Affordable Care Act Issues at the Supreme Court, in Tweet Style

The Tweets:

Monday/The Anti-Injunction Act – Pay taxes now, sue later, delays the decision. Decide about penalties now.

Tuesday/Individual Mandate for Minimum Coverage – The mandate is too much or too little for the Commerce Clause.

Wednesday – Severability and Medicaid Expansion – Strike down the ACA if the mandate is unconstitutional because it’s all part of one plan or save as much as possible. Strike down the Medicaid expansion because the states foresee it will cost and confuse them as have past expansions.

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Collaborative Divorce: An Alternative to the Traditional Adversarial Divorce

Those of you who know me know that I am particularly interested in family law.  Through my experiences learning about and observing the practice of family law, I have become convinced that our adversarial system is, more often than not, a poor way to resolve divorce.  This is especially true where children are in the picture.

So what’s the alternative?  I don’t know, but I did learn about a relatively new process that was created to avoid litigation in these cases called Collaborative Divorce (CD).  The CD process involves both parties to the divorce voluntarily signing a contract called a “Participation Agreement”.  The participation agreement states that each party agrees to work toward a negotiated resolution and will not litigate the case.  To me, it sounded like a good possible solution for people who don’t want to be dragged into litigation.  But, the more I looked into CD, the more I realized it couldn’t be for everyone (or even most individuals) who are going through a divorce.

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Signing a Recall Petition Does Not Require Judicial Recusal

We live in interesting times.  A segment of the general public is quick to forgive the killing of two young men in Slinger, Wisconsin and Sanford, Florida as the unavoidable consequence of the exercise of a constitutional right.  Yet at the same time, state court judges who have exercised their constitutional right of self-governance by signing a recall petition are being publicly called out by both special interest groups and the media, as if by signing the petition they have transgressed some moral boundary.  These are interesting times, indeed.

The signing of a recall petition is a right guaranteed by Article XIII of the Wisconsin Constitution.  It is a procedure whereby any voter can request that the continuation in office of an elected official in the State of Wisconsin should be put to the vote of the full electorate.  If a sufficient number of voters sign the petition, a recall election is held.  A recall can only succeed in removing the officeholder if both a sufficient number of recall signatures are filed and a majority of the electorate votes in favor of removal.  The Recall is democratic self-governance in its purest form, and along with the Initiative and the Referendum it is one of the three structural vehicles by which Progressive Era voters sought to bypass the influence that special interests hold on elected bodies.

The Wisconsin GOP has filed an official complaint against Dane County Circuit Court Judge David Flanagan with the Judicial Commission on the grounds that the judge should have recused himself in a case challenging the constitutionality of the Wisconsin Voter ID law.  Must judges who have signed a recall petition subsequently recuse themselves from sitting on any case in which the Governor, or Republican legislators, or the Republican Party of Wisconsin asserts that the signing of the petition evidences a bias against them?  The answer is “no.”  There is no explicit provision that prohibits judges from signing a recall petition or that mandates that they recuse themselves from any politically charged case if they have done so.

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