Isaac Laquedem

Oregon: if you have to ask, carpool

While at the Baldock rest area (the one on Interstate 5 a few miles south of Wilsonville) recently I saw, propped against a wall, a cardboard sign that read, "Pregnant, hungry, out of gas," next to a folded towel, a bowl, a small pack, and a few personal items, but no person.  Curious, I looked around, and saw a group of four people a hundred feet off, one of whom appeared to be pregnant.  A few minutes later, I noticed that one of the four, a well-nourished male, was now sitting on the towel next to the pack, but with a different sign that read only "Out of gas."

This piqued my curiosity.  Perhaps the four are students of marketing, engaging in some research by testing different approaches and signs to see what provokes the greatest generosity from passing travelers.  Or maybe they independently descended on the rest area and worked out a timeshare.  The most likely explanation, I decided, is that they arranged a carpool, heeding Metro's precepts by reducing their vehicle-miles-traveled and panhandling sustainably.

Isaac takes a fresh look at what might come after the CRC failure

With the bloated Columbia River Crossing project mostly dead, we can turn our attention to a better, finer, cheaper solution.  One possibility occurred to me that would open a route for light rail to reach Vancouver some day, not interfere with interstate road and train traffic, and be reasonably easy to accomplish.  (I think it would cost about $300 million.)  That is to replace the railroad bridge with another lift or swing-span bridge that is 39 feet higher than the existing bridge.  Here's why.

Most of the lifts of the Interstate Bridges are either for maintenance or for barge traffic.  Many of the barge lifts are because it can be difficult to navigate a set of barges underneath the hump of the Interstate Bridges, where the clearance is 72 feet, and then across the river to the swing span of the railroad bridge.  The fixed portions of the railroad bridge have a clearance of 33 feet.

If the railroad bridge were 39 feet higher then its clearance would be the same as the fixed portion of the Interstate Bridges.  Any vessel that could make it under the Interstate Bridges' fixed spans could make it under the new railroad bridge in a straight line instead of requesting that the Interstate Bridges lift so that the vessel could avoid the turn between the two bridges.  The new railroad bridge would still require a lift span or a swing span  to accommodate the occasional taller vessel from the Vancouver industrial district, but barges shorter than about 60 feet would no longer need to request the Interstate Bridges to lift.  This is a twist on the Common Sense Alternative to the CRC, which contemplates adding a lift span to the railroad bridge in line with the hump on the Interstate Bridges; I'm suggesting that we raise the entire railroad bridge and not just add a lift span.

The new railroad bridge would be built to accommodate four tracks: two for the Burlington Northern and two for eventual light rail.  Until light rail is constructed the unused area could accommodate a bikeway.  ODOT and WSDOT could still play with the freeway ramps to their hearts' delight, without demolishing the heart of Hayden Island for a massive highway project.

The media nickname for the newborn British princeling?

I can't be the only one who's mentally tagging the newborn son of Prince William of Wales and the Duchess of Cambridge (known only as Kate Middleton on this side of the pond) not with his official, sonorous name of "George Alexander Louis," but simply as "Boy George."   The world of entertainment stole a royal nickname when a singer named Stacy Ann Ferguson appropriated "Fergie" from Sarah, Duchess of York (the former Sarah Ferguson), so it's only fitting for the House of Windsor to grab a name from show business.

The county commissioners apply the Republican standard to their Democratic chairman

It's instructive to compare the reaction of the other county commissioners to Jeff Cogen's affair with the impeachment of President Clinton.  Both involved  a leader having a consensual affair with an indirect subordinate who worked in the White House, though Mr. Clinton was impeached not for his involvement with Monica Lewinsky but for lying about it under oath.  A mostly party-line vote in the Senate acquitted Mr. Clinton, with the Democrats arguing that Mr. Clinton's private involvement with a subordinate did not reflect on his fitness to hold office, and the Republicans maintaining that it did.  One oddity of the current situation in Multnomah County is that the four other commissioners, all Democrats, want Mr. Cogen to resign for conduct eerily similar to President Clinton's.  This implies that if they had been Senators in 1999 they would, under the same principles, have all voted to convict President Clinton and remove him from office.  That's going to make for some interesting conversation if Hillary Clinton should ask for the commissioners' support in the 2016 presidential primary.

Amanda Fritz joins in asking Isaac's question about Sonia Manhas

The Oregonian reports this afternoon that Portland City Commissioner Amanda Fritz has asked the same question I posed this morning: who at Multnomah County gave the order for Sonia Manhas to be fired?  As written by Brad Schmidt:  "Fritz declined to comment on Cogen's decision to reject calls from the Board of County Commissioners for his resignation.  But Fritz did say the county should explain why Manhas was forced to resign Wednesday and who in the county pushed for it."

