By Lesley Weidenbener
TheStatehouseFile.com

INDIANAPOLIS – Four Hoosier couples are challenging the state’s marriage law, saying it’s unconstitutional for Indiana to refuse to marry same-sex couples or recognize gay unions from other states.

The lawsuit – filed in the U.S. District Court of Southern Indiana – says the state law violates the U.S. Constitution’s guarantees of equal protection and due process.

The suit is similar to one in Kentucky, in which a federal judge ruled that the commonwealth must recognize same-sex marriages performed in another state.

Attorney General Greg Zoeller said Friday that his office will defend the state’s marriage law. 

“As state government’s lawyer, I must defend the state’s authority to define marriage at the state level within Indiana’s borders,” Zoeller said in a statement. “People of goodwill have sincere differences of opinion on the marriage definition, but I hope Hoosiers can remain civil to each other as this legal question is litigated in the federal court.”

The lawsuit is unrelated to efforts by the General Assembly to put the state’s definition of marriage – the union of one man and one woman – into the Indiana Constitution. Lawmakers approved the proposed constitutional amendment this year but it needs approval from the General Assembly again in 2015 or 2016 to go on the ballot for ratification.

However, even if the amendment were in place now, it would not be a defense against the lawsuit. That’s because it’s filed in federal court and challenges the law for violating the U.S. Constitution.

The plaintiffs in the suit include two females who are engaged and want to marry in Indiana, two males who want to be married in Indiana, two females who married in Massachusetts in 2008, and two females who married in New York last year.

Their suit says that Indiana “has no rational, legitimate, or compelling state interest in treating same-sex couples any differently from opposite-sex couples.”

It also claims that marriage is a fundamental right and that the U.S. Constitution requires it to be recognized across states.

“Same-sex spouses who have entered into legal marriages in other jurisdictions have a reasonable expectation that they will continue to be protected by the rights and protections conferred by marriage when they relocate to another state,” the suit said.

Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a federal law defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman and left it up to states to make decisions about the definition of a legal marriage.

Since then, a district judge ruled that Kentucky must recognize marriages in other states. Also, a federal court has ruled that an amendment to the Oklahoma Constitution banning same-sex marriage violates the U.S. Constitution. That ruling came one week after a similar ruling was made on a same-sex marriage ban in Utah.

Zoeller’s office has defended the state’s marriage law against legal challenges in state court. And the Indiana Attorney General’s Office was one of the lead authors of two amicus briefs filed in the U.S. Supreme Court in support of other states’ laws defining marriage in a traditional way.

Lesley Weidenbener is executive editor of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.

President Obama is a magician without equal. With the waving of his pen, he can make thousands of jobs disappear.

Radio Shack, the venerable electronics retailer, just announced it would be shuttering 1,100 stores following a dismal performance in the past holiday season. Office-supply giant Staples followed with a plan of its own to close 225 stores and focus on its more profitable online business.

This is what happens when Washington policies stifle innovation and throw obstacles in the path to prosperity.

The Labor Department put the picture in broader terms, announcing that the official unemployment rate ticked up from 6.6 percent to 6.7 percent last month.

This figure is in many ways misleading. In the past year, the population grew by some 2.2 million, but the number of people working remains virtually unchanged — the labor force participation dipped one-half percent to 63 percent. It hasn’t been that bad since Jimmy Carter asked daughter Amy for economic advice.

The global outplacement firm Challenger Gray & Christmas issued a report Friday estimating that American business firms were planning to cut more than 41,000 jobs, with retail and financial services taking the largest cuts.

This jibes with the store closings by Radio Shack and Staples, and the results of an extensive survey of small banks conducted by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, which finds that community banks are hit disproportionately harder by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street regulation law.

Small community banks get up close and personal. They have a specialized knowledge of their customer base and could make loans based on this were it not for the one-size-fits-all Dodd-Frank rules.

The result is small businesses are missing out on loans, to the detriment of both the small banks and small businesses. Jobs that would have been created, aren’t. This is entirely predictable, but it’s the liberal faith that more laws make things better.

