The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit just upheld TSA’s new screening measures in a unanimous decision:

As other circuits have held, and as the Supreme Court has strongly suggested, screening passengers at an airport is an “administrative search” because the primary goal is not to determine whether any passenger has committed a crime but rather to protect the public from a terrorist attack. An administrative search does not require individualized suspicion. Instead, whether an administrative search is “unreasonable” within the condemnation of the Fourth Amendment “is determined by assessing, on the one hand, the degree to which it intrudes upon an individual’s privacy and, on the other, the degree to which it is needed for the promotion of legitimate governmental interests.”

That balance clearly favors the Government here. The need to search airline passengers “to ensure public safety can be particularly acute,” and, crucially, an AIT scanner, unlike a magnetometer, is capable of detecting, and therefore of deterring, attempts to carry aboard airplanes explosives in liquid or powder form. On the other side of the balance, we must acknowledge the steps the TSA has already taken to protect passenger privacy, in particular distorting the image created using AIT and deleting it as soon as the passenger has been cleared. More telling, any passenger may opt-out of AIT screening in favor of a patdown, which allows him to decide which of the two options for detecting a concealed, nonmetallic weapon or explosive is least invasive.

As Orin Kerr points out, this decision comes from a “pretty Fourth-Amendment-rights-friendly panel.” Judge Douglas Ginsburg is a deeply radical libertarian who once called for a return to a Great Depression-era understanding of the Constitution, but he is also a fairly consistent libertarian who is skeptical of intrusive searches and seizures. Judge David Tatel is one of the federal bench’s leading progressive thinkers. When he was younger, he was considered a likely candidate for promotion to the Supreme Court in a Democratic administration, and his clerks routinely go only to clerk for a justice.

In other words, if this panel would uphold TSA’s practices, it is very unlikely that their decision will be contradicted by a higher authority.

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley(R) has a unique solution to the problem she created by signing a law in May that will require voters to present a government-issued photo ID at the polls — she will personally drive you to the DMV. As with any voter ID requirement, Haley’s law could have the effect of suppressing the vote of thousands of people who don’t currently have South Carolina IDs, especially minorities, college students, rural voters, and the elderly. For these people, it is often difficult or impossible to travel to the DMV to obtain a license, so many wind up not being able to cast a ballot come Election Day.

But Haley isn’t worried because she has a plan. “Find me those people that think that this is invading their rights,” she told a local Fox affiliate, “And I will go take them to the DMV myself and help them get that picture ID.” Watch it:

So, assuming Haley’s offer is genuine, how many rides will the governor be giving? South Carolina’s election commission estimates that 178,000 of the state’s voters lack the ID necessary to allow them to exercise their right to vote. Google Maps estimates that it will take 11 minutes for Nikki Haley to drive from the governor’s mansion to the nearest branch of the state DMV:

That DMV branch is open five days a week for 8.5 hours a day. Assuming Haley wants to save some time and gas, we’ll assume that her car can fit four passengers. That means that if every single one of these 178,000 voters were to present themselves to the governor’s mansion and request the free ride Haley just offered them, it would take just over 7 years, 4 months, 3 weeks and 5 days if she spends every single minute that the DMV is open doing nothing but playing taxi driver. That’s nearly two full terms — assuming there’s no traffic.

A simpler solution: Don’t jeopardize peoples’ right to vote in the first place.

As Marie Diamond noted last week, budget cuts in Alto, Texas forced the town to lay off its entire police force, prompting the city’s mayor to remark that “everybody’s talking about ‘bolt your doors, buy a gun.”

Now, another town reeling from a financial crisis is being forced to do the same. The border town of Columbus, New Mexico, fired its six-person police force because it was unable to keep them on city payrolls:

Still reeling from a scandal that claimed its former mayor, and potentially its former police chief and a village trustee, a small New Mexico border town is now without a police department. Columbus, New Mexico, with a population of about 1,800, is in such financial disarray that the town is not even sure how much it owes, current Mayor Nicole Lawson told CNN.

Whatever that amount is, she said, “we don’t have it.” The sudden drying of the town coffers meant that Columbus, situated across the border from Puerto Palomas, Mexico — a town known to be a staging area for drug cartels — had to fire its six-person police department. The decision to do away with the department “was based on the financial crisis we are in,” Lawson said.

The town’s “code enforcement and animal control components” were also abolished when the police force was disbanded. Columbus will now be relying on the police force of Luna County to attend to its security needs.

Earlier this week, President Obama made the objectively true statement that, without a debt ceiling hike, he “cannot guarantee” that Social Security checks will go out when they are scheduled to be mailed on Aug. 3 “because there may simply not be the money in the coffers to do it.” In a Fox News interview yesterday, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) pretended to care that Social Security would temporarily shut down:

My plan would address the debt limit, and it would continue to allow government to continue to operate, for Social Security checks to continue to be sent out. That’s why I find so insulting the president’s unwillingness to go along with this plan. [...] The president dismissed it out of hand, and the very next day said, let’s go ahead and just cut all the Social Security checks going out to current retirees, without any explanation as to why they would be the first on the chopping block.

I mean, look, when we’re bringing it about $200 billion a month, and our interest payments are less than 10 percent of that, and Social Security payments are about $50 billion, why on earth would you cut Social Security checks first? That doesn’t make any sense to me and I think it’s insulting to America’s retirees.

Watch it:

First of all, there is literally no one on the planet who has less credibility to present themselves as the great defender of Social Security and America’s seniors than Mike Lee. In a lengthy speech on the Constitution, Lee attacked President Franklin Roosevelt for calling for the federal government to provide “a decent retirement plan” and “health care” because “the Constitution doesn’t give Congress any of those powers.” So Lee doesn’t even think that Social Security (or Medicare, for that matter) should even exist because it violates his tenther understanding of the Constitution.

Nor does Lee understand the federal accounting process any more than he understands the Constitution. Unless the debt ceiling is raised, America is no longer able to borrow more money, and our bank account runs dry on Aug. 2. On Aug. 3, the federal government is supposed to mail out about $23 billion in Social Security benefits, but it will only take in about $12 billion in taxes — leaving an $11 billion shortfall. It won’t matter whether the government will eventually collect the “$200 billion a month” that Lee refers to, because only a fraction of that money will actually be in our bank account when Social Security’s bill comes due.

So the truth is that Obama’s statement is unambiguously correct, and Lee’s statement reveals his utter ignorance of how the federal government works. Moreover, Lee’s claim that he cares one bit about whether seniors receive their Social Security checks doesn’t even approach plausibility given his previous claim that Social Security violates the Constitution.