Three really cool things happened this week in Iowa City:
It is Sept. 12th at 4:30 in the afternoon. His voice raspy, a weary RFK Jr. takes the stand and begins to speak. He is sorry, he says, that his voice is so weak, but earlier this morning he presented opening arguments for a case in West Virginia.
This morning. He says it nonchalantly, as if we, fellow members of the legal community, have commitments that are similarly taxing and thus can commiserate.
I think back to my activities of the morning: eating bran flakes, dressing myself, walking to school, realizing that I have forgotten a book, walking home, retrieving said book, writing emails, doing a crossword. I look down in shame and self loathing as I realize that my morning included exactly zero minutes of world saving litigation.
After his humble apologies, he begins his spiel. Corporations are polluting, there are all sorts of great rules on the books to prevent this kind of pollution, but enforcement is lacking.
When I get home a news channel is dedicating its coverage for the hour to the Kathy Griffin Geebus comments.
I look down at my crossword and wonder: isn’t there some litigating I could be doing somewhere?
First things first. I read on Wikipedia before the event that Madeleine Albright can leg press 400 pounds. For reasons still unclear to me, this was not mentioned during the informal discussion.
Many other things were mentioned, however, as Dr. Albright sat and spoke with UI Law Professor Christopher Rossi for approximately 20 minutes before she took questions from the audience.
The topics covered the areas that one would generally expect: Iraq quagmire, needless squandering of international goodwill, Dubya policy slams, international cooperation and humility, etc.
At one point she read a beautiful passage from her book about the United States role internationally and drew a deservedly lengthy applause from the audience.
That America has some serious foreign policy challenges ahead of it was indisputable. The argument that these challenges would somehow be most thoroughly attended to by a Clinton presidency was not so clear. I think this was evident in the questions.
My favorite question of the evening came from a man in the back. It came almost directly after Dr. Albright had (as she has in the past) categorized Iraq as being a worse foreign policy disaster than Vietnam.
He wanted to know how Dr. Albright thought that his first two choices, Bill Richardson and Barack Obama, compare to Hillary in terms of foreign policy decision making ability and/or experience. He noted (always plug your candidates) that Richardson was her successor as Ambassador to the U.N., resisted the war from the start as governor, and ran for re-election in 2002 while maintaining this resistance. Obama, for his part, also resisted and spoke eloquently about the dangerous nature of the war, and ran for a seat in the U.S. Senate, blowing everyone out of the water in 2004. (By the way, at 70%, Obama won with the highest vote for a statewide office in ILLINOIS HISTORY. He’s THAT good).
The two girls next to me both admitted to being Obama supporters, and a fellow law student that I ran into was also backing “the Bomb.” So, based on my COMPLETELY SCIENTIFIC AND UTTERLY INFALLIBLE statistical analysis: 100 % OF THE PEOPLE IN THE AUDIENCE WERE OBAMA SUPPORTERS, while at least half of the people (1/2) on the stage were.
Other noteworthy stuff:
I found this past weekend in Iowa City to be especially inspiring for exactly two reasons:
Reason number one: The Hawkeye football team manhandled Syracuse.
Remember last year when it took a herculean goal line stand to defeat a bad Syracuse team? This year there was never any doubt. We didn’t dominate ANY team last year the way we dominated Syracuse yesterday. Christensen looked good and the d-line limited the Orangemen to 24 rushing yards on 30 attempts. Brian Mattison expressed disappointment when he learned that Syracuse had accumulated 1 total yard on offense in the first half, apparently finding it to be 1 yard too many.
I like his style.
Reason number two: Iowa might just be the next gay marriage state.
Readers of this blog will have noted that a few days ago, I posted to a link in the Daily Iowan about Judge Robert Hansen’s ruling on the unconstitutionality of the Iowa law banning gay marriages. The ruling was stayed and the case kicked up to the Iowa Supreme Court to dispose of.
A quick sidenote: Iowa actually has a kind of peculiar appellate process. Though an appeal in most states would go to an intermediate appellate court before eventually being appealed to the state’s Supreme Court, in Iowa a case is appealed directly to the Supreme Court. The Court then decides whether to hear the case or send it to the intermediate court of appeals. A slight twist, but noteworthy, and it means that in this case the Iowa Supreme Court gets the next crack at it.
