Month: May 2014

In a major victory for state law enforcement, the Pennsylvania
Supreme Court on Tuesday broadened the power of the police to
conduct warrantless motor vehicle searches.

At issue in
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania v. Gary was a 2010
traffic stop in Philadelphia where the officers claimed to detect
the smell of marijuana coming from the vehicle. The resulting
search turned up two pounds of the drug. According to the suspect,
Shiem Gary, his right to be free from unreasonable search and
seizure under Article One, Section Eight of the Pennsylvania
Constitution, which largely matches the text of the Fourth
Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, was violated by this
warrantless search of his vehicle.

Pointing to previous state court rulings, Gary argued that while
the U.S. Supreme Court does allow for warrantless car searches
based only on “probable cause,” the Pennsylvania high court has
imposed additional restrictions on law enforcement under the state
constitution that count in his favor. For example, if Pennsylvania
police are going to search a car without a warrant, they need both
probable cause and an “exigent circumstance,” such as evidence in
“plain sight” inside the car, or a threat posed to officers or the
public. The U.S. Supreme Court, by contrast, requires only probable
cause for warrantless car searches in identical scenarios under the
Fourth Amendment.

In its ruling this week, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court agreed
that its previous decisions in this area have been a “departure”
from the federal standard. But the court did not see that as a good
thing. Instead, it rejected what it called the state’s “fractured
jurisprudence” in order to adopt “the federal automobile exception
[to the Fourth Amendment], which requires only a finding of
probable cause, and no exigency beyond the inherent mobility of a
motor vehicle, to support a warrantless vehicle search.”

In effect, Pennsylvania has adopted a narrower standard and will
no longer offers its residents and visitors greater protection
against warrantless car searches by the police.

“AZ State Senator Targets Home Births; Houston Hassles Hoarders!
(Nanny of the Month 4-14)”is the latest video from ReasonTV. Watch
above or click on the link below for video, full text, supporting
links, downloadable versions, and more ReasonTV clips.

View this article.

What can we extrapolate about
the state of unionized labor in America when 80 percent of one
group’s members dropped out in a single year once presented the
opportunity to do so?

That’s what happened in Michigan. That hard-fought right-to-work
law gave home healthcare workers the chance to choose whether
Service Employees International Union (SEIU) would actually
represent them. Home healthcare workers, who are often family
members of the patients they serve and sometimes not even actually
paid, were forced by the state beginning in 2005 to accept SEIU as
their bargaining representative and pay them dues, which were
deducted from state Medicaid checks for the people the workers were
serving.

Now that Michigan workers have been granted the right to refuse
union representation and decline to pay union does, the home care
workers are showing SEIU Healthcare Michigan the door. According to
federal reports examined by the Michigan-based Mackinac Center for
Public Policy, 44,000 home care
workers have dropped their membership from the union, leaving
just under 11,000 members.

Fox News interviewed a couple who had been forced into the
union while caring for their own children and had little good to
say about their membership. The husband is a retired Detroit police
officer. How bad do you have to be to lose them?

[Patricia] Haynes said that every month, $30 was deducted from
their children’s Medicare payments, and, while it did not break
their bank, they objected on principle.

“They couldn’t get me a raise, they couldn’t get me more
vacation time and they certainly did nothing to improve my
children’s care,” she said. “I’d hate to say it, but in my opinion,
they were stealing.”

Haynes also says that they are also hoping to help others who
had to pay dues.

“We are not anti-union. I just don’t understand why we were
forced to join because I have two disabled kids,” she said. “That
we were told that we had to join a union just because we chose to
keep our kids at home to care for them.”

The Mackinac Center calculates that SEIU has skimmed more than
$34 million from the Medicaid payments across the state and will
lose more than $4 million in annual dues and fees from the plunge
in membership. The Mackinac Center is suing to try to get some of
those dues the union has already taken back.

Michigan isn’t the only state that has forced caretakers into
accepting union representation, and similar requirements in
Illinois have led to a Supreme Court case. The court heard
arguments for and against forced caretaker unionization in
Harris v. Quinn in January. I wrote a summary of the case

here, and SCOTUSblog attended and analyzed the arguments
presented to the court
here. We’re still waiting on the decision.

Authorities
have released footage from a Kentucky deputy’s dash
cam that shows the events that took place just before a
19-year-old girl was shot dead.

Fox 19 reports friends and family of Samantha Ramsey are
calling for justice to be served after they say the teenager was
gunned down by Boone County, Ky. deputy Tyler Brockman as she left
a party on Saturday morning.

Watch the video and read more.

“AZ State Senator Targets Home Births; Houston Hassles Hoarders!
(Nanny of the Month 4-14)”is the latest video from ReasonTV. Watch
above or click on the link below for video, full text, supporting
links, downloadable versions, and more ReasonTV clips.

View this article.

When Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia issued
his
dissent in EPA v. EME Homer Air City Generation
earlier this week, his opinion included an embarrassing
error. Referring back to the 2001 case Whitman v. American
Trucking Associations, Scalia claimed that the Environmental
Protection Agency had argued “it could consider costs” while
setting air quality standards. In fact, the agency had taken the
opposite position. Even more embarrassing for Scalia, he had
written the decision in that case himself.

