nov 7th, 2014

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

It was bound to happen eventually.

Remember the big no-decision decision the Supreme Court issued on same-sex marriage just a month ago? The justices were asked — in five separate cases no less — to weigh in on whether same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marriage. The Supreme Court demurred on the question, which was a significant move in and of itself.

By declining to review any of the cases before it, the justices effectively blessed lower-court rulings that had struck down state gay marriage bans in five states. Circuit courts had been unanimous on the subject. So what more was there to say? Barack Obama even told Jeffrey Toobin recently that he thought this was the best Supreme Court decision of his tenure: a silent statement on the importance of letting cultural change spread across the country, one state at a time.

Well, so much for the power of silence. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit just reversed rulings striking down gay-marriage bans in Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee. This means that four circuit courts have now struck down gay marriage bans, while one has upheld them. We no longer have unanimity. The Supreme Court, eventually, will have to step in.

The 6th Circuit decision is here. A lot of people had been waiting to see what the Fifth Circuit would do, if they would be the court that provided the circuit split that forced SCOTUS to act, but they took too long. They will still get a chance to have their say, of course, and perhaps now that they wouldn’t have to be the trailblazer for upholding this particular injustice they’ll feel more free to let their colors show. One hopes that in the end neither this ruling nor the one the Fifth Circuit is expected to make will matter. Daily Kos and Freedom to Marry have more.

Lots of same sex marriage appeals about to happen

Aug 8th, 2014

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Busy times in the federal appeals courts.

Federal appeals courts soon will hear arguments in gay marriage fights from nine states, part of a slew of cases putting pressure on the U.S. Supreme Court to issue a final verdict.

If the appeals judges continue the unbroken eight-month streak of rulings in favor of gay marriage, that could make it easier for the nation’s highest court to come down on the side of supporters.

If even one ruling goes against them in the four courts taking up the issue in the coming weeks, it would create a divide that the Supreme Court also could find difficult to resist settling.

“We’re going to be racking up more courts of appeals decisions, and every one we get puts more pressure on the Supreme Court to weigh in,” said Douglas NeJaime, a law professor at the University of California-Irvine. “It’s very likely the Supreme Court ultimately settles this question. Given how quickly things have moved, it’s hard for the court to avoid this in the short term.”

[…]

Arguments similar to those [that were] heard Wednesday will take place Aug. 26 in the 7th Circuit in Chicago, for bans in Wisconsin and Indiana, and for Sept. 8 in the 9th Circuit in San Francisco, for bans in Idaho and Nevada. The 5th Circuit in New Orleans is expected to soon set a date to hear arguments on Texas’ ban.

The flurry of arguments means an upcoming spate of rulings, possibly all issued this autumn, that could profoundly alter the nation’s marriage laws.

If the four federal circuit appeals courts rule in favor of gay marriage, then nine states with pending appeals stand to have their bans stricken down altogether or ordered to recognize out-of-state gay marriages: Ohio, Michigan, Tennessee, Kentucky, Texas, Indiana, Wisconsin, Idaho and Nevada, though the decisions likely would be put on hold for a Supreme Court ruling.

Five additional states under those four circuit courts have gay marriage lawsuits awaiting decisions by federal judges: Alaska, Arizona, Louisiana, Mississippi and Montana.

Observers say the 6th or 5th circuits could deliver the first victory for gay marriage opponents.

We know about the Sixth Circuit, in which arguments were heard this week. We still don’t know when the Fifth Circuit will hear arguments there, but we do know that 63 Texas legislators have signed a brief in the appeal in which they declare that same sex marriage is icky and they totally have Greg Abbott’s back. Hey, remember when something like that would have been bipartisan? This one was an all-R effort, with the TDP and these troglodytes’ two LGBT colleagues firing back. I’m so glad those days are over, even if there are still a few laggards on the issue. In any event, the national picture will almost certainly be a lot clearer, or a lot more complicated, in the next few months.

Marriage equality’s legal winning streak may be on the line this week

Aug 4th, 2014

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

And it’s not even the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals that might bring a halt, however temporary, to the march of progress.

Marriage equality has had a very good run in the federal courts ever since the Supreme Court declared the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional in 2013. Every single federal court to consider the question has sided with marriage equality, although two federal appellate judges have dissented from this consensus view in the United States Courts of Appeals for the Fourth and the Tenth Circuits.

