History > 2011 > USA > States (II)

Bishops Say Rules on Gay Parents

Limit Freedom of Religion

December 28, 2011
The New York Times
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

Roman Catholic bishops in Illinois have shuttered most of the Catholic Charities affiliates in the state rather than comply with a new requirement that says they must consider same-sex couples as potential foster-care and adoptive parents if they want to receive state money. The charities have served for more than 40 years as a major link in the state’s social service network for poor and neglected children.

The bishops have followed colleagues in Washington, D.C., and Massachusetts who had jettisoned their adoption services rather than comply with nondiscrimination laws.

For the nation’s Catholic bishops, the Illinois requirement is a prime example of what they see as an escalating campaign by the government to trample on their religious freedom while expanding the rights of gay people. The idea that religious Americans are the victims of government-backed persecution is now a frequent theme not just for Catholic bishops, but also for Republican presidential candidates and conservative evangelicals.

“In the name of tolerance, we’re not being tolerated,” said Bishop Thomas J. Paprocki of the Diocese of Springfield, Ill., a civil and canon lawyer who helped drive the church’s losing battle to retain its state contracts for foster care and adoption services.

The Illinois experience indicates that the bishops face formidable opponents who also claim to have justice and the Constitution on their side. They include not only gay rights advocates, but also many religious believers and churches that support gay equality (some Catholic legislators among them). They frame the issue as a matter of civil rights, saying that Catholic Charities was using taxpayer money to discriminate against same-sex couples.

Tim Kee, a teacher in Marion, Ill., who was turned away by Catholic Charities three years ago when he and his longtime partner, Rick Wade, tried to adopt a child, said: “We’re both Catholic, we love our church, but Catholic Charities closed the door to us. To add insult to injury, my tax dollars went to provide discrimination against me.”

The bishops are engaged in the religious liberty battle on several fronts. They have asked the Obama administration to lift a new requirement that Catholic and other religiously affiliated hospitals, universities and charity groups cover contraception in their employees’ health plans. A decision has been expected for weeks now.

At the same time, the bishops are protesting the recent denial of a federal contract to provide care for victims of sex trafficking, saying the decision was anti-Catholic. An official with the Department of Health and Human Services recently told a hearing on Capitol Hill that the bishops’ program was rejected because it did not provide the survivors of sex trafficking, some of whom are rape victims, with referrals for abortions or contraceptives.

Critics of the church argue that no group has a constitutional right to a government contract, especially if it refuses to provide required services.

But Anthony R. Picarello Jr., general counsel and associate general secretary of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, disagreed. “It’s true that the church doesn’t have a First Amendment right to have a government contract,” he said, “but it does have a First Amendment right not to be excluded from a contract based on its religious beliefs.”

The controversy in Illinois began when the state legislature voted in November 2010 to legalize civil unions for same-sex couples, which the state’s Catholic bishops lobbied against. The legislation was titled “The Illinois Religious Freedom Protection and Civil Unions Act,” and Bishop Paprocki said he was given the impression that it would not affect state contracts for Catholic Charities and other religious social services.

In New York State, religious groups lobbied for specific exemption language in the same-sex marriage bill. But bishops in Illinois did not negotiate, Bishop Paprocki said.

“It would have been seen as, ‘We’re going to compromise on the principle as long as we get our exception.’ We didn’t want it to be seen as buying our support,” he said.

Catholic Charities is one of the nation’s most extensive social service networks, serving more than 10 million poor adults and children of many faiths across the country. It is made up of local affiliates that answer to local bishops and dioceses, but much of its revenue comes from the government. Catholic Charities affiliates received a total of nearly $2.9 billion a year from the government in 2010, about 62 percent of its annual revenue of $4.67 billion. Only 3 percent came from churches in the diocese (the rest came from in-kind contributions, investments, program fees and community donations).

In Illinois, Catholic Charities in five of the six state dioceses had grown dependent on foster care contracts, receiving 60 percent to 92 percent of their revenues from the state, according to affidavits by the charities’ directors. (Catholic Charities in the Archdiocese of Chicago pulled out of foster care services in 2007 because of problems with its insurance provider.)

When the contracts came up for renewal in June, the state attorney general, along with the legal staff in the governor’s office and the Department of Children and Family Services, decided that the religious providers on state contracts would no longer be able to reject same-sex couples, said Kendall Marlowe, a spokesman for the department.

The Catholic providers offered to refer same-sex couples to other agencies (as they had been doing for unmarried couples), but that was not acceptable to the state, Mr. Marlowe said. “Separate but equal was not a sufficient solution on other civil rights issues in the past either,” he said.

Catholic Charities in the Diocese of Rockford decided at that point to get out of the foster care business. But the bishops in Springfield, Peoria, Joliet and Belleville decided to fight, filing a lawsuit against the state.

Taking a completely different tack was the agency affiliated with the conservative Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, which, like the Catholic Church, does not sanction same-sex relationships. Gene Svebakken, president and chief executive of the agency, Lutheran Child and Family Services of Illinois, visited all seven pastoral conferences in his state and explained that the best option was to compromise and continue caring for the children.

“We’ve been around 140 years, and if we didn’t follow the law we’d go out of business,” Mr. Svebakken said. “We believe it’s God-pleasing to serve these kids, and we know we do a good job.”

In August, Judge John Schmidt, a circuit judge in Sangamon County, ruled against Catholic Charities, saying, “No citizen has a recognized legal right to a contract with the government.” He did not address the religious liberty claims, ruling only that the state did not violate the church’s property rights.

Three of the dioceses filed an appeal, but in November filed a motion to dismiss their lawsuit. The Dioceses of Peoria and Belleville are spinning off their state-financed social services, with the caseworkers, top executives and foster children all moving to new nonprofits that will no longer be affiliated with either diocese.

Gary Huelsmann, executive director of Catholic Social Services of Southern Illinois, in the Belleville Diocese, said the decision was excruciating for everyone.

“We have 600 children abused and neglected in an area where there are hardly any providers,” he said. “Us going out of business would have been detrimental to these children, and that’s a sin, too.”

The work will be carried on, but the Catholic Church’s seminal, historic connection with it has been severed, noted Mr. Marlowe, the spokesman for the state’s child welfare agency. “The child welfare system that Catholic Charities helped build,” he said, “is now strong enough to survive their departure.”

    Bishops Say Rules on Gay Parents Limit Freedom of Religion, NYT, 28.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/29/us/for-bishops-a-battle-over-whose-rights-prevail.html

Murder Cases Put Questionable Evidence to Test

December 24, 2011
The New York Times
By BRANDI GRISSOM

Undigested bits of mushrooms and tomatoes from Christine Morton’s last meal — a celebratory birthday dinner she had with her husband — were still in her stomach when the medical examiner performed his autopsy in 1986.

Those remnants, the prosecutor told the jury during Michael Morton’s trial, “scientifically proved” that Mr. Morton had beaten his wife to death.

Twenty-five years later, DNA science revealed that someone else had actually killed Mrs. Morton and that her husband’s murder conviction and more than two decades in prison were a tragic mistake. His exoneration based on DNA evidence is the 45th in Texas.

Before he dismissed the wrongful murder charges against Mr. Morton last week, Judge Sid Harle recounted the faults the case exposed in the Texas justice system. Among them: the use of so-called junk science in the courtroom.

“The courts and the sitting judges need to be ever mindful about their role as gatekeeper in regard to the admission of science,” Mr. Harle said. “Your case illustrates the best and the worst of what can happen.”

Despite scientific advancements like DNA testing, the use of unreliable scientific techniques in the criminal justice system persists. While some judges say they work to ensure only reliable scientific evidence is presented to juries, criminal justice advocates say that more must be done to root out an array of pseudoscientific practices that can have life-or-death consequences.

“What passes for science in courtrooms is not always, in fact, science,” said Kathryn Kase, interim executive director of the Texas Defender Service, which represents death row inmates.

In recent weeks, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has agreed to review cases that indicate it may also see a need to address the types of evidence that meet scientific standards.

In November, the state’s highest criminal court agreed to review the case of Megan Winfrey, who is serving a life sentence for murder. She was convicted largely on the testimony of a sheriff’s deputy who said his bloodhounds “alerted” to her scent on the murder victim’s clothing. The court has previously ruled that dog-scent evidence, used to convict Ms. Winfrey’s father for the same murder, was insufficient without corroborating evidence. The court acquitted her father on appeal.

This month, the court also agreed to review the cases of two men awaiting execution. Both men, convicted of murder, were sentenced to death after a psychologist who was an expert witness in several death penalty cases told jurors that they were mentally competent to face execution.

Lawyers for the men — Steven Butler and John Matamoros — argue they are mentally handicapped and therefore ineligible for the death penalty. In April, the Texas State Board of Examiners of Psychologists reprimanded the psychologist, Dr. George Denkowski, and he agreed to never again conduct evaluations in criminal cases.

Though Ms. Kase said the court’s willingness to review the cases is a hopeful sign, she and other criminal justice advocates said other relatively simple changes could help prevent the use of such evidence.

Judges, who ultimately decide what is allowed in court, should approve adequate money for indigent defendants to hire experts to refute scientific experts whom prosecutors present at trial, she said. It can cost thousands of dollars to hire experts, and Patrick McCann, a Houston defense lawyer, said judges worry that voters would not take kindly to such expenses.

“They act as if funding each defendant’s efforts to have a fair trial comes out of their own children’s pockets somehow,” Mr. McCann said.

In recent years, Jeff Blackburn, chief counsel at the Innocence Project of Texas, has pushed to ban evidence that does not conform to national scientific standards. He will try again in 2013 when lawmakers reconvene. “These are problems that can be fairly easily solved,” he said.

Senator Rodney Ellis, Democrat of Houston, said another key solution already exists: the Texas Forensic Science Commission. For more than two years, the commission was bogged down in a national political controversy over its investigation of arson science used to convict and execute Cameron Todd Willingham for a 1991 fire that killed his three daughters. That issue was resolved this year with a plan to review past arson cases to see whether similar faulty evidence led to questionable convictions. Now, Mr. Ellis said, he hopes the commission will address other questions of courtroom science.

“To have a justice system we can have faith convicts the guilty and protects the innocent, we need scientific evidence that’s based on real science,” Mr. Ellis said, “not some guy saying he has magic dogs that can solve crimes.”

    Murder Cases Put Questionable Evidence to Test, NYT, 24.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/25/us/murder-cases-put-questionable-evidence-to-test.html

Health Care Law Will Let States Tailor Benefits

December 16, 2011
The New York Times
By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON — In a major surprise on the politically charged new health care law, the Obama administration said Friday that it would not define a single uniform set of “essential health benefits” that must be provided by insurers for tens of millions of Americans. Instead, it will allow each state to specify the benefits within broad categories.

The move would allow significant variations in benefits from state to state, much like the current differences in state Medicaid programs and the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

By giving states the discretion to specify essential benefits, the Obama administration sought to deflect one of the most powerful arguments made by Republican critics of President Obama’s health care overhaul — that it was imposing a rigid, bureaucrat-controlled health system on Americans and threatening the quality of care. Opponents say that the federal government is forcing a one-size-fits-all standard for health insurance and usurping state authority to regulate the industry.

This criticism has inspired legal challenges to the new law — with the Supreme Court set to decide next year whether the government can require Americans to buy health insurance — and helps explain why public opinion of the law remains deeply divided.

The law is looming as a central issue in the 2012 presidential race, with Republican presidential candidates being evaluated on the strength of their opposition to it. The announcement by the administration follows its decision this year to jettison a program created in the law to provide long-term care insurance, a move that disappointed liberal backers of the program championed by the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy.

The action Friday prompted questions among supporters of the new health care law. Prof. Timothy S. Jost, an expert on health law at Washington and Lee University, said, “The new bulletin perpetuates uncertainty about what benefits an insurer will be required to cover under the Affordable Care Act.” From the consumer’s point of view, Professor Jost added, “I wish the Department of Health and Human Services had signaled that there would be more uniformity and less flexibility.”

Chris Jacobs, a health policy analyst for Senate Republicans, said the new policy “gives states the flexibility to impose more benefit mandates, not fewer,” and would lead to higher insurance premiums, contrary to what Mr. Obama promised in the 2008 campaign.

The new law lists 10 categories of “essential health benefits” that must be provided by insurance offered in the individual and small-group markets, starting in January 2014. These include preventive care, emergency services, maternity care, hospital and doctors’ services, and prescription drugs.

Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, had been expected to provide details of what services and benefits must be provided in each category. Instead, in an insurance bulletin issued Friday, Ms. Sebelius said the federal government would respect the states’ role, giving them “the flexibility to design coverage options that meet their unique needs.”

Under this approach, each state would designate an existing health insurance plan as a benchmark. The benefits provided by that plan would be deemed essential, and all insurers would have to provide benefits of the same or greater value. Plans could modify coverage within a benefit category so long as they did not reduce the value of coverage.

Each state would choose one of the following health insurance plans as a benchmark:

¶ One of the three largest small-group plans in the state.

¶ One of the three largest health plans for state employees.

¶ One of the three largest national health insurance options for federal employees.

¶ The largest health maintenance organization operating in the state’s commercial insurance market.

While working on health care legislation in 2009 and 2010, Congress spent many hours debating how to balance the goals of comprehensive benefits and affordable coverage.

Sherry A. Glied, an assistant secretary of health and human services, said the administration’s approach “builds off the experience of today’s marketplace and will minimize disruption to it.”

Steven B. Larsen, deputy administrator of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said, “The state is always in control of what the essential benefits package is in that state.”

In recent months, federal health officials have taken a number of steps that could help inoculate Mr. Obama against charges that he was foisting a rigid, inflexible model of health care on the nation.

Several states have received temporary waivers from tough new federal standards that require insurers to spend more of each premium dollar for the benefit of consumers. Federal officials have also provided temporary exemptions from some provisions of the law for some employers and labor unions offering bare-bones coverage.

The new law says that the scope of essential health benefits must be “equal to the scope of benefits provided under a typical employer plan.” But the law itself specifically requires some benefits not widely available in employer-sponsored health plans, like “habilitative services” for people with conditions like autism or cerebral palsy.

Under the new law, each state is supposed to have an insurance exchange or marketplace where consumers can compare options and buy insurance. Health plans must offer the essential benefits, regardless of whether the coverage is sold inside or outside the exchange.

The government will offer subsidies to help low-income people buy insurance through exchanges. The subsidies will help cover the cost of essential benefits. States can require insurers to provide additional benefits, but states will have to pay much of the extra cost.

The law also says that the definition of essential benefits must not “discriminate against individuals because of their age, disability or expected length of life.”

Sara Rosenbaum, a professor of health law and policy

at George Washington University,

said the new bulletin “does not offer any guidance on this crucial part of the law.”

