Judge Hamilton has issued a ruling (pdf) denying Representative Bosma’s Motion to Reconsider his ruling enjoining sectarian prayer as part of official House business. The court addressed a few issues. The first had to do with the standing to sue and the proper remedy for the Constitutional violation. For a plaintiff to prevail in a case like this, among other things, he or she has prove 1) that the government was acting unconstitutionally; and 2) he or she has standing, essentially – the legal right to sue for the alleged wrong. In this case, the Court determined that the plaintiff had standing because taxpayer funds were being used to further the unconstitutional practice. Representative Bosma argued that, rather than ending the unconstitutional practice, the Court should limit itself to doing just enough to eliminate the Plaintiff’s right to sue — i.e. stop the use of taxpayer funds for the Constitutional practice. The Court denied that part of the motion on the grounds that the act was unconstitutional regardless of the taxpayer funding issue and the court had the right to stop unconstitutional practices.

The Speaker also complained that the injunction did not give him a roadmap as to how to enforce the decision. The judge suggested that this was because the numerous potential scenarios did not allow for such specificity, but suggested that people acting in good faith should have no problem. The judge warned ominously that if it turned out people weren’t acting in good faith, he could fashion remedies that were a whole lot more invasive than the one he issued.

Finally, the judge denied the request that the order be stayed pending consideration of the motion to reconsider because he had issued a decision on the motion prior to the beginning of the session. I presume that the next step will be for the Speaker to file a Notice of Appeal and to ask the court for a stay of the injunction pending the appeal.

It’s too late at night for me to provide much context here, but I thought I’d mention that I found the following passage amusing:

The Speaker asks whether the injunction concerning sectarian prayers is limited to “Christian denominations,” and “whether denomination in this context refers to Christendom as a whole, or is
more limited and means only that there should be no appeals on behalf of Methodism, Presbyterianism, or Roman Catholicism, for example.”

This latter question seems to reflect almost a willful obtuseness.

I too have noted some willful obtuseness on the part of Speaker Bosma with respect to this matter. I expect this latest decision to be followed by more press conferences by the Speaker where he is willfully obtuse about the critical distinction between government speech (which this case addresses) and private speech (which it does not.)

Update The Indy Star’s Richard Walton has a story on the judge’s decision here.

Update #2: Additional coverage of the Court’s decision:

Advance Indiana has a nice summary of the Court’s decision as well as a link to the Indiana Daily Insight coverage of the issue.

The Indiana Law Blog contains relevant passages from press coverage as well as links to prior coverage of the original decision and the motion to reconsider.

Torpor Indy quotes Judge Hamilton’s warning to Representative Bosma.

Hoosiers Ate My Brain offers the following:

House Speaker Stung in Judicial Shocker: In the “you didn’t have to be a political operative to see this one coming” department, Federal judge David Hamilton says “no” to House Speaker Bosma’s request he change his mind banning Jesus from House prayers. Bosma branded an idiot for asking.

Maeyan’s Rant of the Day weighs in, but I particularly liked one of the commenter’s sound advice:

Do not screw with the judge for he knows much more about the law then you do, and gets extremely sarcastic if you deliberately misunderstand him.

Also, he can lock your ass up for contempt of court.

Zen and the Art of Obsession also has a well thought out post. Perhaps I think it’s well thought out because it emphasizes the critical distinction between government speech and private speech.

It is hardly surprising that the chairman of the Indiana Democratic Party is critical of Governor Daniels. More interesting to me is that he used the Governor’s ever-shifting position on Daylight Saving Time as a launching point.

In 2003 and 2004, the governor campaigned on shifting the entire state to Central time. Once elected, he strong-armed the Indiana General Assembly into passing daylight-saving time, but he then backed away from the issue entirely, saying local governments should petition the federal government to be placed in a specific time zone.

. . .

Daniels did not attend the [time zone] hearings, but he sent a letter to the DOT requesting that at least one federal recommendation be overruled, despite a clause in state law requiring him to support the local petitions.

When asked about his time zone flip-flop, the governor recently told reporters that he had never supported Central time and attributed the campaign discrepancy to being a rookie candidate who “committed the sin of straight answers.”

This is a complicated issue, but the governor has done his best to make it even more complicated. People might be asking what this means and why it matters.

It matters to all Hoosiers because it is a matter of trust in the governor.

Mr. Parker goes on to list other ways in which Gov. Daniels hasn’t earned the trust of the citizens of Indiana:

Daniels promised voters many things during his campaign, including a unified statewide time zone. He promised to promote and fund education. He promised to help homeowners deal with skyrocketing property taxes. He promised not to send state contracts out of Indiana. He promised to recruit and retain companies that provide high-paying jobs.

Unfortunately for Hoosiers, the governor has either backed away from or turned his back on each of those promises.

Partisan politics? Sure. But, by and large true just the same.

