Section: Law

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Assume that regardless of political tradition, a few Republican nominees to the court decide to retire under Kerry's watch - if reports are to be believed, several are ready to retire now for health reasons alone. Who would Kerry put up as nominees?

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Realizing that a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage faces little chance of passing soon, if ever, House Republicans yesterday discussed alternative approaches, including stripping federal courts of jurisdiction over the issue, passing a federal law to define marriage and using the appropriations process to ban gay marriage in Washington.

All the legislative action on gay marriage is currently in the Senate, but the House GOP is rapidly developing its own tactics. Leaders will take their first step next week when they take up Rep. John Hostettler’s (R-Ind.) “jurisdiction stripping” bill. This would bar federal courts from hearing lawsuits related to gay sex and marriage.

Any "B" horror film director can tell you that monsters are always the scariest when they're kept lurking in the darkness. At the end of January 2004, the Justice Department's Inspector General completed its Patriot Act-mandated six-month review of civil rights and civil liberties complaints levied against actions conducted under the Patriot Act. The results were that out of 1266 complaints, the Inspector General found precisely zero abuses of the Patriot Act. That's right, in the report by the agency Congress designated to investigate allegations of abuse under the Act, the Patriot Act has been responsible for violating the civil rights of exactly no one.  If you are surprised to hear this, it's no wonder. The major networks and major news papers barely breathed a word of it.

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For many years Dollywood has been privileged to offer free admission to individuals who had a total and permanent vision or hearing loss, and/or who have a medical or physical condition which made them permanently dependent on a wheelchair. However, due to recent civil litigation filed against Dollywood regarding the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), we have been advised that legally our disability policy must be changed.

Effective January 01, 2004, we will not be able to offer free or discounted admission to anyone based on their disability or level of disability. From a legal standpoint, our staff is not qualified to make decisions on who should or should not be given free admission to the park based on their level of disability. For those reasons we regret to inform you that individuals who have been admitted under our previous disability policy will no longer be allowed to enter free of charge.

I haven't been able to find an internet copy of this suit, but I think we can safely infer what happened. Dollywood had a policy which allowed certain extremely disabled people get in for free. Someone with a disability less severe than that threshold didn't get in for free. She got angry and sued. Rather than spending tens of thousands of dollars on future lawsuits they decided to drop the policy which was once helpful to certain disabled people in favor of a policy which doesn't help any disabled people.

I am certain that this is not an intended consequence of the ADA. In fact, I suspect that if you were poll all the people who voted for it, at most one or two would be ok with that result. Why is our legislative and judicial system so weird that a law can end up doing almost the exact opposite of what was intended? I almost want there to be some sort of common sense clause in Congressional Acts.

I know that I am providing questions with no answers, but isn't there some way we can stop this from happening? Allowing things to become this ridiculously legalistic just can't be good for our society in the long run.