The Supreme Court’s opinion in Arizona’s SB1070 fits nicely with the Presidential election. In a bit of coincidental timing, Mitt Romney happens to be in Arizona today at a fundraiser. And he has basically lined up with the Arizona law, most of which was overturned today as pre-empted by federal oversight. Arizona Governor Jan Brewer [...]

There will be no ruling on the Affordable Care Act today, per the fine folks at SCOTUSBlog. However, three other consequential rulings did get announced. First, there’s the case of American Tradition Partnership v. Bullock. This was the Montana attempt to effectively overturn Citizens United and re-establish limits on corporate participation in political campaigns. The [...]

The response to the foreclosure fraud settlement fund raid in multiple states, now up close to a billion dollars, has been shockingly muted. No progressive group or housing-focused organization has done much more than grumble about the fact that money intended to go to homeowners is being diverted into state budgets all over the country. [...]

The issues of housing policy and Wall Street criminality have not appeared at the top of the agenda in the Presidential campaign, certainly not among horse race journalists. But new polling shows that this is a major challenge for the President, who is viewed as having failed on housing and foreclosure policy, and as too [...]

We now have yet another state diverting a large portion of the hard dollar funds they received from the foreclosure fraud settlement, and instead of using them to help homeowners, moving them to cover a budget hole. The latest example concerns Arizona, one of the major states suffering from the foreclosure crisis, with an overwhelming [...]

The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has filed suit against Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, alleging discriminatory police conduct against Latino citizens. Federal authorities allege that Arpaio and his office have unconstitutionally and unlawfully targeted Latinos during traffic stops and during crime suppression operations. DOJ alleges that MCSO (Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office) unlawfully detained Latino [...]

Cross-Posted from DeSmogBlog 19th Century German statesman Otto von Bismarck once said, “If you like laws and sausages, you should never watch either one being made.” The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), put on the map by the Center for Media and Democracy in its “ALEC Exposed” project, is the archetype of von Bismarck’s truism. So too are the fracking [...]

Yesterday we had a big national discussion about the choices women make in their lives. Ann Romney at one point said right-out, “We need to respect the choices that women make.” At the end of yesterday, Arizona’s female Governor, Jan Brewer, signed a bill banning abortions after 18 weeks and creating a new definition of [...]

The Republican war on women has now cost the second-largest state in the country all its federal Medicaid funding for a women’s health program. The Health and Human Services Department made the announcement yesterday, arguing that Texas’ defunding of Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers violated federal guidelines, forfeiting the $39 million in funding. Twenty-nine [...]

One of the big claims by defenders of the foreclosure fraud settlement is that it’s just a down payment on future actions. The release was narrow enough that state and federal regulators can still hold the banks accountable for their crimes. Why, even some active lawsuits were carved out to allow state AGs to pursue [...]

When I first heard about the proposed anti-union laws moving through the Arizona legislature, I was fairly resigned to their passage. Arizona has huge Republican majorities in its legislature, and they already passed a major anti-immigration bill, though they obviously weren’t shy about courting controversy. But then a funny thing happened. The Republicans couldn’t find [...]