Two Important Pieces of News

1. As expected, the Supreme Court of the United States announced today that it will rule on the constitutionality of same-sex marriage bans:

The justices agreed to consider four cases from Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee. They will be consolidated and heard together.

That sets up a schedule under which the court will hear 2 1/2 hours of oral arguments in April and issue a ruling before its current term ends in late June.

..."We've reached the moment of truth—the facts are clear, the arguments have been heard by dozens of courts, and now the nine justices of the Supreme Court have an urgent opportunity to guarantee fairness for countless families, once and for all," said Chad Griffin, president of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest gay rights organization.

The justices will consider two questions—whether the 14th Amendment to the Constitution requires states to license marriages between same-sex couples, and whether it requires states to recognize such marriages when licensed by other states.

Don't fuck it up, SCOTUS. Don't fuck it up!

2. Outgoing Attorney General of the United States Eric Holder has barred police forces from seizing property without evidence of a crime:

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Friday barred local and state police from using federal law to seize cash, cars and other property without proving that a crime occurred.

Holder's action represents the most sweeping check on police power to confiscate personal property since the seizures began three decades ago as part of the war on drugs.

Since 2008, thousands of local and state police agencies have made more than 55,000 seizures of cash and property worth $3 billion under a civil asset forfeiture program at the Justice Department called Equitable Sharing.

The program has enabled local and state police to make seizures and then have them "adopted" by federal agencies, which share in the proceeds. The program allowed police departments and drug task forces to keep up to 80 percent of the proceeds of the adopted seizures, with the rest going to federal agencies.

"With this new policy, effective immediately, the Justice Department is taking an important step to prohibit federal agency adoptions of state and local seizures, except for public safety reasons," Holder said in a statement.

There are some exceptions (e.g. weapons) which make sense, but now people's cars can't be "Equitably Shared" away from them, even if they are guilty of no crime at all.

Unfortunately, "police can continue to make seizures under their own state laws," but this is very good news all the same.