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The Supreme Court opened a legal avenue Monday for prisoners to try to gain access to DNA evidence that might prove their innocence but noted that their chances at success might be slim.

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The court ruled 6 to 3 in favor of Texas death row inmate Henry Skinner, who has maintained that he did not kill his girlfriend and her two sons. Skinner came within 45 minutes of being executed last spring before the Supreme Court took up his case.

There was no guarantee in the court’s narrow ruling that Skinner, convicted in 1995, will ever gain access to all of the evidence recovered at the crime scene.

Texas is one of 48 states that allow at least some prisoners post-conviction access to DNA evidence, but their rules vary. More than 260 people have been exonerated after conviction through DNA evidence, according to the Innocence Project, which investigates cases and represents inmates.

A divided Supreme Court decided in 2009 largely to leave the decision about testing up to Congress and state legislatures. It ruled that the convicted do not have a constitutional right to testing but left a narrow opening for those trying to prove that a state’s laws governing access to DNA are inadequate.

Skinner’s attorneys tested that opening by suing Gray County District Attorney Lynn Switzer, saying the decision to withhold DNA testing in his case violated his federal civil rights.

Monday’s court majority said a federal court could consider that claim.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote that court precedents allow civil rights challenges if the result would not “necessarily imply” the invalidity of their convictions.

“Success in his suit for DNA testing would not ‘necessarily imply’ the invalidity of his conviction,” Ginsburg wrote of Skinner’s suit. “While test results might prove exculpatory, that outcome is hardly inevitable. .?.?. Results might prove inconclusive, or they might further incriminate Skinner.”

Ginsburg seemed to indicate it might be difficult for Skinner to ultimately prevail and win access to DNA evidence. The court’s 2009 ruling “left slim room for the prisoner to show that the governing state law denies him procedural due process,” Ginsburg wrote.

Skinner’s attorney, Robert C. Owen, welcomed the court’s decision: “We look forward to making our case in federal court that Texas’s inexplicable refusal to grant Mr. Skinner access to evidence for DNA testing is fundamentally unfair and cannot stand.”

Groups that represented prisoners called on Switzer to test the remaining evidence instead of continuing to fight Skinner’s request. Switzer did not return phone calls after the decision. But when the Supreme Court accepted the case, Switzer said Skinner had has “plenty of opportunity to show that additional testing could prove his innocence, but he could not show that.”

Texas courts said Skinner did not meet the requirements of the state’s law, which, among other things, requires that testing was either not available or not technologically advanced at the time of trial or that the defendant did not pass up the chance for testing.

Justices Clarence Thomas, Anthony M. Kennedy and Samuel A. Alito Jr. dissented, saying that civil rights laws should not allow Skinner another way out when he has exhausted all appeals. They predicted an outpouring of similar lawsuits.

“What prisoner would not avail himself of this additional bite at the apple?” Thomas wrote.

For some, Skinner’s case has become a cause.

He has steadfastly maintained his innocence, despite acknowledging that he was present during the 1993 New Year’s Eve slayings of his girlfriend, Twila Busby, and her two mentally disabled adult sons at the house they shared in the small Panhandle town of Pampa.

Police found Skinner blocks away, hiding in the closet of a former girlfriend, in bloody clothes and with a gash on his hand.

He said that during the killings he was passed out on what tests showed to be a near-lethal combination of codeine and alcohol. Skinner said he could not have overpowered and killed the three in his condition.

He said that he woke to find them dead and that the blood on his clothes came from examining them.

Prosecutors did not test all of the evidence from the crime scene, including material from a rape kit, hair and skin cells under Busby’s fingernails.

Strategic decisions seemed to be in play on both sides: Prosecutors did not need the extra evidence, and Skinner’s attorney feared that more testing would solidify the case against his client.

Skinner and his supporters, including Northwestern University’s Medill Innocence Project, have pointed to Busby’s now-deceased uncle, of whom she was afraid, as the possible killer. Skinner says that he always wanted the evidence tested.

