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Georgia Lawmakers Sue Carl Malamud For Publishing Georgia Law
TechDirt reports that the state of Georgia is unhappy enough with Carl Malamud for publishing the state's own laws that it's sued Malamud for doing so. From the article:
The specific issue here is that while the basic Georgia legal code is available to the public, the state charges a lot of money for the "Official Code of Georgia Annotated." The distinction here is fairly important -- but it's worth noting that the courts will regularly rely on the annotations in the official code, which more or less makes them a part of the law itself.
The article uses the word "ridiculous" only 10 times; they're taking it easy on the poor legislators.
Come on. What is this crap? The article should use "ridiculous" exactly 0 times. "Ridiculous" is an extremely subjective word. Thus it shouldn't be used by any sort of a journalist or article writer, except when quoting what somebody else said or wrote.
When the submitter and editor saw that the word "ridiculous" was used so many times, that should have been a clue that maybe, just maybe, the article has an agenda to push and that should disqualify it from being linked to from the Slashdot front page!
I don't expect much from Slashdot these days, but this is just fucking pathetic, even by Slashdot's exceedingly low standards.
Ridiculous! Ridiculous! Ridiculous!
Are lawmakers suing Malamud for breaking a public law or a pay-per-view law?
In my opinion, if you can not freely access a law, then it should not apply to you. Apparently ignorance of the law is no defence either.
The law and the state exist entirely to serve the people and make civilisation function. Law makers repeatedly forget that it does not exist to benefit them.
Oh well, tax me silly and bully my peers, we all die some day. Long live neo-feudalism!
It's not like we needed another example of why the current copyright laws are ridiculous and stupid and counter-productive but here it is, again.
The state is just being logical here. Georgia is operating well within the limits of the current copyright law. It's the copyright law that allows this insanity in the first place that has to change. So in a way Georgia is doing exactly the right thing: Making it painfully obvious to everyone that the current copyright laws are pure evil and have to go.
But has the idea of copyrighting a legal code ever been tested by the SCOTUS? And if the decision was unfavorable, do we have to buy the text from iTunes now?
SO SAY WE ALL
okay now the following should be illegal at the federal level
1 designing a contract that is setup to hide some of the clauses of that contract so you would need to
A move the 9 pages of defining names and such to the END (Prevents MEGO while still sorting out who is who)
B no changing stuff in earlier parts unless there is a good reason (domestic V international use)
C include the standard gov stuff by reference
D no bundling contract levels up to increase the length and confusion (demo is separate from standard or Pro)
E using nonstandard definitions for words without reason or warning
2 charging above the actual cost for access to laws (hint put a set of PDFS online and be done with it)
3 any law ( as written or enforced) that is physically impossible (red light cameras with yellows that can not be crossed at the speed limit)
also judges should be tasked with Did the Law Get Broken not Can We Jail/Fine for this??
In the common law system interpretation by the courts is integral part of the law, amiright? So yes, that makes it necessary. Disclaimer: not a lawyer here.
The Court ruled in Banks v Manchester that case law cannot be copyrighted. The ruling was that writings by a government official, acting in their official capacity, are owned by the public and cannot have copyright protection. That case also brought up a question relevant to this case. Under federal law citizens and residents may hold copyright. Georgia is probably neither, and therefore arguably cannot hold copyright.
In the Banks case, the state had contracted with someone else to produce indexes, etc. The deal was that if the company wrote these extra pieces, they would have copyright protectionfor a couple of years - they didn't get paid to write them, but were allowed exclusive right to sell their version with indexes, etc. The indexes and such were the original work of that citizen. That original work, but not the law itself, could be copyright the author.The finding in this Georgia case may hinge on who wrote the annotations. If government officials wrote them, it's public domain. If a private company wrote the annotations in order to sell them, they may be allowed to do so. HOWEVER, the fact that the STATE is suing indicates the state claims copyright for themselves, and the state will probably lose.
Also, the Court will probably want the law to be accessible, so they'll likely find some logic to rule against the state. Consider the Obamacare care case. The court ruled that the IRS "penalty" for not having insurance is a tax, and therefore within the powers granted to the feds, while also ruling is NOT a tax, and therefore didn't have to originate in the house of representatives. So in the very same ruling they said "it's a tax ... it's not a tax". Translation: we don't want to go head to head with the Obama administration on this one. They sometimes FIND a way to rule whichever way they want to rule, whether of makes any sense or not.
