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In ACLU v. NSA, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan (Hon. Anna Diggs Taylor) has held that the federal government's "secret program" of warrantless wiretapping violates the Separation of Powers doctrine, the First and Fourth Amendments, the APA, and other statutory provisions.
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court allowed review in Meyer v. Bradbury, a pre-election challenge to IP 8 under the separate vote requirement of Article XVII, section 1. IP 8, if passed, would amend the constitution to provide:
Notwithstanding any other provisions of this Constitution, the people through the initiative process, or the Legislative Assembly by a three-fourths vote of both Houses, may enact and amend laws to prohibit or limit contributions and expenditures, of any type or description, to influence the outcome of any election.
The trial court rejected the plaintiff's separate vote challenge to the measure. The court of appeals reversed, concluding that the measure would amend both Article I, section 8, and Article IV, section 25. It further concluded that the amendments were not "closely related."
On allowing review, the Supreme Court set an expedited briefing schedule, with oral argument set for 3:00 p.m. on August 29.
It is worth noting that this case will present the first opportunity for the Oregon Supreme Court to respond to the separate vote analysis in Californians for an Open Primary v. McPherson, the decision by the California Supreme Court (first noted in this blog here), in which that court undertook an extensive historical analysis of state constitutional separate vote requirements, and ultimately rejected the Oregon Supreme Court's formulation of the analysis. It observed that the Oregon Supreme Court had adopted the "dormant minority rule" for separate vote analysis without apparently recognizing that it was doing so. The court noted that prior to Armatta, a few cases applied a "strict" separate vote analyis, but that "these cases remained an essentially dormant minority position until the Supreme Court of Oregon -- without citing any of them or acknowledging the majority rule cases discussed above -- revived this strict interpretation of the separate-vote provision in 1998."
Secretary of State Bill Bradbury announced today that Initiative petition number 24, which would amend the State Constitution to require the election of Court of Appeals and Supreme Court Judges by districts, has qualified for the November 2006 ballot. He has assigned it Measure number 40.
Last week, in American Bush v. City of South Salt Lake, the Utah Supreme Court concluded that the provisions of the Utah Constitution protecting the right of Utah citizens to "communicate freely their thoughts and opinions" do not protect nude dancing in sexually-oriented businesses.
In Guru Nanak Sikh Society v. County of Sutter, the Ninth Circuit held that the Religious Land Use Freedom and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000 was a valid exercises of Congress's enforcement power under section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment. The court reasoned that RLUIPA was constitutional "because it addresses documented unconstitutional government actions in a proportional manner."
According to this report in today's Oregonian, over the weekend the Oregon Republican Party adopted a resolution that would deny citizenship to U.S.-born children of legal and illegal immigrants who are not citizens themselves. As Charlie Hinkle and Greg Chaimov, who were interviewed for the article, observed, that resolution conflicts with the Fourteenth Amendment, which confers citizenship on all persons born in the United States.
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