Republicans are so thirsty for power that they are taking the people of Arizona all the way to the Supreme Court.
Arizona voters formed an independent commission to handle all the redistricting in the state. Their goal was to take the politics out of the process and have districts drawn in a more transparent manner.
But the Republican-led state legislature couldn’t allow the people to make that decision. Drawing districts in their favor is a great way for them to maintain control, so these Republicans took the people to court stating that according to the constitution, they are the ones to draw the maps.
The lawsuit was dismissed by the lower courts, but on Thursday, the Supreme Court said that it will look at the merits of the case.
If the power hungry Republicans in Arizona win their suit against the people of that state, it can set a precedent for other states with independent commissions to follow suit.
Suing the people who voted you into office? Yeah, you can’t get any more Republican than that.
The Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution clearly states that Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted. The Amendment was originally designed for the federal government, but the section about cruel and unusual punishment was adopted by the states.
The execution that happened in Arizona yesterday is clearly the definition of cruel and unusual punishment.
When describing Arizona execution of Joseph Rudolph Wood, a reporter Troy Hayden of Fox 10 News, said it was “very disturbing to watch … like a fish on shore gulping for air. At a certain point, you wondered whether he was ever going to die.”
The process at the state prison in Florence began about 1:30 p.m. Wednesday and dragged on long enough that, more than an hour after the execution started, Dale Baich of the Federal Public Defender’s Office sent two other lawyers out to file an emergency motion asking the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to halt it, saying it violated Wood’s Eighth Amendment right against cruel and unusual punishment. The motion noted that Wood “has been gasping and snorting for more than an hour” after being injected with a lethal cocktail of drugs.
Wood died before the appeals court responded.
“The experiment failed,” Baich said to reporters as he left the execution chamber. In a statement later, he added that “Arizona appears to have joined several other states who have been responsible for an entirely preventable horror — a bungled execution.”
Joseph Wood – (image source: AP/Arizona Department of Corrections)
The ruling came from The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Saturday. Arizona is set to execute Joseph Wood on Wednesday, but as of now, that execution is on hold until the source of the drugs are revealed.
Joseph Wood, who killed his estranged girlfriend, Debra Dietz, and her father, Eugene Dietz, in Tucson in 1989, is scheduled to die July 23.
But his attorneys at the Federal Defender’s Office in Phoenix filed suit claiming he had a First Amendment right to know who supplied the drugs that will be used to kill him and the qualifications of the executioners who will carry it out.
Two of the judges in a panel of three sided with Wood; the third dissented.
At issue is a new drug combination that Arizona has turned to because it cannot obtain the drugs it normally uses for executions. That combination, and one of the drugs in particular, a Valium relative called Midazolam, has caused apparent “flawed executions,” as the court called them, in Ohio and Oklahoma.
Rocco’s Little Chicago Pizzeria in Tucson had a message for the politicians who supported a bill that allows business owners to refuse to serve gays and lesbians.
“We reserve the right to refuse service to Arizona legislators,” the sign read.
“Funny how just being decent is starting to seem radical these days,” the restaurant commented on Facebook.
Fox News Megyn Kelly summed it up well when talking to Brit Hume about the Arizona Discrimination Bill.
“I look at this bill and I wonder whether this is … an overreaction [by religious] people who feel under attack on this score, and in the end, they may have struck back in a way that’s deeply offensive to many and potentially dangerous to folks who are gay and lesbians and need medical services and other services being denied potentially.”
The law would allow businesses in Arizona to legally discriminate against gays and anyone for that matter, on the basis of Religious beliefs. The legislation passed both the House and Senate in Arizona, and is waiting on Brewer’s desk for final signature to become law.
However, NBC is reporting that this signature will not happen. Here is the latest tweet from NBC on this topic.
More: Brewer “doesn’t want to take any actions that could jeopardize the economic momentum” in Arizona, source says
Brewer has been under intense pressure from business groups and political leaders to diffuse the situation and veto the legislation which they fear will draw unnecessary attention to Arizona a year before it hosts the next Super Bowl and following economic losses on controversial immigration stances.
At the same time, three GOP state senators who initially ratified the measure have written to Brewer, a Republican, asking her to reject Senate Bill 1062, according to The Los Angeles Times.
Brewer, in an interview with CNN, said she is weighing her options. “I will do the right thing for the state of Arizona,” she said.
A lawsuit challenging Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer’s Medicaid expansion plan that was filed by fellow Republicans in the state Legislature was dismissed in a ruling released Saturday, handing Brewer a major victory in her battle against conservative members of her own party.
Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Katherine Cooper agreed with Brewer that the lawmakers challenging the law don’t have the right to sue, saying their argument was incorrect that a hospital assessment included in House Bill 2010 that passed in June was, in fact, a tax that required a supermajority vote of the Legislature under Arizona’s Constitution.
Cooper’s ruling, dated Friday, said it is the Legislature itself that determines if a two-thirds vote is required under a voter-approved constitutional amendment called Proposition 108.
