The Huffington Post’s Jennifer Bendery reports that Vice President Biden told House Democrats that President Obama would have used the Fourteenth Amendment to prevent a catastrophic default if Congress failed to reach a debt ceiling deal:

This report is hearsay upon hearsay, so there is no way to be sure what Biden actually told the caucus. And the report is also surprising given the number of times that Obama claimed he did not have the authority to invoke the Constitution in order to lift the debt ceiling.

The GOP was able to force a one-sided deal for a very simple reason — they took the entire world’s economy hostage and left only a shred of doubt that they were foolish enough to shoot the hostage. Their game was to leave President Obama with no choice but to agree to their terms because he had no tools available to free their hostage.

If the reports about Biden’s statement are true, however, we now know that Obama believed that he did have a tool which, if nothing else, he could have threatened to invoke to scare the GOP into believing that if they pushed too hard they’d be left with nothing. Instead of doing so, Obama consistently stated that he believed the Constitution could not save America from the GOP’s hostage crisis.

There are all kinds of good reasons why invoking the Fourteenth Amendment should only have been done as a matter of last resort. Among other things, a cloud of legal uncertainty would have hung over any bonds issued under the constitutional option, forcing America to pay inflated interest rates in order to sell them. Nevertheless, President Obama was wrong to rhetorically take this option off the table at a time when the GOP’s entire negotiating strategy depended upon backing the nation into a corner.

The right-wing campaign against women’s rights is leaping past the traditional bounds of abortion rights and targeting a woman’s access to birth control. Around 11 million women use a method of birth control. And yet, Republicans are not only standing against federal funding for contraception, but are trying to redefine life as beginning at the moment of fertilization — effectively turning many forms of birth control “into the legal equivalent of a homicide.” Last week, Democratic lawmakers Sen. Frank Lautenberg (NJ) and Rep. Carolyn Maloney (NY) introduced a bill to protect women against another method of infringement that conservatives are pushing: pharmacies’ refusals to fill birth control prescriptions.

In effort to help ensure the Obama administration’s requirement that insurance plans cover birth control without co-payments, Lautenberg and Maloney are supporting the Access to Birth Control (ABC) Act which would make it illegal for a pharmacy to refuse to fill birth control prescription or “interfere with or obstruct the delivery” of contraceptives:

The pharmacy shall ensure that its employees do not–

(A) intimidate, threaten, or harass customers in the delivery of services relating to a request for contraception;

(B) interfere with or obstruct the delivery of services relating to a request for contraception;

(C) intentionally misrepresent or deceive customers about the availability of contraception or its mechanism of action;

(D) breach medical confidentiality with respect to a request for contraception or threaten to breach such confidentiality; or

(E) refuse to return a valid, lawful prescription for contraception upon customer request.

If a pharmacy violates these requirements, it is liable for a civil penalty of up to $500,000.

As the National Women’s Law Center details, pharmacist refusals are not a theoretical problem. Pharmacists have refused to dispense prescription contraceptives or emergency contraception in at least 24 states. All the pharmacists who refused to deliver services based their objection “on personal beliefs, not legitimate medical or professional concerns” and even refused “to transfer a woman’s prescription to another pharmacist or to refer her to another pharmacy.” The ABC act would make it illegal to deny a referral.

Rather than penalizing pharmacies for refusing to assist women, many state statutes actually protect that behavior. Seven states prohibit outright obstruction of patient access to medication but allow pharmacist refusals. Six states have laws or regulations that specifically allow refusals without a requirement to refer or transfer prescriptions. And in 2011, Indiana, Missouri, and Pennsylvania pushed three bills that would permit refusals to dispense birth control “without protecting patient access.”

In pushing the ABC Act, Lautenberg stated that “birth control is basic health care for women.” “By guaranteeing access to birth control, we can ensure that women are never denied the right to make responsible decisions about their reproductive health,” he said. As Maloney points out, “Nearly 8 out of 10 Americans believe that a pharmacist should be required to fill prescriptions for birth control, even if they have a religious objection.”

As one New Jersey young woman put it, “I’m not going to a pharmacy to be judged…The doctors are the ones that should be asking questions, not the pharmacist.”

Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) wants people to think he is Mr. States’ Rights. He thinks Texas should have the right to flout Medicaid laws, ignore federal education laws and thumb its nose at environmental regulations. He notoriously proposed having Texas secede from the union, and he has a long record of support from pro-Confederate groups.

As it turns out, however, Perry only really thinks that states should have the right to do what he wants them to do. Last week, after Perry briefly claimed that respecting the 10th Amendment means respecting New York’s right to treat gay couples with dignity, he almost immediately went grovelling to the leader of an anti-gay hate group to pledge his fealty to an anti-gay constitutional amendment banning marriage equality. This weekend, Perry added women’s reproductive freedom to the list of things he thinks states should be forbidden from respecting:

[Perry's] spokeswoman, Katherine Cesinger, said by e-mail today: “Gov. Perry is proudly pro-life and successfully championed strong pro-life legislation in Texas including parental consent, this year’s sonogram bill and a budget that significantly defunds abortions in Texas. The governor has long supported overturning Roe v. Wade, and would support amending the U.S. Constitution, with the backing of Congress and the states, to protect innocent life.”

So Perry completely supports a conservative state’s right to flout progressive laws ensuring clean air or health care for the poor, but he would also rewrite the Constitution to prevent progressive states from governing the way they want to govern.

Lest there be any doubt, Perry’s belief that things like environmental regulations are completely optional has no basis in the Constitution. The Constitution gives national leaders sweeping power to regulate “commerce…among the several states,” and that includes the power to regulate polluting industries and polluting products such as automobiles. Similarly, while states do have the right to simply refuse Medicaid or federal education funds altogether. They may not, as Perry believes, simply suckle at the federal teat without also agreeing to obey Medcaid and education laws.

Simply put, Perry’s beliefs about the Constitution are radical even among the most radical tenther conservatives. He doesn’t simply misread the founding document to write essential health, education and environmental laws out of existence — he then ignores his own supposed loyalty to states rights to give the finger to gay couples and women.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, a specialized court that deals mostly with patent law, held on Friday that biotechnology companies can patent DNA sequences:

The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which specializes in patent cases, said that Myriad Genetics was entitled to patents on two human genes used to predict if women have an increased risk of getting breast and ovarian cancer.

The court ruled that DNA isolated from the body was eligible for patents because it was “markedly different” in its chemical structure from DNA that exists inside the chromosomes in the body. As a result, the isolated DNA is not simply a product of nature, which would not be eligible for a patent.

The 2-to-1 decision on the gene patenting issue was also a rejection of arguments made by the Obama administration, which had filed a friend of the court brief arguing that isolated DNA should not be patented.

Although this case could potentially be reviewed by the Supreme Court, high Court review of the Federal Circuit’s patent decisions are unusual. The Federal Circuit was created in 1982 as a specialized appeals court that handles all patent appeals brought in any federal court in the nation. Accordingly, the justices frequently defer to the Federal Circuit’s patent decisions because of the court’s particular expertise in this area.