Indeed, O’Donnell was pessimistic about liberalism’s prospects throughout the conversation. He always “kinda assumed” the West Wing’s writers “knew this guy was not a liberal” because he said the show was committed to painting a realistic portrait of what is possible in American politics, and “there was no known equation in which a liberal becomes President of the United States.”

As evidence of this point, that only Democrats tainted by a streak of conservatism can become president, O’Donnell cited presidential candidate Bill Clinton’s decision to fly home to Arkansas to personally oversee the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a death row inmate who self-lobotomized himself in a failed suicide attempt that left him unable to even understand what it meant to be executed. When prison guards arrived to escort him to the death chamber, Rector told them that he was saving the pecan pie from his last meal “for later.”

President Bartlet came from a very different state than President Clinton. As the former governor of New Hampshire, Bartlet would have presided over a state where the death penalty was technically legal, but has not actually been carried out since 1939. As such, the first time Bartlet had to decide whether to offer a last minute reprieve to a condemned man came in the Oval Office, and it ends with Bartlet confessing to his priest that he lacked the political courage to do so:

O’Donnell’s pessimism was at its apex when he discussed his process behind writing this scene. “When I proposed a death penalty episode…the backstory that I wrote in my head for this president is that he pandered on the death penalty, just like every Democrat who doesn’t believe in it, in order to get elected president. And he was from a state where he never had to use the death penalty anyway.”

If anything, however, O’Donnell describes a West Wing writers’ room that was even more pessimistic than the facts on the ground required. We asked why Bartlet did not at least fight to enact a prescription drug plan for seniors or major immigration reform, both of which were realistic enough goals that they were attempted (in the first case, successfully) by President Bush. O’Donnell questioned whether Bush’s rare flirtations with progressivism were really grounds for optimism — Bush’s Medicare expansion, O’Donnell emphasized, was poorly designed. This is certainly true, but if a conservative like President Bush was willing to fight for a Medicare expansion that was not paid for, surely it would not have pushed the bounds of realism for President Bartlet to at least try to enact a similar expansion and also pay for it.

Ultimately, O’Donnell agreed that the West Wing writers’ room was a little too pessimistic about our politics’ potential to reach above the moment and achieve something transformative. When asked if Barack Obama — who actually did fight (and occasionally, win) major battles on health care, immigration, economic policy and the environment — is a better president than Josiah Bartlet, O’Donnell was unequivocal. “Of course. Incomparable. Of course.” And then he went further: “The West Wing writers room would not have come up with the idea of running a presidential campaign in which an African-American gets elected. Because the realism view would have said that’s not possible. And I say that with no disrespect for the creative process, but rather with a greater respect and awe for the real world. … We are lucky enough to live in a country in which our politics in 2008 soared above the creative imagination of its fiction writers.”

Virginia Delegate Bob Marshall (R)

This is hardly the only example of this Personhood bill’s chief sponsor, Del. Bob Marshall (R-VA) showing disregard for women who have been sexually assualted. In a brief he submitted earlier this week opposing the Affordable Care Act, Marshall claims that requiring most Americans to carry health insurance or pay slightly more income taxes is just like rape:

As the Government admits, the individual mandate is designed specifically to “internalize” the risks and costs of health care, which it has the temerity to call “classic economic regulation of economic conduct.” In fact, the mandate is classic sumptuary legislation, prohibiting personal spending choices which offend the moral or religious beliefs of Congress. Thus, the Government’s individual mandate is not a regulation of commerce; it is a compelled societal duty. Indeed, the individual mandate is not voluntary commercial intercourse; it is forcible economic rape.

Marshall, of course has a long history of such opposition to modernity. An arch-nullificationist, Marshall once claimed that children with disabilities are God’s punishment to women who had abortions, and his disregard for reproductive choice and the Constitution is rivaled only by his disdain for gay people.

Nevertheless, Marshall’s latest statement is beyond the pale even by his standards. Enacting an economic regulation that is essential to the Affordable Care Act’s protections for people with preexisting conditions is absolutely nothing like rape.

