Supreme Court

Not to step into the Markus/Marcas arena, but there are a couple interesting arguments coming up in the Supreme Court.  One is all about the Tenth Amendment (yes, there is one between the Ninth Amendment (which nobody pays attention to except possibly Scalia) and the Eleventh Amendment (which the States love - especially when one of their employees really screws up at hurts somebody bad))...the case is Bond v. US...

The Tenth Amendment reads:

"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

The question that the Court is set to settle, is whether or not an American can challenge a law based upon an argument that the law violates the Tenth Amendment.

My answer would be sure - why not?

The second argument will have a far greater impact on us peons in the SD Fla.  You know how the judges and prosecutors down here like to say that if you file a motion, the time that runs between the filing and dispositioin of the motion is excluded???  Does that make sense in any practicle sense?  For example, before many of the judges in the SD Fla., you can file a motion, the government won't respond to it and the judge will deny it on the first day of trial.  How can any honest person say that the motion held up the proceedings?  Well, that is the question presented in US v. Tinklenberg:

"Whether the time between the filing of a pretrial motion and its disposition is automatically excluded from the deadline for commencing trial under the Speedy Trial Act of 1974, 18 U.S.C. 3161(h)(I)(D) (Supp. II 2008), or is instead excluded only if the motion actually causes a postponement, or the expectation of a postponement, of the trial."

Me thinks criminal defendants get screwed on this one.