Suchergebnisse

AbstractThis paper considers the efficiency of the political market in the California State legislature. I analyzed the property tax limitation voter initiative, Proposition 13. I found that districts which supported Proposition 13 more strongly were more likely to oppose the incumbents regardless of whether the incumbents had the different preferences for property taxes from their districts. I also studied how legislators voted on the bills adopted after the passage of Proposition 13 to finance local governments. I found that legislators tended to follow the constituents' will after they received the voters' tax-cutting message expressed by the passage of Proposition 13.

As part of the U.S. federal elections in Nov-ember 2008, voters in California narrowly passed Proposition 8, a ballot initiative that eliminated same-sex marriage rights in that state. Against this political-legal backdrop, the movie Milk, based on the life of gay activist Harvey Milk, was released to audiences across North America. Proposition 8 and its aftermath infused social and cultural meaning into the critical acclaim Milk publicly received, and the movie itself became a way to both galvanize and anchor support for gay (marriage) rights. I contend that there is a particular racialization of queer sexuality and proximity to whiteness that links this moment of law and culture together. The paper examines the "knitted-togetherness" of the film's racially normative representations and the racializing of homophobia that occurred on both sides of the Proposition 8 debate, one that continues the protracted fractioning of race as separate from sexuality within mainstream lesbian/gay politics. ; Dans le cadre des élections fédérales américaines de novembre 2008, les électeurs en Californie ont réussi à faire passer de jus-tesse la Proposition 8, une initiative de scrutin qui a éliminé les droits des personnes ayant effectué un mariage de même sexe dans cet état. Le film Milk, réalisé contre cet environnement politiquement légal, et basé sur la vie du militant Harvey Milk, est sorti sur les grands écrans en Amérique du Nord. Suite à la sortie Proposition 8, ont infusé un sens social et culturel dans au succès publique de Milk. Le film est lui-même devenu un moyen de galvaniser et d'ancrer du support pour le droit du mariage gai. J'affirme qu'il y a une racialisation particulière de la sexualité gaie, et une proximité à la race blanche, qui lie ce moment légal et culturel ensemble. Cet article examine l'union des représentations norma-tives racialisées du film, et la racialisation de l'homophobie qui advient des deux côtés du débat sur Proposition 8, un débat qui continue le prolongement de la fraction de la race, comme une séparation de la sexualité au sein des politiques gaies et lesbiennes.

A major procedural question looms over the two marriage cases currently before the U.S. Supreme Court: Do the parties who seek to defend the marriage-recognition bans have standing to advance their views? The question arises because the governments that would have Article III standing, by virtue of their enforcement authority, are not defending their own laws. Instead, in Hollingsworth v. Perry, private parties are attempting to take up the state government's mantle to defend Proposition 8, which withdrew marriage rights from same-sex couples in California. And in United States v. Windsor, five members of the House of Representatives leadership seek to defend the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in the name of the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group (BLAG). As a preliminary matter, these parties' formal authority to assert the government's standing is questionable. In Perry, the California Supreme Court ruled that the ballot measure's sponsors could act in the government's stead to defend "their" initiative, but that ruling lacks support in California law. BLAG's authority in Windsor is also fragile. BLAG did not obtain approval from the House of Representatives until nearly two years after first intervening to defend DOMA in federal court (and well after filing its petition for a writ of certiorari in Windsor). And even with that approval, BLAG represents only the House, rather than the full Congress that passed DOMA. In addition, in both Windsor and Perry, there are significant problems with the lower courts having permitted intervention at all. There are two more fundamental difficulties with the Perry petitioners' and BLAG's claims to standing. First, each presents the Article III double-dipping problem to which this Essay's title refers. The problem arises because there are parties asserting the government's interest and, therefore, the government's standing, on both sides of each case. That is, the California and United States governments have taken the position that their exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage is unconstitutional while the Perry petitioners and BLAG seek to argue, also on the government's behalf, that the exclusions are constitutional. The second problem arises from the premise, essential to the standing claims of both the Perry petitioners and BLAG, that governments can confer their Article III standing on private actors and subsets of legislators. The difficulty is that the government's standing derives from its interest in enforcing its laws, which is not an interest shared by either group. The remainder of this Essay elaborates these two points in the context of the Perry and Windsor cases. I argue that both the double-dipping problem and the limits on a government's ability to transfer its standing to private actors in this context leave Proposition 8's sponsors and BLAG without Article III standing to press their positions. Nor can either group of would-be defenders demonstrate the "concrete and particularized" stake it would need to have standing in its own right rather than on the government's behalf.