Nevertheless, equality is likely to face more skeptical judges as more of these cases advance to the court of appeals level. As ThinkProgress warned last June, “appointments to federal circuit courts have historically been much more politically charged than appointments to the lower-ranking district courts, so litigants are far more likely to encounter a judge who was selected for their loyalty to a particular ideology.” We also predicted that the Sixth Circuit, with a strong Republican majority and a history of partisan acrimony, was especially likely to treat a marriage equality case with skepticism.

Next Wednesday, a three-judge panel of the Sixth Circuit will convene in Cincinnati to hear several marriage equality cases arising out of Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee — and the GOP-dominated panel that will hear these cases is unlikely to bring joy into the hearts of equality’s supporters.

If the Sixth Circuit really wants to accept a bunch of ridiculous and widely discredited arguments on behalf of discrimination, there’s not much anyone can do to stop them. History will remember them unkindly, but I suppose we’ll all be dead by then, so YOLO and all that. As the story notes, there’s a chance it might not go down this way, so let’s not get ahead of ourselves. In the end, even a bad decision just means that the Supreme Court will have to take it up sooner rather than later.

Another entry for the judicial election files

Jun 21st, 2014

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Get Wallace Jefferson on the phone for me, will ya?

Three justices on the Tennessee Supreme Court are facing an election-year attack, not for any particular decision they have authored or even for any unpopular opinion they have espoused. No, in an ugly campaign in Tennessee that appears to be getting ever uglier, Senate Speaker Ron Ramsey, who is also the state’s lieutenant governor, is attempting to oust three state Supreme Court justices in their Aug. 7 retention elections, chiefly for the judicial outrage of having been appointed to the high court by a Democrat. Under Tennessee law, the governor appoints Supreme Court justices, and then they come up for retention elections every eight years thereafter. This is a pretty common set-up in states that elect their justices.

Former Democratic Gov. Phil Bredesen appointed justices Gary Wade, Cornelia Clark, and Sharon Lee to the high court. They are all up for retention in two months and Ramsey, seemingly unable to get past the first few entries in the “Stock Campaign Insults” dictionary, has mounted a statewide assault targeting the three as “soft on crime” and “anti-business.” As the Shreveport Times notes, Ramsey is going after the three jurists “despite the fact that the Judicial Performance Evaluation Commission that Ramsey helped to appoint found them qualified to retain their posts.” Ramsey is a member of the Republican State Leadership Committee, which has a history of targeting judicial races across the country and calls the Tennessee race “high on our radar.”

Ramsey is arguing that he clairvoyantly knows that the Supreme Court as constituted will overturn limits on payouts in medical malpractice and other civil lawsuits that ensure “you’re not going to be punished by some jury that gives you some exorbitant return on the lawsuit.” And he’s also grumpy that in 2011 the Supreme Court vacated the death sentence of murderer Leonard Edward Smith because of ineffective counsel. (Smith ultimately got a life sentence in exchange for the death penalty being dropped.) But beyond the usual bellyaching about the suckiness of some court decisions with which he personally disagrees—or hopes to disagree with someday—there’s all sorts of speculation in the Tennessee press about what Ramsay is really attempting to achieve with this campaign. If even one of the incumbents loses, it will shift the balance of the court to a majority-Republican institution. The Shreveport Times posits that since the state Supreme Court justices pick the state attorney general, the purge may be an effort to create a “Republican” majority on the five-justice court to ensure that there is a newer, more Republican, attorney general. Ramsey pretty much just up and said so at the state GOP’s annual fundraiser in Nashville last week: “Folks, it’s time that we had a Republican attorney general in the state of Tennessee.”

Or it may not even be that targeted. As the editors suggest, “since the Republican Party now has supermajorities in both legislative houses and holds the governor’s office, perhaps the campaign only is an effort to complete the trifecta with the addition of the judicial branch.”

Sam Venable, a columnist at the Knoxville News-Sentinel, pointed out last week that purging the entire state of all those with a “D” behind their name—or anyone seated by anyone with a “D” behind his or her name—“is completely understandable, of course. It’s what politicians do. It’s how they live, breathe and have their being.” And of course this is true. Smearing judges who can’t, or won’t, smear back is politics pure and simple. The problem for the justice system is that the only solution to a bad guy with a well-financed attack campaign is to construct a good guy with a well-financed ad campaign. After all, the enduring lesson of the Iowa Supreme Court meltdown of 2010 is that dignified silence doesn’t win elections. And so the Tennessee Bar Association is, in an admirably bipartisan fashion, getting itself organized to finance and promote a counterinitiative to keep the judicial seats as judiciously as possible. That this is bipartisan is good. That it is happening at all (lawyers raising money for the judges before whom they will appear) is a disaster.