    Health Care Law Will Let States Tailor Benefits, NYT, 16.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/17/health/policy/health-care-law-to-allow-states-to-pick-benefits.html

William L. Waller, Ex-Governor of Mississippi, Dies at 85

December 2, 2011
The New York Times
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

William L. Waller, who as a prosecutor in 1964 twice tried to convict the segregationist Byron De La Beckwith of murdering the civil rights leader Medgar Evers, and who in 1971 forged a coalition of poor whites and newly enfranchised blacks to become governor of Mississippi, died Wednesday in Jackson, Miss. He was 85.

The cause was heart failure, his family said.

Mr. Waller, a Democrat and self-described “redneck,” used his governorship from 1972 to 1976 to appoint blacks to administrative boards and commissions for the first time in post-Reconstruction Mississippi. He elevated three historically black colleges to university status, and he abolished the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, which had fought integration.

The changes were accepted without much protest, but his declaring a state holiday to honor Mr. Evers was criticized, particularly by rural whites.

Mr. Waller gained prominence as a prosecutor after Mr. Evers, the Mississippi field secretary of the N.A.A.C.P., was assassinated outside his Jackson home shortly after midnight on June 12, 1963. Mr. Beckwith, a fertilizer salesman and an outspoken racist — he often said he wanted to go to the segregated part of heaven or hell — was charged. His fingerprint was on the murder weapon, a high-powered rifle.

Even so, in two trials, two all-white juries could not reach verdicts. Still, civil rights advocates, seeing at least a partial victory, praised Mr. Waller, the district attorney, for preventing an acquittal.

He said he would not try the case a third time unless new evidence emerged. It remained open until 1969, when his successor dropped the murder charge.

In 1989, new evidence did emerge. Witnesses said they had heard Mr. Beckwith brag about the Evers killing. Others came forward to destroy his alibi. Because there is no statute of limitations on murder in Mississippi, Mr. Beckwith was indicted again. He was convicted of murder in 1994 and died in prison in 2001 while serving a life sentence.

William Lowe Waller was born in Oxford, Miss., on Oct. 21, 1926, and grew up on poverty’s edge on a farm in the Northeast Mississippi hill country. He would later be sure to mention the experience in his political campaigns, especially at rural stops. “Bill Waller is a redneck who has felt a hoe handle in his hands,” went the refrain.

After high school he hitchhiked to Memphis State University, where he earned a degree in 1948. He graduated from the University of Mississippi School of Law in 1950, served in the Army in the Korean War and worked as a private lawyer in Jackson. He became district attorney in 1960.

Mr. Evers’s murder was his biggest case, and perhaps his biggest challenge. For the first trial, only 6 out of a pool of 200 potential jurors were not white. Three of these were called for questioning, and all were dismissed. Mr. Waller, having only whites to question in jury selection, tried to weed out the most obvious racists.

“Do you think it’s a crime to kill a nigger in Mississippi?” he asked one potential juror.

After a long silence, the judge demanded an answer.

More silence.

“He’s thinking it over,” Mr. Waller said.

In the trials, Mr. Waller was not sure how to address Myrlie Evers, Medgar Evers’s widow. In his 2007 book, “Straight Ahead: The Memoirs of a Mississippi Governor,” he wrote that he was determined not to call her only by her first name, the customarily demeaning way many Southern whites addressed blacks.

But he knew that showing deference to a black woman by calling her “Mrs. Evers” would harm his chances of winning a conviction. So he managed never to address her by name, an omission he later regretted, he said in his memoir. He wished he had called her Mrs. Evers.

He ran for governor in a six-candidate field in 1967 and finished fifth. He tried again in 1971 in the Democratic primary campaign, emphasizing not race relations but building better highways, fighting drug abuse, creating jobs and cutting government waste. A rival, Lt. Gov. Charles Sullivan, appealed directly for the black vote, which had grown as a result of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Mr. Waller won a runoff between the two, getting many black votes in a contest that in an overwhelmingly Democratic state effectively decided the governorship. Local politicians and pundits attributed his victory to his vigorous prosecution in the Evers case.

As it happened, he was opposed in the general election by Charles Evers, Medgar Evers’s brother and the mayor of Fayette, Miss., who ran as an independent. On a populist platform and backed by rural whites and black Democrats loyal to the party, Mr. Waller rolled to victory with 77 percent of the vote.

Though Mr. Waller had not run on race issues, one of his first acts as governor was to name a black as a top adviser, attracting national publicity. He recruited the first blacks for the state’s highway patrol and appointed the first blacks to a planning committee for the Mississippi State Fair. He was grouped with Dale Bumpers of Arkansas and Jimmy Carter of Georgia as a new sort of Southern governor.

But Mr. Waller did not mind antagonizing his black supporters sometimes. He opposed busing for racial integration, and in 1972 he released a Ku Klux Klansman convicted of murdering a civil rights leader. The governor explained that the skills of the Klansman, Charles Clifford Wilson, in making artificial limbs were needed by a charity in Mr. Wilson’s hometown.

Mr. Waller ran unsuccessfully for the United States Senate in 1978 and for governor in 1987.

He is survived by his wife of 61 years, the former Carroll Overton; his sons, Robert, Edward, Donald and William Jr., who is chief justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court; and 14 grandchildren.

    William L. Waller, Ex-Governor of Mississippi, Dies at 85, NYT, 2.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/03/us/politics/william-l-waller-ex-governor-of-mississippi-dies-at-85.html

The Price of Intolerance

November 27, 2011
The New York Times


It’s early yet for a full accounting of the economic damage Alabama has done to itself with its radical new immigration law.

Farmers can tally the cost of crops left to rot as workers flee. Governments can calculate the loss of revenues when taxpayers flee. It’s harder to measure the price of a ruined business reputation or the value of investments lost or productivity lost as Alabamians stand in line for hours to prove their citizenship in any transaction with the government. Or what the state will ultimately spend fighting off an onslaught of lawsuits, or training and deploying police officers in the widening immigrant dragnet, or paying the cost of diverting scarce resources away from fighting real crimes.

A growing number of Alabamians say the price will be too high, and there is compelling evidence that they are right. Alabama is already at the low end of states in employment and economic vitality. It has long struggled to lure good jobs and shed a history of racial intolerance.

That was turning around and many foreign manufacturers, including Mercedes-Benz, Hyundai and Honda, have set up there. Its business-friendly reputation took a serious blow with the arrest in Tuscaloosa of a visiting Mercedes manager who was caught driving without his license and taken to jail as a potential illegal immigrant.

Sheldon Day, the mayor of Thomasville, has aggressively recruited foreign companies to his town, including a Chinese company — Golden Dragon Precise Copper Tube Group — that plans to build a $100 million plant there, with more than 300 jobs.

Mayor Day is now worried about that project and future prospects. He was quoted by The Press-Register in Mobile as saying business inquiries had dried up since the law was passed. “I know the immigration issue is being used against us.”

Alabama’s competitors certainly won’t waste any time. After the Tuscaloosa incident, the editorial page of The St. Louis Post-Dispatch invited Mercedes to Missouri. “We are the Show-Me State,” it said, “not the ‘Show me your papers’ state.”

Undocumented immigrants make up about 4.2 percent of Alabama’s work force, or 95,000 people in a state of 4.8 million. For all of the talk about clearing the way for unemployed Americans, there is no evidence that Alabamians in any significant numbers are rushing to fill the gap left by missing farm laborers and other low-wage immigrant workers.

The loss of job-filling, tax-paying workers may get even worse if Alabama is allowed to enforce a law requiring people who own or rent a trailer home to obtain an annual registration sticker. This puts the undocumented in a Catch-22 — criminals if they don’t have a sticker, criminals if they try to get one. For now, a judge has issued an order blocking enforcement. But if the state wins, many thousands may simply join the exodus, tearing more shreds in the economy.

The law’s damage is particularly heartbreaking in poor towns across the state, where small businesses are the economic lifeblood. We’ve spoken with Latino shopkeepers and restaurant owners in places like Albertville who say business is catastrophically down, with customers in hiding or flight. The situation isn’t much better in Huntsville and Birmingham.

There should be no doubt about the moral repugnance of Alabama’s law, which seeks to deny hardworking families the means to live. But even some of the law’s most enthusiastic supporters are beginning to acknowledge the law’s high economic cost. There is growing talk of revising or repealing the legislation. The sooner Alabama does so — and other states learn — the better.

    The Price of Intolerance, NYT, 27.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/28/opinion/the-price-of-intolerance.html

Oil Rigs Bring Camps of Men to the Prairie

November 25, 2011
The New York Times
By A. G. SULZBERGER

TIOGA, N.D. — As much as the drilling rigs that tower over this once placid corner of the prairie, the two communities springing up just outside of town testify to the galloping pace of growth here in oil country.

They are called man camps — temporary housing compounds supporting the overwhelmingly male work force flooding the region in search of refuge from a stormy economy. These two, Capital Lodge and Tioga Lodge, built on opposite sides of a highway, will have up to 3,700 residents, according to current plans.

Confronted with the unusual problem of too many unfilled jobs and not enough empty beds to accommodate the new arrivals, North Dakota embraced the camps — typically made of low-slung, modular dormitory-style buildings — as the imperfect solution to keeping workers rested and oil flowing.

But now, even as the housing shortage worsens, towns like this one are denying new applications for the camps. In many places they have come to embody the danger of growing too big too fast, cluttering formerly idyllic vistas, straining utilities, overburdening emergency services and aggravating relatively novel problems like traffic jams, long lines and higher crime.

The grumbling has escalated despite the huge influx of wealth from the boom, largely because it has become clear that growth is overwhelming capacity. Indeed, local leaders note incredulously that a conference on regional infrastructure took place in Colorado last month because the region lacked the facilities to host its own event.

“We need a little time to catch our breath to figure out what resources we need in place before we keep expanding,” said Ward Heidbreder, city coordinator in nearby Stanley, which has two camps.

In recent weeks, Williams County, where thousands of previously approved camp beds have yet to be built, and Mountrail County, where one-third of the population is living in temporary housing, imposed moratoriums on man camp development. McKenzie County, where the growth had been particularly untamed thanks to the absence of any zoning rules, is even considering breaking with a century of tradition and requiring building permits.

Leaders in these communities say they will use the reprieve to draft new fees for the camps to support fire and ambulance services; write tighter rules, like background checks, for residents in these facilities; and require performance bonds to ensure that the modular buildings aren’t simply abandoned whenever the boom turns bust. But the timeout also simply reflects lost patience.

“There is a testiness that’s developed in this last year because it’s so intense,” said E. Ward Koeser, the longtime mayor of nearby Williston, with about 14,000 people, the largest city in the region.

Brian Lash, chief executive of Target Logistics, the largest operator of man camps, boasts that the company plans to house 1 percent of the state’s population within a year, and supports the moratoriums.

Target’s camps, which rent directly to the drilling, hydraulic fracturing and trucking companies that employ most workers, have strict prohibitions on alcohol, firearms and unauthorized women. Violators are evicted and, often as a consequence, fired by the companies. With the employers paying $100 and up per worker per night for housing, good behavior is ensured, Mr. Lash said.

Mr. Lash said that communities should require such strict rules for other operators, as well, to prevent future problems.

“There is a little bit of a backlash that has culminated in these moratoriums,” he said. “They’re trying to catch their breath and ask for a little more regulation, as they should.”

A few years ago, when the oil boom was in its infancy, these long-shrinking communities were doing anything to encourage development. Now the state population is growing, money is pouring into communities and the unemployment rate remains by far the lowest in the nation, even though more job seekers arrive every day.

Confident that a bust is not imminent — industry leaders insist that they will continue drilling for years, if not decades — community leaders who were once deferential to the industry are increasingly comfortable insisting that development slow down a bit.

“Five years ago, anything the industry wanted it got. Anything to move things forward. That’s changed,” said Robert Harms, the former president of an oil producers’ trade association who now works as a consultant. “The industry needs to recognize that they’re guests here. They’re operating in people’s front yards and backyards and they damn well better act that way.”

“But,” he added, “locals need to recognize that newcomers are also struggling.”

Those newcomers include Ryan Nordstrom, who rolled into town not long ago with a dozen empty cans of energy drink in his passenger seat and $11 in his pocket, the meager remainder of the fuel money his sister had given him when he left Michigan. He had no trouble finding work — one of his first jobs was building camps — but housing was elusive.

He had enough cash to dump all his clothes and buy a brand new wardrobe, but Mr. Nordstrom was forced to live in vagabond style, often sleeping in the back of his car. This month he landed a new job working on an oil rig that included free housing at a camp. He walked into his tiny room in a trailer for the first time with an air of celebration, saying he never imagined how hard it would be to find a place to sleep.

That concern, that people are still arriving despite the housing shortage, is shared by some local leaders, including law enforcement officials who warn that people could die if they try to live in vehicles or other makeshift facilities through the North Dakota winter. But the large paychecks, often totaling more than $100,000 a year, mean that some undoubtedly will take the risk.

Motel rooms in Williston are booked solid, sometimes for years. Rents have quadrupled, and building permits have increased sixfold. Many people are so pressed for a place to stay that they commute two or more hours each day. The lucky ones will get spots at the camps.

More reminiscent of a college dorm than a bunkhouse, most of the camps serve three meals a day, have their own security, and come with amenities like workout rooms, game rooms and laundry service. Typically residents work rotations of two weeks in the camp and then have one week at homes scattered around the country, getting a new room each time they return to the camp.

Dropping off a bag of oil-stained work clothes in his small but private room, Shawn Mallimo said the amenities at the camps vary dramatically — his last camp had four men and two beds per room, with people working and sleeping in shifts.

The camps are built to be temporary — concrete is rarely poured. “The idea is when the majority of the work force leaves, these can be picked up and moved,” said Jill Edson, a planning official for Williams County. “So the land can be reclaimed like they were never there.”

At Black Gold, one of a series of camps just outside Williston, interlocking modular units that will house 900 workers when completed are being trucked in and reassembled after serving the oil fields in Alaska. The company is experienced and its rules are less restrictive. The men who have moved in are allowed alcohol in rooms and a few live here with their wives.

The assistant manager, Ann Marie Nowaczyk, whose presence reflects some hard-earned wisdom that nobody keeps a bunch of men on good behavior like a woman, says that she rarely has to use her “mom voice” to stifle trouble. Mostly people come back exhausted, eat and go to bed, she said, then start another 12-hour shift. “I think a lot of people in town think of oil field workers as trash,” she said. “They’re just like anybody else, working their butts off.”

Law enforcement and building inspection officials say most camps have not been problematic, but there have been exceptions. One camp outside Williston was shut down for allowing sewage to flow freely over the property. Others have had fights. Unauthorized encampments are easy to spot along country roads.

Some companies have responded to the criticism. Capital Lodge, which is still under construction, has been drilling wells to provide its own water supply. Across the highway, Tioga Lodge has a waste treatment facility so the owner will not have to continue trucking sewage to surrounding communities. Both moves were warmly welcomed by local utilities.

As more projects to increase the capacity of local sewer, water, electric, roads and law enforcement are completed — already hundreds of millions have been spent — officials expect to lift the moratoriums on the camps.

