Constitutional Rights
Government can be freedom’s best friend when it protects citizens’ constitutional rights. Here’s how the Goldwater Institute is ensuring your rights are protected.
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| Josh Hoyt, former undergraduate president of ASU’s Polytechnic campus. When he criticized the Arizona Students Association, the organization quickly threatened him with a lawsuit. |
The February 2006 edition of Arizona Attorney depicts a courthouse set ablaze in “Fair Courts Under Fire.” In it, Ted Schmidt of the law firm Kinerk, Beal, Schmidt, Dyer & Sethi, defends the virtues of Arizona’s merit-based selection system for judges but the article overlooks a significant flaw in the system.
Merit-based judicial selection commissions are used in counties with a population of more than 250,000. In counties with a smaller population, citizens still vote for judges.
Arizona Republic Editorial
For at least 43 years, personal adornment has been deemed constitutionally protected free speech. It goes back to when the U.S. Supreme Court concluded you could wear a black armband to school to protest the Vietnam War and the principal couldn't stop you.
In the movie "Sicko," Michael Moore takes Americans who have had problems getting medical care down to Cuba. In Cuba's collectivized system, Moore finds medical care for the sick and a model, according to him, for our country to emulate.
The problem is that medical care for Cubans is unlike that afforded to medical tourists. Conditions are so deplorable that diseases including leprosy, typhoid fever and tuberculosis, almost eradicated elsewhere, are becoming common in Cuba.
Constitutional rights are eternal. But the City of Mesa believes that if you don't enforce them promptly, your right to do so expires. That would have been bad news for Oliver Brown, given that the Topeka, Kansas separate-but-equal laws had been on the books for decades before he challenged them.
In May, the Arizona Department of Education reported in the Arizona Daily Star that Arizona's student test scores were eight percent above the national average. That figure has since been revised to put Arizona's aggregate TerraNova scores at the 51.9 percentile, which is 3.8 percent above the national average.
Though it is well over two centuries old, the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms never has been definitively interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court-much less enforced.
The amendment's orphan status among the Bill of Rights may soon change because the Supreme Court has agreed to review a ruling by a federal appeals court striking down the District of Columbia's sweeping restrictions on handgun ownership.
The American Civil Liberties Union received an early holiday present this year, but as a result thousands of Arizona schoolchildren may find coal in their stockings.
That's because a bogus legal challenge to Arizona's individual scholarship tax credit program will be heard by a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit that includes Judge Stephen Reinhardt.
In a recently issued ethics opinion, the Arizona State Bar declared, “a lawyer may ethically counsel or assist a client in legal matters expressly permissible under the Arizona Medical Marijuana Act...despite the fact that such conduct potentially may violate applicable federal law.” Whatever one may think of the wisdom of Arizona’s new medical marijuana law, the Bar apparently takes principles of state sovereignty seriously enough to shield lawyers from blanket claims that helping clients violate federal law is unethical.
There was a time when conservatives stood for smaller government. They fought taxes and believed in spending only on core government functions. Then we saw the era of "read my lips" and "compassionate conservatism." Politicians of all stripes decided that voters wanted carefree spending--and they delivered. That's what generated the spectacle unfolding in California. And during Arizona's go-go real estate boom, it empowered a Democratic Governor and a Republican Legislature to surrender the state's fiscal health to reckless spending.