According to the Marion Chronicle Tribune, WIBC, Network Indiana, and WISH-TV will be coordinating “Ask the Governor: A Conversation with Mitch Daniels.” The title is goofy — reminiscent of a Barbara Walters special or something, but the idea is good.

It will take place tomorrow night (Wednesday 12/28/05 at 8:00 p.m.) Here is the setup:

Radio station WIBC 1070-AM and television station WISH-TV, both from Indianapolis, are coordinating the program.

There will be two studio audiences in Indianapolis and one studio audience each in South Bend, Fort Wayne, Lafayette and Terre Haute. Between 7 and 8 p.m., Daniels will answer questions from those sites.

At 8 p.m., Daniels will answer more questions on a radio-only hookup through WIBC and its Network Indiana affiliates.

Questions will be submitted ahead of time, but Daniels won’t see them in advance, organizers said. They said they want to make sure Daniels gets a “broad range of topics raised, rather than 14 consecutive inquiries about daylight-saving time.”

(The Governor has had something like 14 different positions on Daylight Saving Time, so 14 consecutive questions might be in order. But, I’m a wee bit biased on the topic.)

I’m not sure why this report took the form of an editorial, but in any event, I’m glad they’re putting the word out.

I was going to be helpful and post a link to a list of state-wide Network Indiana affiliates, but, try as I might, I could not find a list with that particular information. Here is a list of Network Indiana’s sports talk affiliates. I suspect the overlap between that list and the stations that will carry Conversations with Mitch is substantial, but I can’t guarantee it. The broadcast is also available online at WIBC.

The method of participating directly seems unnecessarily obscure. In Lafayette, I found this article from December 21, 2005 telling what to do if you want to participate.

If you’d like to participate in the live studio audience at WLFI-TV, send your contact information including name, address and daytime telephone number to cmorisse@wlfi.com. Be sure to include the question you would like to ask the governor.

If there is any information on participation at the WIBC website, it is buried deep. The programming schedule has the event listed as Today in the News with Steve Simpson. Simpson’s web page is so out of date, it discusses the fact that counties will have to submit petitions to the USDOT for consideration of a time zone change. That dates it at about August.

Also, as of 11:22 EST, the WISH-TV submission page tells you to “enter the information below” for a chance to be selected to ask a question, but there is no form below.

WSBT in South Bend actually has a form for submitting questions.

According to the Terre Haute Trib Star the deadline to submit questions via WTHI-TV in Terre Haute was yesterday, December 26, 2005.

With the amount of pre-screening going on and relative obscurity on the issue of how to participate, permit me to be skeptical of how much of a true “town forum” this will actually be.

The Indy Star has an article entitled Groups unite to fight predatory lending which focuses on loans secured against one’s house that are purposely structured to be such that the borrower cannot afford the payments, resulting in default and foreclosure.

In a potentially related matter, I saw that Senator Paul has introduced SB 70 which sets charges for small consumer loans.

Provides that for a supervised loan of at least $100 but not more than $1,000, a lender may charge both: (1) an acquisition charge of not more than 10% of the principal amount; and (2) a monthly installment account handling charge based on the amount of the loan; instead of the finance charge that otherwise would apply to a supervised loan.

I don’t have enough time this morning to determine whether SB 70 effectively allows an increase in such loans or whether this is merely shuffling the charge from one form into the form of acquisition charges and monthly installment accounts.

The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette’s Sylvia Smith has a Question and Answer with Mark Souder about the past year.

Ms. Smith started the article like this:

Eleven years ago this month, Mark Souder was packing his bags to head back to Washington, but this time as one of 435 elected House members instead of as an aide. It was a heady time for Republicans, who had won enough seats in the 1994 elections to hold the House majority for the first time in 40 years. Souder’s defeat of a three-term Democratic incumbent helped create that majority.

That introduction made me think the first question would be about Rep. Souder’s 1994 campaign promise to serve only 12 years. But, no such question was written about in the article.

I was surprised to see that he seems prepared to throw some Republicans under the train in the wake of corruption revelations. He thinks that DeLay may get off on the money laundering charge in Texas and thereby look better when real corruption charges surface in connection with lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Souder also doesn’t try to mount any kind of defense for Ohio Republican Bob Ney.

Rep. Souder also expresses potential uneasiness about Bush’s warantless wiretapping of U.S. citizens.

I should be clear, he doesn’t come out and say that DeLay or Ney or Bush have actually done anything wrong, but he seems to be positioning himself in such a way that he can create distance if any of those scandals really explode.

The Indy Star has an editorial entitled Intelligent design fails readiness test. The problem with Intelligent Design isn’t readiness. The problem is that it’s not science. As Ed Brayton puts it, “ID is little more than a vague form of creationism – creationism with all of the specific testable statements taken out.” If it’s not testable, it’s not a scientific theory. And the Indy Star misses that very important point when it says:

ID, as a scientific theory, simply isn’t ready for primetime presentation to high school or middle school students.