But even then, Tom Rolfstad, who is in charge of economic development for Williston, said that he would like to see more permanent housing, which he believes would encourage more newcomers to bring their families. “There is a bit more testosterone right now than the town was used to,” he said.

    Oil Rigs Bring Camps of Men to the Prairie, NYT, 25.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/26/us/north-dakota-oil-boom-creates-camps-of-men.html

Idiosyncrasy Runs Deep in the Soil of Wyoming

November 24, 2011
The New York Times
By KIRK JOHNSON

CHEYENNE, Wyo. — The rallying cry of “states’ rights” has resonated under many statehouse domes since President Obama’s election, fueled as it usually has been in its many appearances over the years by a ferociously conservative anti-Washington sentiment.

Gov. Matt Mead of Wyoming has another term for it: the pursuit of good government.

If Washington is broken and unable to lead — as millions of Americans believe, according to polls — then who is left to fill the void? Mr. Mead’s answer: States functional enough to soldier on through a time of dystopian crisis should be given the room to run. Whether they are led by conservatives or liberals does not matter so much, he said, as the ability to get things done.

“There certainly have to be national policies, and national rules and regulations — I understand that,” Mr. Mead, 49, a Republican and former prosecutor, said in an interview in his office here. “But I am in part a states’ rights guy because I think we can do so many things better.”

Better or not, Wyoming’s way — always idiosyncratic in the windblown, rural grain that mixes mind-your-own-business cowboy libertarianism and fiscal penny-pinching — is getting its moment in the spotlight.

An agreement worked out this summer between the state and the Department of the Interior — which Mr. Mead, elected last year, is now trying to sell to his party in the Legislature — would have Wyoming take a different path from other states in managing the gray wolves that have spilled out of Yellowstone National Park since their successful transplant in the 1990s.

The fate of a Clinton-era lawsuit over whether the federal government can protect public lands by barring road development on millions of acres in the West sits on Mr. Mead’s desk, too. He has to decide whether to appeal Wyoming’s recent loss in a federal appeals court in Denver.

The state’s experiences in natural gas extraction, especially the controversial technologies of hydraulic fracturing, have come under the microscope as other places around the country see drillers and gas rigs on their horizons.

Whether the spirit here is indeed “something in the soil,” as the historian Patricia Nelson Limerick summed up the regional differences of the West in her book by that title, or something in the personalities of those who stride that soil, political life in Wyoming is decidedly different.

With only about 564,000 people spread across an area nearly twice the size of New York State, and an utterly dominant Republican Party, Wyoming is a place where personal relationships and family histories shape debates more than ideology. One of Mr. Mead’s grandfathers, Clifford P. Hansen, was governor in the 1960s, and a United States senator after that. Mr. Mead’s mother, Mary Hansen Mead, ran for governor in the early 1990s.

At the ranch near Jackson where he grew up, Mr. Mead said, dinner tables were often graced by people like Dick Cheney, who was a congressman from Wyoming before his national rise, and Alan K. Simpson, the former Republican senator.

That identity of difference — small-town feel, wide-open spaces — shapes the outlook and the culture.

“In Wyoming, we think of ourselves as a small community with long streets,” said W. Patrick Goggles, the Democratic minority floor leader in the State House, who said he agreed with Mr. Mead that whatever Wyoming does right should be bottled as an elixir for the nation’s ills.

“In Wyoming’s case, states’ rights is a valid case,” he said. “I’m not sure I would say that about other states.”

Like Alaska, which is probably Wyoming’s closest cousin, there is a lot of geological luck — a mineral bounty of coal, gas and oil — that helps state leaders take the high, if not haughty, ground in gazing on the struggles of others. The fat stream of revenue from mining and drilling can make fiscal prudence less of a bind.

The overwhelming dominance of one party can also make Wyoming feel a bit like a parliamentary democracy, where one party is empowered top to bottom to run things in a kind of steamroller effect, without gridlock. And the small-town ethos frowns on twisting the knife.

“We are small and we know each other, and while you may be mad at somebody today, in 10 years or 15 years my daughter may be marrying their son,” Mr. Mead said. “So the whole notion that it’s ‘burn down the house to get your way’ doesn’t work.”

But there is also a political tradition, Mr. Mead said — notably in his family — of admitting error. On wolves, in particular, Wyoming has fought in court for years for its plan that treated the animals as predators — liable to be shot on sight in most of the state. The new compromise plan expands the wolf’s protected zone and allows interconnection with populations in Idaho.

Few people love the compromise. Some environmentalists fear that the numbers will fall too low, while some ranchers bristle that any wolves at all are too many.

A lesson from his grandfather Hansen guides Mr. Mead. Mr. Hansen, as a young rancher, vehemently fought federal plans to protect lands that eventually became Grand Teton National Park, and then later in life publicly apologized and became a huge supporter of the park.

Saying that wolves are here to stay, Mr. Mead made a similar about-face.

“It sticks in the craw,” he said. “But we’ve done the pounding on the table — let’s find a resolution.”

    Idiosyncrasy Runs Deep in the Soil of Wyoming, NYT, 24.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/25/us/wyoming-holds-on-to-its-pioneering-ways.html

Oregon Tests iPads as Aid to Disabled Voters

November 16, 2011
The New York Times
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

Could the iPad someday supplant the voting machine?

Oregon last week became the first state in the country to use iPads to allow people with disabilities to vote, and it intends to use them again for another election in January. Several other states are expected to follow suit with iPads or other tablets, possibly as early as for next year’s presidential election.

In a special primary election in five counties in Oregon, 89 people with disabilities marked their ballots on an iPad. They did not actually cast their votes online — Internet voting is an idea whose time has not yet come, several elections officials said.

Rather, these voters used iPads, brought to their homes or nursing homes by election workers, to call up their ballots, mark them on-screen and print them out on a portable wireless printer. The voters or assistants then either mailed in the printed ballots or dropped them off at election stations.

One woman, who has impaired vision, was able to enlarge the print on her ballot so that she could see the names of candidates. A man with arthritis who could not hold a pen was able to touch the screen with his finger and mark his ballot.

“The goal was to make voting accessible and convenient for voters with disabilities, and the iPad does exactly that,” said Kate Brown, Oregon’s secretary of state.

For the Jan. 31 election, she said, voters with disabilities will have even more iPad options: those who cannot use their hands, for example, can use a tube to activate software that lets them call up the ballot and mark it. They will be able to attach their own joysticks or paddles. The iPad can also translate the ballot for those who do not speak English, and read it out to the blind.

Ms. Brown said that the state tried out several different tablets and devices at a conference this year and found that people with disabilities preferred the iPad.

Jim Dickson, vice president for government affairs at the American Association of People With Disabilities, commended Oregon’s experiment. “Is the iPad perfect?” he said. “No. But it is an important step forward.” One challenge is that the visually impaired cannot read the printouts of their ballots to verify them.

Election workers found the iPad and wireless printers more convenient than the computer stations that they had previously dragged to homebound voters.

Ms. Brown said that if the experiment went as well in January — when voters in five counties will choose a replacement for Representative David Wu, a Democrat who resigned after a sex scandal — she expected to expand the program statewide.

Other states are interested, too. “It’s definitely a direction we’re moving in,” said Shane Hamlin, co-director of elections for Washington State, although he said it was too early to say whether tablet voting might be available to all voters or just those with disabilities.

But he said that in the long run, voting by iPad or a similar device could save money, considering the costs of maintaining, storing and updating regular voting machines.

Lori J. Steele, chief executive officer of Everyone Counts, the California company that developed the software used by Oregon, said she expected that a half-dozen states would be using iPads or similar tablets for people with disabilities in next year’s presidential election.

“Oregon is the model for what states could and will be doing in the next few years,” she said. “I can see the transformation as old equipment becomes obsolete.”

    Oregon Tests iPads as Aid to Disabled Voters, NYT, 16.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/17/us/oregon-tries-out-voting-by-ipad-for-disabled.html

Medical Nuances Drove ‘No’ Vote in Mississippi

November 14, 2011
The New York Times
By DENISE GRADY

JACKSON, Miss. — When her children woke up on Wednesday morning, Atlee Breland told them, “Mama won her election.”

From her Lego-strewn living room, she had campaigned furiously to defeat an anti-abortion amendment to the state Constitution that would have declared fertilized eggs to be “persons.” She created a Web site and Facebook page that reached tens of thousands of voters.

Mrs. Breland, who proudly identifies herself as a Christian, native Mississippian and mother of three, might seem just the kind of voter who would back such an amendment. But she had needed fertility treatments to conceive her twin daughters, who are now 5, and she saw the amendment as likely to restrict in vitro fertilization and threaten the ability of women like her to have children.

The amendment was rejected by 58 percent of voters in staunchly anti-abortion Mississippi, largely on fears like Mrs. Breland’s that hinged on subtleties of medical science.

The same issues could well foreshadow trouble ahead for similar “personhood” initiatives now being planned in other states by organizers from Colorado. In Mississippi, concerns that the measure would empower the government to intrude in intimate medical decisions far afield from abortion — involving not just infertility, but also birth control, potentially deadly ectopic pregnancies and the treatment of pregnant women with cancer — were decisive in its defeat.

“We don’t need people coming down from Colorado to try to use us as a political experiment,” said Stan Flint, a lobbyist here in Jackson with the Southern Strategy Group, a public affairs firm that fought the initiative. “The people of Mississippi told them to go back where they came from.”

The amendment, all of 21 words long, defined “persons” as “every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the functional equivalent thereof.” It would have banned all abortions, with no exceptions for rape, incest or saving the mother’s life. If it had passed, it would have been tied up quickly in court challenges. If it had finally taken effect, the details of what it controlled would have been decided by judges and state lawmakers. Both sides exploited its vague wording. Promoters reassured voters that abortion would simply be stopped, with little effect on other medical care. Opponents, including Planned Parenthood, warned of worst-case scenarios like coroner investigations of miscarriage and criminal charges against doctors for treating ectopic pregnancies, in which an embryo implants outside the uterus and can cause a hemorrhage unless it is removed.

A few months ago, polls showed “yes” votes for the amendment 30 points ahead. But uncertainty about the amendment’s reach, combined with opposition from citizen groups like Mrs. Breland’s and influential anti-abortion pastors helped reverse the momentum. Medical input was also crucial: The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists said the amendment jeopardized women’s health, and state doctors’ and nurses’ groups refused to support it.

The initiative was brought to Mississippi by Personhood USA, an anti-abortion group in Colorado that has tried and failed twice to pass a similar measure there. But it won some support here.

“It was about defining a person from the beginning of its biological development to its natural end and protecting it by law as any other innocent citizen would be protected,” said Dr. Freda Bush, an obstetrician in Jackson who supported the amendment.

Jennifer Mason, communications director for Personhood USA, attributed the defeat to “false information and scare tactics” by the opposition. “I think that now that we know their game plan, it will be easier to pass a future personhood amendment,” Ms. Mason said. She said the group was now circulating petitions needed for ballot initiatives in Montana, Florida and Oregon, and was planning campaigns in 11 other states.

The amendment’s supporters acknowledge that it would have banned not just abortions, but anything that could prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus, effectively barring some birth control methods, like IUDs, morning-after pills and a contraceptive pill called the “mini-pill” that contains only progestin.

Whether the amendment would also have banned standard birth control pills, which contain both estrogen and progestin, became a matter of debate. Those pills work mainly by preventing ovulation — a mechanism that is acceptable, supporters of the amendment say. However, the standard pills may also alter the uterine lining so that, in rare cases in which a woman on the pill ovulates and the egg is fertilized, it will not implant.

The possibility that the pills and other hormonal birth control can prevent implantation makes them “chemical abortifacients,” according to some anti-abortion groups.

But advocates for the amendment in Mississippi insisted that it would not have outlawed standard birth control pills. “There is no strong argument to suggest that combined-hormone birth control pills cause loss of pregnancies,” said Dr. Eric Webb, an obstetrician in Tupelo who supported personhood. Still, opponents said the amendment’s vagueness left the door open to a ban on the pill — in a state with the nation’s highest rate of teenage pregnancy and of unplanned pregnancy in women of all ages.

Dr. Paul D. Seago, a gynecologic oncologist in Jackson, said he worried that the amendment could have interfered with the treatment of women with rare cancers that can develop from fertilized eggs.

He said the law could also have posed problems for a pregnant woman with breast cancer. The usual treatments — surgery, chemotherapy and radiation — would endanger the fetus.

“Do you continue this pregnancy and let this cancer grow?” Dr. Seago said. “Or do you end it so the patient can get the best therapy for cancer? Does the mother have the right and ability to terminate? If this were to pass, no. What if the physician did prescribe or administer therapy and the pregnancy did die? Is that physician now guilty of murder?”

Ms. Mason said it was true that abortion would not have been allowed for women with cancer, but she said that doctors might have been able to perform a Caesarean section to save the baby and then treat the mother.

Other concerns cropped up. Dr. Seago said pathologists at his hospital asked whether miscarriages would have to be investigated by the coroner if the amendment passed.

“I’m not trying to be overly dramatic, but no one knows, if personhood were to pass, how that would be handled and who would, essentially, write the rules,” Dr. Seago said.

He and other doctors said they were also worried about whether they would be free to use surgery and drugs to treat ectopic pregnancies, which can be fatal for the woman.

Dr. Bush, a proponent of the measure, insisted that state laws protect doctors and women from prosecution in emergencies in which a pregnancy has to be ended to save the mother’s life. As for miscarriages, she said the police had no time for “witch hunts.”

But opponents said that when existing laws were written, a fertilized egg was not considered a person, and that changing the definition could have changed everything.

The amendment would have made it illegal to destroy embryos created by in vitro fertilization. But what worried parents like Mrs. Breland were suggestions by personhood advocates that embryo freezing should also be discouraged or stopped. Many infertility specialists say the ability to use frozen eggs greatly increases their odds of success and helps minimize the number of cycles women must go through to collect eggs.

Dr. Webb questioned the need for freezing, saying some clinics had good success rates without it. If personhood had passed, he said, fertility doctors themselves might have chosen to stop freezing embryos because in the event of a power failure they could have been held responsible for thousands of deaths.

Mrs. Breland was fearful of just such ideas, but she also knew that the amendment’s main opponents, Planned Parenthood and the American Civil Liberties Union, “are not very well loved here,” she said. She took pains on her Web site to say that she had no connection with either group. “I wanted to give people a place where it was O.K. to say no, O.K. to support somebody saying no, and to give people factual information not from Planned Parenthood,” she said.

She has also kept the Web site and an associated parents’ group neutral on elective abortion. Some members call themselves pro-life, and others pro-choice. At times, the battle has turned ugly.

“I’ve had people posting pictures of dead babies on my Facebook wall,” Mrs. Breland said, showing a gory image on her computer screen. One of her children wandered by and she slammed the laptop shut, saying, with tears in her eyes, “I’m sorry, I don’t want my child to see that.” For weeks, a truck with Colorado plates and covered with huge pictures of bloody fetuses has been driving around Mississippi. It turned up near the statehouse in Jackson on Friday, with “Shame on Mississippi” painted on the side.