The objections, led by Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) and a few conservative organizations, are not over the VAWA as a whole, but over a few new provisions in the reauthorization — specifically, protections for LGBT individuals, undocumented immigrants who are victims of domestic abuse and the authority of Native American tribes to prosecute crimes.

The Leahy bill enumerates protections for LGBT victims of domestic violence, forbidding discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity by VAWA grantees.

The VAWA reauthorization also expands the availability of visas for undocumented immigrants who have been victims of domestic violence and may be reluctant to come forward because of the risk of deportation. VAWA has always protected this group of individuals, but the reauthorization would raise the cap on visas for battered women and sexual assault victims from 10,000 to 15,000. The additional visas would come from recaptured visas in previous years that haven’t been utilized.

It is a mystery why Grassley or anyone else could think that battered gay men, lesbians or immigrants (or, for that matter, Native Americans) do not need the full protection of the law. Worse, Grassley’s tactic here does not simply deny protections to these individuals, he is literally holding a bill that protects all battered women hostage in order to score a few anti-gay and anti-immigrant points.

• The New York Times reminds us that the Affordable Care Act’s insurance coverage requirement was a Republican idea, at least until it was embraced by Barack Obama and the GOP’s kneejerk opposition kicked it.
• Baltimore County, Maryland is poised to pass an anti-discrimination bill protecting transgender persons.
• Police on the island of Nevis may have identified a suspect in the robbery of Justice Stephen Breyer.
• A New Jersey court rejects the odd claim that non-citizens lost their ability to change their name because of, um, 9/11.
• Newt Gingrich complains about an “80 year drift to the left” on the courts — something that would come as a huge shock to Chief Justice Roberts and his allies who cannot tell the difference between a corporation and a human being.
• The Minnesota ACLU joins the fight against an anti-gay proposed constitutional amendment in that state.

Unfortunately, Paul is not just restricting this obstructionist tactic to one bill:

Paul is holding up confirmation of one of President Obama’s judicial nominees, Adalberto Jose Jordan, to the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit. The nomination cleared a procedural hurdle with an overwhelming 89-5 vote Monday evening.

But Paul is forcing the Senate to conduct at least some of the remaining 30 hours of required debate on the judicial nominee. Often, that time requirement is waived by senators when an issue gains wide bipartisan support.

Thirty hours does not sound like a lot, until you multiply it across all the other business that the Senate needs to consider. Indeed, if Paul can force 30 hours of delay every time the Senate tries to confirm a single nominee, he can prevent Congress from completing any other business for years:

This is why the Senate’s broken rules cannot coexist with the Tea Party. So long as there are just a handful of senators willing to engage in maximal delay over petty disagreements, each individual member of the Senate cannot enjoy this power to gum up the entire body.

For seven seasons, the West Wing was therapy for thousands of Bush-weary progressives who fantasized about being governed by a Nobel Prize winning scholar who didn’t believe that high-income tax cuts were a panacea. Now that America actually is governed by a Nobel Prize winning scholar with a real domestic policy agenda, however, it’s time to be honest about President Bartlet’s legacy. While the ability to rhetorically shame conservatives made him an appealing fantasy, the substance of Bartlet’s policies ranged from uninspired on issues like health care to downright destructive on Social Security and education. Bartlet had a lackluster economic record. He gave away a seat on the Supreme Court to the far right, and he consistently favored symbolic cultural victories over real opportunities to make life better for American families.

If you set aside the budget-busting Bush tax cuts, George W. Bush was actually a better president on domestic policy than President Bartlet. So Bartlet expanded Medicare to cover mammograms and cancer clinical trials? President Bush actually signed a prescription drug plan for seniors. And while George W. Bush at least had the decency to allow his plan to turn Social Security over to Bear Sterns and Lehman Brothers die a politically embarrassing death, Bartlet worked with Republicans to pass a massive Social Security reform at a time when Republicans’ were single-mindedly focused on privatization. If the Bartlet Social Security plan had actually been in effect when the market bottomed out in 2008, millions of American seniors would have been left with no safety net to fall back on.

