The Court of Appeals’ decision striking down the Voter ID law as unconstitutional under Indiana’s Equal Privileges and Immunities clause drew a petulant response from Gov. Daniels.

At a news conference, Gov. Mitch Daniels, a second-term Republican, called the ruling “preposterous” and said that “there’s nothing in the Indiana Constitution that goes beyond what the federal Constitution provides here.”

He is alluding here to the case of Crawford v. Marion County which was in a different procedural posture and didn’t address the same issues. And, in any case, Indiana courts are the controlling authority on the Indiana constitution (to the extent it isn’t in conflict with the United States Constitution.) Note what he doesn’t address: the fundamental issue of why absentee voters should be treated more leniently in terms of identification than in-person voters. That was the crux of the Court of Appeals decision. Critics of the appellate court’s decision simply lack credibility if they do not address that central question.

Gov. Daniels just bellyaches about prior litigation which has no preclusive effect on the present case. I thought he had a law degree. He obviously knows better. He just doesn’t care and chooses to ignore the central question and start huffing about judicial arrogance. He didn’t get his way and decided to have himself a little tantrum.

For future reference – not that I suppose the Governor is going to take advice from the likes of me – I would suggest something along the lines of, “I respectfully disagree with the Court of Appeals’ decision and believe it will be overturned by the Indiana Supreme Court. Less stringent identification is appropriate for absentee voters than for in-person voters because ______.” And then use that big old brain to fill in the blank more convincingly than the attorney general was able to do in front of the Court of Appeals.

Incidentally, the legislature can probably fix this simply by applying the voter identification requirements equally to all voters.

Update Doghouse has a nice entry on the Governor’s return to Car Bomb form, complete with video. And his is much more fun to read. My favorite line, “He’s like a guy who starts a small business, not to get rich, not for love of his product, but just so he can fire minimum-wage earners at will.”

I have been interested in space for a long time. I recall that, when I was 5 or 6, I had a conversation with my uncle where I told him I either wanted to be a lawyer or an astronomer. From the choices I have made, my decision making skills are obviously suspect. But, I’ve been even more attuned to information about the Big Bang for the past year or so. At some point, Cole was a little agitated about something that had happened at school. He was under the impression that one of his teachers thought he wasn’t telling the truth when he talked about the Big Bang. As best I could piece together, one of his teachers was maybe trying to tell him that the Big Bang might not be accurate, presumably based on religious concerns. (Cole also came back at one point talking about how God had made every snowflake different.)

So, that’s the background noise in my head when I read about the Planck Observatory sending back information about radiation that first swept out across space just 380,000 years after the Big Bang. Planck was launched by the European Space Agency last may and is about a million miles from Earth (about 4x more distant than the moon.)

The Planck observatory, launched in May, is surveying radiation that first swept out across space just 380,000 years after the Big Bang.

The light holds details about the age, contents and evolution of the cosmos.
. . .
It is trying to make the finest-ever measurements of what has become known as the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB).

This is light that was finally allowed to move out across space once a post-Big-Bang Universe had cooled sufficiently to permit the formation of hydrogen atoms.

Before that time, scientists say, the Universe would have been so hot that matter and radiation would have been “coupled” – the cosmos would have been opaque.

Researchers can detect temperature variations in this ancient heat energy that give them insights into the early structure of the Universe.

With Planck, they also hope to find firm evidence of “inflation”, the faster-than-light expansion that cosmologists believe the Universe experienced in its first, fleeting moments.

Theory predicts this event ought to be “imprinted” in the CMB and the detail should be retrievable with sufficiently sensitive instruments. Planck is designed to have that capability.

Its detectors, or bolometers, are the most sensitive ever flown in space, and operate at a staggering minus 273.05C – just a tenth of a degree above what scientists term “absolute zero”.

The Indiana Court of Appeals has decided, in the case of League of Women Voters v. Todd Rokita (pdf) that the Voter ID law (P.L. 109-2005) violates Article 1, Section 23 of the Indiana Constitution which states: “Section 23. The General Assembly shall not grant to any citizen, or class of citizens, privileges or immunities, which, upon the same terms, shall not equally belong to all citizens.”

