Media Alert: Charmaine In USA Today, Reuters, HuffingtonPost, Catholic OnLine
We had a film crew from South Africa at the house today interviewing Charmaine on the campaign.
The rest of the world is confused at our continuing frictional discourse on abortion. Most of the world has real restrictions on abortion on national levels. The world does not understand that we do not.
The USA is one of the few countries in the world that has abortion on demand for any reason through all nine months (and longer under the Obama Born Alive Abortion Plan). Including China where the government makes the demand — not the mother.
Unless the baby is a girl — then everyone wants the child dead…
Or in India where abortion also is used for sex selection to allow only male babies born. Because boys are superior to girls as all advanced nations know.
USA abortion proponents tell us that the “health of the mother” is the only exception. Scare quotes are used in print and air quotes are used in conversation as John McCain does.
The quoting is used because the “health” issue is the exception that swallows the rule as Clarke Forsythe at Americans United for Life reminds us. Because anything, anything can be interpreted as “health.” As in mental health. As in a bad hair day. Any reason is sufficient reason to abort.
There are no exceptions.
The Supreme Court has so ruled. Not we the people.
This was the background for the reporting by Joan Biskupic at USA TODAY in
Election comes at key point for high court’s stance on abortion,
“This is a historic election,” says Charmaine Yoest, [Ph.D.] president of Americans United for Life. “With the next president having the opportunity to appoint one, two or even more justices,” she adds, the election could change the law “on the life issue.”
Ed Stoddard at Reuters writes, Win Or Lose, Sarah Palin To Be A Political Force,
If McCain loses the exit polls will be scoured but many pundits seem likely to blame it on centrist concerns about Palin during a financial crisis.
“It’s really clear that there are some people out there who would like to make her a scapegoat if things don’t go their way Tuesday,” said Charmaine Yoest, president of Americans United for Life Action, which opposes abortion rights.
“But she’s has very clearly connected with the base of the party and the life and family voters and I think that is going to give her a really strong base going forward whatever happens,” she said.
Jessica Arons writing at the Huffington Post has the best summation of the state-by-state, incremental Pro-Life strategy in Not All Politics Is Local: Connecting the Dots on Abortion Initiatives,
California Proposition 4 is endorsed by Americans United for Life, among others.
This is an organization that has worked to slowly erode women’s access to abortion care with bills that limit available abortion methods after 12 to 13 weeks of pregnancy; require waiting periods, biased counseling, and ultrasound viewings prior to an abortion; create burdensome and medically unnecessary regulations for abortion clinics; assert that fetuses feel pain during an abortion; and allow health care employees to refuse to counsel, refer, or treat patients for any service to which they object.
She intends it to be dire and evil, but it comes out good and accurate. Something Biblical in there…
Deacon Keith Fournier at Catholic On Line has SPECIAL: Interview with AUL Action’s Charmaine Yoest on ‘Open Letter to Barack Obama’
Your Business Blogger(R) also recommends Values Voters
Makeup of U.S. Supreme Court Hangs in the Balance
J. Margaret Datiles, staff counsel for Americans United for Life representing the interests of the weakest citizens of the United States and abroad has an article in The Washington Times, A price on your head. Good read. Would get us ready for money saving suicide plans under an Obama administration.
From the USNA-At-Large,
Federal courts—especially the Supreme Court—are always looking for a legal or procedural basis to clear their calendars. At this point in our nation’s history, the federal courts have made this an art form. In addition, they always try to dispose of a case on legal technicalities, so that they can avoid ruling on the main issues. The Supreme Court does this through a variety of evolved procedures, like the way they vote on a petition for certiorari, which needs four Justices to vote for court review. Some limited cases can be directly appealed to the Court.
I argued appellate cases (state and federal), but like most lawyers, never had a case before the Supreme Court. However, some friends that had this experience told me that the slightest deviation from their Byzantine procedural and formatting rules is sufficient to have your case thrown out.
One of the court’s favorite devices, right behind “lack of jurisdiction,” is standing. The federal courts do not want every aggrieved citizen filing law suits to clog their calendars. Here is summary description of how they would get rid of the Berg lawsuit against Obama and the issue of his place of birth:
“There are three constitutional standing requirements:
Injury: The plaintiff must have suffered or imminently will suffer injury – an invasion of a legally protected interest which is concrete and particularized. The injury must be actual or imminent, distinct and palpable, not abstract. This injury could be economic as well as non-economic.
