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Who said it? Who said it?

Nancy Pelosi.

Update: Here is the full quotation:

When asked why she is so confident the Supreme Court will uphold the health care law, Pelosi says, “Because I know the Constitution.”

“This bill is ironclad,” she continued. “It is ironclad. Nobody was frivolous with the Constitution and the health of the American people in writing the bill,” she said. “So, that’s where my confidence springs from, the merit of the bill and the nature of the Constitution. The makeup of the court, well, we’ll see.”

Nobody was frivolous with the Constitution? “Are you kidding?”

Chief Judge Kozinksi finds a substantive due process right to “Control Public Dissemination of a Family Member’s Death Images” based on the viral nature of the internet, and how images are propagated.

Marsh claims that when she learned that Coulter sent her son’s autopsy photograph to the press, she was “horrified; and suffered severe emotional distress, fearing the day that she would go on the Internet and find her son’s hideous autopsy photos displayed there.”2 Marsh’s fear is not unrea-sonable given the viral nature of the Internet, where she might easily stumble upon photographs of her dead son on news websites, blogs or social media websites. This intrusion into the grief of a mother over her dead son—without any legitimate governmental purpose—“shocks the conscience” and therefore violates Marsh’s substantive due process right.3 . . .

Marsh has a constitutionally protected right to privacy over
her child’s death images.

Very Omniveillancy.

I previously blogged about Jamal’s article, which is now on SSRN:

This essay, part of a symposium on Jack Balkin’s Constitutional Redemption and Sanford Levinson’s Constitutional Faith, seeks to explain the curious disregard many originalists show toward the Fourteenth Amendment. On common originalist premises, analysis of the text, history, and structure of the Fourteenth Amendment should predominate in discussions of incorporated rights, in affirmative action cases, and in federalism disputes, and yet originalist interventions into such discussions tend to minimize the amendment and Reconstruction-era history more generally. This essay suggests that the Fourteenth Amendment and Reconstruction represent less usable history than the Founding for several reasons: the Reconstruction amendments were largely failures in their own time; the open-ended language of the Fourteenth Amendment is not well-suited to settlement of modern controversies; and the Reconstruction era holds an awkward and contested place within our national memory. These limitations are consistent with the notion that originalism in practice is as much an ethical as a hermeneutic project.

This argument makes similar points about Originalism at the Right Time.

From this to this!

 

Doug Berman links to a story from the San Diego Union-Tribune discussing how prisons in Cali have dealt with Brown v. Plata a year later:

Just a few months ago, California’s inmates were packed into double- and triple-stacked bunk beds in prison gymnasiums, classrooms and other areas never meant for housing.

Now those beds are empty.

The prison population is declining, but not because there are fewer criminals. Instead, a new state law shifted the responsibility for some lower-level offenders to the county jails, which are filling up.

State officials have “taken the monkey off their back and put it on ours,” said Sheriff Bill Gore, whose department runs seven county jails.

In the nearly eight months since the law took effect, Gore has used a number of strategies to ward off jail crowding, including early releases, but he insists the county is handling the load.

He and other county officials have said that with proper funding the local authorities can do better than the state at rehabilitating criminals so they’re less likely to end up back behind bars.

“We can’t warehouse these inmates,” Gore said.

So how many of the 33,000 prisoners ordered released have been released (about a third):

Public safety realignment, as the law is known, took effect Oct. 1.

Gov. Jerry Brown approved it last year to help fix a budget gap and help the state comply with a 2011 U.S. Supreme Court order to reduce the prison population by 33,000 inmates by June 2013.

And the law is working as designed.

In January, the corrections department announced that the population of inmates housed in its 33 institutions had dropped by more than 11,000 inmates over six months. This month, the population was pegged at 122,305 — 153.6 percent of capacity — according to the most recent figures available.

“The population is going down,” said Dana Simas, a department spokeswoman, who acknowledged county officials’ frustrations over rising jail populations.

“We never purported that it would be without a few bumps in the road,” Simas said.

Even with the recent inmate reductions, some doubt the state will meet the Supreme Court’s deadline.

Prison officials want the court to allow them to hold the inmate population at 144 percent of capacity — rather than the 137.5 percent as originally ordered — while maintaining constitutional standards for medical and dental care, Simas said.

“Our conditions have vastly improved,” she said.

What has the social cost (!) been of releasing these prisoners into the public?

 But, at the very least, these pictures document that a constitutional ruling by the Supreme Court combined with a serious state effort to respect that ruling can quickly engineer some needed changes to a prison system that had for many years been stalled in a political and practical quagmire concerning overcrowding.

I am hopeful that there will be a number of serious and systematic efforts to take stock of what has followed from the Plata ruling in California.  I have little doubt that the demands on local facilities as a result of the urgent need to move bodies out of state facilities has created various new problems.  Still, this story confirms my gut instinct that, a year after the controversial Plata ruling, the 5-4 decision has produced a net gain for not only the inmates who were suffering Eighth Amendment violations, but also for the entire state of California.  At the very least, there seems to be limited evidence (or at least limited reporting of evidence) that the dire predictions of doom and California crime waves right after the Plata ruling (which appeared in the Plata dissents and on this blog) were a bit overstated and hyperbolic.

We shall see.

It was not a theoretical question: Mr. Obama has placed himself at the helm of a top secret “nominations” process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, of which the capture part has become largely theoretical. He had vowed to align the fight against Al Qaeda with American values; the chart, introducing people whose deaths he might soon be asked to order, underscored just what a moral and legal conundrum this could be.

Mr. Obama is the liberal law professor who campaigned against the Iraq war and torture, and then insisted on approving every new name on an expanding “kill list,” poring over terrorist suspects’ biographies on what one official calls the macabre “baseball cards” of an unconventional war. When a rare opportunity for a dronestrike at a top terrorist arises — but his family is with him — it is the president who has reserved to himself the final moral calculation.

“He is determined that he will make these decisions about how far and wide these operations will go,” said Thomas E. Donilon, his national security adviser. “His view is that he’s responsible for the position of the United States in the world.” He added, “He’s determined to keep the tether pretty short.”

This power is startling.