Besides trashing Social Security, the Bartlet Administration had few bold ideas. What was the Bartlet plan to ensure universal access to health care? Or the Bartlet plan to combat global warming? What did President Bartlet do to close the education gap between poor and rich children? Or to ensure that every child who does succeed in high school will be able to pay for college? If anything, his education policy was as much a betrayal as his Social Security debacle. Although the first term Bartlet White House had ambitious plans for education reform, the second term Bartlet wound up supporting school vouchers.

After nearly an entire term in the White House, Bartlet’s economic record was so dismal that it is a miracle he was reelected. Consider his attempt to literally defend this record before God (who he also calls a “feckless thug”): “3.8 million new jobs, that wasn’t good? Bailed out Mexico. Increased foreign trade. 30 million new acres of land for conservation. Put Mendoza on the bench. We’re not fighting a war.”

3.8 million jobs sure sounds like a lot, but at the time Bartlet made this speech, it added up to just over 90,000 jobs during each month of his presidency — far less than the country needs just to keep up with population growth. This kind of stagnant growth could be excused if President Bartlet, like President Obama, presided over our emergence from an historic recession, but the Bartlet Administration experienced no similar economic calamity.

Bartlet does deserve credit for appointing Justice Mendoza, but the Mendoza appointment is overshadowed by his egregious decision to appoint Justice Christopher Mulready. Mulready’s appointment came about as part of a compromise to ensure that Senate Republicans would also confirm a chief justice whose very personal experience with Roe v. Wade would otherwise make her unconfirmable. While there is certainly symbolic value to having a chief justice who once had an abortion, such symbolism will come as cold comfort to the millions of American families impacted every time Mulready joins his fellow conservative jurists engaged in a systematic campaign to rewrite the law to leave workers and consumers powerless against the wealthy and the well-connected.

President Bartlet had his moments — they just rarely had much to do with economic justice. Bartlet was a strong supporter of both gay rights and reproductive freedom, for example, and he deserves credit for negotiating a peace between Israel and Palestine. Ultimately, however, his presidency advances a very small kind of liberalism that appeals mostly to people who’ve never worried if they could pay their medical bills or if their children can afford college.

President Bartlet’s inattentiveness to the 99 percent cannot be dismissed because economic justice doesn’t make good television. Screenwriters could not design a better villain than James Clark McReynolds, the Supreme Court Justice who systematically undermined FDR’s New Deal and routinely referred to President Roosevelt as a “crippled son-of-a-bitch.” Lyndon Johnson’s transformation from southern segregationist to civil rights crusader reached a climax that literally brought Martin Luther King to tears. President Obama’s drawn out battle over the Affordable Care Act is riddled with the kinds of crushing defeats, unexpected setbacks and narrow triumphs that fiction writers dream of recreating.

Ultimately, the Bartlet Administration was a failed opportunity because President Bartlet never once sought out these kinds of battles. Protecting choice or welcoming gays into the military (something the Bartlet Administration supported but never accomplished) are important prongs of the progressive agenda, but a liberalism that’s uninterested in income inequality or ensuring that no American ever dies because they cannot afford to treat a curable disease is both a recipe for electoral defeat and a tragedy of moral neglect.

• Justice Stephen Breyer was robbed by a machete-wielding assailant while vacationing in the Caribbean with his wife.
• Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire (D) signed marriage equality into law in that state. Unfortunately, implementation of the law will likely be delayed as anti-gay groups are already planning to force a voter referendum that can halt the law until after the November election.
• Infamous Virginia Del. Robert G. Marshall (R) brings the anti-abortion, anti-contraception Personhood debate to Virginia.
• Meanwhile, some of his colleagues in the state house want to allow more people to be executed.
• Atlanta police arrested a suspect in a brutal hate crime against a gay man.
• Lawyers challenging California’s ban on affirmative action run afoul of a previous Ninth Circuit precedent upholding the law.