The election here is over, but similar battles loom in other states. Mrs. Breland is not taking down her Web site or giving up this fight.

“No, ma’am,” she said. “They’re not going away.”

    Medical Nuances Drove ‘No’ Vote in Mississippi, NYT, 14.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/15/health/policy/no-vote-in-mississippi-hinged-on-issues-beyond-abortion.html

Back to Common Sense at the Polls

November 9, 2011
The New York Times

It might have been “too much too soon,” a chastened Gov. John Kasich of Ohio admitted on Tuesday night, after his state’s voters overwhelmingly rejected his attempt to break public employee unions. He certainly was right about “too much,” an analysis that also applies to other examples of Republican overreach around the country that were kicked into the gutter: an anti-abortion amendment in Mississippi, a voting restriction in Maine, the radical anti-immigrant agenda of a politician in Arizona.

These policies, and similar ones in other states, were passed in an arrogant frenzy by a Tea Party-tide of Republicans elected in 2010. Many of them decided that they had a mandate to dismantle some of the basic protections and restrictions of government. They went too far, and weary voters had to drag them back toward the center.

As a result, Tuesday brought an overdue return of common sense to government policy in many states. Many voters are tired of legislation driven more by ideology than practicality, of measures that impoverish the middle class or deprive people of basic rights in order to prove some discredited economic theory or cultural belief.

That was most evident in Ohio, where voters overwhelmingly repealed a law pushed through last spring by Republicans to shred collective-bargaining rights for public employees. It prohibited bargaining on health benefits for state and local workers, including teachers, police officers and firefighters, and made it much harder to collect union dues or negotiate on staffing.

Many states are bleeding because of high salaries and lavish benefits, but, as New York and Connecticut have shown, it is possible to reduce them without breaking unions. The roughshod course chosen by Ohio, as well as Wisconsin and Indiana, made the real agenda all too clear: breaking the political power of public unions. Blue-collar voters in Ohio, many of whom got to the middle class through collective bargaining, understood the game.

Many of those same voters also supported a powerless amendment repudiating health care reform. With the matter up to the courts, there was little campaigning on the issue to explain its benefits to the uninsured.

In Arizona, voters recoiling from anti-immigrant stridency recalled the State Senate’s president, Russell Pearce, who was the main sponsor and public face of Arizona’s immigration law, which imposed sweeping police-state powers to harass and expel people without papers. The law, largely blocked in federal court, has done huge damage to the state’s economy and reputation, and voters in Mr. Pearce’s district clearly had had enough.

Maine voters saw right through the partisanship behind Republican attempts to eliminate same-day voter registration and reinstated it. In state after state, Republicans have tried to make it harder to vote, knowing that restrictions tend to hit lower-income and minority voters — traditional supporters of Democrats. Unfortunately, Mississippi voters were not as enlightened, approving a new requirement for identification cards at the polls.

But, even the voters in that state, one of the country’s most conservative, decisively rejected an amendment to ban abortion by declaring a fertilized egg as a person. The measure also would have effectively banned some forms of contraception and even in-vitro fertilization, and 58 percent of voters said that was going too far.

It is not clear that Tuesday’s votes add up to a national trend that will have an effect on 2012 or even the deadlock in Congress. But they do offer a ray of hope to any candidate who runs on pragmatic solutions, not magical realism, to create jobs and reduce the pressures of inequality on the middle class and the poor.

    Back to Common Sense at the Polls, NYT, 9.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/10/opinion/back-to-common-sense-at-the-polls.html

Ohio Vote on Labor Is Parsed for Omens

November 9, 2011
The New York Times
By SABRINA TAVERNISE and STEVEN GREENHOUSE

COLUMBUS, Ohio — The landslide vote to repeal an Ohio law that limits collective bargaining has sounded a strong note of caution for Republican governors and lawmakers across the country, raising questions about some of their legislative efforts, especially those that would weaken labor unions. But the victory, while trumpeted by labor leaders, may not necessarily improve the prospects of unions or the Democrats, their traditional allies, in 2012, political analysts said.

As labor leaders took their victory lap Wednesday, Republicans and Democrats from Maine to Wisconsin were adding the Ohio results to their political calculus for next year’s presidential election. Would there be fallout in Wisconsin, where Gov. Scott Walker could face a recall vote next spring? What can Democrats do to try to keep the energy — and the issue — from fizzling?

Gov. John R. Kasich, who had pushed the law in Ohio, seemed chastened, acknowledging on Tuesday night that, for voters, the bill had been “too much too soon.” Even before the vote, his approval rating was just 36 percent, according to a Quinnipiac poll in October.

“The results here in Ohio are likely to give Republican governors and legislators incentives to be cautious,” said John C. Green, director of the Bliss Institute, a political research center at the University of Akron. “The popularity of the Republican position has fallen somewhat.”

But Tuesday’s result contained a twist: The same voters who overwhelmingly rejected the labor bill — by a margin of 61 to 39 percent — voted in even greater numbers in favor of a symbolic measure against President Obama’s health care law. Democrats dismissed it, but State Senator Bill Seitz, a Republican who opposed the repealed law, said it spoke to a deeper disgust among voters with the political class.

“The message is, a plague on both your houses,” Mr. Seitz said. “It was a nonideological expression of frustration by an overwhelming number of voters about the inability of their elected leaders to come up with a more consensus-based collaborative approach.”

Labor and Democratic politicians seized on the referendum as a warning to Republicans.

“Governors in other states ought to take heed of this,” said Richard Trumka, president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. “If not, they do so at their own peril, and they may face a backlash.”

Mr. Trumka was referring to Florida, Indiana, Maine, Michigan, Missouri and Tennessee, states where Republicans have sought to enact legislation to weaken labor unions.

Perhaps the biggest fallout of the Ohio vote will be in Wisconsin, where thousands of union volunteers have geared up to collect the 540,000 signatures needed to get Governor Walker’s recall on the ballot. Charles Franklin, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, said that while the states were distinct, the outcome in Ohio “should probably worry him a bit,” referring to Mr. Walker.

Stephan Thompson, executive director of the Republican Party in Wisconsin, said that comparing the situation in Ohio and Wisconsin was “ridiculous,” and that Democrats were “clearly desperate to manufacture momentum for their recall attempt.”

In Ohio on Wednesday, Democrats were ecstatic. They had dented, perhaps for the first time, the soaring Republican confidence that had enabled the party to enact ambitious legislative agendas in a number of states.

Still, Mr. Green cautioned against inferring too much from Tuesday’s victory, drawing the comparison with Republican euphoria after the 2010 midterms.

“They were very excited to win the election and then they found out that governing is very hard,” he said. “Unions and their allies have every right to be excited this morning, but what that means for the future is not entirely clear.”

Labor leaders said the Ohio results were an instruction manual for the Democrats, after months of being on the defensive.

“The election last night is the road map for the Democrats if they’re willing to use it,” said Michael Podhorzer, the A.F.L.-C.I.O’s political director. “The base isn’t permanently immobilized. It just needs to be mobilized by an issue they care about.”

Republican lawmakers said the electorate favored some of the law’s provisions — like performance-based compensation, and employees’ paying more toward health care and pension plans — and that while there was no immediate plan for new legislation, trimming labor costs was still pressing.

“SB5 went away last night but the problem didn’t,” said State Senator Keith Faber, a Republican.Other states watched warily, like Indiana, where a Republican-led legislative committee recently recommended adopting a right-to-work law, which would eliminate any requirement that workers in unionized workplaces pay union dues or fees.

Labor experts said events in Ohio were a cautionary tale against legislative overreach.

“This is a wake-up call to tone it down and take on more achievable goals,” said Samuel Estreicher, the director of the Center for Labor and Employment Law at New York University. “A movement towards reform is inevitable because the economics are calling for it.”

For public workers, it was, quite simply, a triumph.

“I did my work with a smile on my face and was very proud,” said Lee Eicher, a 57-year-old meat inspector. “We sent a message. We really sent a message.”

 

Sabrina Tavernise reported from Columbus, and Steven Greenhouse from New York.

    Ohio Vote on Labor Is Parsed for Omens, NYT, 9.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/10/us/politics/ohio-vote-on-collective-bargaining-is-parsed-for-2012-omens.html

Ohio Turns Back a Law Limiting Unions’ Rights

November 8, 2011
The New York Times
By SABRINA TAVERNISE

COLUMBUS, Ohio — A year after Republicans swept legislatures across the country, voters in Ohio delivered their verdict Tuesday on a centerpiece of the conservative legislative agenda, striking down a law that restricted public workers’ rights to bargain collectively.

The landslide vote to repeal the bill — 62 percent to 38 percent, according to preliminary results from Ohio’s secretary of state — was a slap to Gov. John R. Kasich, a Republican who had championed the law as a tool for cities to cut costs. The bill passed in March on a wave of enthusiasm among Republicans fresh from victories. A similar bill also passed in Wisconsin.

Across the country, several other Republican-backed measures were also dealt setbacks, including a crackdown on voting rights in Maine.

In Mississippi, voters rejected an amendment to the State Constitution that would have banned virtually all abortions and some forms of birth control by declaring a fertilized human egg to be a legal person.

The Ohio vote gave a new lease on life to public sector labor unions in Ohio, which had been under tremendous pressure to get the bill repealed. Failure would have brought not only the loss of most of their bargaining rights, including the right to strike, but would also have called into question what had long been their central strength — their ability to organize and deliver votes.

Labor leaders said their victory contained an important message for Republicans.

“Attacking education and other public employees is not at all what the public wants to see,” said Karen M. White, political director of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest public sector union. “It should resonate with politicians that they’ve gone too far.”

At a news conference Tuesday night, Mr. Kasich congratulated the winners and said he would assess the situation before proposing any new legislation. “It’s time to pause,” he said. “The people have spoken clearly.”

When asked about the people’s message, Mr. Kasich said, “They might have said it was too much too soon.”

Labor’s victory in this important swing state comes a year before the presidential election, and policy makers and political strategists will be studying ballot initiatives for clues to voter sentiment in 2012.

The election in Ohio provided an opportunity for the president’s network of supporters, Obama for America, to test its organizational ability and revive its enthusiasm after a bleak year for Democratic activists. Volunteers for the president’s re-election campaign fanned out across the state for weeks, urging voters to stand against the new law limiting collective bargaining.

The issue did not break entirely along party lines. The supporters of the law did not receive as much outside help, with the Republican presidential primary campaign in full swing.

Even when Mitt Romney, a leading candidate, visited Ohio recently, he said he was not sure where he stood on the issue. A day later, he said he stood against the labor unions.

Some analysts cautioned against reading too much into the result as a predictor for 2012. The law has been highly controversial in Ohio, even among groups like firefighters and police officers that traditionally vote Republican, and a vote cast against the law does not translate directly to a vote for President Obama.

“This is not a purely partisan issue,” said Gene Beaupre, a political science professor at Xavier University. “It has merits on its substance.”

The real question, he said, will be how independents voted. In a warning to Democrats, a largely symbolic measure against Mr. Obama’s health care law was among the ballot initiatives that passed.

Republicans who watched the campaign on the union measure said it was doomed from the start. The law was a frontal assault on one of the most sacred principles for Democrats: the right of organized labor to collectively bargain. Defeating the repeal campaign would have required near-universal Republican support, which was not there because some registered Republicans opposed the law.

“This really is a core value, and the bill was out of step with that value,” said one Republican strategist, who asked to remain anonymous because he did not want to be seen as criticizing his party’s position.

Labor fought harder, observers said, because its stakes were higher. We Are Ohio, the main group that opposed the law, poured about $30 million into the campaign, said Melissa Fazekas, the group’s spokeswoman, and had about 17,000 volunteers out over the weekend knocking on doors to persuade residents to go out and vote. The main group supporting the bill, Building a Better Ohio, said it spent just under $8 million.

“What we were actually fighting for was our livelihood,” said Monty Blanton, a retired state employee and union worker who said he spent 14 hours a day knocking on doors in southeast Ohio in the last month. “We’ve been to places you had to get to with a four-wheel drive.”

Labor organizers also had the advantage of appealing to a current of national disgust.

“Who are you going to trust, the politician who is more worried about whether his hair is parted correctly, or the firefighter and policeman in your neighborhood?” said Jim Gilbert, the president of the Fraternal Order of Police in Columbus.

It is unclear whether the episode will cause Republicans to suffer at the ballot box next year. Bill Capretta, a registered Republican and a retired police officer in Columbus, said that while he did not think he would vote for Mr. Obama, whose health care law he opposes, he was frustrated with Republicans for blocking the president’s efforts.

“When you just say ‘No, no, no’ because you want this guy to be a one-term president, I have a problem with that,” he said.

 

Jeff Zeleny contributed reporting from Washington,

and Steven Greenhouse from New York.

    Ohio Turns Back a Law Limiting Unions’ Rights, NYT, 8.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/09/us/politics/ohio-turns-back-a-law-limiting-unions-rights.html

Mississippi Voters Reject Anti-Abortion Measure

November 8, 2011
The New York Times
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

Voters turned a skeptical eye toward conservative-backed measures across the country Tuesday, rejecting an anti-labor law in Ohio, an anti-abortion measure in Mississippi and a crackdown on voting rights in Maine.

Even in Arizona, voters were close to turning out of office the chief architect of that state’s controversial anti-immigration law. State Senator Russell Pearce, a Republican power broker and a former sheriff’s deputy known for his uncompromising style, came close to conceding the race Tuesday with a look of shock on his face.

“If being recalled is the price for keeping one’s promises, then so be it,” he said. His opponent had declared victory. Mr. Pearce, the president of the Senate, was a hero to the Tea Party movement, and apart from his anti-immigration efforts, he had introduced numerous bills to nullify federal laws.

Taken together, Tuesday’s results could breathe new life into President Obama’s hopes for his re-election a year from now. But the day was not a wholesale victory for Democrats. Even as voters in Ohio delivered a blow to Gov. John R. Kasich, a Republican, and rejected his attempt to weaken collective bargaining for public employees, they approved a symbolic measure to exempt Ohio residents from the individual mandate required in Mr. Obama’s health care law.

And while voters in Mississippi, one of the most conservative states, turned away a measure that would have outlawed all abortions and many forms of contraception and had drawn conservative support from members of both parties, they tightened their voting laws to require some from of government-approved identification. Democrats had opposed the requirement, saying it was a thinly disguised attempt to intimidate voters of color.

In Maine, where Republicans recently had ended same-day registration at polling places, voters decided to restore the practice, which Democrats support.

Despite the anger at Washington, voters did not appear to be in a throw-the-bums-out frame of mind at the city and state levels. In Philadelphia, Mayor Michael Nutter, a Democrat, won re-election, as did Mayor Greg Ballard, a Republican, in Indianapolis and Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, a Democrat, in Baltimore. In Phoenix, Greg Stanton, a Democrat, was the winner while in San Francisco, Edwin M. Lee, the interim mayor, seemed poised to become that city’s first mayor of Chinese descent.

