The New York Police Department is not having a great publicity month. First they were deluged with criticism for responding to a string of sexual assaults in Brooklyn by stopping women on the street and telling them to dress less provocatively. Now they’re facing repeated charges of police brutality for arresting and pepper spraying Wall Street protesters.

Today, the AP reports that the NYPD is infiltrating many of the city’s colleges — including Brooklyn College, CUNY, Hunter College, and Queens College — using undercover agents to spy on their their Muslim Student Associations. Cops reportedly stalked Muslim students online, chatted with them in message boards, and sent agents to meetings — all because these students were going on paintball trips they deemed “militant”:

The documents show police were worried about “militant paintball trips” organized by Muslim students at Brooklyn College. The Justice Department has in the past accused would-be terrorists of using paintball games as a sort of paramilitary training. But current and former officials said there was no standard for what kind of paintball trips the NYPD considered militant.

An old website formerly used by the group shows photos from one of these trips to a paintball range in Jim Thorpe, Pa. An announcement for an upcoming trip gives strategy tips like separating players into offensive and defensive lines. It jokingly describes the “luxurious cheesebus” members will ride in and advises them to check “the back of your ‘Fruit of the Loom’” for equipment sizes.

Islamic Society members said it has been years since members did any organized paintball trips. They scoffed at the NYPD report, noting that the club has also organized basketball, football and cricket games in the past.

The NYPD apparently first turned its attention to Muslim college students after receiving sketchy information that a student wanted to be a “martyr.” But police never found this person and did not bring cases charging Muslim student groups with training terrorists.

According to the AP, schools that cooperated with the spying program could have broken a federal law barring schools from releasing students’ information without their consent. This puts them at risk of losing all their federal funding. The cops also apparently violated a 1992 memorandum of understanding between the NYPD and CUNY prohibiting the department from conducting undercover work on campus.

Gawker notes that in the past the NYPD has “imported tactics and personnel from the CIA to set up a massive surveillance operation that the CIA itself is legally barred from creating—casing Muslim cafes, pulling over Pakistani cab drivers for routine infractions and pressuring them to become informants, and even tailing moderate Muslim allies while they dine with the mayor.”

Conservatives can normally rely on George Will to provide a gloss of pseudo-intellectual legitimacy to their worst policy proposals. Will is a passionate global warming denier. He called Americans upset about the 2008 economic downturn the “crybabies of the western world.” And he even spent an entire column praising the Supreme Court’s discredited decision in Lochner v. New York, which struck down a state worker protection law largely because five justices felt like it.

Yet, for all of Will’s willingness to carry water for the most repulsive and out of touch ideas, even he is offended by Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett’s (R) plan to rig the Electoral College in order to elect a Republican president in 2012:

Republicans supposedly revere the Constitution, but in its birthplace, Pennsylvania, they are contemplating a subversion of the Framers’ institutional architecture. Their ploy — partisanship masquerading as altruism about making presidential elections more “democratic” — will weaken resistance to an even worse change being suggested.

Pennsylvania’s Republican-controlled Legislature may pass, and the Republican governor promises to sign, legislation ending the state’s practice — shared by 47 other states — of allocating all of its electoral votes to the candidate who wins the statewide popular vote. Pennsylvania would join Maine and Nebraska in allocating one vote to the winner in each congressional district, with the two remaining votes going to the statewide popular vote winner. [...] The Electoral College today functions differently than the Founders envisioned — they did not anticipate political parties — but it does buttress the values encouraged by the federalism the Framers favoured, which Pennsylvanians, and others, should respect.

As with most Will columns, there is also a lot to not like in his rejection of the Pennsylvania vote rigging plan. Among other things, the “even worse change” Will refers to is the entirely sensible National Popular Vote compact, which would ensure that the person who gets the most votes actually gets to be president of the United States. Nevertheless, Will’s break with Corbett on Corbett’s plan to rig the presidential election is a hopeful sign that establishment conservatives are turning against that plan.

In April, ThinkProgress wrote an article about the next frontier in voting rights: online voter registration. Just nine states – as well as Clark County, Nevada – currently allow their citizens to register online, but voting rights took a major step forward this week as the nation’s largest state enacted a bill to give its tens of millions of eligible voters a 21st-century option for registering.

California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) signed into law SB 397 on Friday, which is expected to lead to significant increases in voter registration and participation rates. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, over 39 percent of eligible Californians – nearly 9 million people – were not registered to vote in 2010.

The Sacramento Bee has more:

Senate Bill 397, by Sen. Leland Yee, D-San Francisco, allows to state to begin registering voters online ahead of the completion of a new statewide voter registration database. [...]

Supporters had argued that the bill would make it easier for Californians to register to vote, increasing voter participation.

“In the 21st century, especially here in California, it is long overdue to have online voter registration,” Yee said in a statement. “SB 397 will not only help protect the integrity of the vote, but will allow many more individuals the opportunity to register and participate in our democracy.”

Brown also protected California voting rights by vetoing SB 205, which would have prohibited “paying canvassers to register voters on a per-registration basis.” Explaining his veto, Brown said, “Efforts to register voters should be encouraged, not criminalized.”

California’s move stands in stark contrast to recent efforts in other states to restrict, rather than expand, access to the ballot box. In Maine, the secretary of state’s office used a GOP list to intimidate student voters into re-registering in other states last month. Meanwhile, numerous GOP-led states have enacted so-called voter ID laws that do little more than disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of poor and minority voters. In Tennessee, a 96-year-old African-American woman was denied a voter ID last week because she didn’t have her marriage license. She told MSNBC that her experience in 2011 is worse than what she went through in the Jim Crow era.

