legislative affairs

A federal judge has ruled that the city legislative districts in Cranston, Rhode Island, are unconstitutional because 3,433 inmates housed in the state's only prison are counted as city residents and allocated to a city ward, The Huffington Post's Cristian Farias reports.

Each of the city's wards are divided into 13,500 residents each, but one ward includes the 3,433 inmates. U.S. District Judge Ronald Lagueux concluded that this situation violates the one person, one vote principle of the U.S. constitution because including prisoners--who cannot vote--in one ward dilutes the voting power of all city residents, Farias reports.

Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe's efforts to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act was thwarted because former Senator Phillip P. Puckett quit the state Senate, The Washington Post's Laura Vozzella reports. McAuliffe had hoped to sneak budget language past the Republicans to expand Medicaid on his own: "Then McAuliffe’s camp found an obscure bit of language in the previous year’s budget that appropriated extra Medicaid funds if — and only if — a newly formed (and hopelessly deadlocked) state Medicaid commission agreed to expansion. If the language was ripped out of that context, the thinking went, McAuliffe could claim that it authorized him to spend an extra $2 billion a year in federal Medicaid funds."

Puckett was enticed to quit by Republicans who discussed jobs for himself and his daughter, Vozzella reports. The jobs nor the Medicaid expansion have come to fruition.

Legislation to ban employment discrimination against LGBT Americans is stalled in Congress. But Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has cleared the way for President Barack Obama to protect LGBT federal contractors through executive action, Huffington Post reports. While backers of the legislation would prefer for the legislation to pass, they also would like to see the president protect as many people as possible as his authority allows for. "Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) noted that Obama taking executive action on the issue would be in line with his recent promise to be more aggressive using his own authority where Congress is deadlocked," The Post further reports.

The Scottish Parliament voted overwhelmingly in favor of same-sex marriage, STV reports. Now Northern Ireland is the only country in the United Kingdom where same-sex couples can't access matrimony.

The Indiana House has advanced a proposed state constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, the Associated Press reports. So far the full House only took a technical vote to accept the action of the House Elections Committee in favor of the measure. A floor debate is expected next week.

The Indiana House Elections Committee voted in favor of a proposed constitutional amendment to bar same-sex marriage last night, the Indianpolis Star reports. Nine Republicans were in favor and three Democrats were against the measure. If passed, the measure would go onto the November ballot for voters to consider. The measure has already been passed by legislators once before, but it has to be passed again before voters get the chance to decide whether to amend the state constitution to incorporate the ban.

The bill was changed from the Judiciary Committee to the Elections Committee because there were not enough votes to pass it out of the Judiciary Committee, The Star further reports.

New York University law professor Burt Neuborne thinks it's a good thing that the U.S. Senate has decided to go nuclear on the filibuster, The Wall Street Journal reports. It's not because Neuborne wants to see more of President Obama's judicial nominees on the bench. It's because he thinks having "the modern filibuster morphed into a de facto super-majority voting rule" made the votes cast by senators mathematically unequal in violation of "'Article V, and the one‐Senator one‐vote principle of the Seventeenth Amendment,"' The Journal further reports.