Note to editors: the article has been updated to strike out part of the that you have quoted in TFS. You should probably update that as well.
So, the annotations are not part of the law. They are comments about the manner in which the law was applied in certain cases, no?
Devil's Advocate...while yes, you can't copyright the law, are you saying you can't copyright things written about the law? How about textbooks used by law schools?
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Charge people for being allowed to read a EULA. I bet there are still people who want to read them before agreeing. What right do people have to know their lawful obligations without paying up?
Lets start by clearing something up. The GA legislature creates and passes the statutes - the actual law. The text of the statute is not subject to copyright. The lawsuit does not address the text of the statute. Courts issue decisions interpreting and applying the law. Neither statutes nor court decisions are subject to copyright.
What the lawsuit focuses on are the ANNOTATIONS. The annotations are short topical summaries that briefly explain what a court said about the statute. An annotation is written by someone who works for a publisher, after reading a court case. Lawyers use the annotations as clues to which cases to go read to beter undertand the tricky bits of a statute. Annotations are not written by the couts and not written by the legislature. Annotations are not the law, are not controlling and are not persuasive.
Courts do not cite to the annotations. Lawyers do not quote the annotations in their briefs and motions to the courts. Simply does not happen, since the annotation is not important except as a finding tool, as a way to figure which court decisions are relevant to the legal issue you are researching.
If you read the lawsuit - the state did not create the annotations, a legal publisher did. LexisNexis is one of the two major legal publishers. Apparently, at least part of the annotations are created by LexisNexis as works for hire, under contract from the state. I'd guess that there are annotations not covered by the contract as well, and that LexisNexis could easily bring its own suit.
To claim that copyright on the annotations is preventing people from seeing / knowing what the law is simply silly. The annotations are NOT the law, but a mere finding aid, and the annotated code is available at no charge. One of the links in the original story takes you directly to the LexisNexis website where you can read, without charge, the annotated statute. Far from impeding public access, GA has taken the enlightened step of making the annotated code available oline in a very useable form at no cost to anyone who wants to go look. In most states the statute itself is available, but to get to an annotated version you have to use a lawyers database service, which charges a subscription fee.
Re: ACA the fine is a penalty, that is why it is a tax. It passed through both houses of legislature too.
As a resident of Georgia this would be ONE case I would not mind being on the jury for. As with so many things that this State's legislature does this is beyond absurd. If this is being published by the State of Georgia as an official document then it should fall under the Open Records Act. Yes, a "reasonable" charge for producing a document is included in that Act and, even though IANAL, I worked for this state for over 30 years and was involved in a number of open records cases and the "reasonable" requirement was pretty strict. Also, the documents are PUBLIC RECORDS and therefore not copyrightable. I would presume that this would include any annotations if published by the State. If Mr. Malamud bought ONE copy of OCGA from the state for whatever their normal charge is then he should be free to reproduce it in any way and in any form that he desires. Newspapers and other news organizations do that here all the time.
Obamacare did originate in the House as HR 3590. (HR meaning House of Representatives.) It was a "shell bill" that was gutted and stuffed with Obamacare to get around the rule. It's not a novel approach either, and the courts took no issue with it.
HR 3590 passed the House first as required, went to the Senate which altered it into Obamacare and then congress "resolved the differences" between the House and Senate versions passed before sending it to the president.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/...
The rational behind starting tax bills in the HR is that it's "closer to the electorate" - or was before Senators were elected by popular vote. Now, the differences between the two as far as being held to the will of the people is lessened.
Sound terrorist. ARREST!
Unless I misread the summary, or it is wrong, Carl Malamud is not being sued for publishing Georgia laws, as it states you can do that freely. He's being sued for publishing annotations on Georgia laws that he copied from elsewhere.
What the lawsuit focuses on are the ANNOTATIONS. The annotations are short topical summaries that briefly explain what a court said about the statute. An annotation is written by someone who works for a publisher, after reading a court case.
This case may very well hinge upon "who wrote them?". If as you say, written by someone who works for a publisher, that publisher would hold copyright (on those annotations alone!) and would be the party going to court.
But it seems it's the state going to court here. Which means it's the state believing it holds copyright here. Read: state employee(s) writing those annotations. In which case this lawsuit would be a non-starter, regardless of whether those annotations are deemed essential for understanding the law.
Or a (private) 3rd party wrote them for the state, read: "tax dollars at work to produce those annotations". Which imho is effectively the same as a state employee doing the writing.