Steve Beshear, the Democratic governor of Kentucky, was re-elected. In Mississippi, Phil Bryant will succeed Gov. Haley Barbour, a fellow Republican, who was prevented by term limits from running for reelection.

And in something of a surprise, an attempt by Republicans in Virginia to take over the state Senate — and thereby take complete control of the state government — appeared stalled. In one district, the final vote showed the Republican candidate with an edge of fewer than 100 votes, putting the party within striking distance of a 20-20 tie with Democrats in the Senate. When the Senate is deadlocked, the lieutenant governor — a Republican — casts the tie-breaking vote.

But in Iowa, Republicans failed in their attempt to win control of the State Senate. Had they won a special election there, they would have likely been able to pass numerous measures, including a ban on same-sex marriage, that had been blocked by Democrats.

In one of the biggest surprises of the night was Mississippi’s rejection of a far-reaching and stringent anti-abortion initiative known as the “personhood” amendment, which had inspired a ferocious national debate.

Initiative 26 would have amended the state Constitution to define life “to include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the functional equivalent thereof.”

Supporters, including evangelical Christians, said it would have stopped the murder of innocent life and sent a clarion moral call to the world. They said they expected that passage in Mississippi would have built support for similar laws in other states.

Opponents, led by Planned Parenthood and the American Civil Liberties Union, said the proposal would have outlawed all abortions, including in cases of rape and incest and when the mother’s life was in danger; would have barred morning-after pills and certain contraception such as IUD’s; and could have limited in vitro fertility procedures.

“The message from Mississippi is clear,” Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, said in a statement. “An amendment that allows politicians to further interfere in our personal, private medical decisions, including a woman’s right to choose safe, legal abortion, is unacceptable.”

The push for a personhood amendment split the country’s anti-abortion movement. Traditional leaders including the Roman Catholic bishops and National Right to Life opposed it on strategic grounds, fearing it would lead to a United States Supreme Court defeat and set back to their efforts to chip away at abortion rights.

Governor Barbour is a strong opponent of abortion rights but expressed skepticism about the amendment’s wording

“It’s unnecessarily ambiguous,” he told MSNBC on Tuesday. He also criticized the strategy of sending it to voters rather than to the Legislature — a blunder he attributed to people in Colorado, who wrote the measure — and said it would not be a good test case with which to try to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion. Nonetheless, Mr. Barbour said, he had supported the measure because he believes that life begins at conception.

Theo Emery, Erik Eckholm and Kirk Johnson contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 9, 2011

An earlier version of this article mistakenly said there were governor’s races in Louisiana and West Virginia; there were not.

    Mississippi Voters Reject Anti-Abortion Measure, NYT, 8.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/09/us/politics/votes-across-the-nation-could-serve-as-a-political-barometer.html

Killing Medicaid the California Way

October 13, 2011
The New York Times
By BRUCE C. VLADECK and STEPHEN I. VLADECK

VIRTUALLY all of the debate over the health care legislation enacted last year has focused on the constitutionality of the individual mandate, the requirement that, by 2014, nearly all Americans either purchase health insurance or pay a fine if they fail to do so. The Supreme Court now seems likely to decide the fate of the mandate, perhaps as early as June.

But last week the court also heard oral arguments in another case that could, indirectly, have a far greater impact on whether the act can meet the goal of expanding health care access by broadening eligibility for Medicaid, by 2014, to 15 million people.

One of the central substantive requirements of the Medicaid program, which serves more than 50 million poor and disabled Americans, is what’s known as the equal access mandate, which requires states to set the rates at which they reimburse Medicaid providers at levels sufficient to ensure an adequate supply of providers. As both Congress and the executive branch have understood since Medicaid’s creation in 1965, there would be little incentive for providers to participate in Medicaid if their payments were too far below market levels.

Nevertheless, in response to vast budget shortfalls, the California Legislature in 2008 enacted an across-the-board 10 percent cut in reimbursement levels for Medi-Cal, the state Medicaid program. Three groups of Medicaid beneficiaries and providers sued the state, arguing that the categorical reduction was inconsistent with, and therefore pre-empted by, the equal access mandate. On the merits, three federal appellate panels agreed and halted the rate reduction.

In the case it heard last week, Douglas v. Independent Living Center of Southern California, the Supreme Court will not resolve whether those decisions were correct: the incompatibility between California’s rate reduction and the equal access mandate appears to be settled. Instead, the justices agreed to consider a technical but critical question: whether private parties, be they Medicaid beneficiaries or providers, may even bring such suits in the first place.

When Medicaid was enacted, the possibility of private suits to enforce its provisions could be taken for granted. In the past decade, however, the Supreme Court has held federal statutes to an increasingly restrictive standard in deciding whether or not they may be privately enforced. The result has been clear: most of the lower courts facing the issue in recent years have held that the equal access provision can no longer be enforced in suits by beneficiaries or providers.

But if beneficiaries or providers can’t enforce the equal access provision, who will? The answer, according to both California and the Obama administration, which filed an amicus brief in support of California in the Douglas case, is the United States Department of Health and Human Services. What they fail to acknowledge, however, is that the department utterly lacks the financial, legal, logistical and political wherewithal to enforce the provision. (We helped write an amicus brief in support of the plaintiffs.)

First, the department doesn’t have the resources to oversee compliance with the equal access provision. As Justice Anthony M. Kennedy pointed out at the oral argument last week, only 500 employees supervise nearly $400 billion in Medicaid expenditures. Indeed, the department’s budget for the administration of Medicaid declined by 44 percent between the 2008 and 2010 fiscal years, even as Medicaid costs have kept rising.

Second, even if the department sought to expand enforcement of the equal access provision, it would encounter the additional hurdle that its enforcement budget — unlike the bulk of the Medicaid program — depends on annual appropriations. Medicaid must compete annually with the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other agencies.

Third, even with proper funding, the department has repeatedly admitted that its authority to enforce the equal access provision and to provide remedies for violations is limited, practically and legally. When states fail to comply with the equal access mandate, the department’s options are either to reject a state Medicaid plan up front or withdraw financing after the fact — both of which punish Medicaid beneficiaries at least as much as they punish the offending states. As a result, the department has focused instead on trying to cajole rather than coerce states into complying.

Despite these reservations, only Justice Kennedy seemed outwardly concerned during last week’s oral argument in Douglas about whether exclusive federal enforcement could be effective. If the rest of the justices hold that the equal access provision cannot be privately enforced, that will open the door for other states with budget shortfalls to enact similar across-the-board cuts in Medicaid reimbursement rates. From there, it would be only a matter of time before providers abandoned Medicaid beneficiaries for private consumers en masse, thereby vitiating the animating purpose of the Medicaid program.

Of course, even if the justices rule for California, Congress is free to respond by clarifying that Medicaid beneficiaries or providers should be able to enforce the equal access provision. But given the politics of the moment, and the reality that violating the equal access mandate saves money for states and the federal government, a true legislative fix seems unlikely.

Thus, even as it vigorously defends the constitutionality of the individual mandate, the Obama administration may be complicit in eviscerating Medicaid — and setting back the broader goal of ensuring that all Americans have access to quality health care.

 

Bruce C. Vladeck was the administrator of Medicare and Medicaid from 1993 to 1997.

Stephen I. Vladeck is a professor of law at American University.

    Killing Medicaid the California Way, NYT, 13.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/opinion/killing-medicaid-the-california-way.html

How to Fix California’s Democracy Crisis

October 10, 2011
The New York Times
By JAMES S. FISHKIN

Stanford, Calif.

ONE hundred years ago today, California voters added the ballot initiative to the State Constitution, allowing citizens to use petitions to bring proposed statutes and constitutional amendments for a public vote.

But as California, the nation’s most populous state, marks this anniversary, the accumulated impact of direct democracy has made it virtually ungovernable. A two-thirds vote is required in each chamber of the Legislature to approve new taxes as a result of Proposition 13, the fabled tax initiative adopted in 1978. California is the only state requiring a two-thirds vote for both taxes and the budget, thus giving the minority party a veto on all major fiscal matters. Ballot-box budgeting locks in large portions of the budget; Proposition 98, passed in 1988, dedicates about 40 percent of the state’s general fund to public education.

The “three strikes” law (Proposition 184, passed in 1994) greatly increased the cost of the criminal justice system. Term limits (Proposition 140, adopted in 1990) have reduced the number of state legislators with significant experience. Finally, once a measure is passed by a vote of the people in California, it cannot be overturned by the Legislature, but only by another vote of the people (or by the courts).

Direct democracy in California was born in the hopes of bringing the people into the governance process, but it has led to a kind of audience democracy. Voters have become consumers of television sound-bite campaigns and new-media messaging, not authors of the laws they give to themselves. It was supposed to take the role of money out of politics but it has, instead, created a vast appetite for advertising. Getting on the ballot costs millions of dollars to pay for professional signature gatherers because the threshold of signatures required is so high (5 percent of the number of voters who turned out in the last election for statutes, and 8 percent for constitutional amendments). So instead of the process being open to everyone, it is open mostly to those organized interests that can pay the entrance fee.

But the cure for the ills of democracy can be more democracy. Ballot measures have been approved in an attempt to address partisan gridlock — the “top two” primary system (in which the top two primary vote-getters advance to the general election, even if they are from the same party) and redistricting with a citizens commission (both for the State Legislature and Congressional districts). The public has an appetite for major reforms. It understands the state is not working.

The public complains about the lack of transparency in initiatives, often wondering what interests are really financing a proposal or the opposition to it. It complains about the complexity of propositions, sometimes not being clear what a no vote or a yes vote really means. And it complains about the torrent of ads, often misleading, untrue or sensational. Lastly, voters complain about not really knowing what a proposal will cost and how it will be paid for.

My colleagues and I heard all of these concerns when we gathered a scientific sample of more than 400 of the state’s registered voters in Torrance over the weekend of June 24-26, to discuss the ballot initiative and other elements of California governance. Our project, known as What’s Next California?, was the first statewide deliberative poll — a poll that gathers a scientific sample of respondents to answer questions both before and after they have had a chance to deliberate competing arguments and trade-offs. It provides a window on what voters think of direct democracy and what changes they would, and would not, support. Despite the evident problems, California voters have more confidence in the ballot initiative than they do in other elements of their state government. After spending a weekend immersing themselves in the issues and questioning competing experts about possible reforms, 65 percent of the sample expressed disappointment with California’s state government in general and 70 percent expressed disappointment in the Legislature, but only 37 percent were disappointed in the ballot initiative.

They do think the system needs reform, but in many cases not the reforms championed by policy elites. The popularity of proposals to involve the Legislature in the initiative process sank once voters in our poll discussed their implications. After deliberating, they did not want the Legislature to be able to place a counter-measure on the ballot or to amend an initiative that has passed, or even to remove an initiative from the ballot by enacting it into law. They held the Legislature in low regard (at an approval rate of only 14 percent). They viewed the ballot initiative as “the people’s process,” and they wanted the Legislature to keep its hands off it.

There was, however, strong support for requiring the names of the top five contributors for and against a measure to be published in the ballot pamphlet and for requiring ballot measures with new expenditures to indicate how they will be paid for. And there was majority support for lowering the threshold voting requirement in the Legislature for new taxes from two-thirds to 55 percent — a surprising willingness to reconsider the best-known aspect of Proposition 13. Regardless of party, the people wanted transparency and accountability and they wanted government to be able to make decisions.

These are reforms that people support once they really think through their implications. A real reform of the initiative process would let the people’s considered judgments — after a process of deliberation, and not just yes or no — set the agenda, not influential special interests that have the money to collect the petitions. Something like this happened in the first democracy, in ancient Athens, where a deliberating microcosm chosen by lot, the Council of 500, set the agenda for the votes by everyone in the assembly. If the ballot initiative process is to survive for another century, it must take into account the considered judgments of voters coming together to deliberate hard choices and not just cast a vote based on sound bites. If this succeeds it will help bring California much closer to the ideal that voters were striving for 100 years ago: legislation genuinely initiated by the people.

 

James S. Fishkin, a professor of communication and the director of the Center for Deliberative Democracy at Stanford University, is the author of “When the People Speak.”

    How to Fix California’s Democracy Crisis, 10.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/10/opinion/how-to-fix-californias-democracy-crisis.html

Alabama’s Shame

October 3, 2011
The New York Times

Only about 3.5 percent of Alabama’s population is foreign-born, according to the Census Bureau. Undocumented immigrants made up roughly 4.2 percent of its work force in 2010, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. But the drafters of Alabama’s harsh immigration law wanted to turn their state into the country’s most hostile territory for illegal immigrants. They are succeeding, as many of Alabama’s most vulnerable residents can attest.

The law went into effect over the weekend, after being largely upheld by a federal district judge. Volunteers on an immigrant-rights group’s hot line said that since then they have received more than 1,000 calls from pregnant women afraid to go to the hospital, crime victims afraid to go the police, parents afraid to send their children to school.

School superintendents and principals across the state confirm that attendance of Hispanic children has dropped noticeably since the word went out that school officials are now required to check the immigration status of newly enrolled students and their parents.

That rule is part of the law’s sweeping attempt to curtail the rights and complicate the lives of people without papers, making them unable to enter contracts, find jobs, rent homes or access government services. In other words, to be isolated, unemployable, poor, defenseless and uneducated.

The education crackdown is particularly senseless and unconstitutional. In 1982, the Supreme Court found that all children living in the United States have the right to a public education, whatever their immigration status. The justices’ reasoning was shaped not by compassion but practicality: it does the country no good to perpetuate an uneducated underclass.

Officials in Alabama — some well meaning, others less so — insisted that nothing in the new law is intended to deny children an education. School districts, they noted, are supposed to collect only numbers of children without papers, not names.

“I don’t know where the misinformation’s coming from,” Alabama’s interim state school superintendent, Larry Craven, told NPR. “If you have difficulty understanding the language anyway, then who knows what they’re being told?” With comments like that, it’s not surprising that any of “them” would be frightened.

The Obama administration was right to sue to try to stop the Alabama law. It needs to press ahead with its appeal of the ruling and challenge similar laws in Utah, Georgia, Indiana and South Carolina.

President Obama needs to show stronger leadership in defending core American values in the face of the hostility that has overtaken Alabama and so many other states. He can start by scrapping the Secure Communities program, which encourages local immigration dragnets and reinforces the false notion that most undocumented immigrants pose a threat to this country’s security.

As for Alabama, one has to wonder at such counterproductive cruelty. Do Alabamans want children too frightened to go to school? Or pregnant women too frightened to seek care? Whom could that possibly benefit?

    Alabama’s Shame, NYT, 3.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/04/opinion/alabamas-shame.html

10 Years of Hope, Trying to Save Abandoned Newborns

September 29, 2011
The New York Times
By KRISTEN McQUEARY

When Bloomington police officers pulled a newborn baby from a toilet early Sunday, it was the first time in more than a year that an unwanted Illinois infant had been left in a potentially dangerous place.

