The legal challenge of a 2004 in-state tuition law reached the finish line Thursday, as the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case. The law has been allowing about 200 eligible kids of illegal immigrants to pay in-state tuition at Kansas’ public colleges and universities — and better their lives and the state’s economy in the process. The rejections at the federal district court and appellate levels were based on the plaintiffs’ lack of “standing” to sue, so no court has yet passed judgment on the law itself. But it’s good to know this case has run its course.
Kansans don’t seem to be warming to the Sebelius administration’s exhaustive efforts to block a coal-fired power plant expansion near Holcomb. Though one survey last November found that 62 percent of Kansans strongly agreed with the administration’s initial decision to deny the plant’s air-quality permit, 48 percent of the 500 Kansans surveyed earlier this month by Rasmussen Reports said the state should allow the plant to be built, compared with 32 percent against the plant.
Justice Antonin Scalia’s majority opinion in the handgun-ban case explored the historical context for the Second Amendment’s language on gun ownership. In the process, Scalia quoted from abolitionist Massachusetts Sen. Charles Sumner’s famous 1856 speech about “Bleeding Kansas”:
“The rifle has ever been the companion of the pioneer and, under God, his tutelary protector against the red man and the beast of the forest. Never was this efficient weapon more needed in just self-defense, than now in Kansas, and at least one article in our national Constitution must be blotted out, before the complete right to it can in any way be impeached. And yet such is the madness of the hour, that, in defiance of the solemn guarantee, embodied in the amendments to the Constitution, that ‘the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed,’ the people of Kansas have been arraigned for keeping and bearing them, and the senator from South Carolina has had the face to say openly, on this floor, that they should be disarmed — of course, that the fanatics of slavery, his allies and constituents, may meet no impediment.” Three days later, in reaction to that speech, S.C. congressman Preston Brooks attacked Sumner and beat him with a cane into unconsciousness.
City leaders were right that the new downtown arena would spawn economic activity — it’s already happening.
This is from an adult entertainment classified ad in The Eagle for an escort service: “Arena workers get $10 discount.”
The legal challenge of a 2004 in-state tuition law reached the finish line Thursday, as the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case. The law has been allowing about 200 eligible kids of illegal immigrants to pay in-state tuition at Kansas’ public colleges and universities — and better their lives and the state’s economy in the process. The rejections at the federal district court and appellate levels were based on the plaintiffs’ lack of “standing” to sue, so no court has yet passed judgment on the law itself. But it’s good to know this case has run its course.