Causation: There must be a causal connection between the injury and the conduct complained of, so that the injury is fairly traceable to the challenged action of the defendant and not the result of the independent action of some third party who is not before the court. Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency (global warming caused by EPA’s refusal to regulate carbon dioxide emissions satisfied element of causation for Massachusetts’s alleged injury of loss of coastland).
Redressability: It must be likely, as opposed to merely speculative, that a favorable court decision will redress the injury.
Prudential limitations
Additionally, there are three major prudential (judicially-created) standing principles. Congress can override these principles via statute, but Congress cannot change the three constitutional standing requirements.
Prohibition of Third Party Standing: A party may only assert his or her own rights and cannot raise the claims of a third party who is not before the court; exceptions exist where the third party has interchangeable economic interests with the injured party, or a person unprotected by a particular law sues to challenge the over-sweeping of the law into the rights of others, for example, a party suing that a law prohibiting certain types of visual material may sue because the 1st Amendment rights of others engaged in similar displays might also be damaged as well as those suing. Additionally, third parties who don’t have standing may be able to sue under the next-friend doctrine if the third party is an infant, mentally handicapped, or not a party to a contract.
Prohibition of Generalized Grievances: A plaintiff cannot sue if the injury is widely shared in an undifferentiated way with many people. For example, the general rule is that there is no federal taxpayer standing, as complaints about the spending of federal funds are too remote from the process of acquiring them. Such grievances are ordinarily more appropriately addressed in the representative branches.
Zone of Interest Test: There are in fact two tests used by the United States Supreme Court for the Zone of Interest:
Zone of Injury – The injury is the kind of injury that Congress expected might be addressed under the statute.[5]
Zone of Interests – The party is within the zone of interest protected by the statute or constitutional provision.[6]
Recent development of the doctrine
In 1984, the Supreme Court reviewed and further outlined the standing requirements in Allen v. Wright, a major ruling concerning the meaning of the three constitutional standing requirements of injury, causation, and redressability.[7]
In the suit, parents of black public school children alleged that the Internal Revenue Service was not enforcing standards and procedures that would deny tax-exempt status to racially discriminatory private schools. The Court found that the plaintiffs did not have the standing necessary to bring suit.[8] Although the Court established a significant injury for one of the claims, it found the causation of the injury (the nexus between the defendant’s actions and the plaintiff’s injuries) to be too attenuated.[9] “The injury alleged was not fairly traceable to the Government conduct respondents challenge as unlawful”.[10]
In another major standing case, Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, the Supreme Court elaborated on the redressability requirement for standing.[11] The case involved a challenge to a rule promulgated by the Secretary of the Interior interpreting §7 of the Endangered Species Act of 1973 (ESA). The rule rendered §7 of the ESA applicable only to actions within the United States or on the high seas. The Court found that the plaintiffs did not have the standing necessary to bring suit, because no injury had been established.[12] The injury claimed by the plaintiffs was that damage would be caused to certain species of animals and that this in turn injures the plaintiffs by the reduced likelihood that the plaintiffs would see the species in the future. The court insisted though that the plaintiffs had to show how damage to the species would produce imminent injury to the plaintiffs.[13] The Court found that the plaintiffs did not sustain this burden of proof. “The ‘injury in fact’ test requires more than an injury to a cognizable interest. It requires that the party seeking review be himself among the injured”.[14]
Beyond failing to show injury, the Court found that the plaintiffs failed to demonstrate the standing requirement of redressability.[15] The Court pointed out that the respondents chose to challenge a more generalized level of Government action, “the invalidation of which would affect all overseas projects”.[16] This programmatic approach has “obvious difficulties insofar as proof of causation or redressability is concerned”.[17]
Taxpayer standing
Taxpayer standing is the concept that any person who pays taxes should have standing to file a lawsuit against the taxing body if that body allocates funds in a way that the taxpayer feels is improper. The United States Supreme Court has held that taxpayer standing is not a sufficient basis for standing against the United States government, unless the government has allocated funds in a way that violates a specific prohibition found in the Constitution. (See Flast v. Cohen, 392 U.S. 83 (1968)). The Court has consistently found that the conduct of the federal government is too far removed from individual taxpayer returns for any injury to the taxpayer to be traced to the use of tax revenues. In DaimlerChrysler Corp. v. Cuno, 547 U.S. 332 (2006), the Court extended this analysis to state governments as well.