The Court of Appeals, therefore, reversed the order of the trial court and remanded the case with instructions that the trial court enter an order declaring the Voter ID law void.

Update The primary reason for the Court Appeals finding the Voter ID law to be unconstitutional seems to be the disparate treatment between absentee voters and in-person voters. (Incidentally, when the bill was originally considered, a proposed amendment that would have treated in-person and absentee voter requirements more equally was voted down.)

In 2005, the Indiana General Assembly passed a law requiring “citizens voting in person on election day or casting a ballot in person at the office of the circuit court clerk prior to election day to present photo identification issued by the government.” Crawford v. Marion County Election Bd., 128 S. Ct. 1610, 1613 (2008). The Voter I.D. Law applies to voting in both primary and general elections. Ind. Code §§ 3-10-1-7.2 and 3-11-8-25.1. It does not apply, however, to voters casting absentee ballots by mail or those who happen to reside at a state licensed care facility where a precinct polling place is located. I.C. §§ 3-10-1-7.2(e), 3-11-8-25.1(e), and 3-11-10-1.2.

The Court of Appeals found that the Voter ID law did not violate Article 2, section 2 by impermissibly imposing an additional qualification for voting. Rather, the Court of Appeals held that the Voter ID law was a regulation of the time, place, and manner in which eligible citizens could cast their vote.

Turning to the Equal Privileges and Immunities Clause (Art 1, sec. 23):

The League contends that three aspects of the Voter I.D. Law violates Section 23: (1) the disparate treatment between mail-in absentee voters and in-person voters; (2) the disparate treatment between voters who reside at state licensed care facilities that by happenstance are polling places and elderly and disabled voters who do not reside at state licensed care facilities that also happen to be polling places; and (3) the requirements that an identification contain an expiration date and photograph is not reasonably related to the purpose of the statute.

Citing to a case where the Supreme Court decided that a provision placing more stringent requirements on absentee ballots to be included in a recount than in-person ballots was constitutional, the court of appeals noted the Supreme Court’s rationale:

Our supreme court declared to the contrary that the statute was constitutional, because inherent differences make mailed-in ballots more susceptible to improper influences or fraud, and, therefore, “it is reasonable that the legislature believed it in the interest of Indiana voters to more stringently govern absentee balloting.”

It would be irrational for the legislature to believe that mailed-in ballots are inherently more susceptible to fraud on one hand and less susceptible to fraud on the other hand. (There is a legal fiction that the legislature acts rationally.) Consequently, imposing more stringent requirements on in-person voters than on absentee voters is unreasonable and violates the equal privileges and immunities clause of the Indiana Constitution.

Apparently there is a provision which exempts from the ID requirement individuals residing in care facilities which also serve as polling places. The Court determined that the inherent natural characteristics of such a class of people did not justify treating them differently in this fashion. “The nature of state licensed care facilities and the inherent natural characteristics of the residents who reside in them may make them subject to certain directed legislation, but the Voter I.D.?s grant of immunity from the identification requirement for in-person voters is not appropriately related to those characteristics.”

There was also some discussion of the photo and requirement that the ID have an expiration date which had not yet passed. The Court did not have any problems with those requirements. Specifically noting the incident where Purdue student IDs were accepted as identification without expiration dates, the Court said that this was irrelevant to a facial challenge to the statute. It would be a challenge to the way a statute was being applied, which is a different sort of lawsuit.

The Associated Press is reporting that the LaPorte County Assessor, Carol McDaniel, is facing removal. The LaPorte County Commissioners voted 2 to 1 to refer the matter to the county prosecutor after a report of misconduct from the Department of Local Government Finance. The allegations are that cash was mishandled, assessed values reduced without proper evidence, and there was noncompliance with parts of a state-ordered reassessment. The LaPorte County assessor says she’s being targeted by wealthy remonstrators with allies in the Daniels administration.

Craig Davidson, writing for the Herald Argus has more.