Or at least he was identified as its author. It is rarely clear
how much of the writing in a Supreme Court decision is the work of
the judge and how much is the work of the justice’s clerks; this
may well be a case not of poor memory but of poor editorial
oversight. David Garrow’s 2005 article “The
Brains Behind Blackmun” demonstrated just how much control over
his output a justice can cede to his staff, to the point where one
memo from a clerk to Justice Harry Blackmun included the words
“I do not really know what your views are on this case, but I can
see no reason not to join this”—this in reference to a high-profile
case that had been argued six months earlier. Blackmun may be
an extreme example, but he was not necessarily a unique one.

When justices do produce their own work, there is
always the possibility that their acuity isn’t what it used to be.
Justice Joseph McKenna was so incompetent at the end of his term
that, in the words of his colleague William Howard Taft, he once
“wrote an opinion deciding the case one way when there had been a
unanimous vote the other, including his own.” Garrow wrote about
those situations in another article, “Mental
Decrepitude on the U.S. Supreme Court,” which shows that such
highly respected figures as Taft and Thurgood Marshall were losing
their mental faculties while they were still on the court.

I interviewed
Garrow about his work back in 2005. In my write-up, I said that
he

demonstrates in uncomfortable detail that the Supreme
Court is an institution not just of laws but of men, and that since
the 18th century some of those men have suffered from senility,
severe depression, even drug addiction. In the late 1940s, Justice
Frank Murphy was hooked on Seconal and then Demerol, and “some of
his closest acquaintances were convinced that the Justice was
regularly purchasing illegal drugs.” He was hospitalized more than
once, and during his absence he instructed a colleague to cast his
votes for him. In at least one case, “his” position was conjured by
committee, with two justices and Murphy’s clerk collaborating to
invent an opinion for the phantom judge.

To read the rest—including the story of how William O. Douglas,
after retirement, “continued to show up for work, apparently
convinced that he was still on the Court”—go here.

One of the big remaining
questions about Obamacare sign up data is how many, out of the 8
million people the administration says have signed up for coverage,
have actually paid their first month’s premium. It’s an important
question, because people who haven’t paid aren’t enrolled.
Non-payment is virtually certain to reduce the administration’s
headline enrollment figure somewhat.

House Republicans have asked administration officials for this
information, but they’ve generally been met with a shrug, and some
deflection. The White House says it doesn’t have that information
right now.
Insurers do. Maybe you could ask them?

Republicans on the House Energy & Commerce Committee decided
to take the White House up on the idea. The Committee sent letters
to all the insurers operating in the federal health exchange, which
covers 36 states, and asked for some very specific information. How
many people have paid their first month’s premium? How many people
have not? What age groups do the people who have paid fall into?
You can read a complete copy of the letter
here.

Last night, the Committee
released its findings. Obamacare’s official open enrollment
period ended March 31, and as of April 15, the Committee reports,
insurers say that only 67 percent of sign-ups have actually paid.
And of those who have paid, only 25 percent are the critical “young
and healthy” cohort between the ages of 18 and 34.

That really doesn’t look great for the administration. If only
67 percent of the 8 million sign-ups have paid, then that reduces
total enrollment down to just over 5 million. And since the
administration has stressed that it’s important to have a healthy
demographic mix—ideally about 39 percent of enrollees should be
between the ages of 18 and 34—the 25 percent figure doesn’t look so
great either.

But just as with the administration’s evasive Obamacare
reporting, the Committee figures don’t tell the entire story
either. For one thing, they only look at enrollment in the federal
exchange. That leaves out high participation states like California
and New York that ran their own exchanges.

For another, more important thing, April 15 is just too early to
measure anything close to a final payment rate. A huge portion of
Obamacare exchange sign ups came in the last few days of open
enrollment, for coverage that doesn’t begin until the first day of
May. More people signed up later in the month, in the law’s special
open enrollment period, and in some cases their coverage won’t
start until June. Since the first payments aren’t due until the
first day coverage starts, or even as long as 10 days after, that
means that lots of people who have signed up still have time to
pay. The deadline hasn’t arrived yet. And one thing the end of
March sign up spike revealed is that when it comes to health
insurance under Obamacare, lots of people wait until the very last
minute to take action.

In addition, as The New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn

notes, there are other hints that the payment rate may be
higher, or could get there by the time the deadline arrives.
Yesterday, for example, health insurer Wellpoint told investors
that the payment rate was about 90 percent. Officials in California
have said their payment rate is 85 percent. The head of America’s
Health Insurance Plans, the big health insurance trade group, has
said that about 85 percent have paid. And in responding to the
Committee, insurers
stressed that the information they were providing was not
final, and that there were grace periods for many new sign-ups.

Republicans on the Committee are aware that the information they
have so far is incomplete, and they are going to follow up with
insurers toward the end of May. So we’ll get more
information—eventually. But it’s going to take time. The
administration could have headed off a lot of this sort of
discussion by being more transparent from the start, releasing
updates about payment rates, along with sign ups and demographics,
and context about deadlines as well. Instead, they stonewalled and
deflected. Which is how we ended with a Republican Committee trying
to get this information themselves, and a report that at most
suggests an eventual possibility of significant non-payment
problems, but doesn’t demonstrate much of anything right now. For
the time being, then, we’re left right back where we started, with
no solid, comprehensive information to rely on about how many sign
ups have paid.