The police were called to Home Sweet Home Ministries, a homeless shelter, around 4 a.m. after a woman was said to have given birth to a baby and put it in a toilet. The woman, Tonya McKee, a 37-year-old resident of the shelter, faces charges of attempted murder, said David White, public affairs officer at the Bloomington Police Department.

For 10 years, Dawn Geras of Chicago has tracked cases like this one. Ms. Geras is the founder of the Save Abandoned Babies Foundation, a charity she runs out of her home in a downtown high rise. She helped get a state law enacted in 2001, the Abandoned Newborn Infant Protection Act. The law allows parents of babies less than 30 days old to relinquish them, no questions asked, at police stations, fire houses and hospitals.

“I had just posted something on Facebook that we went one year, one month, one week and one day,” Ms. Geras said. “And then 12 hours later, I found out about this one,” the Bloomington baby.

Since the law was enacted in 2001, 69 Illinois babies have safely been taken to designated sites. The law is designed to make the process anonymous for the parents and safe for the babies. As long as the infant is unharmed and handed directly to staff members, the parents are not prosecuted.

“What’s common to these cases is a pregnancy where the mother fears the consequences if the pregnancy is revealed,” said Kendall Marlowe, spokesman for the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services. “As a result, these overwhelmed parents felt they had no option but to discard their child. The ‘safe haven’ law gives parents in crisis an option to do the responsible thing.”

Until Ms. Geras got involved, the department tracked child abandonment cases for anyone under 18, but not infants specifically. The system also put abandoned babies in the foster care system, an unappealing option. Now, they go directly to adoptive families.

Four years ago, Lori Nicholson and Lesley Millar got a call about a baby girl who had been turned in at a hospital in the Chicago area. At the time Ms. Millar was standing at her office window and noticed a large praying mantis outside on the window sill. She looked it up later. A praying mantis is a sign of good luck.

They drove to the hospital and waited in the lobby.

“The hospital social worker came down and said, ‘Are you waiting on a baby?’ And we said, ‘Yes.’ And she said, ‘You got a keeper,’ ” Ms. Nicholson said. Now 4 years old, the girl, Aidan Jane, has curly, dark pigtails and chocolate-brown eyes.

Despite the new law and successful adoptions, problems persist. Including the Bloomington newborn, 63 babies have been abandoned illegally during the last 10 years, nearly as many as were taken to the safe havens. They were left at churches, along roadways and, in some cases, thrown in garbage cans. Of those, 30 died before someone found them.

Those are the statistics Ms. Geras dreads.

It was a newspaper article 11 years ago about teen-age Alabama mothers abandoning babies in hospital emergency rooms that motivated Ms. Geras to do something. Officials there were trying to make it legal for mothers to hand over their infants safely, and Ms. Geras decided Illinois needed a safe haven law, too.

“I’ll bet we could figure out something we could do to make a difference,” she remembered telling friends at a cocktail fund-raiser for a charity.

They wrote the bill at her dining room table and spent months lobbying to get it passed. At first, politicians were uncomfortable with the whole idea, and law enforcement officials worried that it would encourage mothers to abandon babies just anywhere without being held accountable.

Ms. Geras understood that, but she said she did not have time for a philosophical debate. So she said she told lawmakers, “If we don’t pass this law now, I can promise you, we’re going to be on your doorstep with that baby’s coffin and hold you accountable.”

Headlines about unsafe abandonments helped her lobbying efforts. A North Carolina couple left a dead newborn in a grocery store restroom. A Minnesota farmer found a baby, still alive, strapped in a car seat along the side of the road.

“The stereotype of this being an urban phenomenon just affecting teen-aged mothers is untrue,” said Mr. Marlowe, of Children and Family Services. The most common factor, he said, is a desire to hide a pregnancy.

One mother found her way to a suburban police station two years ago after having given birth at home three hours earlier. She handed over her newborn daughter and waited while paramedics came to check the baby. She declined medical attention for herself.

And then she left. The baby girl was the 49th infant relinquished under the act.

The girl is now 2, with strawberry blonde hair and dimples. Her name is Molly. Her parents are Kevin, an accountant, and Tracy, a first-grade teacher. The Chicago News Cooperative agreed to publish only their first names to protect their privacy.

Kevin was treated for leukemia about 10 years ago, and he and Tracy knew they would not be able to have a baby on their own. So they started the adoption process shortly after they married and waited for a birth mother to choose them. One day, they got a phone call about a 16-year-old girl from Moline who was pregnant with a baby boy. They met her. She picked them.

Kevin and Tracy drove to the hospital for the baby’s birth. They kept him overnight in their room, gave him his first bath and marveled at his tiny features. But the next day, a hospital social worker stepped into their room with heartbreaking news. The birth mother changed her mind.

“They very politely escort you out of the hospital,” Tracy said.

They were devastated. But eight months later, Kevin got another phone call from their adoption agency. Were they interested in meeting Baby 49? Kevin pumped his fists in the air excitedly and said, “Yes, please!”

Kevin and Tracy do not know much about Molly’s birth mother, except that “she must have loved Molly because to go through this loving sacrifice, obviously she did,” Kevin said. “And she must be darn cute because Molly is.”

The Illinois law is one of the strongest in the country and is regularly updated. This year, legislators added police stations on college campuses as safe havens.

Ms. Geras’s foundation recently paid for informational posters inside Chicago bus shelters to help spread the word.

She said she was haunted by stories of babies who had been abandoned unsafely. The Bloomington baby found in the toilet was flown to Children’s Hospital of Illinois in Peoria; hospital officials declined to disclose the baby’s condition.

Now, Ms. Geras is looking at how her organization can reach out to homeless shelters. Maybe there is a gap in the system she can help close, she said.

“This is the first time there has ever been a case like this,” she said. “Our volunteers will now be targeting them. Somebody’s going to be making some phone calls.”

 

Kristen McQueary covers state politics for The Chicago News Cooperative

and Chicago Public Media.

    10 Years of Hope, Trying to Save Abandoned Newborns, NYT, 29.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/30/us/10-years-of-hope-trying-to-save-abandoned-newborns.html

Claude R. Kirk Jr., Former Florida Governor, Dies at 85

September 28, 2011
The New York Times
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ

MIAMI — Claude R. Kirk Jr., who as a brash political neophyte became Florida’s first Republican governor since Reconstruction, then basked in publicity and courted confrontation in an eventful four years, died on Tuesday at his home in West Palm Beach, Fla. He was 85.

His family announced his death in a statement.

An insurance executive who switched parties, Mr. Kirk was vaulted into the governor’s mansion in 1966, defeating the Democrat Robert King High, who had won the nomination by defeating the incumbent, Gov. Haydon Burns, in a divisive primary.

Mr. Kirk’s victory, ending a century of Democratic control in Florida, was one of the first major Republican gains in the South at the time and a harbinger of an even greater Republican tide in the South, beginning with the election two years later of President Richard M. Nixon.

Mr. Kirk had switched his affiliation from Democrat to Republican in 1960 to campaign for Nixon in Florida, a state that Nixon won narrowly in his losing race against John F. Kennedy.

A supporter of states’ rights, Mr. Kirk found support among Southern voters who had grown disenchanted with Democrats after they had pushed through civil rights legislation under President Lyndon B. Johnson. Mr. Kirk forcefully opposed the racial integration of schools and as governor defied a court order to allow school busing.

His views on crime and punishment were no less strong. On the campaign trail, he had vowed to execute all 51 of the state’s condemned convicts. Then he went to death row to visit them.

“If I’m elected,” he said, as he shook their hands, “I may have to sign your death warrants.” (In office, however, he presided over no executions.)

Though Mr. Kirk served only one term, his decisions still reverberate. He was an early and strong proponent of environmental conservation in Florida, in one instance stopping the construction of an airport in the Everglades. His environmental adviser was Nathaniel Reed, who was later an assistant interior secretary under Presidents Nixon and Gerald R. Ford.

Mr. Kirk, the state’s 36th governor, expanded the power of the governor’s office by perpetually riling Florida’s cabinet. He also signed off on a deal, known then as the Florida Project, with Roy Disney to build a theme park on vast tracts of land in sleepy Central Florida.

“He was one of the most fascinating characters in Florida in a state that is full of fascinating characters,” said James M. Denham, the director of the Lawton M. Chiles Jr. Center for Florida History at Florida Southern College. “He was a maverick, an extremely independent person and outrageous.”

A towering man with a booming voice and ample personal charm, Mr. Kirk hardly embodied anyone’s notion of genteel Republicanism, and not long after arriving in Tallahassee, the capital, he began shaking some trees, as he had promised.

“In those days, a Republican wasn’t welcome in Tallahassee politically or socially,” Mr. Kirk told The St. Petersburg Times in 2008. “I had to put flags on my car to let everyone know I was in town.”

He immediately angered the Democrats in the Legislature, using his veto 48 times in his first year as governor. Soon afterward he convened a special session to adopt a new Constitution to replace the old charter.

His approaches to tackling problems could be unorthodox. One of his first official moves was to hire the Wackenhut private detective agency to lead a statewide “war on crime.” The experiment was a failure, but his focus on crime led to the creation of the first statewide law enforcement agency.

When the black nationalist H. Rap Brown, speaking to a gathering in Jacksonville, advised black citizens to arm themselves with guns, Governor Kirk showed up and quickly changed the mood by wading through the crowd, taking the microphone and welcoming the audience to Florida.

A relentless self-promoter, he was contemptuous of the press. In response, The Miami Herald labeled him “Claudius Maximus.”

Mr. Kirk reveled in the attention. “The garden of controversy must be continually cultivated,” he told Time magazine in 1967. “Otherwise, nobody knows you are alive.”

He lost his bid for re-election in 1970 at the hands of Reubin Askew, a Democrat who beat him with 57 percent of the vote.

After leaving office, Mr. Kirk pursued long-shot campaigns for the presidency, the governorship again and the Senate, sometimes as a Democrat.

Claude Roy Kirk Jr. was born in San Bernardino, Calif., on Jan. 7, 1926, and grew up in Illinois and Alabama, where he attended high school. As a lieutenant in the Marine Corps, he served on a battleship in the Korean War.

He entered politics after starting a successful insurance company. From his first year as governor, his sights were set on the presidency or, barring that, the vice presidency, which he sought vigorously during Nixon’s 1968 campaign. Long after Nixon chose Gov. Spiro Agnew of Maryland, a miffed Mr. Kirk told The St. Petersburg Times that Nixon, courting him as a power in Florida, had “crashed” his wedding to Erika Mattfeld, a German-born Brazilian, in 1967.

The wedding had raised eyebrows in some quarters for its suddenness — Governor Kirk introduced his fiancée at his inaugural ball as “Madame X” — and because she was divorced and a foreigner. Governor Kirk was also divorced after marrying the same woman twice.

Asked two decades later about how he fell in love with Ms. Mattfeld, Mr. Kirk told The St. Petersburg Times: “She couldn’t speak English, and I couldn’t speak German or Portuguese, which means we got along fine.”

Allison DeFoor, a longtime Florida Republican who served as lieutenant governor, said Mr. Kirk was too outlandish to get re-elected.

“He was so much larger than life that he overshadowed his own accomplishments,” she said.

    Claude R. Kirk Jr., Former Florida Governor, Dies at 85, NYT, 28.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/29/us/claude-r-kirk-jr-former-republican-governor-of-florida-dies-at-85.html

Alabama Wins in Ruling on Its Immigration Law

September 28, 2011
The New York Times
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

A federal judge on Wednesday upheld most of the sections of Alabama’s far-reaching immigration law that had been challenged by the Obama administration, including portions that had been blocked in other states.

The decision, by Judge Sharon Lovelace Blackburn of Federal District Court in Birmingham, makes it much more likely that the fate of the recent flurry of state laws against illegal immigration will eventually be decided by the Supreme Court. It also means that Alabama now has by far the strictest such law of any state.

“Today Judge Blackburn upheld the majority of our law,” Gov. Robert Bentley said in a brief statement he delivered outside the State Capitol in Montgomery. “With those parts that were upheld, we have the strongest immigration law in the country.”

The judge did issue a preliminary injunction against several sections of the law, agreeing with the government’s case that they pre-empted federal law. She blocked a broad provision that outlawed the harboring or transporting of illegal immigrants and another that barred illegal immigrants from enrolling in or attending public universities.

The governor, in his statement, said he believed even the sections that were temporarily enjoined on Wednesday would eventually be upheld, and added that the state would consider appealing if that did not happen.

For the most part, Judge Blackburn, who was appointed by the elder President George Bush, disagreed with the Justice Department’s arguments, including those that had been successful in challenges to laws in Arizona and Georgia.

The judge upheld a section that requires state and local law enforcement officials to try to verify a person’s immigration status during routine traffic stops or arrests, if “a reasonable suspicion” exists that the person is in the country illegally. And she ruled that a section that criminalized the “willful failure” of a person in the country illegally to carry federal immigration papers did not pre-empt federal law.

In both cases, she rejected the reasoning of district and appeals courts that had blocked similar portions of Arizona’s law. Legal experts expected the Justice Department to appeal.

“The department is reviewing the decision to determine next steps,” Xochitl Hinojosa, a department spokeswoman, said in a statement. “We will continue to evaluate state immigration-related laws and will not hesitate to bring suit if, in fact, a state creates its own immigration policy or enforces state laws in a manner that interferes with federal immigration law.”

The Alabama law was the latest, and broadest, of the state laws against illegal immigration, going further than one passed in Arizona.

While Alabama is estimated to have a relatively small population of people who are in the country illegally, the numbers have been growing.

Acting on a pledge that they would crack down on illegal immigration, Republicans passed the bill when they won a supermajority in the State Legislature in the 2010 elections. Mr. Bentley signed it into law in June.

Del Marsh, the Republican president pro tem of the Alabama Senate, said in a statement after Wednesday’s ruling, “Our goal has always been to make sure Alabama jobs and taxpayer-funded resources are going to legal Alabama residents, and Judge Blackburn’s ruling is a significant win for this cause.”

All summer, rallies for and against the law have been taking place throughout the state. Farmers and even the state agriculture commissioner have raised concerns about the law’s effect on farms, sheriffs have condemned it as too onerous for financially hurting counties and others have worried that it could seriously hinder the state’s efforts to rebuild after last April’s devastating tornadoes.

The law’s backers argued that most of the concerns arose out of a misreading of the law that they believed in some cases was intentional.

The judge ruled on three suits challenging the law on Wednesday, one brought by the federal government, another by a group of church leaders and another brought by civil rights groups.

She dismissed the suit brought by church leaders, who had argued that the law prevented them from carrying out crucial duties of their ministry, concluding that they did not have standing to challenge one part of the law and that she had addressed the other challenge in her ruling on the federal law.

Judge Blackburn agreed with the arguments of the civil rights groups on several sections or subsections of the law, but did not address many of their arguments because they overlapped with those put forth in the Justice Department’s suit.

