"Why did they start with abortion clinics? Because it begins with the letter 'A'?" asked Judge Richard Posner.

At the oral argument in the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals yesterday.

The subject was Wisconsin's new law requiring doctors at abortion clinics to have access to hospitals within 30 miles, which has been temporarily blocked by the lower court.

At times appearing exasperated, Posner repeatedly interrupted [Wisconsin assistant attorney general Daniel] Lennington, asking why lawmakers — if it's true they saw the law as primarily a public health measure and not an anti-abortion bill — focused on abortion clinics and not other outpatient clinics, such as those performing laparoscopic surgeries....

Lennington professed to have no idea why. One suspects that the reason is: Because it's only abortion that we disapprove of and therefore want to encumber. If that's the real answer, Lennington wouldn't want to say it, because it lays the groundwork for finding the law to be the kind of undue burden that violates privacy rights.

Posner also cited figures that just .3 percent of abortions have medical complications. Asked if there were records of women dying in Wisconsin after abortions, Lennington said he didn't know.

At that point, Posner said about the law, "It doesn't sound reasonable. It sounds irrational."

Lennington didn't even know if there were records?! If you actually want to get away with imposing these burdens, you ought to build a foundation for showing that there are strong medical reasons for the new requirement. But then it would be less obvious that the law expresses opposition to abortion. I'm going to presume that the legislature wanted to flaunt its opposition to abortion — for political reasons — and the law is more of a gesture than a genuine health provision that can and should be upheld.

Part of the plan, perhaps, is a tempting invitation to the judges to strike it down. Can a judge resist? If not, the social conservatives will bray about "activist judges," and they'll overplay their hand, in all likelihood, and we'll be back in the throes of the "war on women" just in time for the next presidential election, which, of course, will be won by Hillary Clinton, who — through judicial appointments and federal statutory law and health-care regulations — will save The Right To Choose.

7th Circuit upholds Gov. Walker's much-protested collective bargaining legislation.

"The district court invalidated Act 10's recertification and payroll deduction provisions, but upheld the statute's limitation on collective bargaining. We now uphold Act 10 in its entirety."

Voting to uphold the law in its entirety were Judges Joel M. Flaum and William J. Bauer. Flaum wrote the opinion.

Judge David F. Hamilton dissented in part, saying he believed part of the collective bargaining law violated the First Amendment. Hamilton argued the state could not bar some unions from having their dues deducted from paychecks while it allowed police and fire unions to do so.

ADDED: Here's the opinion PDF.

AND: The panel said it's well-settled that "use of the state’s payroll systems to collect union dues is a state subsidy of speech that requires only viewpoint neutrality." The law didn't target any particular viewpoints. It subsidized the speech of public safety unions but not other public employee unions, and the unions had argued that the speech of the groups that were subsidized would be more favorable to the party that supported the legislation and so Act 10 wasn't genuinely viewpoint neutral, but only the dissenting judge agreed.

"Court keeps alive inmate's quest for pork feast."

Headline at the National Law Journal makes the "quest" sound more absurd than it is. The prisoner, Derek Kramer, is an Odinist and he's suing in pursuit of his rights under the Free Exercise Clause and the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act.

From the 7th Circuit court's opinion (PDF):

Odinism is a polytheistic religion, which was practiced for millennia in northern Europe before the rise of Christianity and has been revived in recent decades. The practice of Odinism includes group worship ceremonies. Pork is a sacred food to Odinists....

Specifically, Kramer asked for a feast on December 21st for the “High Feast of Yule” and “further requested that HAM/PORK be included in with the FEAST MEAL.”...

Kramer had a larger problem with the group worship at the Green Bay Correctional Institution: The Department of Corrections lumps the "Pagan" religions together for group worship purposes, and he objected to a specifically Wiccan ritual at the service. The demand for an annual pork feast was part of a larger effort to separate the Odinists from the Wiccans.

Kramer's loss on everything but the pork feast (which he hasn't yet won) is based on procedural matters that are probably only interesting to lawyers — unless you know how to be interested in the way procedure can operate to undermine rights.