The case is Skinner v. Switzer .

barnesr@washpost.com

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Wednesday is the first birthday of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the law better known as health-care reform. Cake, I imagine, will not be served. As much as Democrats are trying to leverage the milestone to sell the public on the legislation’s many virtues, the reality is that it has been a tough year.

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At best, public support for the law is mixed and contradictory. A Kaiser Family Foundation survey released last week was typical: A slight plurality had an unfavorable impression of it, but a slight majority opposed efforts to repeal it or replace it with a Republican-backed alternative. It brings to mind an old Woody Allen joke about a restaurant where the food is terrible and the portions are too small. Americans don’t think they like the Affordable Care Act, but they don’t want to be without it or left with whatever Republicans want to put in its place.

For most Americans, the dominant emotion is confusion. According to the Kaiser poll, “confused” outranks “angry,” “anxious” and “enthusiastic” as a descriptor. At 53 percent, it commands an easy majority — and I’d guess that’s a low estimate.

So this is my birthday present to the legislation, and those who are befuddled by it: some clarity on what it does, and how it does it.

The health-care reform law is, without a doubt, among the most consequential pieces of social policy passed since the Great Society. But it’s also a lot more incremental than many people realize. More modest, by far, than the health-care overhauls proposed by Presidents Clinton, Nixon, Johnson and Truman.

In 2019, once the law has been fully implemented for five years, it is expected to cover about two-thirds of the uninsured, to cost about 4 percent of what the health-care system spends in any given year and to cut the federal deficit by less than 1 percent. If you obtain insurance from your employer, Medicare, Medicaid or the veterans system — and that describes most Americans — you probably won’t notice the legislation at all.

Nevertheless, the Affordable Care Act, once it kicks in fully in 2014, is expected to do four things: provide coverage; remake a small slice of the private insurance market; pay for itself; and try to control costs. Let’s take them in order.

The law has two main mechanisms for covering people: Medicaid — which is a government insurance program that focuses on the poor — and subsidies to help people afford private insurance. The split is expected to be almost even: Of the 32 million people the law is expected to cover by 2019, 16 million will be on Medicaid and the rest covered by private insurance.

The problem with subsidizing insurance is that the sick rush to sign up and the insurers refuse to cover them. The law escapes this conundrum by telling people who can afford insurance that they have to buy it or face a small fine (the dreaded individual mandate) and by telling insurers that they can’t discriminate based on preexisting conditions. That is to say, healthy people can no longer say no until they get sick and insurers can no longer say yes only when applicants are healthy.

These transactions will happen on the new “exchanges” — a place that will, in effect, be a Web site where people can compare plans and choose the one that will serve them best. But behind the pleasing exterior (you can see it at HealthCare.gov), the exchanges offer another layer of consumer protection: Just as Amazon.com would stop carrying a toaster that routinely exploded when customers plugged it in, if an insurer repeatedly misbehaves, regulators can kick it out of the exchange.

All this will cost money — and in a system that’s already overpriced. Which brings us to offsets and cost controls. It’s important to know the difference: Offsets are the policies that cover the law’s costs. They’re concrete, simple reforms — cutting this much, taxing that much — and as long as we are willing to implement them, they are likely to work. Controls are the policies that try to rein in health-care spending. They’re ambitious attempts to change the way doctors are paid, insurance is bought and Medicare is reformed. If they work, they will, in the long run, save an enormous amount of money — much more than the offsets.

The big offsets in the health-care law slow payment increases to doctors who participate in Medicare ($240 billion), cut payments to private insurers that participate in Medicare but cost more than the basic Medicare program does ($140 billion), add a new tax on high-income beneficiaries of Medicare ($210 billion) and on very expensive health-care plans ($20 billion, although much more than that between 2020 and 2029), and so on. All in all, the legislation is expected to save or raise about $100 billion more than it spends in the first 10 years.

The cost controls will occur over a longer period and are more speculative. Medicare, for instance, is going to experiment with paying hospitals a flat sum for all successful care associated with a particular condition. This will mean that doctors make more money when they do less and are successful at it, rather than making more for doing more, as is the case now. The tax on expensive health insurance plans is meant to drive people — and employers — to seek plans that better control costs.