Note that Tennessee is using the appointment-with-retention-election system for picking judges, which is often cited as a nice, safe way to get partisan politics out of the judicial selection process. Until some people decide they don’t like the judges that the governor of the other party selected, so they’re going to work to defeat them so that the governor of their preferred political party can name replacements. Note that since these are retention elections, these judges don’t have opponents, so they technically exist outside the partisan voting process, and definitely aren’t affected by straight-ticket voting. And yet they’re affected by the partisan voting process anyway, because the people who are the most interested in the outcome of these elections are smart enough to know who plays for which team. The lack of a label on the actual ballot does not deter them. Which is what I’ve been saying all along.

I keep harping on this issue because there continue to be so many examples of why the “solutions” that so many people like to propose to “fix” the judicial selection process don’t actually work they way their advocates claim they would. The root of all problems in the judicial election process is the influence of money in judicial elections. You have to address that problem if you want to have any chance at success. I can’t see any path to a solution for judicial elections that doesn’t involve strictly limiting campaign contributions and/or public financing of judicial elections. As we currently live in a Citizens United world, that will probably require a Constitutional amendment allowing for such limits on campaign spending first. Hey, I never said this was going to be easy. The alternate path is an appointment-only system for all judicial positions, which needless to say has its own hurdles to overcome – there are thousands of judgeships in Texas, so just having a system that can scale to such a degree is daunting, and of course there’s politics aplenty any time one person gets to hand out goodies like these. My preferred approach is to overhaul the campaign finance system first, since that would also help make for better non-judicial elections, and then deal with whatever problems remain. That’s a journey of a thousand miles, and the sooner we take that first step without going down needless detours, the better.

More on Achievement School Districts

May 12th, 2014

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Chris Barbic, the founder of YES Prep and the superintendent of Tennessee’s Achievement School District, one of the models for Greg Abbott’s education plan, weighs in on what these things are and are not.

First, by law, the Tennessee ASD charters can’t pick and choose their students; the charters are not open-enrollment schools. When a charter joins the ASD, it replaces an existing low-performing neighborhood school – one ranked in the bottom 5 percent of schools in our state (Tennessee’s “Priority Schools”). Nothing about that school’s attendance zone changes – all zoned kids are guaranteed seats just as before, and the only kids who can transfer in to our schools are those zoned to other Priority Schools. Our ASD charters have special education populations that are larger than the local district averages – in some cases, more than one-quarter of the school’s population.

Second, it is important to put our first-year results – the entire ASD operation in Tennessee is only 2 ½ years old – in proper context. Prior to any ASD intervention, conditions in Priority Schools were dire – fewer than one in six students could read on grade level and the average ACT score was a 14. In our first year, we earned Level 5 growth as a district (the highest-possible growth rating in Tennessee) and our Memphis schools grew faster than the state average in math and science. Where our kids struggled in reading – many of them are years behind their peers – our school communities were fast learners, going into the summer with major adjustments and plans for improvement. We worked hard to create a new culture and conditions for success, earning high marks from teachers and parents.

This is what year one in a school turnaround effort is really about – changing the vision of what is possible and setting schools up for rapid growth in student achievement. It has taken many years for the Priority Schools to get where they are, and it will take more than one year to get them where they need to be.

Over the past two years, we have learned a great deal about what it takes to make an achievement school district work. A nimble and responsive governance structure is most important. In Tennessee, the ASD superintendent reports directly to the state’s commissioner of education. If an achievement school district is created to exist in a bureaucracy more cumbersome than the district and schools it is trying to fix, it will never work.

Next, it is critical that an achievement school district have charter-authorizing power. The ability to authorize charters leverages the great public charters already in Texas and provides them an opportunity to serve the highest-need kids.

And finally, an achievement school district will need adequate startup funding. We were fortunate to use federal “Race to the Top” dollars as startup capital. Texas will need to identify when, where and how this money will flow.

See here and here for the background. Barbic was responding to Lisa Falkenberg’s column from a couple of weeks ago. A few points:

– The issue of who the students are is very important. A big criticism of charter schools is that they get to cherry pick their students, which includes the ability to dump students they don’t want to deal with. If they have to take all comers and they can succeed, that’s a huge point in their favor.

– We should definitely be cautious about short term gains. As with sports teams hiring new coaches after bad seasons, there’s almost always an immediate boost in performance for a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with actual improvements in quality. I know we all want quick fixes, but until we get some long-term studies that show (for example) an increase in graduation rates and college completion, we can’t say if this model is any better or worse than what we already have.