Who indeed pushed for Ms. Manhas to leave the county, making some say that the county has a double standard, one for women and one, much more lax, for men?  I believe that with one exception, everyone above Ms. Manhas in the county hierarchy -- every one of the suspects -- is female: her supervisor, the county attorney, the deputy county attorney, and the four commissioners.  Mr. Cogen himself is the lone exception, leading to the Homeric conclusion that unless Mr. Cogen himself ordered her to lose her job, Ms. Manhas became the victim of a double standard applied not by the male establishment, but by other women.

Sonia Manhas says she was pushed out of her county job, but by whom?

I followed this morning's hearing at Multnomah County with great interest.  The commissioners listened to public testimony on a resolution, introduced by Judy Shiprack, that calls on county chair Jeff Cogen to resign because of his affair with Sonia Manhas, a manager in the county's public health department.  Ms. Manhas has resigned her position, saying that unnamed county officials forced her to quit. The commissioners voted 4 to 1 for the resolution, with Mr. Cogen understandably voting against it.

One argument that Mr. Cogen's detractors are making is that since the other person in the affair was forced to resign over this issue, in fairness Mr. Cogen should resign also.  Let's assume that unnamed county officials in fact forced Ms. Manhas to resign. Consider the possibilities.

First, Ms. Manhas may have violated county policies so egregiously that she deserved to be fired.  In that case the question should be whether Mr. Cogen also violated county policies so egregiously that he should resign.  The public evidence so far indicates that he didn't. 

Second, Ms. Manhas may not have violated county policies sufficiently to merit being fired.  In that case the question the commissioners should be asking is not whether Mr. Cogen should resign, but who at the county unjustly pushed Ms. Manhas out.  The number of suspects is limited:  the five commissioners, Ms. Manhas's supervisor, and the county attorney.  It strikes me as very odd that the county has not disclosed who decided to fire Ms. Manhas.

Third, it's possible that Ms. Manhas did not tell the truth when she said that county officials forced her to resign, but in that case the county would have promptly denied her statement and said that she resigned of her own free will and not under pressure from her employer.  The county hasn't said so, so I rule this out.

Thus, it's wrong to say "Ms. Manhas had to leave, so Mr. Cogen should also," unless both of them violated county policy to the same egregious degree.  If the other commissioners believe that Ms. Manhas was unjustly terminated, then they should find out who ordered her to leave.  There's time enough to look into what Mr. Cogen did.

Jeff Cogen should stay put

I think people were saving up their scandals waiting for Professor Bogdanski to start his blog sabbatical, including perhaps the one involving Multnomah County chair Jeff Cogen and county health department manager Sonia Manhas, who had a workplace affair that recently ended.  It's a story with all the elements of the genre:  rising political star, attractive employee, out-of-town trips, flirtatious e-mails, and so on.  The crescendo of disclosures led the Oregonian to call on Monday for Mr. Cogen to resign.

Much as I'd instinctively like to join the chorus to "throw the rascal out," I've been searching through all of the smoke looking for the fire, and I haven't found it.  The suspicion that their relationship brought Ms. Manhas preferential treatment doesn't so far have any facts behind it.  Her push to work two days a week in his office was an idea that Mr. Cogen said he liked, but so far as has been reported, did nothing to bring about.  The only county money he expended on their affair, at least as reported so far, is $50 on a hotel room upgrade in Atlanta. (At that modest rate, one Rudy Crew is worth dozens of Jeff Cogens.)  Notably absent from the smokestorm is any allegation that Mr. Cogen and Ms. Manhas broke a law or a county policy.

Mr. Cogen and Ms. Manhas have brought shame on themselves and embarrassment to his wife, her husband, and their children.  But merely being the object of derision is not, even in politically correct Portland, a firing offense.  I'd like to see Mr. Cogen stay in his job and let the voters judge him in the next election based on his performance in the boardroom.   I do predict that he won't be going to many out-of-state conferences between now and then.