If a private company wrote the annotations in order to sell them, they may be allowed to do so. HOWEVER, the fact that the STATE is suing indicates the state claims copyright for themselves, and the state will probably lose.
The filing itself (as linked to in the techdirt article) says:
The copyrighted annotations include analysis and guidance that are added to the O.C.G.A. by a third party publisher of the O.C.G.A. as a work for hire.
So, yes, Georgia is claiming ownership of the copyright by the state, not the 3rd party author.
Also, the Court will probably want the law to be accessible, so they'll likely find some logic to rule against the state.
Pretty much every state in the country has annotated laws that are owned by a private company under some kind of agreement with the state. The private company puts some money into indexing them, may have an el cheapo version available online, and charges very mysterious pricing for commercial use that varies by who your sales rep is and how big you are and the like. Physical copies may also be available.
In New York, for example, McKinney's costs about $10,500 for a physical copy: http://legalsolutions.thomsonr...
You can go to a library that has it, of course, but it's pretty ridiculous in today's day and age that you need to go to a library to get access to a law.
It's kind of like the building code--basically a group of experts is involved so the state lets them copyright the laws and sell them rather than having the state *pay* them for their work and make the result free.
My take-away from this is that the indexes and annotations may be subject to copyright by the private party that wrote them-- but from my experience working as a VA employer on policy and procedure manuals, with some indirect experience in handling material that was produced by contract workers, this would depend on the wording of the contract between the government and the private party. In most of those contracts the author is hired as an agent of the government and his relationship to his product is the same as that of any government worker to their assigned tasks, which means he cannot claim copyright and the work is in the public domain. There are major benefits to being an agent of the government and that is usually how this kind of thing is done.
That said, I don't see how Georgia could win this lawsuit, since if the material is copyrightable, the author, and not Georgia, would hold copyright and Georgia would have no standing in the matter. If the author was working as an agent of Georgia, then the work produced is in the public domain, and there is no valid copyright.
In either case the suit seems like a frivolous one, since if there is any copyright involved, Georgia cannot be the party that owns it.
Of course the defending party would be facing legal expenses to just get the case dismissed, and Georgia might be using that as a club to get an early out-of-court settlement. There is a term for legal battery but I don't recall it (coming up on my 10th year of retirement), and that is what Georgia might be attempting with this. Filing suit, even when you know that you cannot win in court but you think you could get an early out of court settlement, should be considered a breach of a lawyer's duty as an officer of the court. Lawyers who do this should be penalized, and in some cases disbarred. But that doesn't happen. That part of the legal system is totally broken.
Will
The problem with that logic is that, if it is Constitutionally valid, the Constitutional provision requiring tax laws to originate in the House is meaningless. If that provisions is meaningless, why did the Framers include it?
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
So in Georgia, they can compel people to pay the government MONEY in order to know what the law is, which seems illegal. Either that, or the law is in essence a service, in which case, if you don't pay for it, it doesn't apply to you.
Imagine a society in which you are exempt from all laws unless you pay to know what they are. :-) Lemme know how THAT works out! Also, at some point, some jurisdiction will surely experiment with à la carte laws. "Yes, I want to opt IN to the basic package, but I want to be exempt from the motor-vehicle registration and rules of the road laws..."
Yeah, you and everyone else! Okay, form lines everybody. Everyone who wants to be exempt from marijuana laws, over he... okay, we're obviously going to need more space for THAT one...
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Largely, I expect, because that was the principle in effect in the British Parliament. It's a common feature of most, if not all, bicameral legislative assemblies, and it dates back to that division of powers between the House of Commons and the House of Lords in Britain. The problem comes from the fact that the US Senate is elected, and thus it gains the democratic legitimacy to significantly tamper with bills. It's a debate being had in Canada right now, where we're trying to decide whether to reform or abolish our Senate. The fear up here is that an elected Senate (Canada's Senators are appointed by the Governor General in the name of the Queen on the advice of the Prime Minister) would become like the US Senate, a competitor to the lower house, and that the supervisory role would be abandoned. Even in the UK the Lords' tendency to try to overrule the House of Commons reached the point where the Parliament Acts of 1911 and 1949 were pushed through and give the Government an override power at second reading so the Lords cannot block a bill.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
If this was 20 years ago, I wouldn't bat an eye at the idea that the Government would need to charge for their 'annotated' copy of the laws -- because it would have to be physically printed in paper books. But this isn't 20 years ago, this is 2015, and we have these convenient, near-magical devices called computers, and more to the point, .pdf files, which make the cost of 'publishing' such a reference work near zero, and the cost of updating it also, relatively speaking, near zero. To claim anything else in this day and age is just bald-faced profiteering. Get correct, Government.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
The rational behind starting tax bills in the HR is that it's "closer to the electorate" - or was before Senators were elected by popular vote. Now, the differences between the two as far as being held to the will of the people is lessened.
