US District Court judge Timothy Black of Cincinnati, Ohio said yesterday that he intends to issue a ruling by April 14 that will strike down Ohio’s ban on recognizing same-sex marriages that are legally performed in other states. The reason that he announced his intentions in advance is to allow the state to prepare to file an appeal, which Ohio’s Attorney General has promised he will do.
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In order to bring suit against someone in court, the plaintiff has to show that they have ‘standing’, which means that they have suffered a fairly direct injury of some sort that the court can redress. In response to my post on the cases bought against Obamacare because of its use of federal subsidies in the form of tax credits to make health insurance affordable to low income people, reader Mark Dowd posed the good question of how the people who were suing could have standing to do so. How can getting money from the government to purchase health insurance be considered to cause an injury?
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One of the key features of the highly complicated Affordable Care Act is the subsidy that is given to lower income people to enable them to afford to purchase health insurance. These subsidies are provided through both the state exchanges for those states that set them up and through the federal exchanges in those states that decided that they wanted to have no part of the ACA or decided to let the federal government set them up. So far, 16 states have set up their own exchanges and 34 exchanges are run by the Department of Health and Human Services. The subsidies come in the form of tax credits provided by the IRS.
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The Daily Show weighed in on the big court case of the week, that of Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby, with a couple of good segments.
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The oral arguments from the Hobby Lobby contraceptive case that was heard before the US Supreme Court on Tuesday can be heard online here, where the concurrent scrolling of the transcript along with the spoken word and identification of the speaker makes things much clearer.
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Lyle Denniston has a summary of the oral arguments in today’s contraceptive case and you can also read the transcript here. Denniston seems to have the sense (shared by several other reports I read) that the day did not go well for the government’s case, despite the spirited question by the three women justices of the lawyers for the companies. It will be quite telling if a 6-3 verdict splits along gender lines.
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Today the US Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the case in which two private non-profit companies Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Specialties are claiming that the health insurance plans they provide to their employees should not have to provide contraceptive coverage if doing so violates the religious beliefs of the companies’ owners.
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A US District Court judge in Michigan became the latest in an unbroken string to strike down a state’s ban on same-sex marriage as unconstitutional because it violated the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution’s equal protections clause.
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You may have heard of the Christian school teacher in Louisiana who ridiculed a student in her class who happened to be Buddhist. She seems to be a real piece of work and what was worse, was backed up by school and district authorities.
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