Fortunately, the actual parties to this lawsuit were not nearly as unreasonable as Mr. Gingrich, and they eventually agreed to settle the case after mediation. In his order approving the settlement, Biery includes an unusual “personal statement” directed at the many lawmakers who, like Gingrich, have painted him as some kind of enemy of religion:

To the United States Marshal Service and local police who have provided heightened security: Thank you.

To those Christians who have venomously and vomitously cursed the Court family and threatened bodily harm and assassination: In His name, I forgive you.

To those who have prayed for my death: Your prayers will someday be answered, as inevitably trumps probability.

To those in the executive and legislative branches of government who have demagogued this case for their own political goals: You should be ashamed of yourselves.

Biery also includes a clever dig and the many Christian right groups that have attacked him: “Any American can pray, silently or verbally, seven days a week, twenty four hours a day, in private as Jesus taught or in large public events as Mohammed instructed.”

As the video also reminds these Republicans, however, there’s one giant problem with their talking point — the Senate GOP’s unprecedented abuse of the filibuster. Indeed, the number of votes attempting to break Sen. McConnell’s use of this tactic more than doubled the minute he took over as minority leader:

Anti-Islamic Delegate Bob Marshall (R-VA)

One bill, HB825 from Republican Del. Bob Marshall of Prince William County, would have prohibited judges and state administrators from using any legal code established outside the United States to make decisions. [...]

But when legislators started hearing from business groups concerned about how the proposal could affect their dealings abroad and foreign companies located here, they sent the bill back to committee.

“I had some business concerns,” said Del. Terry Kilgore, R-Scott County, after making the motion Thursday to kick back the bill. “It’s just something that needs some work.”

It’s unfortunate, if far from unexpected, that similar protests from religious groups, both Islamic and otherwise, were not enough to kill the bill. Nevertheless, the emergence of business opposition to these sorts of bills is a very important development.

The first wave of anti-Islamic bills introduced in state legislatures specifically named “Sharia” or Islamic law as off limits to state court judges. Such laws are unambiguously unconstitutional, as the First Amendment forbids any law that exists for the sole purpose of lashing out at a particular faith. Del. Marshall’s bill short circuits this constitutional limit because it does not expressly call out something unique to a particular faith. Instead, it paints with a broad brush by forbidding citations to any legal code that’s not established in the United States.

The problem with this tactic, however, is that there are all kinds of legitimate reasons why a judge may need to rely on foreign legal sources in order to render a decision. Most significantly, contracts between U.S. and foreign companies frequently require any disputes between them to be resolved under a foreign nation’s law. Needless to say, business don’t like it when lawmakers take away an important tool that they need to conduct international business just to push back against some baseless fantasy about judges lining up to replace the Constitution with Islamic law.

So the punchline is that anti-Islamic lawmakers are now in a bind. They can either push a narrow law targeting Islam, and have that law be struck down in the courts, or they can broaden the law, and wind up pushing something with spillover effects that will greatly annoy powerful interest groups.

Or, alternatively, they could simply abandon their anti-Islamic crusade altogether, and devote their attention solving problems that actually exist.

• Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg told an audience at Columbia Law School that Roe v. Wade was probably decided too soon.
• Meanwhile, NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre describes Ginsburg, who probably did more to guarantee equal constitutional rights to women than any other living American, to a “giddy school girl.”
• Tenther Sen. Mike Lee’s (R-UT) Constitutional Conservatives Fund, which he began to elect people who share his belief that pretty much everything is unconstitutional, turns out to be a fundraising dud. It raised only $26,000 while spending close to $29,000 in the final half of 2011.
• Washington state supreme court Justice Mary Fairhurst has terminal colon cancer.
• Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is lobbying his state’s legislature for a statewide guns registry. Currently, no such registry exists in Illinois.
• The Conservative Political Action Conference hosted an entire panel celebrating the Supreme Court’s election buying decision in Citizens United.
]]> http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/02/13/423665/justiceline-february-13-2012/feed/ 0 http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/02/10/423402/gingrich-places-guy-who-thinks-social-security-medicare-are-unconstitutional-in-charge-of-tenth-amendment-implementation/ http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/02/10/423402/gingrich-places-guy-who-thinks-social-security-medicare-are-unconstitutional-in-charge-of-tenth-amendment-implementation/#comments Fri, 10 Feb 2012 22:09:44 +0000 Ian Millhiser http://thinkprogress.org/?p=423402 In a speech this afternoon at the Conservative Political Action Conference, GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich announced that Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) is designing legislation for him on “Tenth Amendment implementation.” Perry, of course, believes that Social Security and Medicare violate the Tenth Amendment. Watch Gingrich’s announcement:
]]> http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/02/10/423402/gingrich-places-guy-who-thinks-social-security-medicare-are-unconstitutional-in-charge-of-tenth-amendment-implementation/feed/ 0 http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/02/10/423174/supreme-court-asked-to-double-down-on-citizens-united/ http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/02/10/423174/supreme-court-asked-to-double-down-on-citizens-united/#comments Fri, 10 Feb 2012 20:10:49 +0000 Ian Millhiser http://thinkprogress.org/?p=423174


Justice Anthony Kennedy

Late last year, the Montana Supreme Court refused to follow the Supreme Court’s erroneous Citizens United decision and upheld that state’s longstanding ban on corporate money in politics. Although we criticized that decision shortly thereafter — a lower court must follow the Supreme Court’s decisions even when they are obviously and tragically erroneous — the Montana justices’ overreaching does not excuse the Supreme Court’s far greater sin in handing down Citizens United in the first place. As we said before, “[t]he U.S. Supremes will doubtless decide they need to review the Montana decision. They should do so, and they should reverse their error in Citizens United as soon as possible.”

The day has now come for the Supreme Court to fix its most egregious error since Bush v. Gore:

Challengers to Montana’s ban on corporate independent expenditures—recently upheld by the Montana Supreme Court—have asked Justice Anthony Kennedy to put a hold on the state court’s ruling and have urged the full Court to reverse it. . . .

“The Montana Supreme Court held the Ban constitutional despite the holding in Citizens United v. FEC, 130 S.Ct. 876 (2010), that `[n]o sufficient governmental interest justifies limits on the political speech of nonprofit or for-profit corporations.’ Immediate relief is needed to prevent irreparable harm to the Corporations’ First Amendment free-speech right. Montana’s primary elections are on June 5, making it vital that planning begin now for independent expenditures before the election.”

Citizens United was wrong the day it was decided, and it has only succeeded in refuting itself during the two years it’s been in effect. One of the core conclusions in Citizens United was the majority’s statement that so-called “independent expenditures” — as opposed to contributions directly to campaigns — “do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.”

It’s unclear how anyone could have ever believed this was true, but it’s impossible to believe this now. Casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson’s family, for example, gave $11 million to a Super PAC intended to elect Newt Gingrich, and Gingrich met personally with Adelson after this money started flowing. Mitt Rommey has also met with Adelson, and, while it will never be known what the two men said to each other, Romney managed to extract from that meeting an assurance that Adelson “will be behind him 100 percent should he become the nominee.”

Maybe there really were five justices who didn’t understand that this was bound to happen when Citizens United was handed down in 2010, but, in the wake of these backroom meetings between top funders and their candidates, the justices cannot possibly deny the fact that Citizens United leads to corruption or at least the appearance of it. It’s time for the justices to simply admit they were wrong the first time around and overrule Citizens United.

]]> http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/02/10/423174/supreme-court-asked-to-double-down-on-citizens-united/feed/ 0 http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/02/10/423012/gop-caucus-turns-its-back-on-mike-lees-obstructionist-tantrum/ http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/02/10/423012/gop-caucus-turns-its-back-on-mike-lees-obstructionist-tantrum/#comments Fri, 10 Feb 2012 19:10:21 +0000 Ian Millhiser http://thinkprogress.org/?p=423012 Yesterday, the Senate voted 90 to 6 to confirm Judge Cathy Ann Bencivengo to a federal court in California. This vote is significant because it is a hopeful sign that Tea Party Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) has become isolated even within his own caucus. Last month, Lee promised to wage a scorched earth campaign of obstructionism against President Obama’s nominees in retaliation for Obama’s decision to recess appoint four people to protect workers and consumers. Although Lee reiterated his plans to continue this tantrum before Bencivengo’s confirmation vote, 37 of his fellow Republicans broke with the Tea Party extremist.
]]> http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/02/10/423012/gop-caucus-turns-its-back-on-mike-lees-obstructionist-tantrum/feed/ 0 http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/02/10/422749/sen-mike-lee-emallem-entitlement-spending-is-unconstitutional/ http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/02/10/422749/sen-mike-lee-emallem-entitlement-spending-is-unconstitutional/#comments Fri, 10 Feb 2012 18:00:55 +0000 Ian Millhiser http://thinkprogress.org/?p=422749 Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) has left no doubt that he cannot tell the United States Constitution from a buzzsaw designed to reduce America’s safety net into sawdust. Long before he became a lawmaker, he was on record claiming that Social Security and Medicare are unconstitutional.

Speaking on a panel at the Conservative Political Action Conference yesterday, Lee admitted to the full implications of his backwards view of our founding document. All spending on national programs intended to secure Americans’ retirement or provide for their health are unconstitutional:

QUESTION: What programs that we now call entitlement spending are part of the enumerated powers of Article I, Section 8 [of the Constitution]?

LEE: There are those that will tell you that those are based on the Spending Clause, in, uh, clause one of Article I, Section 8. That was the justification advanced at the time these programs were created. And it rested on an expansive interpretation provided by the Supreme Court saying, in essence, Congress can spend anything it wants, as long as it has tax revenues coming in, or, as it turns out, even if it doesn’t. It can spend it on whatever it wants.

This can’t be reconciled with the original understanding of the clause. If you go back to founding era documents, to discussions around state ratification debates — the Federalist Papers — they understood the Spending Clause as being there to spend money on those powers that were duly enumerated. . . . If these kinds of programs, ah, were to come forward and we were really following the original understanding of the Constitution, we’d say let’s do these at the state level, and the local level. Never at the federal level.

Watch it:

Lee’s odd reading of the Constitution cannot be squared with the text of the document itself. Had Lee actually bothered to read the founding document, he’d know that the United States may “collect taxes . . . to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States.” Medicare, Social Security and other such safety net programs clearly provide for the nation’s “general welfare” and thus are unambiguously constitutional if you take the text of the document seriously.

Moreover, Lee’s description of early constitutional history is misleading at best. The reality is that there were two very distinct camps regarding how the Constitution should be interpreted in the early days of the Republic. James Madison led one camp, which believed that America should read the Constitution much more narrowly than its text suggests — although, to Madison’s great credit, he openly admitted that his preferred reading of the Constitution is inconsistent with its “literal” meaning.

Alexander Hamilton led a different faction which rejected the idea that the Constitution creates restrictions that don’t exist in its text, and the Supreme Court unanimously adopted Hamilton’s view in the very first Supreme Court decision to consider the question. More recently, conservative Justice Antonin Scalia laughed openly at the suggestion that this debate should be reopened, stating that “of course it’s not” the proper role of judges to second guess how Congress decides to spend money.

In other words, Lee’s position doesn’t just place him at the lunatic fringe of constitutional thinkers, it also puts him at the lunatic fringe of conservative constitutional thinkers.

]]> http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/02/10/422749/sen-mike-lee-emallem-entitlement-spending-is-unconstitutional/feed/ 0 http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/02/10/422651/justiceline-february-10-2012/ http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/02/10/422651/justiceline-february-10-2012/#comments Fri, 10 Feb 2012 12:52:16 +0000 Ian Millhiser http://thinkprogress.org/?p=422651 Welcome to Justiceline, ThinkProgress Justice’s morning round-up of the latest legal news and developments. Remember to follow us on Twitter at @TPJustice.
• Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire (D) announced that she will sign marriage equality into law in that state on Monday. Unfortunately, the law may not actually take effect until next November, as anti-gay groups plan to challenge it via ballot referendum.
• The Senate Judiciary Committee votes 11-7 to require the Supreme Court to televise its hearings.
• The Mississippi Supreme Court heard oral arguments on whether to allow several last minute pardons by former Gov. Haley Barbour (R).
• Wyoming becomes the latest state to consider legislation preventing towns and other localities from enacting gun safety laws.
• Spain appears likely to win a legal dispute over who owns a pile of sunken treasure discovered by an American company off the Spanish coast.
• The Today show shows how terrifyingly easy it is under many states’ laws to purchase a weapon capable of bringing down a helicopter in a drug store parking lot:

  Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

  ]]> http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/02/10/422651/justiceline-february-10-2012/feed/ 0 http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/02/09/422527/kansas-house-committee-approved-concealed-carry-on-campus-bill/ http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/02/09/422527/kansas-house-committee-approved-concealed-carry-on-campus-bill/#comments Thu, 09 Feb 2012 22:40:46 +0000 Ian Millhiser http://thinkprogress.org/?p=422527 Yesterday, a bill that would allow concealed firearms on college campuses passed a state house committee vote. Forcing state universities to allow hidden guns on campus has become a centerpiece of many conservative state lawmakers‘ agendas, despite widespread opposition from actual university officials.
  ]]> http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/02/09/422527/kansas-house-committee-approved-concealed-carry-on-campus-bill/feed/ 0 http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/02/09/422358/scalia-the-soviet-unions-constitution-was-much-better-than-ours/ http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/02/09/422358/scalia-the-soviet-unions-constitution-was-much-better-than-ours/#comments Thu, 09 Feb 2012 21:40:31 +0000 Ian Millhiser http://thinkprogress.org/?p=422358 During a recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, conservative Justice Antonin Scalia said that U.S. Constitution is vastly inferior to that of one of our long defunct enemies:

  The bill of rights of the former evil empire, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was much better than ours. I mean it literally. It was much better. We guarantee freedom of speech and of the press, big deal! The guaranteed freedom of speech, of the press of street demonstrations and anyone who is caught trying to suppress criticism of the government will be called to account.

  Watch it:

  Scalia’s casual disregard for our Constitution proves that he is manifestly unfit to interpret it. If Scalia would rather live under the Soviet constitution, than he should move to Russia and see how he likes trying to get a job as a judge there. Clearly, ThinkProgress has no choice but to call for this communist infiltrator to immediately resign from the federal bench.

  Except that such a call would be completely dishonest, which will be clear to anyone who takes half a minute to watch the entire video embedded in this post.

  Sadly, a small army of right-wing legal groups and commentators are perfectly willing to levy an equally unfounded attack against left-of-center Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Last week, Justice Ginsburg told an Egyptian audience that she would not recommend using the United States Constitution as a model for the new Egyptian Constitution. Ginsburg suggested that Egypt should learn from the full experience of the world in drafting constitutions, and because we have the world’s oldest enduring Constitution, its drafters did not benefit from all that humanity has learned about constitution drafting in the last 200 years.

  It was no doubt predictable that these comments would inspire right-wing editorials headlined “Justice Ginsburg Should Resign,” but those editorials are just as ill-considered as a suggestion that Scalia must resign because of his comments about the Soviet Union. If Ginsburg’s opponents had actually bothered to watch her entire statement to the Egyptians, they would have heard her stirring praise for our First Amendment, her references to the “genius” of our Constitution, and her statement about how powerful it is that our Constitution places power in “We the People.”

  But, of course, Ginsburg’s critics aren’t interested in actually doing their homework, they just want an excuse to go on the attack.

  ]]> http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/02/09/422358/scalia-the-soviet-unions-constitution-was-much-better-than-ours/feed/ 0 http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/02/09/422242/how-santorum-romneys-fake-first-amendment-endangers-all-protections-for-workers/ http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/02/09/422242/how-santorum-romneys-fake-first-amendment-endangers-all-protections-for-workers/#comments Thu, 09 Feb 2012 20:10:29 +0000 Ian Millhiser http://thinkprogress.org/?p=422242 As ThinkProgress previously reported, GOP presidential frontrunners Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney, along with Speaker John Boehner, all incorrectly believe that the First Amendment permits the Catholic Church to immunize itself from a law simply because they have a religious disagreement with it.

