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...House Dems were also criticized by some Republicans for refusing to take up a bill that would have put in place a special election for Obama's vacant Senate seat rather than leave it open to appointment. Their defense was that it would be prohibitively expensive to hold a vote, especially since candidates would have to run again in 2010, when Obama's current term expires. (As it stands, no one knows how and when the seat will be filled, since Blagojevich has made it clear he is not going to make the appointment under the current cloud...
With an 111-page legal brief that has surprised legal scholars, Brown reversed course and repudiated his previous statements indicating he'd likely support the legality of Prop 8. Instead, on Friday, he urged the state's Supreme Court to overturn the vote, a move that would infuriate conservatives who are still white-hot mad over the court's historic 4-3 decision that earlier this year prohibited all forms of discrimination against gays, and mandated the state issue marriage licenses to gay couples. In a wide-ranging interview, Brown told TIME that his view of the legal merits...
...Right from the beginning, it looked like the only question was whether the vote was an amendment to the state constitution or something more, a revision," Brown told TIME, explaining his original stance in favor of Prop 8's legality. "But the precedents for saying that the vote was a revision were very few. Based on that, I didn't think we could call it a revision, and therefore Prop 8 looked valid...
...that formed a foundation for our Constitution, that we enjoyed even before California became a state. That was a new way to look at this." Rights like that, he came to believe, can't be taken away, at least not by something as simple as constitutional amendment by popular vote. Instead, those rights he said, are "inalienable" in the same sense that the Declaration of Independence speaks of inalienable rights...
What would it take to take away such an "inalienable right"? Brown said that's up for the Courts to decide, but it would probably take something more like what is required to amend the U.S. Constitution, a three-fourths vote, for instance. "There has to be a special burden imposed on an effort to take away these rights," he said. "Prop 22 [the previous initiative banning gay marriage] passed with 61% of the vote, and yet the Supreme Court said it was invalid. You can't just come back with [November's] 52-48 vote and write the same...