Welcome to your Thursday open thread. Today is Return Day – who’s attending? What do you expect to see? Will O’Donnell show up? It means mixing among the rabble, which she is loathe to do. If she shows up, I think it means she’s running in 2012 (Lord help us).
There were a lot of bad outcomes from Tuesday’s elections (Delaware being an exception) but there was at least on good outcome. The Colorado “fetal personhood” amendment went down to defeat:
Colorado “fetal personhood” amendment goes down in flames.
This illustrates that abortion is like federal spending cuts; criminalizing abortion requires focusing on the abstract rather than the specific. “Pro-lifers” can be a pretty sizable group in the abstract, but start talking about constitutional amendments that would actually make obtaining abortions a serious criminal offense and require that sanctions not be applied selectively and support for criminalization vanishes as quickly as support for spending cuts vanishes if it’s ever made clear that this means “slashing defense, Medicare and Social Security” rather than “limiting welfare recipients to one Cadillac a year.”
Who’d a thunk that throwing women in jail and requiring more government bureaucracy to track the state of women’s wombs would have been unpopular?
There was another, lesser known bad outcome on Tuesday. In Iowa, social conservatives started a campaign to oust the judges who voted to allow gay marriage. It succeeded. Three justices who ruled in favor of gay marriage lost their “retention” election.
Three Iowa Supreme Court justices lost their seats Tuesday in a historic upset fueled by their 2009 decision that allowed same-sex couples to marry.
Vote totals from 96 percent of Iowa’s 1,774 precincts showed Chief Justice Marsha Ternus and Justices David Baker and Michael Streit with less than the simple majority needed to stay on the bench.
Their removal marked the first time an Iowa Supreme Court justice has not been retained since 1962, when the merit selection and retention system for judges was adopted.
…
Not everyone agreed with Vander Plaats or the majority of voters.
“In the end, the aggressive campaign to misuse the judicial retention vote, funded by out-of-state special interests, has succeeded,” Drake University Law School Dean Allan Vestal said. “The loss of these three justices is most unfortunate, and the damage to our judicial system and the merit selection of judges will take much to repair.”
I’m sure it won’t surprise you to learn that the campaign was financed by shady, out-of-state rich people. Now conservatives in Iowa think they have momentum to try to repeal marriage rights for LGBT people.
I do have mixed feelings about the ruling. I understand the reason for long appointments of judges so they can make rulings outside of political considerations. However, lifetime appointments like SCOTUS make me uncomfortable. We probably have at least 20 more years of Roberts and Alito. Can we have expiring appointments instead?