Someone is a little confused about how to provide access for the disabled

Isaac dissects Hollingsworth v. Perry (the other SSM case) and shows that Chief Justice Roberts is smarter than you think

Last week I wrote about the Supreme Court's decision in United States v. Windsor, in which the Supreme Court held unconstitutional the provision of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) that defined marriage as between one man and one woman. Justice Kennedy, writing for the court majority, decided the case on federalism grounds:  the definition of marriage has traditionally been left to the states, some states have defined marriage to be between one man and one woman, others have defined marriage to be between two adults without regard to gender, and it isn't really the federal government's business to impose its own definition of marriage that disqualifies certain state-recognized marriages from being recognized by the federal government.  In the particular case, two female New York residents were legally married in Canada.  After DOMA was adopted, New York passed al law that recognized same-sex marriages that were legal where made as being legal in New York.  One spouse died and left her estate to Windsor, the surviving spouse.  Windsor claimed the marital estate tax deduction, the IRS denied the deduction based on DOMA, and the Supreme Court eventually held that the one-man-one-woman portion of DOMA was unconstitutional.  Rights that New York chose to recognize, Justice Kennedy wrote, could not be taken away by the federal government.

The same day, the Supreme Court issued its opinion in Hollingsworth v. Perry, the Proposition 8 case from California.  The voters of California passed the Proposition 8 initiative, basically a mini-DOMA that forbade same-sex marriage in California.  A same-sex couple challenged the initiative.  The state declined to defend Proposition 8, and a federal trial court held that Proposition 8 unconstitutionally discriminated against same-sex couples.  The chief petitioners of Proposition 8 asked to intervene in the case, on the ground that the state wasn't defending their initiative.  The California supreme court said that under California law, the chief petitioners of an initiative have standing to defend their ballot measure if the government won't, and allowed them into the case.  The petitioners appealed the trial decision to the court of appeals, which affirmed the trial court and held that Proposition 8 was unconstitutional.  The petitioners then appealed to the Supreme Court.  The Supreme Court vacated (cancelled) the decision of the court of appeals, holding that because the chief petitioners, who didn't want to marry persons of the same sex, would be in the same position whether Proposition 8 is upheld or struck down, they had no standing to defend the measure.  Even though California law (the court said) gives the petitioners special standing to defend their measure, the federal government doesn't have to recognize the special rights that the state court grants.  This, of course, is contrary to the Court's decision of a few minutes earlier, in which it insisted that the federal government must recognize rights granted by the state on matters of state concern, such as marriage; apparently in the Supreme Court's view state legislation is not as important to the states as marriage is.

The kicker comes in the  clever way that Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the Hollingsworth majority, disposed of the case.  If he and the Court had affirmed the ruling of the court of appeals, then it would be the law of the land that Proposition 8, and by extension similar measures in other states, are unconstitutional: that is, states could not constitutionally prohibit same-sex marriage.  He didn't do that; instead, he and the Court vacated the Ninth Circuit ruling on the ground that the petitioners didn't have standing to defend Proposition 8, and therefore the Ninth Circuit should not have heard their appeal.  That means that the Ninth Circuit's ruling that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional is not the law any more.  The decision of the trial court is still in place, I think, but that decision applies only to California and doesn't bind any other state or federal court.  That's pretty clever.

But wait -- there's more.  The really clever, or possibly diabolical, thing is what will happen if the case gets back to the California federal trial court.  Unlike when it heard Hollingsworth v. Perry several years ago, that court is now bound by the Supreme Court's decision in Windsor, which holds that as a matter of constitutional law, the states can regulate marraige and decide who can get married.  (The Windsor court majority very carefully did not say that states were required to recognize same-sex marriages.)  The upshot?  The Windsor court in effect said that Proposition 8 is constitutional, and the Hollingsworth court kept the California decision from preventing the other 49 states from banning same-sex marriage.

Chief Justice Roberts pulled off an amazing bit of legal legerdemain: the result of the two victories for proponents of same-sex marriage is that 49 states can now constitutionally ban it.

The Portland Police Association complains because the police chief is daylighting as a working cop

I can't be the only one perplexed by the latest complaint of the Portland Police Association, the union that represents the rank and file of Portland's police.  As reported here by the Oregonian, the PPA has filed a grievance alleging that Mike Reese, the Chief of Police, went out on patrol with a lieutenant on three days in May, instead of assigning the patrol shifts to PPA union members at overtime rates of pay.  The union asserts, possibly correctly, that the City's contract with the PPA prohibits officers who are not members of the PPA from going on patrols.  Chief Reese is not a member of the PPA.   (The higher-ups in the Police Bureau are members of a different union.)

Not every wrong needs to be righted.  A police union that complains because a Portland police officer, in this case the chief, is actually out in a car patrolling has got a tin ear (I'm tempted to say a brass ear) for the mood of the public and the City Council. It's hard to like a union that wants to keep the police chief off the streets.  Curiously, it doesn't appear that the PPA has complained about Chief Reese's practice of filling patrol shifts for the PPA members who have been named Employee of the Month, something that the chief will have to stop doing if the union wins this round.