The commission was given a report from the Department of Local Government Finance critical of McDaniel and, for the first time under a 2008 law, allowed the county to begin the process of removing her from office. Two weeks ago, La Porte County Council President Mark Yagelski presented the report to the commission as required by the law.
. . .
Although Huston called the paperwork submitted to council from the DLGF “damning,” she said other factors were more so. Huston cited that the DLGF document had 36 questions from a deposition but did not include everything, and that because county employees don’t know what’s going to happen to McDaniel, work has come to a stalemate.
. . .
Now, the process moves to the prosecutor’s office, where Beckman is required by law to file information in La Porte County Circuit Court. Judge Tom Alevizos will make the final decision. After the meeting, Beckman said he couldn’t comment because he did not yet have the files for the case.

The DLGF memo is here (pdf). The DLGF’s authority to recommend removal apparently comes from IC 6-1.1-4-31.

Rosa Salter Rodriguez has an article in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette about an ad featuring the tenets of the United Methodist Church with respect to health care which is causing some controversy because of the political implications of those tenets.

My main problem with the article is that it spends a lot of time talking about the reaction to the ad before getting around to telling you what the ad actually said. And, even then, you still have to kind of piece it together. Apparently the ad says “The United Methodist Church advocates lifting up those now relegated to second-class citizenship by providing adequate health care for ALL living in our great society” and also includes a quote from Senator Kennedy saying “The fundamental test of our society is how it treats the least powerful among us.”

The ad was put out by Al Kuelling, a retired physicist and member of a Fort Wayne Methodist Church. Before putting out the ad, he cleared it with a board of the national church. This has the local church riled up, apparently because they feel like it associates them with Democrats.

Maybe I’m just not as sensitized to it – or maybe the national media has different standards for its coverage – but I haven’t heard as much about the religious positions on health care as I have about various religious groups holding forth on a candidates abortion voting record. In the past, religious organizations have very much been involved in social justice issues – slavery, civil rights, etc. Health care seems to be along those lines.

A friend of mine noted that this poem by James Patrick Kinney seems to have a lot of relevance just about now.

‘The Cold Within’

Six humans trapped by happenstance
In dark and bitter cold
Each possessed a stick of wood–
Or so the story’s told.

Their dying fire in need of logs,
But the first one held hers back,
For, of the faces around the fire,
She noticed one was black.

The next one looked cross the way
Saw one not of his church,
And could not bring himself to give
The fire his stick of birch.

The third one sat in tattered clothes
He gave his coat a hitch,
Why should his log be put to use
To warm the idle rich?

The rich man just sat back and thought
Of wealth he had in store,
And keeping all that he had earned
From the lazy, shiftless poor.

The black man’s face bespoke revenge
As the fire passed from his sight,
For he saw in his stick of wood
A chance to spite the white.

And the last man of this forlorn group
Did nought except for gain,
Giving just to those who gave
Was how he played the game,

Their sticks held tight in death’s stilled hands
Was proof enough of sin;
They did not die from cold without–
They died from cold within.

Betsy Reason, writing for the Indianapolis Star, has an article about the death of Tony Feller, a guy I knew in school. I didn’t know Tony well, but I did know him to be a very nice guy back in high school. By all accounts, that hadn’t changed in the past 20 years. His dad, as it happens, was an excellent teacher from whom I learned calculus and a lot about computers.

Tony died after a long battle with colon cancer. He and his wife, Crystal, kept a blog chronicling his fight. Donations to cover his treatment can be made through the Tony Feller Fund.

The blog makes for some sad reading, mainly because you know how it comes out in the end. But, for us all, it comes out the same in the end. That’s a tough part of life, but the important part is what we do with the time we have. It looks as though Tony made the most of life and did not succumb to despair. That’s about the most any of us can really ask for — though, obviously, more years on the planet would have been more fair.

The sad part, as always, is for the friends and family left to carry on without a loved one. Sympathy goes out, in particular, to Tony’s wife and children. Rest in peace, Tony.

Niki Kelly and Jeff Wiehe have an article on the Indiana Supreme Court’s new rule concerning the admissibility of evidence of custodial interrogations in felony cases. (At the moment, the Indiana Judiciary’s website is less than helpful. There is a press release, but then you have to go digging for the actual order promulgating the new rule of evidence.)

The Supreme Court’s press release says:

The rule, which was approved by majority vote, states in part, “In a felony criminal prosecution, evidence of a statement made by a person during a Custodial Interrogation in a Place of Detention shall not be admitted against the person unless an Electronic Recording of the statement was made.”