However, the Supreme Court has also held that taxpayer standing is constitutionally sufficient to sue a municipal government in a federal court. States are also protected against lawsuits by their sovereign immunity. Even where states waive their sovereign immunity, they may nonetheless have their own rules limiting standing against simple taxpayer standing against the state. Furthermore, states have the power to determine what will constitute standing for a litigant to be heard in a state court, and may deny access to the courts premised on taxpayer standing alone.
In the U.S. Commonwealth of Virginia, the Supreme Court of Virginia has more-or-less adopted a similar rule. An individual taxpayer generally has standing to challenge an act of a city or county where they live, but does not have general standing to challenge state expenditures.” [Source: Wikipedia]
This is a pretty fair summary of the issue at hand, and why the Supreme Court will throw out Berg’s lawsuit. As Joe laments, the federal government doesn’t want to hear from its citizens, and the courts are no exception.
In the 2000 case of Bush vs. Gore, the court took the case because important federal issues were involved, and because the plaintiff (Bush) had undeniable “standing,” since his election was at stake. This raises the issue of who, if anyone, should sue to resolve Obama’s murky place-of-birth issue. How about John McCain? Does John, who refuses to talk about Rev. Wright, have the courage to take this on? Will we soon have a President-elect who was actually born in Kenya, or forfeited his U.S. citizenship when he moved to Indonesia as a child and became an Indonesian citizen?
…
One of the at-large may have commented on this before, or maybe i read it in one of the three million e-mails i’ve read in the last couple of months, but it seems to me that credence should be given to the argument that anyone who has, at some point, taken the oath to “defend and protect” the constitution (e.g., members of congess when they are sworn in, judges, military personnel, law enforcement types, (maybe even lawyers?), automatically has “standing?” if they don’t, then what do those words mean in the context of a swearing in?
that is not to say that i don’t believe that every american citizen should have standing — i believe they do. my argument is that the above list, at the very least, should have standing.
and, to take it one step further, what will it mean when (or if) mr. enigma is sworn in and pledges to “protect and defend” the constitution, when he has already stated publicly that he does not agree with some of it in principle? sorry, i guess i just don’t understand.
and finally, maybe it’s just a procedural thing and one our constitutional law experts among the at-large can explain it, but “…applying to Justice David Souter for an immediate injunction…” has got to be the joke of the century so far! fat chance of that ever happening, wouldn’t you say??!
Jack and Charmaine,
In your attempt to state world views on abortion I am so saddened that you stated what you did about the Chinese people and baby girls. You couldn’t be more wrong!! Surely you know that conservatives in general and Christians depend on people like you to state truth even through a media such as a blog. In case you don’t know, my Yu Yi Ke was given life in China because her parents wanted her to have life. She was placed where she would be found for adoption. Please get your facts straight when making your passionate case on abortion policy.
Sincerely,
Suzanne
Suzanne, thank you for the correction. I didn’t know that there have been real changes to China’s one child policy — both in the law and in practice.
I also didn’t know that China’s culture now places equal love on the first born — regardless of gender — no matter if the first born is either a girl or boy.
I look forward to seeing the new data in China that will show a normal newborn gender ration of 1.05 boys for every 1.00 girl. What is the ratio in China today? 150 boys born for every 100 girls?
And you are certainly right about the culture changing in China. Oddly, it will be through the legal route — lawyers will change China — for good.
In contrast to the USA where most lawyers seem to make the country worse — liberal trial lawyers, anyway.
The difference is that a compelling number of lawyers in China are Christians.
(The only Christian trial lawyer in America is John Edwards. And even he is mistreated. Lookit the pious wife Elizabeth Edwards, Isn’t she going to sue him? For what? A typical liberal diversion? Didn’t she know that a little cheating is what liberals do? As the Bible says, “How dare you sue one another!” Come on Elizabeth, forgive and forget. See how forgiveness helped Hillary Clinton?)
Anyway, look to China to soon be a missionary sending Christian nation where the population has embraced the teachings of Jesus Christ in a national revival — a great awakening. Much like South Korea.
Thank you for commenting,
Jack