Word: courts
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...Supreme Court on Monday overturned Judge Sonia Sotomayor's ruling in a controversial reverse-discrimination case, prompting a new round of attacks on her by Republicans. By a vote of 5 to 4, the court ruled that the city of New Haven improperly denied promotions to a group of white firefighters who had done better on a test than minority firefighters had. But aside from the ruling's implications for antidiscrimination law, the most intriguing issue raised by the decision is what it might mean for Sotomayor's influence on a court that she is almost sure to join...
...seek additional terms.) Zelaya, whose term ends early next year (he's limited to one), had hoped to hold an informal, nonbinding plebiscite on Sunday to gauge whether Hondurans want to change their national charter and allow, among other things, more than one term for Presidents. But the Supreme Court last week ruled the Sunday vote illegal; the Congress, where Zelaya loyalists are a minority, and the attorney general rejected it as well. (See pictures of the Honduras coup on LIFE.com...
...well need to do more than keep his cool. The U.S. recently argued that Cuba should be reinstated in the Organization of American States (which convened an emergency meeting over Honduras on Sunday) only when it demonstrates a commitment to democratic norms. Zelaya's defiance of his Supreme Court may not have been the behavior of a leader who respects the rule of law; but when soldiers in Latin America haul a democratically elected President out of his palace and into exile, the U.S. has no choice in this day and age but to roundly condemn it. Not just...
Zelaya vowed to hold the referendum anyway, insisting that Honduras' grinding poverty stemmed from a constitution - written in 1982 at the height of that country's brutal repression of leftists - that rigs the game for the most powerful families and interests. When his military chief, citing the Supreme Court ruling, said last week that the armed forces opposed the vote, Zelaya had him fired. The Congress then began deliberations over whether Zelaya was still mentally fit to govern...
...though, it was Zelaya's opponents who appear to have become unhinged. Technically - before Sunday, anyway - Honduras' Justices and generals could claim they held the legal high ground: Zelaya was, after all, blatantly defying a high-court ruling, as well as his legislature and attorney general. He was, they could argue, behaving like the populist caudillo his opponents warned he wanted to be. But their violent Sunday-morning response has made them look like the Latin oligarch lackeys of old - and has in fact lent credence to Zelaya's suggestion that they were indeed just defending a constitution fashioned exclusively...