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.