Progress Illinois

Some call it grandstanding. Others point to pre-election politicking. Whatever is behind the latest push to get state officials to reconsider the moratorium on the death penalty, it's short-sighted, says Jane Bohman, director of the Illinois Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.

The state's House Judiciary Committee took up the topic of repealing the moratorium at a hearing in Chicago last week that seemed to come out of left field. For eight years, lawmakers have been studying flaws in our criminal justice system that, in recent years, sentenced 18 innocent people to death. Next year, a legislative panel, will release their findings through the Capital Punishment Reform Study. Until then, Blagojevich has vowed to keep the moratorium in place.

So why the public pressure to repeal it now?

Enter Rep. Dennis Reboletti, of Elmhurst.

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Barack Obama is really taking enfranchisement seriously. Aside from launching an unprecedented voter registration drive, the Democratic presidential nominee is doing his best to prevent Republican voter suppression, particularly in a key battleground state:

A class action lawsuit has been filed to challenge what Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's campaign says is an attempt to keep people facing foreclosure from voting. [...]

It asks for an injunction prohibiting the Macomb County GOP, the Michigan Republican Party and the Republican National Committee from challenging Michigan voters whose homes are on foreclosure lists.

For the context, check out this astonishing Michigan Messenger piece filed last week. According to reporter Eartha Jane Melzer, the chairman of the Republican Party in Macomb County, Michigan -- a key swing county north of Detroit that served as the original home of the so-called "Reagan Democrats" -- is planning to use a list of foreclosed homes to block people from voting in the upcoming election:

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In an unusual and encouraging development, a federal grand jury today subpoenaed several former senior Justice Department attorneys as part of an investigation into the work of Bradley Schlozman, who was instrumental in politicizing the agency's Civil Rights Division while serving as its head. He later investigated phantom "voting fraud" cases for partisan ends while an interim U.S. attorney in neighboring Missouri. Over at Huffington Post, Murray Waas has more:

The extraordinary step by the Justice Department of subpoenaing attorneys once from within its own ranks was taken because several of them refused to voluntarily give interviews to the Department Inspector General, which has been conducting its own probe of the politicization of the Civil Rights Division, the same sources said.

The grand jury has been investigating allegations that a former senior Bush administration appointee in the Civil Rights Division, Bradley Schlozman, gave false or misleading testimony on a variety of topics to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Sources close to the investigation say that the grand jury is also more broadly examining whether Schlozman and other Department officials violated civil service laws by screening Civil Rights attorneys for political affiliation while hiring them.

The details are still coming in, but Waas' sources have identified Hans von Spakovsky as one of the attorneys who received a subpeona. Spakovsky served as a former counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights and was at one time Schlozman's top aide. Ostensibly hired to block the implementation of voting laws that infrigned on the rights of minority, the two stooges actually worked to preserve restrictive voter ID laws. Classy.

It was this record that led Barack Obama to successfully block President Bush's nomination of Spakovsky to the Federal Election Commission.

For more on the DOJ's downfall, check out this post from late-June.

In a big speech on judicial appointments this past May, John McCain joined fellow conservatives in decrying "activist judges," the left-leaning boogeymen who allegedly decide cases based on their personal beliefs rather than the law. Of course, in the mind of the right-wing, politically-motivated jurisprudence is the sole province of the left. Conservatives, or "strict constructionists" as they like to be called, would never "legislate from the bench."

Not so fast, says University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein. In a study of over 20,000 court decisions, Sunstein found that the right boasts their fair share of activists, too. Among the Supreme Court justices most likely to strike down decisions by federal agencies, conservatives Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas top the list, only upholding agency decisions in 52 and 54 percent of cases, respectively. Justice John Paul Stevens, at 71 percent, has the lowest percentage of the four left-leaning justices.

So what does an "activist judge" really mean? Paul Waldman explains.

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Good news out of our nation's capitol today. The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to take up a challenge to a 2004 Kansas law allowing some illegal immigrants to pay in-state tuition at public universities and colleges.

Illinois is one of nine other states that have a similar law on the books. And that's a good thing, because it's a statute that is sensible and humane. Children of immigrants, who by no fault of their own were born outside the United States and brought across the border illegally, are routinely shut out of college because of economic and social barriers. Even though many of them are bright, motivated kids who grew up speaking English in American schools, studies show less than 10 percent of undocumented high school graduates move into higher education.