This is just my worthless opinion but I feel the 17th Amendment should be repealed because ever since the 17th Amendment was ratified the state legislatures no longer have any voice in the federal government and now the whole system is grossly out of balance and state's rights are being slowly eroded into a unitary state. The people are already represented in the House of Representatives which makes a senate elected via the populace just redundant.
In a free republic which we are suppose to have; the law should be in the public domain, and freely available. If it is not one must ask; what kind of Facist / communist state does Georgia think it is.. We are talking about the Georgia that is a US State, right?
Oh, that is so cute!
He is publishing the "Official Code of Georgia", published under the "Authority of the State of Georgia". Either the annotations are an essential and/or official part of Georgia law, in which case they should not be copyrighted, or they are a convenient additional aid for lawyers, in which case they shouldn't be part of the "Official Code of Georgia" "Published Under Authority of the State of Georgia" and published separately and given no special preference to any other private publication.
Under your logic, the State of Georgia could publish its laws in a made up language and then have a copyright on the information necessary to decode the language. That clearly isn't the intent of our laws.
Yes, and that is a good solution. For a state to partner with a private firm and publish a mix of free and commercial stuff as an official publication is wrong. What's even more wrong is that the state attempts to enforce the private copyright.
State legislatures use gerrymandering and voter restrictions to influence House seats and state government elections. Statewide senate elections are practically the only place an individual can express his vote without the state government diluting it to suit their purposes.
The problem comes from the fact that the US Senate is elected,
No, the problem comes from the fact that the U.S. government no longer considers itself bound to follow the Constitution. The rest of your post indicates what causes this problem. The legitimacy of the various parts of the U.S. government to do ANYTHING is supposed to come from the U.S. Constitution, not from "democratic legitimacy". The various states yielded their sovereignty to the federal government under the understanding that the federal government would be constrained by the Constitution, not free to do anything which was not opposed by the democratically expressed will of the people..
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
The rational what?
"Ignorance of the law is no excuse" really is a valid excuse if they refuse to give people valid options to knowing what the law is. Clearly they have made it difficult for people to know the law except at huge expense. How are people supposed to follow the rules if the rules are only known by the people making them? Its insane! Also the people making the laws are being paid by the general public. If you are a contractor, you are entitled to copyright protection, but since the politicians are employees of the state, they are under no such protection, so copyright protection from their creative works does not apply, all of their creative works belong to the state, and the people paying their salaries (taxpayers). And while corporations might be the ones *bribing* them the most, *taxpayers* are the ones who mostly pick up the tab. And now they are trying to double-dip taxpayers by making them pay for the creation of the laws, and then make them pay to see the finished product. Screw that. Georgia lawmakers have broken both state and federal laws here. They should know better, and need to be informed. Copyright is a federal thing, there is no 'states-rights' option for copyright. But ignorance of the law is no excuse, incarcerate the politicians and make them pay restitution.
Actually, that's not true for the same reason the Electoral College being composed of a number of representatives based upon populace and a fixed additional 2 per State. Inherently this was struck as a compromise to the fundamental problem that many States are much more populace than the others. So as much as Florida, Ohio, etc are swing states today--as they're both populace enough and mixed enough in party affiliation--, a system of pure democracy would leave basically the East and West coasts in control of the whole US.
Having said that, I do tend to agree that direct election of the Senate does tend to create issues of State [Legislature] control of the US, but then I have to take a step back and ask the obvious question: why would it be that a State Legislature which are elected would have even marginal election differences than the people who vote for them? To me, it's clear the reason why: concerns of State Legislature corruption becoming from an endemic State-level problem to an entrenched Federal-level problem. There was also the issue of racially motivated suppression of democracy. In either case, the reason repeatedly we've had the Federal government either in Congress or the SCOTUS create or interpret law to expand rights has been precisely because State rights have often been "the right to oppress".
