In the past year, GOP state lawmakers have enacted a raft of laws intended to make it more difficult for Democrats to win election. These include so-called voter ID laws, which disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of minority, student, low-income and elderly voters; laws making it easier for corporations to influence elections; and laws cutting back on early voting and erecting new barriers for absentee voters.

Today, in an interview with radio host Michael Smerconish, President Obama addressed these anti-voter laws, indicating that the Department of Justice will examine them to ensure their compliance with the law:

SMERCONISH: Are the goal posts being moved on you in 2012? In my native Pennsylvania there’s a move afoot that would change the way in which electoral votes are apportioned. You picked up 21 in ’08, you’d of only had a net gain of one if this new rule, this new system were to come into effect. I look at that, and the requirement of photo IDs in some states, and the reduction of advanced voting and I wonder what’s going on out there on a grand level. What’s your level of concern? [...]

OBAMA: With respect to Pennsylvania the people of Pennsylvania will ultimately decide how they want to allocate their electoral votes, and I’ll leave it up to them. I will say that my big priority is making sure that as many people are participating in our democracy as possible. Some of these moves in some of the other states that we’ve seen—trying to make it tougher to vote, restricting ballot access, making it hard on seniors, making it hard on young people. I think that’s a bit mistake and I have made sure that our Justice Department’s taken a look at what’s being done across the country to ensure that people aren’t being denied access to the franchise.

Watch:

The same GOP operatives who have pushed these election rigging laws will no doubt seize upon the president’s statement as evidence that DOJ’s investigations are political motivated, but the truth is that protecting the franchise from these kinds of attacks fits squarely within the Justice Department’s mission. The Voting Rights Act not only forbids laws that are passed specifically to target minority voters but also strikes down state laws that have a greater impact on minority voters than on others. Because voter ID laws disproportionately disenfranchise minorities, they violate this landmark legislation.

Indeed, as former President Bill Clinton recently explained, the current round of anti-voter legislation is the most “determined effort to limit the franchise” since Jim Crow. If anything, the real question is why DOJ has not been much more aggressive in filing lawsuits challenging these illegal laws.

As countries around the world attempt to crack down on immigration, they are no longer turning to government workers held accountable by taxpayers and government officials. Instead, they are outsourcing the operations and staffing of immigration detention centers to scandal-plagued private companies that are raking in exorbitant profits from government contracts even as they face terrible inspection reports, lawsuits, and claims of abuse and neglect from detainees.

The practice has become most prevalent in Australia, Great Britain, and the United States as political leaders attempt to prove to voters that they are tough on illegal immigration by detaining and deporting undocumented immigrants. In the United States, private companies control more than half of the nation’s detention beds, while the number of detainees has increased by more than 40 percent since 2005. In Australia and Britain, where privatization has advanced the fastest, companies like G4S continually bring in profitable government contracts even as their costs and human rights abuses have soared, the New York Times reports:

In Britain last fall, the company came under criminal investigation in the asphyxiation of an Angolan man who died as three G4S escorts held him down on a British Airways flight. Soon afterward, British immigration authorities announced that the company had lost its bid to renew a $48 million deportation escort contract because it was underbid by a competitor.

Even so, G4S has more than $1.1 billion in government contracts in Britain, a spokesman said, only about $126 million from the immigration authority. It quickly replaced the lost revenue with contracts to build, lease and run more police jails and prisons.

There was a public outcry when an Aboriginal man died in another G4S van in similar circumstances the next year. A coroner ruled in 2009 that G4S, the drivers and the government shared the blame. The company was later awarded a $70 million, five-year prisoner transport contract in another state, Victoria, without competition.

Serco, another prominent private prison company, reported a 35 percent profit increase in 2010 and a 13 percent rise in the spring of 2011, and the cost of their contracts often ends up higher than expected. The cost of a five-year, $370 million contract awarded by the British government in 2009, for instance, has already skyrocketed to $756 million.

This type of profiteering and corruption, unfortunately, has been a predictable side effect of efforts to privatize domestic American prisons. Private prison companies have spent millions lobbying for longer, harsher prison sentences to maximize their own profitability, and lawmakers at the front of the privatization push — most notably Govs. Rick Perry (R-TX) and Rick Scott (R-FL) — led the fight after receiving thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from the industry. And as their lobbying efforts have grown, so too has the number of prisoners incarcerated at private facilities. And just last week, a former Pennsylvania judge was sentenced to 210 months in prison for his role in a “cash for kids” scandal, in which he ordered a state-run facility closed and directed juvenile offenders to private facilities.

While private prisons continue to be a good investment for the companies that run them, evidence is mounting that they are a terrible investment for taxpayers and governments. A recent study of Arizona’s private prisons, for instance, revealed that even though they steer clear of the state’s costliest inmates, they cost the government more than state-run facilities.

On Wednesday, Judge Sharon Lovelace Blackburn issued an opinion that struck down parts of Alabama’s radical new anti-immigrant laws, but left in place a provision requiring public schools to “systematically determine the immigration status of public school students and to report the number of undocumented students in their district to the state.”

Many of the laws critics feared that the children of undocumented families would be afraid to go to school if it made it easier to deport their parents — and those fears have now been validated. The Alabama online news hub al.com reports today about one school in Foley, Alabama where dozens of students either stayed home or withdrew altogether, fearful that the new law was going to lead to the deportation of their families. The principal of the school said some undocumented parents are even making arrangements for documented parents to take custody of their children if they are deported:

Many of the 223 Hispanic students at Foley Elementary came to school Thursday crying and afraid, said Principal Bill Lawrence. Nineteen of them withdrew, and another 39 were absent, Lawrence said, the day after a federal judge upheld Alabama’s strict new immigration law, which authorizes law enforcement to detain people suspected of not being U.S. citizens and requires schools to ask new enrollees for a copy of their birth certificate. [...] Lawrence said that parents are afraid that they’ll get arrested and detained, and be cut off from their children. “Many have made arrangements with American citizens in case they are separated from their children,” Lawrence said. “One of our mothers has agreed to accept seven families’ worth of children, just in case.”

“We don’t want them to take away our children,” said Dawn DuPree Kelley, the principal of Greenwood Elementary School in Jefferson County, Alabama. The state’s governor, Robert Bentley (R-AL), remains defiant, saying, “I will continue to fight at every turn to defend this law against any and all challenges.” Alabama’s interim state superintendent has emphasized that schools will not be refusing admission to students because their parent’s citizenship status and that students already enrolled won’t be checked.

Depending on the day, GOP presidential candidate Gov. Rick Perry (TX) will claim — in words or in print — that Social Security is unconstitutional, a monstrous lie, or a Ponzi scheme. Or perhaps he’ll stuff a popover in his mouth to avoid saying what he thinks of Social Security. Or he may simply make the false claim that he’s never said Social Security is unconstitutional. Now, however, Perry is taking an entirely different approach — claiming that Social Security is unconstitutional and that it’s still “going to be there” after a Perry Administration.

Yesterday on CNBC’s Squawk Box, Perry was asked to pin down exactly what he thought of Social Security and what he would do to reform it. His answer is hardly a tribute to coherence:

PERRY: What we talked about in the book was that this was one of many places where the bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., or Congress or the president of the United States went well outside of what our Founding Fathers — but listen, Social Security is in place, that program is going to be there, it’s just got to be transformed, and that’s what we’re talking about doing.

Watch it:

Perry is trying to have it both ways by declaring the program both unconstitutional and worth preserving in the same breath. But in trying to bury his unpopular Social Security position, Perry still offered two Social Security reform ideas that are quite damaging to future beneficiaries. First, he suggests “staggering the age upward for people to become eligible” for benefits. Raising the age is very regressive for low-income workers because they do not live as long as high income workers. From 1997 to 2006, low-income men registered only about one-fifth the gain in life expectancy at age 65 compared to higher-income men over the same period. The workers who need the benefits they earned the most would be less likely to see them if the age is raised, a reason the idea is very unpopular with the public.

Perry’s second thought is to give young people a “private option” of private accounts rather than guaranteed benefits. Three years after the 2008 financial meltdown, the idea is still foolish. Millions of Americans lost enormous chunks of their retirement savings in that crisis. For many of them, Social Security was the only source of retirement funds they had left. The sheer volatility of market behavior “illustrates the real potential for decades-long declines that could erode the value of a private retirement account invested in stocks.” Despite being the big plan for nearly every GOP presidential candidate, a plurality of Americans still dislike privatizing Social Security.

Perry may be endeavoring to shed his wildly unpopular plans to ditch Social Security, his ideas for “reform” fair no better. Given his extreme views on Social Security, it appears that stuffing a popover in his mouth is the best answer he’s given so far.

The latest voter suppression tactic employed by Republicans can be found in Maine, where last week the Secretary of State sent a threatening letter to hundreds of college students who were legally registered to vote in Maine, floating the possibility of election law violation and encouraging them to re-register elsewhere.

The letter explained that Maine Secretary of State Charles Summers was writing because he “was presented with a list of 206 University of Maine students with out-of-state home addresses and asked to investigate allegations of election law violations.” That list was provided to him not by an uninterested citizen, but rather the Maine Republican Party Chairman Charlie Webster, who has accused these students of voter fraud.