A place of detention means a jail, law enforcement agency station house, or facility owned and operated by law enforcement. An electronic recording means an audio-video recording. The exact definitions for “place of detention” and “electronic recording” can be found in Rule 617 online.

There are seven exceptions to the rule which can be found online as well. Generally, the exceptions include the following:

1. statements made as a part of routine processing or “booking”
2. statements made when the suspect does not agree to be electronically recorded.
3. when there is an equipment malfunction
4. when the interrogation takes place in another jurisdiction
5. when law enforcement officers reasonably believe the crime under investigation is not a felony
6. the statement made is spontaneous and not in response to a question
7. substantial exigent circumstances exist which prevent the recording

The Journal Gazette article has an interesting quote from Rep. Matt Pierce who chairs the House Courts and Criminal Code Committee. He called a grey area the issue of whether such a rule should have gone through the legislature or the courts.

“There has been tension between the legislature and the courts in the past about what the legislature can do in areas of evidence,” he said. “The court says the Constitution gives them the job of administering courts, so they are the final word.”

Justices Dixon, Boehm, and Rucker voted in favor of the new rule. Justices Shepard and Sullivan dissented, mostly on the grounds that police departments are largely moving in this direction on their own and there hasn’t been any particular evidence of dishonesty in the Indiana law enforcement community where such interrogations are not recorded.

Bill Ruthart, writing for the Indianapolis Star (link is to the Courier Journal version), has an article on the Interim Study Committee on Alcoholic Beverages hearing on Sunday liquor sales. The issue seems pretty clearly to be whether to offer protections to liquor stores not available to smaller stores selling other products.

Nobody seems to be advancing the original rationales about the morality of selling evil liquor on a holy day. Instead, the assumption seems to be that total liquor sales will remain static while the time over which the product is sold will increase by a day. This will result in lesser profit for the liquor stores, more market share for big retailers, and no appreciable increase in overhead for the box stores because they’re open anyway.

I don’t want the good liquor stores to go out of business, but I don’t really care about the seedy ones selling low end stuff staffed with employees who don’t know much about what they’re selling. Regardless, though, I don’t know of any reason why businesses selling alcohol should enjoy protections not available to those selling, for example, sporting goods. Sporting goods stores have to compete with big retailers even on Sundays. A really good sporting good store (the REI in Denver being the best one I’ve personally had the pleasure of enjoying) can be invaluable. A low end one without knowledgeable staff is just redundant.

For legislators gathering information on the subject, one approach might be to find a state with similar alcohol laws but with Sunday sales and see what that has done to the alcohol industry in that state. Liquor laws being what they are, however, I don’t know how easy or hard it would be to find an apples-to-apples comparison.

The Indiana General Assembly’s Regulatory Flexibility Committee (for which I was once counsel – I know you are all very impressed) will be studying nuclear power plants.

One thing they will have to address is what went wrong at Marble Hill. If they plan to go down the nuclear reactor avenue at some point in the future, they’ll have to figure out how to avoid an expensive debacle like that.

There is a Time Magazine article from 1984 that discusses the fate of Marble Hill.

Marble Hill has already eaten up some $2.5 billion, making it the most expensive nuclear power project ever to be dropped. The decision brings the total number of cancellations of U.S. nuclear plants since 1974 to 100.

Public Service began constructing Marble Hill in 1978. The original cost estimate for the plant, situated near the small town of Madison, was about $1.4 billion. But Marble Hill ran into the same sort of quality-control problems that have bedeviled the rest of the nuclear power industry, and costs shot upward. Construction crews, for instance, routinely failed to repair properly the air pockets that formed in the concrete as it was being poured. Last month a task force estimated the total price of completing the project would be $7.7 billion or more.

Marble Hill’s voracious appetite for cash has left the utility strapped. Just to continue generating power to its 540,000 customers, Public Service said it will immediately need to boost rates 14%. Later the utility plans to apply for additional rate increases to begin paying off its $2.2 billion share of the construction bill.

(There is also some information here, but the site is riddled with questionable spelling, making me question the accuracy of the information.)

Currently the discussion of nuclear issues by the Reg-Flex Committee looks like it’s slated to take place on the afternoon of September 22, 2009 in the Senate Chambers.