So, yes, we've seen a substantial erosion of State rights to the point that even an advocate of State rights doesn't capitalize State but does capitalize House of Representatives. Honestly, as much as I believe there needs to be a substantial reform of the Congress, I think the solution isn't to suddenly shift the power of the people back to States. As I see it, the fundamental issue is that those with the desire to exploit or abuse others will seek the position, State or Federal, to achieve those ends. So long as States were the bastions of power, that's where the money flowed and it was possible for those who were against such abuse to use the Federal government where corruption was (less widespread* merely because it was less economical use of money) to curtail those abuses, even though it's taken over a century to move anywhere near the ideals of the Progressive movements of equality.
Now, the Federal government is the seat of power, so money fundamental flows there. To simply shift power back to the States would undoubtedly give States the ability to end various Federally created oppression as well, but States have a pretty horrible track record of being the SOURCE of oppression--the very nature of the system basically means the Federal government's own abuses for a long time were State-backed and not self-enacted under direct populace demand. The sheer fact that the country as a whole is widely diverse increases the probability and reality that State-level oppression won't be indefinitely tolerated precisely because "bleeding-heart liberals" (aka pacifist Quakers) won't stand for abuse that doesn't happen in their State but does happen in their Country.
Put another way, I think a shift in power will at best curtail corruption for a while and perhaps in 100 years (personally, I imagine a lot less time) we'll be right back where we started with people demanding Federal power to overcome State abuses. The overall problem then is the corruption and abuse, where ever it originates. Figuring out how to deal with that seems a much more important issue than trying to figure out who is doing the corruption. Which is why so many people are disillusioned with Republicans and Democrats and why Congress is such an issue**.
*This is, btw, no rosy picture of the past. The Federal Government was and nearly has been corrupt from day one, but that's a problem of all Governments.
**Obviously, this is the point where I should state I
is it barratry?
This. A thousands times this. Should be modded to positive infinity.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I'm guessing the Framers didn't anticipate such substantial changes being made in conference committee (where differences between what the House- and Senate- passed bills are resolved).
There's no good way to come up with a hard line against this kind of practice. If we're going to allow bills to evolve as they pass between both houses, then how would one quantify sufficient "gutting and stuffing" to cross a threshold of "is not allowed"?
I realise it's tempting to say things like "The government isn't bound to follow the Constitution", and some political persuasions love to do that without either understanding the Constitution or how law works. We need reasonably bright (even if not necessarily precise) lines within which reasonable practices are workable.
Either way, the Constitution doesn't stand alone - like other Common Law nations, we have a body of legal practice that has evolved and will continue to evolve as our needs change and as good legal ideas come into vogue. This happened in the Founders' times, it happened well before them, and it will continue for as long as our nation does law this way.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
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So I remember watching T.V. in Turkey in the early 90s and the interview was about a Turkish lawyer talking about the finer interpretations of a specific law. He said something I'll never forget when he was asked, "The language of the law is nearly Ottoman, how are the average citizens supposed to intelligably read and obey this law?" To which he responded, "It's not the job of every citizen to read and understand our laws, that's the job of lawyers, we need to know." Much like how some important points of law in the US is still in Latin. It makes 0 sense to expect a population to obey laws that aren't readily available and easily consumable.
Now to be fair, the spirit of the law must also be preserved. But I think that's what the Constitution is for.
Actually, there is a good way. The bill that originates in the House has to actually contain provisions for raising revenue AND there has to be some resemblance between what the bill passed by the Senate says and the one originally passed by the House.
Of course, it would be even easier if the people in Congress actually took their oath of office seriously to support and defend the Constitution.
Personally, I would like to see every bill contain a reference to where in the Constitution Congress is given the authority to enact the legislation in question.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
States are NOT restricted from holding copyright in general (only the federal government is). There are some exceptions to this, but they probably don't apply here.
On the face of it this seems like a perfectly legitimate complaint on the part of the state. The state is expected to assume the cost of producing the laws themselves (that's why we pay legislative salaries), and making those things freely available in order to enforce them, but the indexing, research, and reference work involved in creating an annotated version costs money and isn't guaranteed to be done by statute, meaning that it could be covered by copyright and the state is reasonably justified in attempting to recover those costs. There are of course many complexities here (although almost all of them will be found in Georgia law itself, and have nothing to do with the federal constitution), but the suit is far less unreasonable than the poorly researched editorial "reporting" it.
the cost should only be related to procuring and making paper copies (like foia)
therefore post it online, and everyone wins (except the extortionists)
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
The article says the state of Georgia is suing Mr. Malamud. But who is "the state of Georgia" in this case?
