Nevada's federal district courts reject the lawsuit brought by 24 GOP lawmakers and a group of state taxpayers. (Read the decision here.)
I'll be fascinated by the legal pros' take on this, but the ruling appears sound to me. The judges said they lack jurisdiction to deal with the complaint of the lawmaker plaintiffs, who should have gone to the U.S. Supreme Court first.
In the second part of the ruling, the judges say the non-legislator plaintiffs "state no claim" against the defendants (the Legislature, Gov. Kenny Guinn, etc.), because there's nothing to claim. The Legislature has enacted no tax law; Guinn has signed nothing. The implication I take from this is that the judges were suggesting that if Guinn signs any bill that was passed with less than a two-thirds majority, the non-legislator plaintiffs may have grounds to sue after all.
An appeal to the 9th Circuit is imminent ... and the Legislature keeps working on a tax-and-spend deal.
D'oh!
On the wall of the office in our house is a framed poster commemorating 1995 -- the only year the Atlanta Braves have won a world championship during their current remarkable run -- and it includes the ticket stubs from the two postseason games I attended that year, the only two I've witnessed in my lifetime. I was in Cleveland twice, thanks to my buddy Al Dawson ... we saw a LCS game vs. Seattle (Randy Johnson pitched!) and one of the Braves' losses. Between the two ticket stubs is a Tom Glavine baseball card from that year. Glavine won the clinching game in the Series ... a brilliant, 1-0 victory in which the only run resulted from a David Justice home run. (I saw Justice play for the Durham Bulls way back when, long before Halle Berry, for instance.) Now Glavine is toiling for the hated Mets and he's got to be wondering what the hell he was thinking when he left Atlanta.
The Braves are 30 (soon to be 31) games above .500, the pitching is finally rounding into shape, the offense may finally be good enough to win in the postseason, and there are the Muts, dragging around in the cellar, unloading payroll, destined to spend the declining years of Glavine's likely Hall of Fame career rebuilding. On one level, I feel bad for Glavine. He's by all indications a standup guy, intelligent, an excellent representative of the MLB Players' Association, and a true pro ... a guy who's probably going to win 300 games on guile rather than a blazing fastball.
Had I my druthers, the Braves would have kept him and left Greg Maddux go, but Glavine had a lot to do with that. Things are shaping up nicely in the Chop Shop after all. Maddux will be gone after the season, and the Braves' rotation will be on average at least five years younger than it was at the end of last year, poised to play in the postseason for the rest of the decade. Too bad the guy who anchored the rotation when these good times started chose to not be around for the final years of his career.
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