Forcing prison inmates to work as unpaid laborers is not a new practice, but GOP-controlled states are increasing taking the idea to extremes as they face budget shortfalls and refuse to raise taxes. Under Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) anti-collective bargaining law, at least one Wisconsin county replaced some union workers with prison labor. Inmates are not paid for their work, but may receive time off of their sentences.

Now Camden County in Georgia is considering tasking prisoners to take on one of the most dangerous jobs there is: fighting fires. Using prisoners as firefighters is a cost-cutting measure that’s expected to save the county a bundle:

A select group of inmates may be exchanging their prison jumpsuits for firefighting gear in Camden County.

The inmates-to-firefighters program is one of several money-saving options the Board of County Commissioners is looking into to stop residents’ fire insurance costs from more than doubling. [...] The inmate firefighter program would be the most cost-effective choice, saving the county more than $500,000 a year by some estimates. But that option is already controversial, drawing criticism from the firefighters who would have to work alongside – and supervise – the prisoners.

The Camden program would put two inmates in each of three existing firehouses, and they would respond to all emergencies – including residential – alongside traditional firefighters. The inmates would have no guard, but would be monitored by a surveillance system and by the traditional firefighters, who would undergo training to guard the inmates.

The inmates would not be paid for their work, but upon release they would be eligible to work as firefighters five years after their conviction dates instead of the normal 10.

Naturally, many are questioning the wisdom of asking prisoners to put their own lives at risk in a dangerous job they don’t necessarily want to do. Not only would the program jeopardize inmates’ safety, but their potential lack of enthusiasm and training could jeopardize the lives of fire victims they are supposed to be saving. Firefighter Stuart Sullivan told the Florida Times-Union that firefighters choose the profession because they have a passion for serving the public and helping people, while the inmates would only be there as an alternate way to serve their sentences.

Many firefighters are speaking out against the idea, and don’t relish the additional responsibility of having to guard and worry about inmates as they are trying to put out fires and save lives. This distraction could be another life-threatening consequence of the measure. The program also runs the risk of inmates escaping — all in all a very dangerous proposition for public safety just to save money.

Georgia is not the first state to use prison slave labor to try to cut costs: in California there are more than 4,000 firefighting inmates stationed at 45 camps throughout the state. (HT: Gawker)

The following is the fourth in a multi-part series on former Speaker Newt Gingrich’s speech to the Values Voter Summit. Part I of this series is available here. Part II is here. Part III is here.

Despite his authoritarian claim that he is free to simply ignore court decisions he disagrees with if elected president, Gingrich’s speech also implicitly recognizes that it is helpful to have your values legitimated by a judicial decision. Unfortunately, however, Gingrich also sees nothing wrong with obtaining the illusion of legitimacy by simply intimidating judges into doing whatever you want them to do:

[T]he Jeffersonians eliminated 18 out of 35 federal judges — didn’t impeach them, just abolished their offices — told them to go home. Now, I’m not — let me be clear — I am not as bold as Jefferson. I think the judge in San Antonio would be an important initial signal, and I think the 9th Circuit Court should be served notice that it runs the risk of ceasing to exist. [...]

[T]here are other steps you could take that — that are far short of wiping out half the judges. One, you can hold hearings. I — I think for the Congress to bring in Judge Biery from San Antonio and say to him, explain to us your rationale…[if judges] knew that when they were radically wrong they’d be hauled in front of Congress would immediately have a sobering effect about how much power they have.

Watch it:

The “judge in San Antonio” Gingrich refers to is Judge Fred Biery, a federal district judge who ordered a public high school not to include invocations of prayer in its graduation ceremony before he was reversed on appeal. Biery is a reoccurring villain in Gingrich’s narrative, and Gingrich has a simple remedy for judges like Biery who depart from the far right’s preferred outcomes — scare them into submission through congressional hearings backed by the threat of removal. And if the judge refuses to be cowed, kick them out of office.

This kind of government by intimidation is clearly unconstitutional. The Constitution provides that “[t]he judges, both of the supreme and inferior courts, shall hold their offices during good behaviour, and shall, at stated times, receive for their services, a compensation, which shall not be diminished during their continuance in office,” a provision which exists entirely to prevent Congress from strong-arming judges by threatening their jobs. While there is some precedent for reducing the size of a judge’s area of jurisdiction for non-punitive reasons — the 5th Circuit was split into two circuits in 1981 after it became too large and unwieldy — an Act of Congress which effectively stripped a court’s judges of all their responsibilities would certainly run afoul of the Constitution.

Gingrich, however, views constitutional law not as a quest to be loyal to the text of the document, but instead as a scavenger hunt to find a single historic example of a president engaging in whatever kind of abhorrent tactic he desires, and then using that single precedent to claim that he may do as he chooses. To justify intimidating judges, he cites Thomas Jefferson. Previously, he cited President Andrew Jackson’s infamous disregard for the Supreme Court and President Franklin Roosevelt’s genuinely abysmal record on civil liberties in war time. Most scholars view these incidents as tragic departures from our Constitution and our moral values. Gingrich views them as an invitation.

And that is why Gingrich’s speech to the Values Voters Summit rates as one of the scariest speeches in recent political history (scary enough to warrant a four-part series on ThinkProgress). Gingrich embodies America’s constitutional id. He culls through history to find the worst moments in our constitutional history and then he makes them his own. The moral lapses Gingrich relies on to justify his authoritarianism are both uncommon and reviled chapters in American history. Gingrich, however, would revisit those chapters over and over again if given the chance.