The bottom of this document (sorry, I'm not a lawyer - I don't know what the document is called) indicates Anthony B. Askew's signature. Is he the one who decided to sue Mr. Malamud?
How do you quantify resemblance?
There's nothing unconstitutional about what happened. Maybe you'd like to amend the Constitution to make some parts of it unconstitutional - maybe even some of those amendments would be ok if they were practical and enforcable, but your attempt to portray yourself a defending the Constitution here against assailants is ridiculous - you just don't like the way our system works. Which is fine, it's just the posing that's off.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
I think the term you're looking for is barratry.
So, what you are saying is that the Framers of the Constitution placed a provision in it which they knew meant nothing?
In the case of the ACA, the bill passed out of the Senate contained NONE of the language which was in the bill passed out of the House which it supposedly amended...not only that but it did not even contain any language relating to what the House bill was about.
You are correct that I do not like how our system works...and neither would the men who wrote the Constitution, nor would the men who ratified the Constitution in the 13 states. If they imagined that it would be interpreted as it currently is, they would not have ratified it.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
I'm saying the founders gave a rough sketch, and in this case that sketch was too vague to work right. We'd either need to fix it, or accept that it won't work. It's quite likely the founders would've accepted it, maybe not even included this restriction if they knew it wouldn't work, or done a better job drafting it. Still, their system as a whole worked well enough, and provided means for its broken bits to be improved. If some part is important now, we can still fix it. If not, why worry about it? Build momentum, propose an alternative, and maybe it'll be fixed. Our government isn't a shrine to long-dead people -it belongs to the people alive today.
It's also important not to treat the founders as if they significantly agreed with each other. They didn't. They had huge differences, long debates, and like any representative government, they had an enormously difficult time reaching agreement. Our first government failed. We're in a heavily evolved descendant of the second try.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Voter restrictions such as?
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Georgia may have standing, not on copyright grounds, but tortuous interference.
There are many unconstitutional things that happened. The ACA itself is unconstitutional in a multitude of ways, the SCOTUS decisions notwithstanding. The House-Senate compromise bill was not actually legally passed in the Senate, jiggery-pokery by Harry Reid prevented the vote from occurring legally.
Further, critical votes in the Senate were made by persons there illegally, most notably Al Franken.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
No. Both the letter of the law and its obvious intent have been perverted and violated.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
FWIW, it was Madison's argument that indirect election of U.S. Senators would result in good people (those in State legislatures) choosing the very best to become U.S. Senators, a kind of compounding of virtue. He either didn't see the potential problem or thought it insignificant compared to the available alternatives (and I agree with the latter possibility.)
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Restrictions that are effectively poll taxes. Costly IDs, and restricted poll times make for good barriers.
Learn to love Alaska
Blame the confederacy. They fought a war to remove states rights, and though they lost the war, they won that issue.
Learn to love Alaska
Voter IDs are supposed to be free unless you mean the state's that require a state ID to vote? Those are usually just a few dollars and required for many other tasks which minimizes the expense. I agree with you in theory but in practicality?
Restricted poll times? The booths are open late and one can vote absentee if they want to or if they are worried about the time constraints. I can not speak to other states but I have been able to get my ballot online in my state for a number of years now. Such was not really an option when I retired and moved here. Things like state functions where just starting to go online eight years ago. Prior to that one had to call or write to request an application. It has never really been anything I have seen as prohibitive. There has to be a finite limit to the times the booths are open. Such needs to fit in with social expectations. Remediation is possible with absentee voting if such is a problem due to scheduling or physical limitations.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Voter IDs are supposed to be free unless you mean the state's that require a state ID to vote? Those are usually just a few dollars and required for many other tasks which minimizes the expense. I agree with you in theory but in practicality?
Many also require a home address and additional government paperwork. For someone who doesn't have a birth certificate on them, the cost for a "free" ID can be quite expensive. For someone who doesn't have a home address, you have to commit perjury and find a co-conspirator to your crime (now a felony) to be able to get the ID. So a homeless person must commit a felony to get an ID. Plus the cost.
Plus, it doesn't solve any known problem. Fraud didn't go down in the places that required IDs. There were just fewer Blacks voting.
Learn to love Alaska
So, it's even linked in that article, but the entire publication is officially hosted by lexisnexis. It also looks like it's free... What is Carl actually interested in here?
