Cultivated Compendium

The Rhode Island State Police has been asking people visiting its barracks to submit photo IDs, even though the state's open-records law says that people can request public records anonymously, the Providence Journal's Amanda Milkovits reports. The policy for checking visitor IDs is meant to protect police officers in light of law enforcement killings in Paris, New York City and outside a Pennsylvania State Police barracks. However, Justin Silverman, the executive director of the New England First Amendment Coalition, said "'requiring public record requestors to identify themselves violates the law. State agencies should not be able to unilaterally decide which parts of the law they are going to follow.'"

As of Monday afternoon, 49 of 67 counties in Alabama refused to issue same-sex marriage licenses in Alabama, Montgomery Advertiser's Brian Lyman reports. Even though a federal judge has struck down the state's ban on same-sex marriage, Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore has ordered the probate judges not to issue same-sex marriages. The U.S. Supreme Court also refused to grant a stay against the issuance of same-sex marriage licenses.

U.S. District Judge Ginny Granade, who struck down the state's ban on same-sex matrimony, denied a motion for contempt against Mobile County Probate Judge Don Davis for refusing to issue marriage licenses, ruling that the parties had not yet shown they were harmed by a failure for the constitution to be followed.

Republican-sponsored bills to expand Medicaid in Wyoming died last week, the Casper Star Tribune's Trevor Graff and Laura Hancock report. The proposal would have expanded healthcare to 17,600 uninsured Wyomites, they report. One bill died in a Senate committee, and a similar bill was pulled from the House. Eric Boley, president of the Wyoming Hospital Association, "hospitals around the state are stuck with hundreds of millions of dollars in uncompensated costs annually as uninsured people are treated at emergency rooms." Proponents, however, plan to try again in the future.

Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore has ordered a ban on same-sex marriage licenses, even though a federal judge in Alabama has found the state's ban on same-sex nuptials unconstitutional, the Montgomery Advertiser's Brian Lyman reports. The stay on the federal court decision is set to expire today. The chief justice argued that federal district and appellate courts had no binding authority on state courts, Lyman reports. What effect Moore's orders will have is still unclear. 

The Seventh Circuit ruled that the Chicag0 Sun-Times broke the law when it published the heights and weights of Chicago cops who acted as fillers in a police lineup, Kim Janssen reported for that newspaper. The cops' height, weight, eye color, hair color and months and years of their birthdates were private information that was improperly obtained from the officers' drivers licenses in violation of the Driver's Privacy Protection Act, the court ruled.

The lineup involved former Mayor Richard M. Daley's nephew, who threw a deadly punch that killed a man, and who was investigated by the newspaper for allegedly getting preferential treatment from the police.

A referendum aiming to strengthen Slovakia's ban on same-sex marriage and same-sex adoption failed because of low turnout, BBC reports. Only 21 percent of those eligible voted. One of questions was whether marriage can only be between opposite-sex couples.

The stars were aligned for Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam to expand Medicaid in his state to 280,000 low-income Tennesseans: "Hospitals and chambers of commerce endorsed the plan. A recent poll showed Haslam had an 86 percent approval rating among Republicans in the state, and he has a GOP supermajority in the House and Senate." But the plan died this week after a state Senate committee voted the plan down, The Tennessean's Dave Boucher reports. Haslam said that he didn't realize how deeply Republican legislators had issues with the federal government: '"I think this whole sense of distrust of the federal government. Well, I could've told you that was, that our legislature felt that way (before the special session). It was so much bigger than I thought.'"

Three University of Pennsylvania bioethicists recently called for reestablishing mental asylums, The Inquirer's Stacey Burling reports. When  large-scale institutions for people with mental illness were abandoned decades ago, smaller, community-based institutions were not created to house people instead. Jails and emergency rooms have become the new mental asylums because there are few community-based beds for people with severe mental illnesses. The bioethicists "argue that what really happened was not deinstitutionalization but transinstitutionalization," Burling reports. "That means that at least some residents of mental hospitals did not thrive in their communities, as hoped, but shifted to inappropriate institutions, most notably prisons." One of the paper's authors told Burling he envisions asylums built on campuses and emphasizing patient autonomy and recovery as much as possible.

Linda Greenhouse, writing in her regular column for the New York Times about the U.S. Supreme Court, suggests that the latest challenge to Obamacare may also fail before the justices because they would have to upend traditional ways of interpreting federal statutes in order to find for the challengers. At issue is "the validity of the Internal Revenue Service rule that makes the tax subsidies available to those who qualify by virtue of their income, regardless of whether the federal government or a state set up the exchange on which the insurance was bought. The challengers’ argument that the rule is invalid depends on the significance of two sub-clauses of the act that refer to 'an exchange established by a state,' seemingly to the exclusion of the federally established exchanges." A coalition of Democratic and Republican attorneys general argued in a brief that, finding that tax subsidies are only available on state-run exchanges, would surprise states with "'a dramatic hidden consequence of their exchange election.”' There is much Supreme Court precedent that Congress must give "'clear notice'" to states of the consequences of their choices in federal law, Greenhouse said, and a narrow reading of the exchange language in Obamacare would undermine that.

The Eleventh Circuit granted a stay Wednesday in litigation over same-sex marriage bans in Alabama, Georgia and Florida until the U.S. Supreme Court rules on the constitutionality of such laws, the Washington Blade reports.