The Independent Payment Advisory Board is a group of stakeholders and experts charged with helping Medicare control costs and empowered to make changes to the system even if Congress is too paralyzed or distracted to act. It will be fed ideas by the new Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, which will test ways to improve care and cut expenses. The exchanges will make it easier to comparison-shop, and the subsidies are linked to the lowest-priced plans in the exchanges to reward cost-efficient insurers. New information about what drugs and treatments work best and for whom will come from trials, and if combined with electronic-medical records, could help doctors make more cost-effective decisions.

Is it a perfect piece of legislation? Not even close. Will everything work as expected? Almost certainly not. But for all its flaws, it’s a good law, which is why Republicans have had so much trouble coming up with state plans that could cover more people at a lower cost. And it’s worth trying.

So happy birthday, Affordable Care Act. Here’s to many more.

kleine@washpost.com

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If you want ideas on how to save money, ask the people who spend it.

That’s what President Obama did when he began the SAVE Awards two years ago.

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SAVE is one of those terms that sounds like someone came up with a smart acronym, then searched for words to fit it. It stands for Securing Americans’ Value and Efficiency — a bureaucratic mouthful. The shorter version also is appropriate, because federal employees recommended more than 18,000 ways Uncle Sam can save money through the SAVE program. About 20 were incorporated into Obama’s proposed budget for fiscal 2012. The Office of Management and Budget expects the ideas to save $867.5 million through 2015.

Trudy Givens, a Bureau of Prisons employee from Portage, Wis., submitted the winning suggestion. Like many of the other ideas, Givens’s suggestion is so simple, yet so effective, you wonder why Sam didn’t think of it earlier.

Her idea: Send the Federal Register — a daily compendium of government regulations and notices — to federal employees online, rather than by snail mail, with an estimated savings of $16 million through 2015.

“In 2010, there were more than 4,700 subscriptions across the entire Federal Government. Based on Government Printing Office estimates, this proposed reduction would save taxpayers up to $4 million (annually) in postage and printing costs,” according to the budget proposal.

I wanted to speak with Givens but couldn’t reach her. She explained how she developed her suggestion in a White House video: “The Federal Register is all online now. It’s easily accessible to look things up. By the time we get the hard copy we’ve already researched what we need to see.”

Unfortunately, Givens, a business administrator at the Federal Correctional Institution in Oxford, Wis., won’t get a cut of the millions her idea will save. But she did have an Oval Office meeting with the president, who signed a certificate honoring her.

“Your mom, she just has common sense,” Obama told Givens’s 12-year-old daughter, Jessica, who was with her mom and dad, Lance Givens, at the White House. Trudy and Lance are 19-year veterans of the Bureau of Prisons.

Even more important than the winning idea “is the change of culture,” Jeff Zients, the president’s chief performance officer, said on the video. Obama’s meeting with Givens “sends a real signal to the federal workforce that the president believes that the best ideas for improving efficiency, saving money, making the government more effective exists on the front line. And that culture change, where there’s a recognition that’s where the best ideas are, is the most sustainable way to improve government service.”

The Internet is going to be a big part of that. In addition to Givens’s idea, two of the other four finalists also suggested using the Web to increase efficiency and save money.

Paul Behe, a paralegal specialist for the Homeland Security Department in Cleveland, suggested advertising property seized by Customs and Border Protection online instead of in newspapers. That’s not good for the ailing newspaper industry, but the OMB pegs the government savings through 2015 at $5 million.

“After having processed the advertising for the Cleveland Port Office, I thought there had to be a more efficient way to comply with the statutes,” which require print advertising, Behe said by e-mail. “We used to process advertising for the Department of Justice and when I stopped seeing their advertising requests, I contacted the local offices and found that they were advertising online.”

Thomas Koenning, of Littleton, Colo., works for the Mine Safety and Health Administration’s (MSHA) Information Technology Center and suggested requiring mining companies to use online reporting forms.

“Although mine operators and contractors are required by regulation to file quarterly data with MSHA, the agency is not required to mail the multi-part forms each quarter,” said Koenning via e-mail. “The forms are mailed as a courtesy.”