To be “ready for primetime,” Intelligent Design would have to put forth testable hypotheses which is to say, it would have to become something it is not: namely, science. The Indy Star correctly concludes that Intelligent Design shouldn’t be on lawmakers’ agenda this year, but for the wrong reasons.

Here comes the poor, oppressed John Hostettler, trying to make the United States safe for the Christianesque. An article in the Courier Press discusses Hostettler’s “Public Expression of Religion Act.” Hostettler resolutely refuses to understand the difference between government speech and private speech. When schools and local governments get sued for pushing indicia of Christianity on the public, including the non-Christian public, they get sued under the Establishment Clause. Hostettler doesn’t like the Establishment Clause, so he deliberately (or possibly ignorantly, but I doubt it) conflates restrictions on government speech with restrictions on private speech.

Apparently Hostettler’s website, for which I do not have the stomach this morning, has an info-mercial like “interview” between Hostettler and his spokesman Matthew Faraci:

“This year, it seems that Christmas has become controversial.” He wrapped up the introduction by saying if Tiny Tim grew up to be an elected official in the United States, he could be sued for saying “God Bless us every one.”

Faraci asked: “Why have our laws been twisted to prevent public officials from their right of free speech? And can anything be done to restore that right?”

Hostettler’s answer is that yes, that right can be restored if his colleagues pass PERA, which would end the ability of the American Civil Liberties Union to recoup legal fees when it wins cases on governmental religious displays.

He says that some officials back away from religious displays that are constitutional because of the fear of being sued.

When Faraci began to interview Hostettler, Faraci asked about the Tiny Tim analogy: “That’s not an exaggeration, is it?”

“No, Matthew, not at all, the current threat to public officials is real, it’s ongoing,” Hostettler said. “It is a problem that needs to be addressed in Washington, D.C.”

I’m really pretty tired of the persecution complex from the Christianesque. I’m trying to be careful recently to separate these loud political types from true Christians. I have a great deal of respect from true Christians who I see as the folks who draw strength from their faith, listen to the teachings of Christ, and try to do some good in the world. The Christianesque talk a lot about being Christians, but mainly for the purpose of taking offense at the slightest pretext. Seemingly such folks are more concerned about tending to the faith of others than to their own.

If Hostettler is not being disingenuous, then I am a bit frightened by our elected representative’s inability to distinguish between government speech and private speech. We saw the same thing from Representative Bosma when Judge Hamilton made a ruling about what sorts of religious speech was permissible from the Speaker’s podium as official House business.

One of the things that is so annoying about the “look at me” grandstanding of the Christianesque is that it falsely creates the impression that Christians are mostly occupied with whining about how persecuted they are. The reality is that most Christians are humbly trying to follow the example set by Jesus and to make the world a better place. But you would never know that from the amount of ink spilt on guys like Hostettler and Bosma.

In a letter to the editor in the Elkhart Truth, Senator Joe Zakas says he is considering legislation for a “toll road tax credit.”

With a “toll road tax credit,” Hoosiers who use the Indiana Toll Road would be reimbursed for tolls paid by receiving a credit against their state income taxes. I believe that this is a good idea, and have asked the non-partisan Legislative Services Agency to research this proposal and draft such language for consideration during the upcoming session of the General Assembly.

To me, that doesn’t seem much different than just paying for the road out of the state’s general fund. So why wouldn’t we just cut out the shenanigans and just go ahead and pay for it out of the general fund?

An Associated Press story entitled ID law called burden on voters reports that a lawsuit has been filed challenging Indiana’s recently passed voter identification law. The law requires state or federally issued identification. As I recall, during the session, the Republicans specifically rejected proposed amendments that would have permitted flexibility in permissible identification documents.

Democratic Party attorneys William Groth and Geoffrey Lohman wrote, making repeated trips to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles and other agencies to obtain documents to prove their identity would cost potential voters money for gas, fees and lost pay they likely cannot afford and discourage many people from voting.

All of this, they argued, is required to combat a problem that the state has no solid evidence exists.

The law that took effect July 1 does not apply to absentee voting, where fraud is well established, Groth and Lohman wrote.

Georgia’s voter ID law was ruled unconstitutional recently. I haven’t read the opinion in that case though, so I don’t know whether the same issues apply.

An article in the Evansville Courier Press says that Rep. Dennis Avery plans to introduce two bills designed to help soldiers and their families. The first one would allow “residents to designate $1 of their state tax refunds to a fund that would provide emergency financial aid to families of service members on active duty.” The second one “Military Family Leave for parents and spouses of service members who are preparing for deployment. The proposed unpaid leave would offer job protection in the style of the Family Medical Leave Act.”