States Rights & the power of the Vice President

I will do a post covering major recent events in American Politics soon, but in the meantime take a look at this Joe Biden interview in Rolling Stone Magazine which discusses his influence and why he is the "last guy in the room" after every meeting with Obama:


A blog post from the Economist magazine discusses the importance of States rights and also a recent law in Texas which seems to underline the rights of state officials to ignore federal law. So, the federal government may pass a law to limit access to guns, but Texas certainly doesn't have to enforce that law:

A quick reminder that the debate about gay marriage has reached the Supreme Court and that some kind of decision over California's Proposition 8 (a popular vote which banned it) is due some point in late May or June. Bloomberg has an article about it here, indicating the decision may not be entirely straightforward. The decision over Obamacare was not straightforward either, although some simplification is sensible for the A2 exam.

The short version of the Obamacare decision is that the law is constitutional, but only if classed as a tax (which the Federal government has the right to levy). The problem for the Obama administration is that Obamacare was not called a tax and in fact they denied that it was.

To finish, there is a great article in the Economist this week which discusses the various methods Obama has used to get round the obstructionist Congress. You can find it here. He has used the control of the executive to ignore certain parts of legislation, announced this using signing statements, and used "recess appointments" to get members of the executive confirmed without Senate approval. Great stuff.

[Picture Credits: Top - Rolling Stone. Middle - The Economist. Bottom - Hoai Phuong, Flickr]