Successful and struggling businesses such as Staples realize that they must update the business model to thrive in the 21st century. Going online represents a radical departure from the past, but it makes sense.

The Obama administration, however, clings to old-fashioned Keynesian prescriptions that didn’t work in the 20th century and aren’t working now. Despite the five years of stagnation and failure, the White House still thinks that an easy-money policy and a flood of government spending will cure all ills.
In a rapidly evolving economy, the private sector must be free to innovate, to exploit technological and other changes, to seize the opportunity to expand and create jobs. Instead, the Obama administration continues with the tax-and-spend, borrow-and-spend program that created stagflation under Mr. Carter.

Even Mr. Obama’s own former chief economic adviser, Christina Romer, now says cutting government spending by a dollar generates more growth than increasing federal spending by a dollar.

The Federal Reserve can’t keep printing money forever. The scheme of buying billions of dollars in bonds to keep interest rates low is, even on its own terms, supposed to be a short-term solution. The idea is long past its expiration date.

Mr. Obama hasn’t changed in five years, and it grows tedious and tiresome. He would be a crowd pleaser if he could pull some jobs out his hat. But there’s no magic needed. All he has to do is get out of the way.

Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/mar/7/editorial-the-great-disappearing-act/#ixzz2vNuZfA5s

INDIANAPOLIS – In a few more days, the 2014 session of the Indiana General Assembly will be over.

And the postmortems will begin. I fearlessly predict that the governor and his super-majorities in the House and Senate will grandly pronounce that the session was a resounding success.

Unfortunately for the citizens of Indiana, they are wrong.

They will attempt to make you believe they have improved our state’s economy by passing a “jobless creation” program that will serve only to increase corporate profits at the expense of putting Hoosiers back to work.

Instead of ending the divisive debate over who can marry whom in Indiana, they prolonged it for another two years.

They did nothing to reduce the burdens faced by our middle class or make the path easier for our children to prepare for a quality education.

But there were efforts this session to help Hoosiers.

Here is what Indiana House Democrats proposed:

…putting Hoosiers back to work and helping them earn a decent wage:

• Increasing the state’s minimum wage from $7.25 to $8.25 an hour (House Bill 1126).
• Giving the people of Indiana a chance to say whether or not they supported an increase in the state’s minimum wage (House Bill 1126).
• Identifying our best and brightest in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), and encouraging them to stay In Indiana by giving them a break from paying state income taxes and helping them pay off their student loans (House Bill 1201 + Senate Bill 330).
• Studying Indiana’s wage equity gap that finds Hoosier working women earning only 73 cents for every dollar earned by a man (House Bill 1226).
• Restoring the state’s Small Business Innovation Program to help companies engaged in technological innovations (House Bill 1020).
• Establishing Manufacturing Reinvestment Accounts to help small businesses purchase equipment and hire new workers (House Bill 1020).
• Creating an Indiana Goes Back to Work Tax Credit to encourage employers to hire unemployed and underemployed Hoosiers (House Bill 1020).
• Increasing the state’s earned income tax credit, called “the best anti-poverty, the best pro-family, the best job creation measure” by none other than Ronald Reagan (House Bill 1211).

…helping Hoosier families and workers:

• Asking Congress to restore unemployment benefits for more than 70,000 out-of-work Hoosiers (House Bill 1346).
• Increasing the exemption the state provides families with children to $2,000 per child (House Bill 1211).
• Studying the reasons behind Indiana’s appalling numbers of sexual assaults of teen girls (Senate Bill 227).
• Getting rid of Indiana’s failed wage suppression law (House Bill 1346).
• Funding solutions to find the best ways to reduce the number of child deaths in Indiana (Senate Bill 408).
• Creating a Hoosier Women Veterans Program to help those who have sacrificed so much for our country after they have completed their service (House Bill 1117).

…avoiding divisive social issues:

• Getting rid of the proposal attempting to amend the state Constitution to tell the world who can marry whom in Indiana (House Joint Resolution 3).