A bipartisan coalition of lawmakers Brewer assembled to support her plan voted not to impose that requirement on the law, which expanded the state’s health insurance program for the poor, known as the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System, or AHCCCS, and imposed the hospital assessment.
“In short, Plaintiffs are a minority group within the Legislature who lost a battle over H.B. 2010. They do not claim a concrete, individual injury. Rather, they seek to overturn the vote of the House and Senate. The Legislature as a whole did not authorize them to bring this action,” Cooper wrote.
Brewer spokesman Andrew Wilder called the court ruling “a huge victory.”
The Arizona Republican Party formally censured Sen. John McCain on Saturday, citing a voting record they say is insufficiently conservative.
The resolution to censure McCain was approved by a voice-vote during a meeting of state committee members in Tempe, state party spokesman Tim Sifert said. It needed signatures from at least 20 percent of state committee members to reach the floor for debate.
Sifert said no further action was expected.
McCain spokesman Brian Rogers declined to comment on the censure. But former three-term Sen. Jon Kyl told The Arizona Republic (http://bit.ly/1mIyKyy ) that the move was “wacky.”
“I’ve gone to dozens of these meetings and every now and then some wacky resolution gets passed,” Kyl told the newspaper on Saturday. “But most people realize it does not represent the majority of the vast numbers of Republicans.”
Kyl also said McCain’s voting record was “very conservative.”
McCain isn’t up for re-election until 2016, when will turn 80. He announced in October that he was considering running for a sixth term.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a U.S. District Court ruling that will prevent Arizona Governor Jan Brewer’s administration from effectively defunding Planned Parenthood. In their opinion, the panel of judges held that the Arizona law (HB 2800) violates the Medicaid Act’s requirement that Medicaid recipients are free to choose their provider “by precluding Medicaid patients from using medical providers concededly qualified to perform family planning services to patients in Arizona generally, solely on the basis that those providers separately perform privately funded, legal abortions.” The law would have prevented Arizona patients from having access to preventative care — including cancer screenings, STI tests, and birth control — at a Planned Parenthood health center.
In a 7-2 decision announced Monday morning, the Supreme Court of the United States has rejected the state of Arizona’s efforts to add a proof of citizenship requirement to voter registration forms.
The National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (a/k/a “The Motor Voter Law”) requires States to “accept and use” a uniform federal form to register voters for federal elections, and the Court now holds that states cannot graft additional requirements onto that form, which only requires that voters affirm that they are citizens.
Justice Scalia—yes, him—wrote the decision of the court, a majority consisting of everyone other than Justices Thomas and Alito. It relies on the Elections Clause of the Constitution (Art. I, §4, cl. 1), which provides that while states have preliminary control over federal elections, Congress can supersede the states’ choices:
The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the places of chusing Senators.
And, basically, the Court holds that when the NVRA says the states must “accept and use” the federal form, it must accept and use them as sufficient to register voters:
When Congress legislates with respect to the “Times, Places and Manner” of holding congressional elections, it necessarily displaces some element of a pre-existing legal regime erected by the States. Because the power the Elections Clause confers is none other than the power to preempt, the reasonable assumption is that the statutory text accurately communicates the scope of Congress’s preemptive intent. Moreover, the federalism concerns underlying the presumption in the Supremacy Clause context are somewhat weaker here. Unlike the States’ “historic police powers,” the States’ role in regulating congressional elections—while weighty and worthy of respect—has always existed subject to the express qualification that it “terminates according to federal law.” In sum, there is no compelling reason not to read Elections Clause legislation simply to mean what it says.
We conclude that the fairest reading of the statute is that a state-imposed requirement of evidence of citizenship not required by the Federal Form is “inconsistent with” the NVRA’s mandate that States “accept and use” the Federal Form. If this reading prevails, the Elections Clause requires that Arizona’s rule give way.
PRESCOTT VALLEY, Ariz. — Authorities in northern Arizona say a 4-year-old boy has accidentally shot and killed his father at a Prescott Valley home.
Prescott Valley police say the shooting occurred just after noon Friday.
The 35-year-old man and his young son were visiting from Phoenix and were at a friend’s house.
Police say the boy somehow found a gun in the home’s living room and accidentally fired it and a bullet hit his father, who was rushed to a hospital where he died. Police identified the man as Justin Stanfield Thomas.
Police say the boy is with his mother. No other details have been released.
There have been no shortage of sore losers in the aftermath of last week’s presidential election, but Pinetop, Arizona, may be home to the sorest loser of them all.
Cope Reynolds, who runs the Southwest Shooting Authority gun shop in the small Navajo County town of 4,000, spent his own (presumably) hard-earned money to take out a full-page ad in the White Mountain Independentdeclaring all Obama voters personae non gratae.
“If you voted for Barack Obama you business is NOT WELCOME at Southwest Shooting Authority,” reads the ad. “You have proven you are not responsible enough to own a firearm.”
(For the record, should Obama supporters in Pinetop heed the ad and stay clear of Reynolds’ shop, he stands to lose about a 736 potential customers.)
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