“We’re really disappointed,” said Andre Segura of the American Civil Liberties Union, which represents plaintiffs in one of the suits. “We already know that this is going to cause a lot of problems in Alabama.”

The civil rights groups are planning an appeal.

Among the other sections Judge Blackburn upheld: one that nullifies any contracts entered into by an illegal immigrant; another that forbids any transaction between an illegal immigrant and any division of the state, a proscription that has already led to the denial of a Montgomery man’s application for water and sewage service; and, most controversially, a section that requires elementary and secondary schools to determine the immigration status of incoming students.

The civil rights groups challenged this last section on the ground that it would unlawfully deter students from enrolling in school, even if it did not explicitly allow schools to turn students away. The judge dismissed their challenge for lack of standing, though she did not rule on the argument’s merits.

Peter J. Spiro, a law professor at Temple University, said: “This decision really gives the anti-immigration folks more of a victory than they’ve been getting in other courts. There’s a lot for them to be happy about.”

Still, Professor Spiro added, “This is not the last word on the constitutionality of this statute.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 30, 2011

An article on Thursday about a federal judge’s ruling that upheld most of Alabama’s far-reaching immigration law misstated the role of the American Civil Liberties Union in one of the lawsuits challenging the law. The A.C.L.U. represents plaintiffs in the suit; it is not itself a plaintiff.

    Alabama Wins in Ruling on Its Immigration Law, NYT, 28.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/29/us/alabama-immigration-law-upheld.html

Obama Turns Some Powers of Education Back to States

September 23, 2011
The New York Times
By SAM DILLON

With his declaration on Friday that he would waive the most contentious provisions of a federal education law, President Obama effectively rerouted the nation’s education history after a turbulent decade of overwhelming federal influence.

Mr. Obama invited states to reclaim the power to design their own school accountability and improvement systems, upending the centerpiece of the Bush-era No Child Left Behind law, a requirement that all students be proficient in math and reading by 2014.

“This does not mean that states will be able to lower their standards or escape accountability,” the president said. “If states want more flexibility, they’re going to have to set higher standards, more honest standards that prove they’re serious about meeting them.”

But experts said it was a measure of how profoundly the law had reshaped America’s public school culture that even in states that accept the administration’s offer to pursue a new agenda, the law’s legacy will live on in classrooms, where educators’ work will continue to emphasize its major themes, like narrowing student achievement gaps, and its tactics, like using standardized tests to measure educators’ performance.

In a White House speech, Mr. Obama said states that adopted new higher standards, pledged to overhaul their lowest-performing schools and revamped their teacher evaluation systems should apply for waivers of 10 central provisions of the No Child law, including its 2014 proficiency deadline. The administration was forced to act, Mr. Obama said, because partisan gridlock kept Congress from updating the law.

“Given that Congress cannot act, I am acting,” Mr. Obama said. “Starting today, we’ll be giving states more flexibility.”

But while the law itself clearly empowers Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to waive its provisions, the administration’s decision to make the waivers conditional on states’ pledges to pursue Mr. Obama’s broad school improvement agenda has angered Republicans gearing up for the 2012 elections.

On Friday Congressional leaders immediately began characterizing the waivers as a new administration power grab, in line with their portrayal of the health care overhaul, financial sector regulation and other administration initiatives.

“In my judgment, he is exercising an authority and power he doesn’t have,” said Representative John Kline, Republican of Minnesota and chairman of the House education committee. “We all know the law is broken and needs to be changed. But this is part and parcel with the whole picture with this administration: they cannot get their agenda through Congress, so they’re doing it with executive orders and rewriting rules. This is executive overreach.”

Mr. Obama made his statements to a bipartisan audience that included Gov. Bill Haslam of Tennessee, a Republican, Gov. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, an independent, and 24 state superintendents of education.

“I believe this will be a transformative movement in American public education,” Christopher Cerf, New Jersey’s education commissioner under Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican, said after the speech.

The No Child law that President George W. Bush signed in 2002 was a bipartisan rewrite of the basic federal law on public schools, first passed in 1965 to help the nation’s neediest students. The 2002 law required all schools to administer reading and math tests every year, and to increase the proportion of students passing them until reaching 100 percent in 2014. Schools that failed to keep pace were to be labeled as failing, and eventually their principals fired and staffs dismantled. That system for holding schools accountable for test scores has encouraged states to lower standards, teachers to focus on test preparation, and math and reading to crowd out history, art and foreign languages.

Mr. Obama’s blueprint for rewriting the law, which Congress has never acted on, urged lawmakers to adopt an approach that would encourage states to raise standards, focus interventions only on the worst failing schools and use test scores and other measures to evaluate teachers’ effectiveness. In its current proposal, the administration requires states to adopt those elements of its blueprint in exchange for relief from the No Child law.

Mr. Duncan, speaking after Mr. Obama’s speech, said the waivers could bring significant change to states that apply. “For parents, it means their schools won’t be labeled failures,” Mr. Duncan said. “It should reduce the pressure to teach to the test.”

Critics were skeptical, saying that classroom teachers who complain about unrelenting pressure to prepare for standardized tests were unlikely to feel much relief.

“In the system that N.C.L.B. created, standardized tests are the measure of all that is good, and that has not changed,“ said Monty Neill, executive director of Fair Test, an antitesting advocacy group. “This policy encourages states to use test scores as a significant factor in evaluating teachers, and that will add to the pressure on teachers to teach to the test.”

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said her union favored evaluation systems that would help teachers improve their instruction, whereas the administration was focusing on accountability. “You’re seeing an extraordinary change of policy, from an accountability system focused on districts and schools, to accountability based on teacher and principal evaluations,” Ms. Weingarten said.

For most states, obtaining a waiver could be the easy part of accepting the administration’s invitation. Actually designing a new school accountability system, and obtaining statewide acceptance of it, represents a complex administrative and political challenge for governors and other state leaders, said Gene Wilhoit, executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers, which the White House said played an important role in developing the waiver proposal.

Only about five states may be ready to apply immediately, and perhaps 20 others could follow by next spring, Mr. Wilhoit said. Developing new educator evaluation systems and other aspects of follow-through could take states three years or more, he said.

Officials in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, and in at least eight other states — Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Idaho, Minnesota, Virginia and Wisconsin — said Friday that they would probably seek the waivers.

    Obama Turns Some Powers of Education Back to States, NYT, 23.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/24/education/24educ.html

Families Feel Sharp Edge of State Budget Cuts

September 6, 2011
The New York Times
By MONICA DAVEY

LANSING, Mich. — Stretched beyond their limits and searching for new corners of their budgets to find spending cuts, states are now trimming benefits for residents who are in grim financial shape themselves.

Some states, including Florida and Missouri, have decided to shrink the duration of state unemployment benefits paid to laid-off workers, while others, including Arizona and California, are creating new restrictions on cash aid for low-income residents.

Here in Michigan, more than 11,000 families received letters last week notifying them that in October they will lose the cash assistance they have been provided for years. Next year, people who lose their jobs here will receive fewer weeks of state unemployment benefits, and those making little enough to qualify for the state’s earned income tax credit will see a far smaller benefit from it.

Some political leaders see these sorts of cuts as unfortunate necessities to help bridge their state’s financial gaps. Others see them as overdue limits on out-of-control government handouts — some lawmakers here fumed, for example, that 30,000 college students, newly dropped from the state’s food stamp rolls, should never have been allowed to collect such benefits in the first place.

Whatever the motive, such policy changes come as the downturn has left a growing number of low-income families in worse financial trouble.

The percentage of children living in poverty rose during the last decade, particularly once the recession hit and unemployment soared.

By 2009, about 2.4 million more children’s families lived below the poverty line than in 2000, an increase of 18 percent, according to a recent analysis of Census Bureau data by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a child advocacy group. In states like this, where Republicans took control of the capital this year, the new cuts have helped resolve Michigan’s expected budget gap, once estimated at $1.4 billion.

“Michigan can no longer afford to provide lifetime assistance,” said Sheryl Thompson, an official with the state Department of Human Services, which reported that of those being dropped from the state’s cash-assistance rolls, some 1,200 families had been receiving payments for 10 years, more than 700 others for a dozen years, and an additional 400 families had been getting payments for 14 years.

The pattern of new cuts around the nation leads some advocates to fear that the number of low-income families will only grow in the next few years if programs they can lean on shrink or vanish.

“We’re O.K. unless something — anything at all — goes wrong,” said Rachel Haifley, who lives here in Lansing and said she works part-time making a little less than $9 an hour and receives child support for her two young sons, 1 and 3.

Ms. Haifley said she has become an expert at seeking out giveaways, thrift shops and bargains — for clothes, portable cribs, toys for the boys. “All I want is for them to feel like everyone else,” she said. “I don’t want them to grow up and ask me why they’re poor.”

In Dearborn Heights, Celia Kane-Fecay, another mother of two, said she has given up on the job hunt for now and returned to college — with help from $597 a month in cash assistance, Medicaid and any other aid she can track down with what she has come to describe unhappily as her daily list of begging phone calls. “You don’t ever want to be here,” she said.

Signs of new poverty are already evident. A project by the Annie E. Casey Foundation Kids Count Data Book found that by 2010, nearly 11 percent of the nation’s children, or 7.8 million children, had at least one parent who was unemployed, when only about half as many were in such circumstances in 2007. And since four years ago, the study found, at least 5.3 million children have been affected by home foreclosures.

Meanwhile, around the nation, lawmakers have weighed new limits to tax credits for low-income people; in Michigan, a proposal to throw out the earned income tax credit entirely was dropped, but lawmakers shrank the benefit — to an average of $138 a year for a Michigan family, advocates say, from $432 last year.

Six states have approved reductions in the length of state unemployment benefits. The notion appalls people like Jeananne Bishop, who has been desperately searching for a job since July 2010 and found herself washing her hair with laundry detergent at one point because she could not afford shampoo.

Ms. Bishop said her continuing benefits — now part of a federally financed extension — are the only thing keeping her afloat. Michigan’s shortened unemployment benefit limits will apply starting next year, but Ms. Bishop, 56, of Benton Harbor, seemed skeptical that much will have changed in the job market for them, cautioning, “No one calls back.”

And while at least three states, including Michigan, shortened the period during which poor residents can receive cash assistance, other states began enforcing stricter limits already on the books.

“We clearly recognize that states have huge deficits they’re dealing with, but all of these things add up in certain states to very little safety net protection for children,” said Patrick McCarthy, president of the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

In Michigan — where 23 percent of children were living in poverty by 2009 (compared with 14 percent in 2000) and with an unemployment rate, at 10.9 percent, worse than the nation’s — state leaders defended their changes.

Sara Wurfel, a spokeswoman for Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican in his first term, said his efforts had focused on creating an economic climate in the state for more and better jobs, while also protecting and even enhancing core safety-net services like Medicaid, she said.

Ms. Wurfel added that the state had, for instance, hired hundreds of new child welfare workers. And as part of their decision to cut state unemployment benefits next year, Michigan lawmakers had accepted a federal extension of benefits this year for residents.

“In this state, we are losing hard-working families and taxpayers and gaining people who were moving here for our entitlement programs,” said Ken Horn, a Republican state representative who introduced a bill setting strict limits on cash assistance to those who have had it at least four years. That bill was signed into law on Tuesday, even as state officials were newly carrying out five-year lifetime federal limits on such assistance, which in Michigan averages $415 a month for an eligible family.

“The bill is designed with the simple idea that there should be a safety net but it should not be a lifestyle,” Mr. Horn added. “As we looked at it, it turned out to be part of the budget solution.”

Republicans said that even the cuts to those who have been on cash assistance the longest allow some exceptions (for those with disabilities, for instance), and that the rest will get special attention from social workers.

But Fred Durhal Jr., a Democratic state representative from one of Michigan’s poorest regions, said that will not be enough. He has begun calling Oct. 1 — the start of cuts to cash aid — doomsday.

“Sometimes you’ve got what’s fiscally sound, and you’ve got what is morally and ethically the right thing to do,” Mr. Durhal said. “Those don’t always jell well together. You can’t take grandmas away and put them on the street, and you can’t take milk from babies.”

    Families Feel Sharp Edge of State Budget Cuts, NYT, 6.9.2011
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/07/us/07states.html

For the Governor of Vermont,

a Crash Course in Disaster Management

September 1, 2011
The New York Times
By ABBY GOODNOUGH

PITTSFIELD, Vt. — After helicoptering into this flood-ravaged town and delivering a pep talk to residents who had been stranded for three days and counting, Gov. Peter Shumlin asked if anyone had questions for him. It took a minute for anyone to speak up, and even then, the queries were polite to the point of apologetic.

“I keep pushing for generators,” said Peter Borden, the town’s emergency management coordinator. “I’m sorry, Governor.”

He may be lucky, skillful or both, but so far, Mr. Shumlin, the relatively new governor of a state unaccustomed to disasters, has encountered almost nothing but geniality as he has traveled the hardest-hit parts of Vermont, doling out hugs and reminding residents that “Vermonters are tough.”

Eight months into a two-year term he expected to be dominated by health care and economic issues, Mr. Shumlin, a 55-year-old Democrat, now faces a complicated and costly recovery effort that could well be the defining issue of his governorship.

Dozens of homes were destroyed or badly damaged across the state on Sunday by the flash flooding, which also closed a state office complex and left roads and bridges in tatters.

Mr. Shumlin and his staff are working to get plans in place before patience runs out, making big promises, like to restore power to most towns by week’s end, provide school buses to take residents of isolated towns to grocery stores and not let the widespread damage interfere with leaf-peeping season and all the tourists it draws here.

“We’ve got enough roads to get around, and we’ve still got leaves on our trees,” Mr. Shumlin told a group in Rutland on Wednesday, adding that he would tell tourists, “It might be goat paths instead of highways, but we can get you there.”

Chris Graff, a former journalist and longtime political observer in Montpelier, said that while Mr. Shumlin had so far made good on promises — getting at least crude roads open to 13 cut-off towns, for example — it would get harder as the weeks wore on.

“He has a tremendous can-do spirit, and sometimes that can get ahead of his ability to put the plans in place,” Mr. Graff said. “There is no doubt that the state government is fully engaged and well aware of all the problems in these communities, but it’s just a huge undertaking down the road.”

Mr. Shumlin, a thin, spry man from Putney with a folksy air, was president pro tempore of the Vermont Senate before narrowly winning the governor’s race last November. Until now, his top priorities have included creating something close to a single-payer health care system, the nation’s first, and shutting down Vermont Yankee, a nuclear power plant in the southeast corner of the state.

In an interview Wednesday, he said such goals would not fall off the radar.

“I’m the kind of person, the more balls I have in the air, generally the more I can land,” he said as a helicopter shuttled him to Rochester, an isolated, hard-hit town in south-central Vermont. “We’ll just work longer hours and longer days. We can multitask, absolutely.”