…helping our communities:

• Providing more than $500 million in state funding for streets, roads and bridges (House Bill 1002).
• Helping firefighters, police and EMTs purchase the everyday equipment they need to keep their communities safe (House Bill 1266).

…restoring trust in government:

• Requiring the state’s Inspector General to provide regular updates on investigations of fraud or abuse in state government (House Bill 1121).
• Studying the effectiveness of our state’s efforts at privatizing taxpayer services (Senate Bill 394).
• Requiring the State Board of Finance to keep the public better-informed whenever it transfers millions of your tax dollars from one account to another (Senate Bill 106).
• Prohibiting “pay-to-play” in Indiana by preventing people and companies seeking taxpayer-funded incentives from contributing to candidates for statewide offices and the Legislature (House Bill 1020).
• Requiring the Indiana Attorney General to keep us better-informed about cases involving your tax dollars (House Bill 1005).
• Asking the Indiana Economic Development Corporation to be more honest about the effectiveness of our state’s job creation programs (Senate Bill 394).
• Getting rid of excess educational bureaucracy in state government by eliminating the Center for Education and Career Innovation (CECI) (House Bill 1028).

Washington’s preoccupation with Ukraine has pushed the continuing decay of Obamacare from the headlines. And what little news about Obamacare there has been is just more of the same – delays, a lack of transparency and the usual efforts by Republicans to repeal and replace Obamacare. Yesterday, the White House announced yet another Obamacare delay, this time waiving the law’s minimum health care benefit requirements to allow Americans to keep their canceled health care plans until 2017. This came as the House passed H.R. 4118, which would suspend the individual mandate penalty, by a margin of 250-160 (including 27 Democrats who voted for the bill). And the latest enrollment numbers from the Department of Health and Human Services will be announced in the next week, but the administration continues to hide the composition of the 3.3 million who have managed to sign up for Obamacare so far.

Anyway, from what we know about the president’s management style and his lack of interest in details, we can assume that President Obama either didn’t know or didn’t much care about what was actually in Obamacare. Who knew that the president was among those who then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was talking to when she famously said, “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it”? Obama either believed that you could keep your doctor and your health care plan because that was what showed up in the prepared speeches he was given to read, or he willfully lied to the American people. Either way, because the president didn’t really know what was in the bill, he doesn’t mind changing it when it doesn’t fit his political purposes. The distraction of Ukraine and the media’s numbness to the stream of Obamacare travails is providing time and a smokescreen for Obama to prepare a big announcement for after March 31, 2014: The BIG PUNT, i.e. a delay in the individual mandate.

The White House and their Democratic allies must realize that they are on a trajectory to lose the Senate in 2014 and are likely coming to terms with the idea that delaying the individual mandate is one way to attempt to change that path. Look for the president to bite the bullet and give in to the vulnerable Democrats, consultants, pundits and other credible handwringers who are telling the president they must try anything and everything to alter the course of the elections. Otherwise, the last two years of the president’s time in office will be spent either vetoing or signing into law Republican legislation, and only conservative-approved nominees will be confirmed for any federal post by a Republican Senate.

Obamacare is a terminal political cancer for incumbent Senate Democrats, including senators Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), Mark Pryor (D-Ark.), Mary Landrieu (D-La.), Kay Hagan (D-N.C.) and Mark Begich (D-Ala.). Senators Mark Udall (D-Colo.) and Mark Warner (D-Va.) are showing early stage symptoms as well. Combine those races with the open seats in West Virginia, South Dakota, Iowa and Michigan and it’s obvious the Democrats are struggling.

Obamacare is not getting any more popular and neither is the president. It’s obvious that the incremental moves the White House has made to try and temper voters’ anger isn’t working.

Source: Washington Post

Scott,

Likewise, I have had numerous complaints about what Mr. Ziemer has charged our City. Please proceed with the request forthwith. 

John Friend

This e-mail was sent to the CCO by City Council Attorney Scott Danks.  Mr. Danks requested that the CCO posted this e-mail soon as possible.  This e-mail is posted without editing , bias or opinion.