  This isn’t just wrong and contrary to Supreme Court precedent, it is disastrously wrong. In this case, Santorum, Romney and Boehner all believe that conservative Catholic bishops should be able immunize themselves from a contraception regulation, but the truth is that there is no limit on these three men’s misreading of the Constitution. Indeed, as superlawyer David Boies explained on MSNBC last night, if one employer can immunize themselves from one law simply by claiming that it violates their religion, then any employer can use this tactic to immunize themselves from any law. Boies cites the minimum wage, safe working conditions, workman’s compensation, age discrimination laws & taxes as examples of laws that employers could ignore simply by claiming they object to them. Watch it:

  Santorum, Romney and their co-ideologues like to claim they are defending “religious liberty,” but the truth is that they are really fighting against the rule of law. It cannot be the case that employers can treat their workers however they choose simply because they object to the law requiring them to behave otherwise.

  ]]> http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/02/09/422242/how-santorum-romneys-fake-first-amendment-endangers-all-protections-for-workers/feed/ 0 http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/02/09/421989/after-triple-primary-loss-romney-picks-up-santorums-false-claim-about-government-picking-church-ministers/ http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/02/09/421989/after-triple-primary-loss-romney-picks-up-santorums-false-claim-about-government-picking-church-ministers/#comments Thu, 09 Feb 2012 18:00:06 +0000 Ian Millhiser http://thinkprogress.org/?p=421989 Yesterday morning, presidential candidate Rick Santorum made the unambiguously false claim that the Obama Administration wants the government to force Catholics to ordain female priests — a brief the administration filed in the Supreme Court actually says exactly the opposite. Perhaps inspired by his surprising triple loss in three GOP primary and caucus states earlier this week, Santorum’s opponent Mitt Romney repeated Santorum’s fabricated claim at a campaign event later in the day:

  This president is attacking religion, and is putting in place a secular agenda that our forefounders would not recognize. He, uh, he took a position which I thought was interesting which is he said, instead of a church being able to say who their ministers are, the government has to approve who you say your ministers are. He made that decision, and by the way, the church involved went to the Supreme Court, ultimately, to see if they could reverse that decision by the Obama Administration . . . did you know that the Supreme Court voted 9-0 against the president to retain religious liberty.

  Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but Romney really shouldn’t ape Santorum’s inability to get his facts straight. For starters, the Obama Administration did not even come close to saying that the government has to approve church ministers. Rather, as conservative Chief Justice John Roberts explained in the unanimous opinion Romney refers to, the Obama Administration’s position is that “it would violate the First Amendment for courts to apply [anti-discrimination] laws to compel the ordination of women by the Catholic Church or by an Orthodox Jewish seminary.”

  Nor is it true that this Supreme Court decision ended some nefarious Obama plot to impose unwanted clergy upon churches. The case that Romney refers to, Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC, dealt with a school teacher who spent most of her time teaching secular subjects, but who also spent some time providing religious education at a religious school. The school claimed this teacher was actually a minister — and thus unprotected from the federal law that makes it illegal to fire her because she has a disability — while the teacher (and the Obama Administration) believed that she should not be treated the same way as Catholic priests or Orthodox rabbis because the overwhelming majority of her job duties were secular. Ultimately, a federal appeals court agreed with the teacher, and the Supreme Court agreed with the school.

  No one in this saga ever claimed that the government can pick and choose a church’s ministers. Rather, the most important issue in the case was a very narrow factual dispute over what a single woman’s job was. But, of course, for Romney to realize this, he would actually have to spend some time learning basic facts before opening his mouth. And he has much more important things to do, like finding ways to copy Santorum’s successful strategy of telling falsehoods to GOP primary voters.

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