– Note the bit about the need for adequate startup funding at the end there. Rick Perry thumbed his nose at Race To The Top funds; if Greg Abbott had any problems with that, he kept them to himself. Abbott has studiously avoided any mention of school finance throughout the Governor’s race, while he continues to defend the $5.4 billion cuts to the education budget in court. (Those budget cuts had a negative effect on charter schools, too, according to Chris Barbic.) I don’t know about you, but there’s nothing in Greg Abbott’s record or his current rhetoric that suggests to me that he’s interested in fighting for the resources that an Achievement School District would need. If I had to bet, I’d guess he’s hoping that could be a way to cut costs in the budget.

– But let’s say that Abbott would fight to ensure sufficient funding for Achievement School Districts, even to the point of going hat in hand to the dreaded federal government. If that is the case, then one has to wonder why he wouldn’t fight for adequate funding for the existing school districts. Why not fully fund them and see what they can do before you go reinventing the wheel? I know it’s crazy but hey, it just might work.

Add Tennessee to the list

Mar 15th, 2014

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

A partial win, but the rest will follow.

A federal judge here granted a preliminary injunction Friday against the state’s ban on same-sex marriage in certain instances.

In October three same-sex couples filed a lawsuit asking the state to recognize their marriages that had been performed in states where gay marriage is legal. The four couples taking part in the suit were living and had been married in New York or California but had moved to Tennessee.

“At this point, all signs indicate that, in the eyes of the United States Constitution, the plaintiffs’ marriages will be placed on an equal footing with those of heterosexual couples and that proscriptions against same-sex marriage will soon become a footnote in the annals of American history,” Judge Aleta Trauger wrote in the order.

Friday’s U.S. District Court ruling applies only to these three couples.

Nashville lawyer Abby Rubenfeld, who represents the couples, cheered the legal win and said it was a good first step toward total equality for all same-sex married couples in Tennessee.

Buzzfeed has the opinion, which leaned heavily on the one in Kentucky that made the same ruling. The Tennessean has more about the lawsuit and the couples that were the plaintiffs. The next step is a lawsuit to overturn Tennessee’s anti-gay marriage amendment, and there’s been no trouble recruiting more plaintiffs for that. Another step forward for equality, and another step towards the inevitable at the national level.

The limits of the Arkansas option

Apr 1st, 2013

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

I’ve mentioned the Arkansas option for expanding Medicaid several times, under which the state uses Medicaid money to buy private health insurance for those who would be eligible for Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. It’s not my preferred solution, but it has some merits and would certainly be better than doing nothing. However, while the federal government has shown a great deal of flexibility in allowing an arrangement like this and like what is on the table in Florida if their legislature doesn’t deep-six it, that flexibility has its limits, as the state of Tennessee found out.

It’s constitutional – deal with it

Tennessee wanted to pursue a plan like that of Arkansas, one where it would use the Medicaid expansion dollars to buy private insurance coverage. And while Arkansas received a preliminary go-ahead from HHS, Gov. Bill Haslam had a quite different experience: He says that Health and Human Services would not support his plan to expand Medicaid and, as a result, he will not move forward.

“As a result of the lack of clarity from HHS,” his office said in a late Wednesday statement, “the governor will not ask the General Assembly for approval to accept the Medicaid expansion federal funds as he continues to work for the flexibility needed to implement his plan.”

Haslam told local reporters that the Obama administration didn’t reject the entire proposal. “Of our request to Medicaid,” he said, “we got one or two yes’s, one or two no’s, and a whole lot of I don’t knows.”

[…]

But some of the other points in the Tennessee proposal might have raised eyebrows in the Hubert Humphrey Building. The governor proposed “co-pays for those who can afford to pay something.” As for what that would mean in practice, Andy Sher at the Chattanoga Times Free Press reports that the governor wanted Medicaid beneficiaries to pay the same cost-sharing as other exchange enrollees.

Medicaid experts I’ve spoken with have made it clear that such an approach wouldn’t fly: Even if they receive private coverage, the Medicaid agency would need to ensure they aren’t spending more out of pocket than they would in the public plan.

Officials in Arkansas agree with this interpretation, too. “Medicaid definitely has strict rules for people below the poverty line and then they issued some new rules this year, for people above the poverty line,” Arkansas Medicaid spokeswoman Amy Webb told me last month. “We still believe those apply, and we intend to follow those.”