Providing an opportunity to lower their education costs, even if they can't receive scholarships or financial aid, isn't a drag on our economy either, as some conservatives like to suggest. The Immigration Policy Center explains (pdf):

The ten states which, since 2001, have passed laws allowing undocumented students who graduate from in-state high schools to qualify for in-state college tuition have not experienced a large influx of new immigrant students that “displaces” native-born students or added financial burdens on their educational systems. In fact, these measures tend to increase school revenues by bringing in tuition from students who otherwise would not be in college.

With Kansas' law secure, it's now time for Congress to approve Dick Durbin's DREAM Act.

In what will certainly become a controversial decision, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Washington D.C.'s ban on handguns this morning, declaring for the first time that the Constitution protects an individual’s right to possess a gun, not just the right of the states to maintain militias:

Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority in the landmark 5-to-4 decision, said the Constitution does not allow “the absolute prohibition of handguns held and used for self-defense in the home.” In so declaring, the majority found that a gun-control law in the nation’s capital went too far in making it nearly impossible to own a handgun.

But the court held that the individual right to possess a gun “for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home” is not unlimited. “It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose,” Justice Scalia wrote.

The decision is the first since 1939 to deal with the scope of the Second Amendment. In his dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that the majority “would have us believe that over 200 years ago, the framers made a choice to limit the tools available to elected officials wishing to regulate civilian uses of weapons.”

So how will this affect Chicago's gun-control laws, which were similar to DC's and have been in place since 1982?

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We briefly highlighted it yesterday, but this new report confirming the partisan hiring habits of Bush's Justice Department deserves more attention:

Justice Department officials over the last six years illegally used “political or ideological” factors to hire new lawyers into an elite recruitment program, tapping law school graduates with conservative credentials over those with liberal-sounding resumes, a new report found Tuesday.

The blistering report, prepared by the Justice Department’s inspector general, is the first in what will be a series of investigations growing out of last year’s scandal over the firings of nine United States attorneys. It appeared to confirm for the first time in an official examination many of the allegations from critics who charged that the Justice Department had become overly politicized during the Bush administration.

As Steve Chapman writes in the Tribune today, the GOP and the Bush administration have embraced the dangerous notion that "every aspect of governance should serve the ends of the Republican Party." Scott Horton's invaluable story from the March issue of Harper's recaps in great detail how Bush degraded the Justice Department -- an agency that ostensibly exists to protect our civil rights:

Every new president comes to Washington with a policy agenda, of course, appointing officials in the expectation that they will implement that agenda. And especially since the end of the Sixties, such red-meat political issues as abortion, civil rights, and immigration policy have risen to the top of the law-enforcement agenda. This trend has caused controversy, as it should, but the controversy is nonetheless democratic. In recent years, though, these controversies have obscured a larger phenomenon. It is increasingly clear that Republicans have come to understand the Justice Department not as “the very foundation for a free society,” or even as a spoils system for issues-oriented voters, but rather as a machine that utilizes “evasion, cover-up, stonewalling, and duplicity,” among other techniques, to achieve the far more fundamental goal of taking and maintaining power.

While Barack Obama's stances on FISA and the Supeme Court's death penalty decision yesterday leave something to be desired, we can be certain that, if elected, he'll do his best to restore faith in the Justice Department and government more generally. And like most Americans, I'm ready for a president who will use government to protect the public good -- not manipulate it to the benefit of his party and his cronies.

In May, the University of Chicago Law School released a report assessing every state Supreme Court in the nation. The researchers used three metrics to rate each court's job performance: productivity (how many cases they hear), national influence (how often their opinions are cited by other courts), and judicial independence (how often a judge of one party will agree with a judge of the opposite party). The researchers concede that overall performance is a hard thing to measure:

The objective measures that we use capture some aspects of judicial quality but not all of it. It would be a mistake to believe that small differences in measured outcomes reflect significant differences in quality. But where the differences are large, it is likely that the lower-ranked judges or courts are inferior, at least unless a good reason can be given to explain the difference.

Illinois' high court fared quite well by the U of C standards. Out of the 52 state Supreme Courts (Texas and Oklahoma have two each), ours was found to be the 15th most productive, the 14th most referenced by other courts, and it ranked 10th in its ability to divorce decisions from current political trends.

Some other findings? New Mexico was deemed the least productive, the Oklahoma Criminal Court the least influential, and Michigan the least independent. While Georgia has the most prolific court, California has the most influential and Rhode Island the most independent.

(H/T Michigan Messenger)