Sorry, your analysis is flawed in relationship to Banks. First Banks is an 1888 case, and congress has changed copyright law considerably since then (as noted in Banks, copyright is a power of the legislature). The Banks analysis covers language that is no longer in the copyright act. The citizen or resident language was for determination of the author of the work (In that US copyright can only be granted over works by a US citizen or resident, this is no longer the case). Banks further went on to say that judges did not get a copyright on the work. The annotated codes are more like textbooks (in fact, often written by academic professors) that analyze and annotate the law. The current law prohibiting Federal government copyright is 17 USC 105, which does not reach the states.
What makes you think you're more qualified to judge constitutionality or legality than our Supreme Court? Courts judge these things. Your opinion doesn't matter - these things remain legal and constitutional until and unless successfully challenged - that's how our system works. It is challenge-based. If you don't get that, you're just clueless about our Constitution, how it's judged, and the broader legal system in which it resides.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Plus, it doesn't solve any known problem. Fraud didn't go down in the places that required IDs. There were just fewer Blacks voting.
Well, for the one state that I happen to have read anything about this matter (Georgia), black voting participation increased after the voter ID law passed (source: Atlanta Constitution). So, you're wrong.
So the few outliers (you can use a shelter as an address) are influencing elections as you claimed? That seems quite a stretch. Few elections are lost or won by the margin you are suggesting. It is not that I agree with the practice but your hyperbole is trite and not entirely correct - or even really correct when taken in regards to your statement.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I am sorry, but the American Republic as designed by the men who wrote the Constitution is over. We no longer have a government which considers itself bound by that Constitution. We no longer have a government of laws. Which rules apply depend on the political power of the individual involved, not on what the law says.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Nope. You're just documenting your own failure to understand how our kind of legal system works.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
I am sorry, but the Supreme Court just ruled, "Yes, the law explicitly states this, but we do not like the consequences of that so we are going to say it does not mean what it says. No, there is no place in the law where it actually says what we would like it to say, but we are going to say it says it anyway."
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
I'm having trouble grasping what you meant by
When I read it, it sounds like you're saying the federal government cannot do anything--anything that is supported by the democratically expressed will of the people.
On another note, assuming there's no voting fraud being done by the "elites", I would say that I'd be okay if we let the individual states decide if they want...
1. Their Senators chosen by the People.
2. Their Senators chosen by the state Legislature.
3. Something else.
provided that it's approved and re-approved every 6 years by a statewide vote. The even-year election in which neither of the two Senators are up for reelection.
Where did it "rule" that? I'm not looking for an interpretation - if they ruled it, they must have actually said it. Where?
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
If that provisions is meaningless, why did the Framers include it?
Because at the time that the Framers wrote the Constitution (and until 1913) the Senate was not directly elected by the popular vote, instead being appointed by the state governments? Seriously - go look up the Seventeenth Amendment.
Hence the GP's last paragraph:
The rational behind starting tax bills in the HR is that it's "closer to the electorate" - or was before Senators were elected by popular vote. Now, the differences between the two as far as being held to the will of the people is lessened.
So while it might not have been meaningless at the time it was specified, it's more so now.
And to head off your next rhetorical question, the reason why they haven't changed the constitution is that they've come up with a legal fiction (again, look it up. It's a fascinating example of how common law systems work in practice, as opposed to how theoreticians on the internet think it works.) which allows them to end run around the issue. There isn't a need, so they don't go through the bother.
The whole issue in modern times is somewhat of a moot point anyway, as most of the spending bill & budgets really come from lobbyists and special interest groups, anyway. "Originating" in the house is just a pantomime - it's not like the Representatives actually write the things.
If the annotations were written by public servants, paid for with taxpayer dollars, then the work should exist in the public domain.
From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
Requiring a license before allowing citizens to read or speak the law would be a violation of deeply-held principles in our system that the laws apply equally to all.This principle was strongly set out by the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Marshall when they stated “the Court is unanimously of opinion that no reporter has or can have any copyright in the written opinions delivered by this Court, and that the judges thereof cannot confer on any reporter any such right.” Wheaton v. Peters, 33 U.S. (8 Pet.) 591 (1834). The Supreme Court specifically extended that principle to state law, such as the Official Code of Georgia Annotated, in Banks v. Manchester (128 U.S. 244, 1888) , where it stated that “the authentic exposition and interpretation of the law, which, binding every citizen, is free for publication to all, whether it is a declaration of unwritten law, or an interpretation of a constitution or a statute."