Which got me to wondering: how is the Supreme Court going to handle this case? As of last week, I knew very little about the make-up of our court. Ironically, I was, like many casual followers of public policy, much more familiar with the characters and temperaments that make the U.S. Supreme Court than those that make up my home state’s highest court. Anyone who reads any daily newspaper is vaguely familiar with the narrative: uncompromising textualist Scalia, liberal stalwart Ginsburg, Anthony “the swingman” Kennedy, etc.
I did some quick research and learned that three of the justices—Chief Justice Marsha K. Ternus, Jerry Larson, an Mark Cady—are Republican appointees, and four—Michael Streit, David Wiggins, Daryl Hecht, and Brent Appel, are Democratic appointees.
What does this mean? I have no idea. Even in the Democratic party there is pretty large divide among those who support and those who don’t support gay marriage. This is highlighted by statements from a guy named Chet who runs this state making comments explicitly denouncing gay marriage. Sigh. Politicians will be politicians.
Then there’s the further complication of governors crossing party lines to make appointments. For example, former Chief Justice Luis Lavorato, my new hero, was a lifelong Democrat but was appointed by two Republican governors to get to the highest court. So analysis of this kind is inherently suspect.
We can also look at the kind of treatment that the court has given cases like this in the past. The only time that the court has dealt with anything like this, as far as I can tell, was when they dissolved a gay civil union for a couple who had been united in VT a couple years back. A bunch of right wingers led by the frothy mouthed Steve King appealed and said that the Iowa Supreme court didn’t have jurisdiction to make this kind of decision. At which point the Supreme Court quietly assured him that they did, gave him a pat on the rear, and sent him on his merry way with directions mind his own business.
So, I wanted to get a handle on this situation. I wanted to have at least some kind of thoughtful, informed speculation other than state 29’s brief and dismissive commentary of how these justices are going to handle this case.
Enter Supreme Court day at the University of Iowa. Last Friday 6 of the 7 justices made the two hour trip Iowa City to hear a fake case argued by some of our students. Marsha K. Ternus was unable to attend, but was replaced by the venerable former Chief Justice Luis Lavorato.
Following the arguments, students who were interested were invited to dinner at faculty homes to dine with a justice. The justice that we were assigned? None other than the aforementioned Louis Lavorato.
Who better to give me an idea of how the Supreme Court was going to treat this question than someone who not only had worked with the majority of the justices, but also someone who was no longer ON the court and thus, in theory at least, could speak freely.
Justice Lavorato’s response to my question was both candid and comforting. After a brief discussion of the kind of language used in the Iowa Constitution and the personnel currently sitting on the bench, he made his prediction: he thinks that the Supreme Court is going to uphold Justice Robert Hanson’s ruling.
Let the champagne flow.
Kind of.
Obviously it was just an educated guess, and he made it clear that the issue could revolve around one swing vote. But even assuming that his guess is right, there’s still the question of amending the constitution of Iowa. As far as I can tell, doing this actually isn’t that hard. At least not nearly as hard as amending our federal constitution. First the legislature needs to pass the amendment with a majority vote in two consecutive years. Then the amendment gets put on the ballot and submitted to the general public for another straight majority vote (if I’m wrong about this please feel free to correct me). If that was the case, that would still mean two years of unfettered gay marriage before the constitutional amendment would even be on the ballot.
Even then, I’m not so sure 50% of Iowans would vote for it. Maybe I just have too much faith in Iowans as reasonable humans (crazyman Steve King did get 59% last year), but the idea that 50% of the population would vote in favor of an amendment to restrict the rights of our citizens strikes me as improbable.
But I’m probably getting a bit ahead of myself. First, the Supreme Court needs to uphold the ruling, then we can worry about any kind of campaign to change the constitution. In the meantime, there should be plenty of time to sip on that champagne.
Cheers. . . to a world that, like a defensive line on a college football team, has the potential to get a little better every year. Go Hawks.