Estimated savings, $302,000 by 2015.

The other finalist was Marjorie Cook, a Gobles, Mich., food inspector with the Agriculture Department. Labs send empty containers, that once contained samples, to the department using overnight delivery. Cook suggested saving money by having the empties returned by regular ground delivery. That will save more than $1 million through 2015, according to the budget plan.

A million here, a million there — it adds up.

“It’s really encouraging that Washington is, you know, requesting and implementing some of these ideas,” Givens said, “because what we see everyday isn’t something that people in Washington are seeing.”

federaldiary@washpost.com

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Nearly half the city workers in Costa Mesa received layoff notices last week. Street sweepers. Firefighters. Mechanics. Payroll clerks. Animal control workers. In all, about 210 of the city’s 472 employees, many of whom have worked there for decades. On Thursday, as the notices were being handed out, one maintenance worker committed suicide by jumping from the city hall roof.

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“It’s like they decided to blow up the city,” said Billy Folsom, 58, a mechanic who got a pink slip. “It’s devastating.”

The cutbacks are necessary because the escalating costs of providing pensions for police, firefighters and other unionized employees are draining the city’s revenue, city leaders say.

Within three years, city projections show, more than one of every five tax dollars will be spent on employees’ retirement benefits, which were made far more generous in the years before the stock market crashed in 2008.

“Just do the math — this is unsustainable,” said Jim Righeimer, the city’s recently elected mayor pro tem. He campaigned on the pension issue, eliciting anger and a counter-campaign from the city’s police and firefighters. “Under these kinds of burdens, we can’t do everything the city needs to do.”

The public pension fight

The financial follies of the boom years — by banks that lent too easily, by home buyers who bought places they couldn’t afford, by consumers who didn’t save — became obvious shortly after the recession.

But many states and cities may have overextended themselves as well, and the risks they undertook are now playing out in the public pension shortfalls provoking political battles across the nation.

Republican efforts to roll back public employee benefits and bargaining rights has triggered mass protests in places such as Wisconsin, Indiana and Ohio. But in Costa Mesa, where conservatives dominate city politics, the offensive against public worker compensation has gone further.

During the boom, many state and local governments promised their employees better pensions. Some employees were allowed to retire earlier. Others received a larger portion of their final pay. Financially, it was easy to do; the stock market was soaring, lifting pension fund balances.

Between 1998 and 2008, the last year for which figures are available, total pension payments by state and local governments rose twice as fast as their payrolls, according to census figures.

But now that the recession has led to steep drops in pension funds, those promises to past and present employees may be much harder to keep. Dozens of state and local pension funds around the country are now considered seriously underfunded. By 2009, about 58 percent of state and local pension funds were less than 80 percent funded, a standard benchmark of pension soundness, according to the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.

The shortfalls have had far-reaching political ramifications. Already, some politicians ideologically opposed to public employee unions have attributed the problems to their greed and political influence. Now members of those unions are on the defensive.

“What angers a lot of us is that we’re being blamed for the economic situation,” said Jason Pyle, 38, a fire department captain who earned $160,000 in base, overtime and certification pay in 2010, according to city records. Pyle, who has been with the department for 14 years, could retire at age 54 with 90 percent of his base salary and some other forms of pay. “They’re marginalizing what we actually do — like everything I’ve done in my life now has no meaning.”

He called the city’s approach to the problem — the layoff notices — “a scorched-earth policy.”

Indeed, in few places has the rhetoric over the unions and the “ticking pension bomb” been as strident as it is in California — or, more specifically, this coastal bastion of conservatism where the battle erupted most clearly during Righeimer’s fall campaign.

Righeimer, 52, an Orange County developer, has long fought against unions. In the mid-1990s, after forming a political action group, he ran afoul of teachers unions while pushing for vouchers and a back-to-basics approach to education. Then, in 1997, he pushed a ballot measure to prohibit labor unions from using their members’ dues for political purposes without the permission of each member, each year.

Not surprisingly, when he declared his intention to run for City Council in this city of 116,000, he blamed the city’s budget shortfalls on the union-negotiated compensation for police, firefighters and other city employees.

In his view, governments have been too generous with public employee unions that have wide influence over local elections.

First, he and other critics note, the unions can be a major source of funding in local races. Righeimer’s campaign spent $70,000 for the November election, according to city records; the Costa Mesa police and fire unions, meanwhile, spent $101,000 in a campaign to discredit him. (Righeimer won the post of mayor pro tem, similar to a vice mayor.)

Second, he notes, many candidates compete to win the endorsement of police and firefighters.

“Everyone wants to get their endorsement,” he said. “They fight crime, save people’s lives, all these good things. The people really go for that.”

The unions note that their candidates have frequently lost. But when it comes to gaining richer pension benefits, they have often won.

After the state allowed richer pensions for many workers in 1999, many localities, including Costa Mesa, quickly followed suit. Today, police and firefighters in the city can retire at 50 with as much as 90 percent of their base salary and some other forms of pay. It was, in part, the tenor of the times, some said.

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The battle for the presidency and the Senate in 2012 are deeply intertwined, with as many as nine states expected to be central to both contests.

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The national map shows four competitive Senate races featuring Democratic incumbents in states that have been at or near the center of the race for the presidency in the past several elections and will be so again in the next one.

In Florida, Sen. Bill Nelson is certain to face his toughest challenge since winning his seat in 2000. Sensing his vulnerability — and the importance of the state to the White House’s 2012 electoral calculus — President Obama held a fundraising event for Nelson earlier this month and Vice President Biden will do so this week.

The story is the same in Missouri, where Sen. Claire McCaskill, a strong Obama ally, is seeking a second term, and in Ohio, where Sen. Sherrod Brown is up for reelection. Both states were heavily targeted by Obama in 2008, and they will be again by both him and the eventual Republican nominee. Ditto Michigan, where a struggling economy could complicate Sen. Debbie Stabenow’s reelection bid as well as Obama’s path to victory in the state.

Should Democratic Sen. Herb Kohl retire in Wisconsin before the 2012 election, the Badger State would be added to the list of contested Senate races in states likely to decide the presidency as well.

It’s not just Democratic senators who will be running in states featuring a fight at the presidential level.

Open-seat Senate races in Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico and Virginia are on the radar screens of Senate and presidential strategists.

The most obvious political impact in these nine overlapping states is that it will be more difficult for incumbents (or challengers) to separate themselves from their party’s presidential nominee.

Of the nine states, Obama carried seven in 2008 — losing only Arizona and Missouri — but Republicans had considerable success in several of them in 2010.

In Florida, Missouri, Ohio and Wisconsin, Republican Senate candidates won by linking their Democratic opponents to Obama and some of his less-popular policies, most notably the health-care legislation.

Senators such as Brown, McCaskill and Nelson — and maybe even Stabenow — can expect more of the same in 2012. And, although Democrats tried last year to point out that the president wasn’t the one on the ballots in their states, the senators won’t have that luxury in 2012.

On the other hand, having Obama at the top of the ticket will help to drive turnout among base voters — African Americans, Hispanics, members of labor unions — to levels that Democrats on the ballot in 2010 only dreamed about.

And, because winning in states such as Florida, Michigan and Ohio will be high priorities for Obama’s reelection race, millions of dollars will be spent on ensuring that every potential Democratic voter in each of those states is not only found but contacted — a voter outreach effort that should have considerable trickle-down effect for the party’s nominees down the ballot.

The less obvious but perhaps no less important effect of so many double-down states — politics and blackjack in the same column! — is that outside interest groups such as the conservative American Crossroads, as well as its yet-to-be-named liberal counterweight, may be able to get more bang for their buck.

For example, an ad hitting Obama in Missouri could not only do him political damage but also could reinforce the connection between the president and McCaskill — a problematic campaign narrative for her.

Viewed broadly, it’s clear that the fight for the White House and the Senate will move in tandem. Whichever party wins the majority of these nine states will almost certainly control both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue in 2013.

chris.cillizza@washpost.com

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At a time when our political system is said to be incapable of rising above poisonous partisanship to promote the national interest, Gen. David Petraeus’s visit to Capitol Hill last week was instructive.

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What — you didn’t know Petraeus was in town for make-or-break hearings on President Obama’s Afghanistan policy? Well, in a way that proves the point.

In September 2007 Petraeus returned from Baghdad at a comparable moment in the Iraq war. The week he was in town Iraq filled 42 percent of the newshole monitored by the Pew Research Center’s News Coverage Index — mostly with stories that Petraeus is unlikely to want in his scrapbook.

A full-page MoveOn.org ad branded him “General Betray Us.” Protesters jeered him and the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker. Then-Sen. Hillary Clinton said that Petraeus’s claims of progress were not credible.

Like Iraq then, the Afghanistan war today is unpopular; the president has ordered a surge in U.S. troops that has aroused skepticism; and most Americans want U.S. troops home.

Yet Petraeus’s appearances last week, this time accompanied by Defense Undersecretary Michle Flournoy, could hardly have been more different.

The Democratic chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Carl Levin (Mich.), kicked off the week by saying that Petraeus’s counterinsurgency strategy had been “instrumental in turning the tide in Afghanistan.” The panel’s ranking minority member, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), agreed: “We are turning around the war in Afghanistan.”

On the House side it was the same story, but with the Republican going first. “Our forces have made significant gains in the past year and have reversed the Taliban’s tactical momentum,” said House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon (R-Calif.). “I want to start by concurring with the chairman’s remarks about the progress that has been made in Afghanistan in the last year to 18 months,” said ranking Democrat Rep. Adam Smith (Wash.).

Many members went on to probe aspects of U.S. policy, often skeptically, just as you’d hope legislators would: about Afghan corruption, Pakistani instability, suicide prevention and brain-injury treatment, the war’s high cost in lives and money, and the perceived free-riding of allies. But the questioning was respectful and directed at improving U.S. policy, not proving that it had failed.

There are many reasons for the contrast. Historic events from Japan to Libya overshadow news from Kandahar. Petraeus’s success in Iraq, combined with his deft political touch, has made him as close to bulletproof as anyone can be in this town, and he obviously wasn’t counting on that alone; it was astonishing how many members seemed to have just returned from the front.

Most important, the progress in Afghanistan is real — but, then, that was true in Iraq in 2007 and had little impact on the political debate, when there was such bitterness between President George W. Bush and Democrats that Iraqi reality was almost irrelevant. Bush had played the “soft on homeland security” card mercilessly and effectively, and Democrats were looking for payback.

Obama’s escalation, when 73 percent of Americans want substantial numbers of troops brought home, would seem to open fertile ground to Republicans. But from their leaders on down, they haven’t sought to plow there. In this instance at least, politics really has stopped at the water’s edge.

Meanwhile, the president has cocooned his activist policy in minimalist rhetoric. He never speaks of victory or idealistic goals, certainly not for the Afghan people. When he announced the surge in December 2009, he simultaneously emphasized a July 2011 withdrawal. When he nudged that withdrawal clock to the end of 2014, there was no address to the nation marking the new emphasis.

There are costs to this reticence. It’s hard to build support for an unpopular war if you leave that job to Petraeus and Flournoy, as capable as both are. Already, Congress is threatening to reduce funding for the civilian side of U.S. efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, which could undercut both missions.

On the other hand, by doing as much as he thinks necessary while talking as little as he thinks possible, Obama may make it easier for all kinds of politicians to stay on board — Republicans who vilify him in almost every other context and liberal Democrats who dislike the policy, whose supporters hate the policy and who therefore would rather talk about almost anything else.

It may not be exactly how textbooks say leaders are supposed to lead — and if you believe the war is a mistake, it’s a picture of democracy failing to respond. But if, like Obama, you believe we need “an enduring, long-term commitment to Afghanistan,” as Flournoy paraphrased last week, “having made the mistake historically of walking away and then paid a very dear price for that,” then it is reassuring to see that Washington can stick with something hard, in a bipartisan and civil way.

Given the alternative still fresh in his memory, that’s probably good enough for Petraeus as he flies back to the war this week.

fredhiatt@washpost.com

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