Oregon does not need any f**king polling places or any stupid voter registration. The last item is brand new though. We do have some minor vote fraud though occasionally. The two recent public cases I recall were a widower voting for his wife and a county vote counter caught with an illegal pencil and voting everyone ballot.
If you note, it also indicated that nationwide Black vote was up sharply in 2008 for Obama's first election. From what I could tell from the AJC story, Black vote in Georgia was under-represented in GA, compared to the national increase in turnout that year. And it fell in 2010. About 1600 votes were discarded due to the inability of the voter to provide acceptable ID. So much for one man one vote.
Learn to love Alaska
What was the minimum number of votes to swing the 2000 election? It was about 270 votes (depending on how you count them).
Learn to love Alaska
How else can they legislate from the bench? If the had to follow the law, listen critically to arguments, and rule based on evidence and arguments presented they couldn't generate new laws or rights.
Unfortunately this would leave them in the untenable position of being merely a third branch of government, not all three.
For someone who doesn't have a home address, you have to commit perjury and find a co-conspirator to your crime (now a felony) to be able to get the ID. So a homeless person must commit a felony to get an ID. Plus the cost.
Where you vote - and which issues you can vote on - are determined by where you live. If you don't have a reasonably fixed address, then no - you can't vote.
If you don't have a reasonably fixed address, then no - you can't vote.
That only applies to the poor. Trump has (or used to have, no idea what he uses now) a hotel room as his "permanent" address. Many other politicians have had the same. And they were allowed to vote for themselves. It's only the poor and minorities that the system targets.
Learn to love Alaska
yes it is, and it's an offence at common law.
Some jurisdictions have fairly recently introduced SLAPP (strategic lawsuit against public participation) statutes that impose summary penalties on offenders - where a single judge and no jury can make a finding and impose the maximum penalty.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
... "we have these convenient, near-magical devices called computers, and more to the point, .pdf files, which make the cost of 'publishing' such a reference work near zero, and the cost of updating it also, relatively speaking, near zero. "
I get your point. However, PDF files are difficult as hell to update. Now I don't know what proprietary/open source/web-based desktop publishing and/or word processing software the state of Georgia uses, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't chew PDF files for breakfast.
...come on, guys, fire up wget and let's hammer the shit out of that site before they take the code offline.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
You apparently don't understand the American legislative system. If SCOTUS rules a law to be Constitutional, it is Constitutional. That is the particular power granted to SCOTUS -- to declare a law Constitutional or Unconstitutional. In fact, that is their only power.
That's not the only power of SCOTUS. Many of its decisions are to harmonize Federal law across circuits. Different circuit courts can interpret Federal law differently, which brings obvious problems.
SCOTUS is a full court, which has original jurisdiction in very limited areas. Besides, it wasn't granted the right to rule laws unconstitutional explicitly, but very early on they ruled that they had that power, and of course there was no superior court to appeal to if anybody disagreed.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
It applies to all. Trump can use his hotel room; an indigent can use a homeless shelter.
The Founding Fathers explicitly made the Senate a "house of the States", where Senators, essentially acting as agents of the state legislatures, had the power to amend or veto bills produced in the House of Representatives. However, being unelected, Senators while enjoying greater prestige than Representatives, were also in a position where their powers were not democratically derived. The "check" as it were on the Senate was that any significant interference in bills would inevitably be viewed somewhat more dimly, which is how it has worked out in most Westminster parliaments.
With the 17th Amendment, the Senate gained the democratic legitimacy which in facts leads to the greater possibility of this seeming end-run around the requirement that money bills originate in the House. You don't really find this happening overly much in Canada, where the lack of democratic legitimacy means that Senators usually do not feel they have the right to alter taxation or spending bills. In the UK, of course, explicit measures were put in place in the 1911 and 1949 Parliament Acts that heavily restrict the House of Lords' ability to tamper with such bills.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The Constitution was written to limit what the federal government was allowed to do. Those limits were supposed to apply even if the majority of the people wished otherwise. There is a provision in the Constitution for changing those limits if a sufficiently large percentage of the population so desires, but barring that being done those limits were intended to continue.
So, the federal government does not have the authority to do whatever is supported by the democratically expressed will of the people. It only has the authority to do those things the Constitution gives it the authority to do, with the caveat that even there it only has the authority to do them according to the democratically expressed will of the people.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison