June 26, 2013

Quote of the Day: Nobody Cares About Federalism

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From Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority in United States vs. Windsor:

The class to which DOMA directs its restrictions and restraints are those persons who are joined in same-sex marriages made lawful by the State….This opinion and its holding are confined to those lawful marriages.

In a nutshell, Kennedy says the Constitution doesn’t forbid states from banning same-sex marriage. But if a state allows same-sex marriage, the federal government can’t refuse to recognize it. Marriage is a state concern—in fact, it’s literally a textbook example of a state concern—not a federal one. Taken as a whole, this ruling was as pure a defense of federalism as we’ve seen in a while.

So why did all the conservative justices oppose it? Answer: Because no one actually cares about federalism. It’s merely a convenient veneer when you prefer one outcome over another. Yesterday state sovereignty was of crucial concern when conservatives gutted the Voting Rights Act. Today, they couldn’t care less about it.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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