Mr. Shumlin has used the rare national spotlight to call attention to another of his priorities: preparing for climate change, which he said was a factor in the torrential rains that dropped as much as nine inches of rain on parts of Vermont as the remnants of Hurricane Irene moved through.

“Any objective scientist will tell you that as a result of climate change, we’re going to get more intense storms in New England,” he said. “We’ve got to rethink where you build houses, where you build schools, where you build highways and how you build them. We have to redefine our flood plains.”

He has proven an agile communicator in the early days since the storm, posting frequent updates on Twitter and sending agency heads to answer questions from callers on radio shows. And he has traveled to many of the most damaged towns, asking people what they need and saying, time and again, how proud he is of their resilience.

“From an image standpoint,” Mr. Graff said, “Peter has had a tremendous week.”

Bright sun this week has helped keep spirits up; they could flag when the weather turns darker and colder. The fast approach of winter will also pose challenges for rebuilding.

“We’ve got a very short construction season left, and the snow’s going to be flying,” said Tom Pelham, a former state housing and finance commissioner who has worked for both Democrats and Republicans.

“At some point, Peter is going to have to understand he can’t be all things to all people,” he said. “Some choices are going to have to be made, and he’s going to have to explain them.”

So far, one of the few negative responses that Mr. Shumlin has evoked this week came when he quibbled with a CBS News correspondent’s description of people “stranded” in flood-damaged towns.

“Stranded is a bit of an exaggeration, to be honest with you,” Mr. Shumlin told the correspondent. Word of the exchange got to residents of Rochester, and some were miffed.

“That frayed some tempers,” said Martha Slater, a resident. “Every way to get out of town is basically blocked off.”

While outsiders have questioned why Mr. Shumlin did not order evacuations before the storm, he has said it made no sense to do so. And while some Vermonters have complained that rescue workers gave them minutes of warning instead of hours as the waters were rising, few appear to be taking it out on Mr. Shumlin, at least so far.

“We’re used to storms,” the governor said. “We’re used to taking care of ourselves in the winter, living on top of mountains in the middle of nowhere. You know, we know how to tough it out here. You’re not going to talk a Vermonter out of their house.”

Here in Pittsfield, where residents have taken it upon themselves to try to patch roads with local equipment and to fetch urgent supplies using all-terrain vehicles, Ray Rice, a resident of 11 years, said he had not even begun to think about what Mr. Shumlin and state government could do for the town.

“Oh God, no,” Mr. Rice said. “We’ve been taking care of ourselves pretty good.”

That kind of ethos, typical throughout the state, is helping Mr. Shumlin for now.

“Vermonters are incredibly tough and realistic and practical,” he said. “They know the governor didn’t create the storm. They know we’re working hard to respond.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 2, 2011

An earlier version of this article misstated the location of Vermont Yankee, a nuclear power plant that Mr. Shumlin wants shut down. It is in the southeast corner of the state, not the southwest.

    For the Governor of Vermont, a Crash Course in Disaster Management, NYT, 1.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/02/us/02vermont.html

A Study in Judicial Dysfunction

August 19, 2011
The New York Times

Harsh state judicial campaigns financed by ever larger amounts of special interest money are eating away at public faith in judicial impartiality. There are few places where the spectacle is more shameful than Wisconsin, where over-the-top campaigning, self-interested rulings, and a complete breakdown of courthouse collegiality and ethics is destroying trust in its Supreme Court.

On Monday, a special prosecutor was named to investigate an altercation between two justices on opposite sides of the court’s bitter ideological divide. Ann Walsh Bradley, a member of the court’s liberal wing, has charged that David Prosser, a conservative, put her in a chokehold during a heated exchange shortly before the court upheld the new state law eliminating most collective-bargaining rights for public employees.

Justice Prosser has disputed Justice Bradley’s version of what occurred, and the facts remain unclear. What is certain is that Justice Prosser should have recused himself from that ruling. His vote to uphold the law occurred shortly after his re-election campaign in which he benefited from heavy anti-union independent spending.

Justice Prosser won the April election by a very small margin, prompting a recount. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that he then raised more than $270,000 for the recount, much of it in $50,000 chunks. (The contribution limits that apply under Wisconsin’s public financing system for judicial races do not extend to recounts.) Some $75,000 of the haul was used to pay fees to a law firm led by an attorney representing conservative groups in a case challenging state campaign disclosure rules, which is scheduled to be heard by the court next month.

Given the lawyer’s role in Justice Prosser’s recent recount success, a reasonable person might well question the judge’s impartiality on that case, too. After first saying he had no intention of recusing himself, Justice Prosser on Thursday asked the parties in the campaign finance case to file memos stating their views about recusal. It should not take a formal request for him to step aside.

A contentious 4-to-3 decision by the court last month declared recusal decisions by the justices to be unreviewable. In another sign of the court’s dysfunction, the deciding vote came from Justice Patience Roggensack, whose involvement in an earlier case was the subject of the disqualification motion that the court was reviewing. Like the ruling itself, Justice Roggensack’s participation in judging her own conduct showed astounding disregard for legal ethics and every litigant’s right to impartial justice. The problems don’t even stop there. A year ago, by another 4-to-3 vote along ideological lines, the court weakened the recusal standard by adopting a rule saying that campaign fund-raising or expenditures can never be the sole basis for a judge’s disqualification. The rule was largely written by a business group that has spent lavishly in judicial campaigns.

Members of Wisconsin’s top court need to focus on restoring civility and public trust. For starters, they should scrap last year’s decision on campaign money in favor of strict disclosure requirements for lawyers and litigants. They should also adopt an appeals process for recusals, so the final decision is no longer left to the judge whose impartiality is being questioned. The court’s credibility, and justice in Wisconsin, are on the line.

    A Study in Judicial Dysfunction, NYT, 19.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/20/opinion/a-study-in-judicial-dysfuntion.html

States’ Money Woes Show No Favorites

July 17, 2011
The New York Times
By MICHAEL COOPER

SALT LAKE CITY —Arizona began cutting more than 100,000 people from its Medicaid rolls this month. Illinois, even after raising taxes, began the month with $3.8 billion worth of unpaid bills left over from last year. Connecticut sent layoff warnings last week to state troopers.

The governors who gathered here over the weekend for the summer meeting of the National Governors Association have all been scathed by the unpopular things they have had to do to keep their budgets in balance. For the veterans, it was just the latest in a series of tough years. For the rookies — 29 new governors took office this year — it was their first taste of state budget battle.

“It’s funny, here I am, I’m six months into it and I don’t think of myself as a new governor anymore,” said Gov. Dannel P. Malloy of Connecticut, a Democrat who took office this year and closed a gaping deficit with a blend of tax increases, service cuts and union concessions.

Since the unions have failed to ratify the agreement he made with their leaders, he now faces the prospect of having to lay off more than 5,000 state workers. “It’s been that kind of six months,” he said.

Now, more than a dozen governors of both parties said in interviews here, states are going to have to adjust to what some are calling the “new normal”: the strong likelihood that they will be asked to make do with less federal aid. It is not just the end of the stimulus money, which has helped keep many states afloat but is now mostly gone. Governors are closely watching from their statehouses as the debate in Washington increasingly centers on what further cuts to make.

“It’s like falling off a cliff,” said Gov. Christine Gregoire of Washington, a Democrat. “And we’re going to be at the bottom of that cliff for a long time in our relationship with the federal government. And whatever they’re going to decide in the way of cuts, I hope they understand the implications to the states and what it’s going to mean on the ground out here.”

Gov. Terry E. Branstad of Iowa, a Republican, said, “I think we’ve got to recognize that the federal government is never going to be able to deliver what they promised.”

The uncertainty over federal cuts — both Democrats and Republicans in Washington have called for cutting $100 billion from Medicaid over the next decade — is clouding the outlook for states even as their tax collections are slowly climbing back toward their pre-recession levels.

There was a partisan divide here over how to react to the expected new austerity. Democrats, for the most part, called for the federal government to balance cuts with taxes, so services could be preserved. Republicans, on the other hand, opposed higher taxes, and said that they would be able to manage with less federal money as long as the federal government also gave them the flexibility to spend less money on required programs.

Some Republicans — including Gov. Gary R. Herbert of Utah, who surprised his guest governors when a stunt double posing as him did a ski jump — say they support amending the Constitution to require the federal government to balance its budget. That would almost certainly result in a steep decline in aid to states.

But Mr. Herbert said that he still worried about the potential impact of some federal cuts.

“In order to get our fiscal house in order, the federal government is going to have to do what they need to do,” he said. “And if they’re going to have us administer federal programs, it helps if they don’t balance their budget on our backs. That would not be fair, either. But everyone needs to tighten their belts.”

Many governors rattled off the cuts they had reluctantly made, or the taxes they had reluctantly raised, to keep their states going after a downturn that included the deepest and longest declines in state tax collections on record. Ms. Gregoire lamented that she had put a big hole into her safety net by ending a program that sent checks to unemployable adults. “These are folks who, without anything, will probably go homeless on the streets,” she said.

Cutting access to Medicaid was a tough decision, said Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona, a Republican. The state had expanded access in flusher times, but now, after selling off state office buildings, winning passage of a temporary sales tax increase to help finance education and making cuts elsewhere, she said that there were few options open to her.

“That was, of course, very, very difficult, but we had no other choice but to address that issue,” Ms. Brewer said of the Medicaid cuts, which are being challenged in court. “We were kind of caught in a situation where, although people felt it was a good thing that we were able to do that, we weren’t financially able to continue that. So we had to go in and remove it.”

For Gov. Martin O’Malley of Maryland, a Democrat, one of the hardest cuts he made was closing a mental health center on the state’s Eastern Shore that he said had helped many vulnerable people.

“Not easy,” he said. “I still remember one of the letters I was given by a guy who went through that center. It said we all face a fundamental choice in life. We can either be bitter about what we’ve lost, or focused on what we have.”

    States’ Money Woes Show No Favorites, NYT, 17.7.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/18/us/18governors.html

Vulnerable Feel the Pinch of Minn. Gov't Shutdown

July 2, 2011
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) — Minnesota lawmakers headed home for a long holiday weekend, bracing for likely public anger as some of them meet constituents for the first time since a failure to reach a budget agreement forced a government shutdown.

The reception they get starting Saturday, and during 4th of July parades around the state, could go a long way toward determining how long the shutdown lasts. Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton and GOP leaders had no plans for new talks before Tuesday, five full days after the shutdown started.

Minnesota's second shutdown in six years was striking much deeper than a partial 2005 shutdown. It took state parks and rest stops off line, closed horse tracks and made it impossible to get a fishing license. But it also was hitting the state's most vulnerable, ending reading services for the blind, silencing a help line for the elderly and stopping child care subsidies for the poor.

The shutdown was rippling into the lives of people like Sonya Mills, a 39-year-old mother of eight facing the loss of about $3,600 a month in state child care subsidies. Until the government closure, Mills had been focused on recovering from a May 22 tornado that displaced her from a rented home in Minneapolis. Now she's adding a new problem to her list.

"It just starts to have a snowball effect. It's like you are still in the wind of the tornado," said Mills, who works at a temp agency and was allowed to take time off as she gets back on her feet — but after the shutdown also has to care for her six youngest children, ages 3 through 14, because she lost state funding for their daycare and other programs.

Minnesota is the only state to have its government shut down this year, even though nearly all states have severe budget problems and some have divided governments. Dayton was determined to raise taxes on the top earners to help erase a $5 billion deficit, while the Republican Legislature refused to go along with that — or any new spending above the amount the state is projected to collect.

Here, as in 21 other states, there's no way to keep government operating past the end of a budget period without legislative action. Even so, only four other states — Michigan, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Tennessee — have had shutdowns in the past decade, some lasting mere hours.

The shutdown halted non-emergency road construction and closed the state zoo and Capitol. More than 40 state boards and agencies went dark, though critical functions such as state troopers, prison guards, the courts and disaster responses will continue.

On Friday, former state Supreme Court Chief Justice Kathleen Blatz started the court-appointed job of sifting through appeals from groups arguing in favor of continued government funding for particular programs.

Nonprofit groups helping the state's poor have already been hit hard. Some closed their doors immediately, while others continued services, at least for now. Some were looking at layoffs, said Sarah Caruso, president and CEO of Greater Twin Cities United Way, which funds 400 programs serving poor people. She said the impact will depend on how long the shutdown lasts.

"If we go well beyond that two-week window, I think then we will start seeing much more significant closure of programs to support the vulnerable, and the long-term financial viability of some of these agencies will really be called into question," she said.

So far, 30 agencies had accepted United Way's offer of advances on their grants, seeking cash to stay up and running.

The stoppage suspended some programs for the blind and visually impaired, including a radio reading service run by volunteers and training for blind people who are learning to walk with a cane. Bonnie Elsey, director of the state's Workforce Development Division, said a vocational rehabilitation program that places people with disabilities in jobs or school was halted.

Minnesota food pantries scurried to make sure they would still get 700,000 pounds of food — about 30 percent of their total volume — in the next two months through a federal program. Nearly a million pounds already in warehouses were also put on hold by the shutdown. Colleen Moriarty, executive director of Hunger Solutions Minnesota, said the federal program's operation depended on a single state employee working in a data management system. Later Friday, Moriarty said the employee had been called back to work.

The shutdown also idled a state hotline set up to help seniors and their caregivers find services, housing options, help with Medicaid and Medicare insurance and more. A call to the 800 number Friday got a recording saying callers could leave a message.

The political stalemate meant instant layoffs for 22,000 state workers, including Paul Bissen, a road and bridge inspector for more than 26 years. Bissen said he cut back on spending last month. He figured he could go a couple of months without worrying, but on the first day of the shutdown, he said it looked like his washing machine had died — adding another expense.

"I want to work. I've got road construction projects to build, to try to make them safe and make them smooth so people can get back to forth to their work," Bissen said.

Fearful of voter anger, both parties blasted each other for Minnesota's second shutdown in six years.

GOP Chairman Tony Sutton called Dayton a "piece of work" and accused him of inflicting "maximum pain" for political reasons.

Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party Chairman Ken Martin laid the blame on Republicans, saying they drove the state to a shutdown to protect millionaires from tax increases sought by Dayton.

The Alliance for a Better Minnesota, a left-leaning group supportive of Dayton, plans to run weekend radio ads in three popular vacation areas blaming Republicans for the impact of the shutdown, including closed state parks. The group also debuted a "shutdown shame" website.

The shutdown has been a slow-motion disaster, with a new Democratic governor and new Republican legislative majorities at odds for months over how to eliminate the state budget deficit. Dayton has been determined to raise taxes on high-earners to close the deficit, while Republicans insisted that it be closed only by cuts to state spending.

Even after the shutdown looked like a certainty, Dayton and Republicans did not soften their conflicting principles. Dayton said he campaigned and was elected on a promise not to make spending cuts to a level he called "draconian."

Vulnerable Feel the Pinch of Minn. Gov't Shutdown, NYT, 2.7.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/07/02/us/AP-US-Minnesota-Government-Shutdown.html