In his letter, Summers informed the recipient that “our research shows you have registered to vote as a resident of Maine,” before going on to strongly imply that the students did not meet the state definition for “residence of a person”. Summers went on to encourage the students to re-register in another state, telling them that if “you are no longer claiming to be a Maine resident, I ask that you complete the enclosed form to cancel your voter registration in Maine.” Here is the relevant section of the letter:

Dear ______:

On July 25, 2001, I was presented with a list of 206 University of Maine students with out-of-state home addresses and asked to investigate allegations of election law violations.[...]

Our research shows you have registered to vote as a resident of Maine. Maine’s election law (Title 21-A of the Maine Revised Statutes, section 111, subsection 1) defines “residence of a person” as “that place where the person has established a fixed and principal home to which the person, whenever temporarily absent, intends to return.” [...]

If you are currently using an out-of-state driver’s license or motor vehicle registration, I ask that you take appropriate action to comply with out motor vehicle laws within the next 30 days (i.e. by October 20, 2011). If, instead, you are no longer claiming to be a Maine resident, I ask that you complete the enclosed form to cancel your voter registration in Maine so that out our central voter registration system can be updated.

The letter does not explicitly accuse the students of violating the state’s residency laws — and indeed it would be very difficult for Summers to defend such a claim. The Supreme Court ruled over 30 years ago that students cannot be held to a different residency standard than other people within the state. Nevertheless, the letter succeeded in intimidating many of its targets.

ThinkProgress spoke with a few of the letter recipients. Casey O’Malley, a senior at University of Maine Farmington, said her family has been worried about potential legal consequences because of this letter. She hasn’t decided whether to cancel her registration or not, but her family has been “pretty insistent” that she do so in order to be on the safe side. Another recipient, who wished to remain anonymous, said that students she knew were “beyond scared and freaked out.” One was “so shaken up” because she was scared the letter meant she was going to get sued.

Maine Secretary of State spokeswoman Caitlin Chamberlain told ThinkProgress that intimidating student voters “wasn’t our aim.” The office “just wanted to inform students who may not have been aware of those laws,” Chamberlain said. Though she said the office accepted the Supreme Court ruling permitting student voters, she also claimed that “to vote in Maine, you must declare yourself a resident.” This was reflected in the letter, leading many students to mistakenly believe that they were illegally registered in Maine.

For the Maine secretary of state to target hundreds of college students with scare tactics on the behest of the Maine Republican Party chairman is one of the worst forms of voter intimidation. Most citizens would be understandably frightened by such a letter, especially college students who were first-time voters. Though these Maine students were performing their civic duty, the same cannot be said for Summers and Webster.

There’s a word for top elections officials who decide not to help students to vote but rather harass them into un-registering: reprehensible.

American students do not know the basic history of the nation’s civil rights movement, and most of the blame for this lack of knowledge falls on states’ academic standards for public schools, according to a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The report gave letter grades to states based on how well their state curriculum included the civil rights movement; in all, 35 states received an F. Alabama, Florida, and New York received an A, and eight of the 12 states that received an A, B, or C are southern states. “Generally speaking, the farther away from the South — and the smaller the African-American population — the less attention paid to the civil rights movement,” the report says.

But according to the New York Times, the SPLC report is just one of many that continue to show how few students are considered to be proficient in history:

Over the past decade, students have performed worse on federal history tests administered by the Department of Education than on tests in any other subject. On the history test last year, only 12 percent of high school seniors showed proficiency.

The law center’s report noted that on that federal test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, seniors were asked to read a brief excerpt from the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, including the phrase, “Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” Only 2 percent of the seniors were able to state that the ruling had been prompted by a school segregation case.

While presidential candidate former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) has blamed these weak history scores on a left-wing conspiracy, ThinkProgress has documented how conservatives are manipulating history textbooks and state curriculum in order to push their ideological agenda — especially in Texas. The state’s Board of Education rewrote the requirements to remove Thomas Jefferson, take out mentions of civil rights leaders, and prevent “gross pro-Islamic, anti-Christian distortions” in its textbooks.

Sadly, Texas’ slanted curriculum could easily spread to infect other states. Because of the state’s size, textbook manufacturers gear their textbooks to match Texas’ requirements rather than have to produce multiple copies to match multiple curricula for all of the states. And if students across the nation are learning about just what the right-wing wants them to know, then the large number of states failing to teach students about the civil rights movement is not likely to improve.

In a transparent attempt to punish teachers for organizing union efforts, Michigan Republicans are pushing a bill through the legislature that would prohibit public employees from sending political messages through their work emails. The bill is an attempt to stifle any union-related communication between teachers and other public employees, imposing ridiculously harsh penalties for teachers who send “political” messages:

Michigan educators could face a year in prison for conducting union or political business over public school e-mail servers under a bill advancing in Lansing.

State House Bill 4052 was reported out of committee last week, and would prohibit a public employee from using public e-mail for political campaigning, union activities, union recruitment, and fundraising.

Violators could be found guilty of a misdemeanor, which would carry a fine of up to $1,000, up to one year in prison or both in the bill’s amended version. Organizations found guilty would face up to a $10,000 fine.[...]

The bill is an example of ongoing “classic scapegoating” in Lansing against teachers, and is being used to appeal to the Republican-led Legislature’s base, said Doug Norton, former Howell Education Association president.

“I think that they hate the fact that teachers are able to join a union and collectively bargain. I think they have targeted teachers in their organization,” Norton said.

The Michigan Education Association, the largest teachers’ union in the state, says the bill is political retribution after a conservative activist lost a legal battle over the use of school districts’ email service for union lobbying efforts. The Michigan Court of Appeals ruled that teachers’ emails were not subject to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which would’ve made all personal communications subject to public scrutiny.

Instead of abiding by the court’s decision, Michigan Republicans are determined to circumvent the law and crack down on unions by completely banning “political” communication by public employees. The Livingston Daily notes that the bill actually cannot be enforced without modifying the state’s Freedom of Information Act.

These so-called small government conservatives seem entirely comfortable with the prospect of a Big Brother police state that would monitor all communications by all public employees. Disturbingly, the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Al Pscholka (R) said the law would depend on co-workers reporting violations by their colleagues, fostering an atmosphere of fear and suspicion and inviting public accusations based on personal vendettas.

The Michigan Education Association warns that this GOP assault is about more than public workers and their unions — if passed, it would weaken constitutional protections on every citizen’s right to freedom of speech and freedom of association.

Despite Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s (R) belief that nearly the entire 20th Century violates the Constitution, much of the GOP have declared him an apostate for vigorously defending a bill he signed giving undocumented immigrant students in Texas the ability to pay in-state tuition to state universities. The latest Republican to jump on this bandwagon is Perry’s presidential rival Herman Cain, who told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer yesterday that he could not support Perry in large part because of Perry’s somewhat moderate stance on immigration:

Today I could not support Rick Perry as the nominee for a host of reasons. Him being soft on securing the border is one of the reasons. I feel very strongly about the need to secure the border for real, the need to enforce the laws that are already there, the need to promote the path to citizenship that is already there. But, more importantly, empower the states to enforce the national federal immigration laws, because the federal government didn’t do it, can’t do it and they never will do it.

Watch it:

Cain’s suggestion that immigration law enforcement should simply be turned over to the states is just another example of his naive understanding of both foreign policy and the Constitution.

As the Supreme Court established almost 70 years ago, the states have very little business weighing into immigration policy because “[e]xperience has shown that international controversies of the gravest moment, sometimes even leading to war, may arise from real or imagined wrongs to another’s subjects inflicted, or permitted, by a government.” If a single state mangles an immigration prosecution, for example, or directs disparate resources against the citizens of one nationality, it will impact the foreign relations of the entire United States — potentially even thrusting America into a needless war. The Constitution leaves these kinds of decisions up to a leader who has actually been elected by the whole nation, and not to the governor of just one state.

Nevertheless, Cain’s weak understanding of law and policy is apparently quite appealing to the kind of voters who cheer death and boo U.S. servicemembers. A new Fox News poll shows previous frontrunner Rick Perry hemorrhaging support — more than one third of his previous supporters ditched his candidacy in the wake of Perry’s defense of humane treatment for immigrants — while Cain has surged 11 points to third place in the GOP primary.

Over at Reason’s Hit & Run blog, Mike Riggs writes of an immigration case that is indicative of the broken nature of the nation’s immigration system. Nadia Habib is a junior psychology major and an honor student who is attending Stony Brook University in New York. Her father has a green card and has been living in the United States for 20 years, and all three of her siblings are American citizens.

Yet despite living in the United States since she was brought here by her mother when she was 20 months old, she is expected to be deported back to Bangladesh alongside her mom tomorrow. “I feel like I’m just going to be in a room depressed. I don’t know anybody there. I don’t speak the language,” Habib told a local news station.

Her planned deportation comes at a time when the Obama administration has made repeated promises to focus its deportation on immigrants who’ve committed crimes while in the U.S. “Although Obama has promised not to be going after non-criminal cases, he’s going after Nadia and her mom,” noted Hunter College student Sonia Guinansaca, who works with the New York State Youth Leadership Council and is fighting Habib’s deportation. Local students have launched campaigns on Facebook in her support and Sen. Kristen Gillibrand (D-NY) has spoken up against her deportation as well. Both Habib and her mother are expected to be deported at 11 a.m. tomorrow.