DAN'S PAPERS, April 2, 2010 Page 17 www.danshamptons.com
Law Hijinks BumsontheStreet,Cooper’sBeach,Goats,NationalHealthReform By Dan Rattiner So through a whole lot of Congressional procedural rule bending, the new National Health Care bill is the law of the land. It will now play out in the courts to see if what the Congress did was on the up and up and by the Constitution. Probably the Supreme Court will get around to deciding it one way or another, after a bunch of lower court rulings, in about two years. What has happened here is on one level quite historic. But on another level, it is reminiscent of what has been going on here in the Hamptons for many years as far as our small town Villages and Village Mayors go. The Mayors occasionally pass laws that could
get overturned in court but get away with it because the challenge will take years and either the problem will go away by then or nobody will bother to start a lawsuit because of the expense. For example, in East Hampton, there is a law that says no store can be larger than 30,000 square feet. They also have a law banning fastfood chain restaurants, although chain clothing stores are acceptable and are, in fact, now rampant in the village. Neither of these might pass muster if legally challenged. Southampton has a village dress code law I wrote about last week. It’s probably unconstitutional. The Village of Quogue has some laws
that many think are far more restrictive than what the law would allow. Sag Harbor regulates flowerboxes that stick out from store windows. They also regulate how many chairs you can have in a store. And there’s a law on the books about how many feet the front door of a restaurant serving alcohol must be from a church. (That’s why the entrance to Il Cappuccino on Madison is on the far sidewall like that.) I think that on the Federal level, these bits of grey-area business are far more highly regulated than in small towns. And the reason is that (continued on page 20)
CHINA, GEOGRAPHICALLY CHALLENGED By Dan Rattiner Last week I commented upon Google’s challenge to China, about censorship and freedom of information. I thought it was an interesting thing to see a company standing up to a country in its hometown. As it turned out, the story ran as a lead in the newspaper, and as such, it required a quarter page drawing or picture of some sort to illustrate it. I envisioned the outlines of three nations floating on the page in close proximity to one another. They would be the two entities mentioned above, and also the United States, which, because of an apparent treaty they have with Google, briefly waged in on the dispute. A standoff! I had no problem drawing the United States.
It’s a pleasantly proportioned rectangle with Florida sticking out down on the bottom right, the bump for New Orleans, the wavy border of Texas and the curve of California, Oregon and Washington. I drew those cute Great Lakes, I drew Maine sticking up in the northeast, the dash of Long Island and the bulge of the Carolinas. I decided Google would be the same size as the United States, and, as you might expect,
took liberties with its shape. Nobody knows its shape of course. I gave it a free cloudlike shape. China was another matter. I’ve seen it. But I don’t remember it. I decided that whatever it was, I’d make the country about one and a half times larger than Google and the United States in honor of its billion plus people. Then I pulled out an atlas to draw its shape. I have to say that China is quite a disappointment as far as its shape goes. It has a thing that sticks out of it on the northeast, but it’s not China. It’s Korea. Then on the southeast corner there’s a big peninsula heading down toward the South Pole but that doesn’t (continued on next page)