The Chicago Cubs and the "Defeat of Barack Hussein Obama"

The initial case could have been resolved the first way. If you read the statute/regulation not to apply to video on demand, you do not need to reach the difficult constitutional question (it split 5-4, after all).

Maybe you're conflating the savings canon--interpret a statute so it is not unconstitutional--with the canon of avoidance--interpet a statute to avoid a reading that requires answering a constitutional question.

 

More on this from a former White House Counsel:

http://www.moresoftmoneyhardlaw.com/news.html?AID=1425

 

No. The canon of avoidance, like you said, is when you can decide the case in a way that avoid the Constitutional problem. An example would be this free speech hypothetical: A restaurant opens up. It names itself, "Burn Jews, Burn." The city shuts down the restaurant on two grounds: It violates the city's hate speech ordinance. And it did not pass the health inspection. Restaurant facially challenges the hate speech ordinance on First Amendment grounds. It challenges the health code violation because it says that rats are not covered by the statute, only mice. The Court holds that rats are covered, too, and shuts the restaurant down, thereby avoiding the Constitutional free speech question, which is not necessary to resolve the case.

 

I hate the savings canon. It invites judicial activism more than any other doctrine I can think of.

Have you read Citizens United? I'm a little rusty, but I do remember that Kennedy spent pages and pages explaining why it couldn't be decided on narrower grounds. Now, I don't buy the motivation - I think that Roberts was going to get this result come hell or high water. That said, some of the arguments (about constitutional avoidance, exclusively) were pretty solid.

 

How much of an issue is turnout for conservatives? Obviously it isn't as tied to success as it is for Democrats - Republican voters turn out pretty reliably. However, could a not insignificant number of them be convinced to stay home because of Romney's Mormonism? The idea is that you aren't changing their vote from Romney to Obama. That's not going to happen. It's that you are convincing them not to vote at all.

 

And we just got a half a news cycle of talking about Rev. Wright and reminding people that Obama is a Not Like Us.

Expect a lot more stories just like this one, reminding the people with whom it will resonate that he's Not Like Us.

 

More than anything I think this is a ploy to soak the rabid Obama haters of more money.

 

Goes back to Bush v Gore

 

I think indifference could be an issue for republicans, although probably not as much of an issue as it could be for the democrats.

If that's the case, I think it will have more to do with people not liking Romney than it does with him being a Mormon.

 

I think the SC is probably the most poorly understood governmental entity in the country.

 

The entire field of statutory interpretation is basically a mess, since underlying all of is assumptions about legislatures and judges we can never prove.

I haven't read it in a while.

 

Back to the local politics: I can't imagine Rahm Emanuel is going to be happy to see the Ricketts family when it shows up for the next meeting about tax money for Wrigley Field. The funding issues for Wrigley are always contentious, and Joe Ricketts is doing his son no favors here.