I bring this up because while there has been some talk about the “Arkansas solution” among Texas Republicans, what they’re really talking about is more akin to the Tennessee proposal. Specifically, “copays, deductibles and premium payments on a sliding scale for poor patients, using asset testing to ensure services are going to people who truly need them” are among the items Rick Perry and his ideological cohorts are demanding. The shell bill filed by Rep. John Zerwas that would direct HHSC to negotiate with the Obama administration over a “Texas solution” includes this language, though it’s not clear to me if it’s an option or a requirement. If it’s the latter, I think we now know how these negotiations are going to go.

The point I’m trying to make here is that we need to pay attention to the contents of HB 3791 and listen carefully to what people like Rep. Garnet Coleman have to say about it. If the final bill includes demands for things that the feds have already categorically rejected, then we need to be aware of that up front. Because if it does contain such a requirement, then we need to be prepared for when Rick Perry claims that he “tried” to negotiate with the Obama administration but they were too inflexible and unwilling to compromise so we can call it out for the BS that it is. If Texas negotiates in good faith, the feds have shown that they can be very accommodating. If not, we shouldn’t be surprised when the negotiations fail, and we shouldn’t let the state claim that they made a legitimate effort. Perry and his cronies have made it abundantly clear that they really, really don’t want to expand Medicaid. We should take them at their word and not be distracted by side issues.

Two suggestions for better elections

Aug 10th, 2012

by Charles Kuffner.

3 comments

Ed Kilgore writes that Tennessee Democrats shot themselves in the foot with the winner of their low-information, low-profile Senate primary.

[F]acing incumbent Sen. Bob Corker will be some obscure dude named Mark Clayton, who won a plurality of the vote in a large field of unknowns via the inestimable advantage of appearing at the top of the ballot thanks to his alphabetically superior surname. Turns out Clayton is an enthusiast for homophobia along with various classic conservative extremist memes, including the “NAFTA Super-Highway” and “FEMA Concentration Camps For Patriots.” The Tennessee Democratic Party quickly disowned Clayton, but the damage to the state ticket is already done.

I’d say the situation provides some empirical evidence relevant to two issues of how states conduct elections. Tennessee is one of the relatively few southern states without a threshold requirement of the percentage of votes needed to secure a party nomination. Requiring runoffs can have pernicious effects, but on the other hand, it’s a good way to avoid deeply embarrassing accidental nominations, as Texas Democrats showed earlier this week by nominating former state senator Paul Sadler for the Senate instead of perennial candidate (sometimes as a Republican) Grady Yarbrough, whose first place finish in the primary seems to have been primarily a matter of voters confusing him with the late liberal Sen. Ralph Yarborough.

As for the alphabetical ballot listing issue, it’s long past time for every state to list non-incumbent candidates randomly. Otherwise Tennessee primary ballots may regularly feature crazy-person candidates with names like Aaron Aardvark, and Democrats may fondly remember the days when they worried Bob Corker’s last opponent, Harold Ford, Jr., was not sufficiently progressive.

We do have runoffs here, and as was the case in 2006 with Barbara Radnofsky versus Gene Kelly, I think that helped the voters figure out who the candidates were and why one was such an obviously better choice than the other. In our case at least, Paul Sadler would have been the nominee anyway under Tennessee’s system, as he finished first among the four candidates in May. One possible reason why Sadler did so much better in the runoff may be the email sent by the TDP highlighting the differences between his record and that of his runoff opponent’s. Some people disliked that action as you can see from the comments on that post, but I’m not one of them. I do think it’s appropriate and increasingly necessary for the party to play at least an informational role in primary elections. I don’t want to see smoke-filled-room shenanigans of the old days, but I do want to see the party – state or county as appropriate – put together and disseminate basic factual data about candidates in its primaries for the benefit of the voters. Stuff like primary voting history, political contributions, previous candidacies, that sort of thing. Sure, that would normally be the province of a candidate’s campaign, but I see this as being as much in the interest of the party whose banner is going to be carried by the winners of these races. This isn’t foolproof, as there are people who change their minds about which party best represents them and we want to be welcoming to them, but on the whole I think it will do a lot of good. If nothing else, if it forces parties to do a better job of maintaining contact information for its members, it will be a win.

As for randomizing ballot order, that’s a longtime hobbyhorse of mine. I do not understand why in this age of electronic voting machines that isn’t standard practice by now. As far as I’m concerned, every election in Texas that requires a majority of the vote to win – primaries, special elections, local and city elections, pretty much everything except the even-year November generals – should always have randomized ballot ordering. No one should be at an advantage or a disadvantage because of the luck of a ballot draw. I can’t even begin to think of an argument against this.

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