Earlier this month, federal prosecutors in California announced that they were stepping up enforcement against medical marijuana clinics that have allegedly become de facto dealerships where people without a medical need can still buy pot. In response to this unfortunate diversion of scarce resources to minor drug crimes that cause, at most, negligible harm to society, a medical marijuana advocacy group called Americans for Safe Access filed an equally unfortunate lawsuit seeking to have the Justice Department’s actions declared unconstitutional:

Adamant in its disagreement with the policy choice made by the States of California to decriminalize marijuana for medical use — which is California’s sovereign right under our federalist system of government — the federal government has instituted a policy to dismantle the medical marijuana laws of the State of California and to coerce its municipalities to pass bans no medical marijuana dispensaries. . . . While the federal government is entitled to enforce its criminal laws against marijuana in the states that have decriminalized it for medical use in an even-handed manner, the Tenth Amendment forbids it from selectively employing such coercive tactics to commandeer the law-making functions of the State. This case is brought to restore the constitutional balance embodied by the federalist principles of our Constitution and the Tenth Amendment.

This is strong rhetoric, but it’s tough to find an actual legal argument in here. In essence, the lawsuit appears to claim that the federal government is violating something known as the “anti-commandeering doctrine,” which forbids the federal government from requiring a state government to take a particular action. As the Supreme Court held in Printz v. United States, “the Framers explicitly chose a Constitution that confers upon Congress the power to regulate individuals, not States.”

The problem with this lawsuit is that there is no indication whatsoever that DOJ is ordering California to do anything. The Justice Department is targeting marijuana clinics and individuals who do business with them. None of these people are the state of California.

Yet the fact that DOJ’s attacks on these clinics is constitutional does not make them right, and they expose a very real political danger for anyone worried about the tenther movement’s effort to replace our Constitution with a radical libertarian vision that would declare much of the Twentieth Century unconstitutional. The polling trend on marijuana policy is clear and unambiguous, and it leaves no doubt which side is on the right side of history:

Our current policy, which criminalizes an activity that nearly half of all Americans will engage in is unsustainable. And many people who want to take a machete to the Constitution are eager to exploit this fact. Randy Barnett, the extremist law professor who wants to make everything from Social Security to Medicare to child labors law unconstitutional, began his crusade by unsuccessfully arguing to weaken federal marijuana laws in the Supreme Court. The Tenth Amendment Center, an even more extremist organization that lists unconstitutional nullification of federal laws as one of its primary objectives, touts an unconstitutional hemp bill as one of its top priorities.

Progressives cannot afford to cede an increasingly popular issue to a movement that wants nothing more than to dismantle our social safety net, strip workers of their most basic legal protections and create a society where wealth becomes destiny. Our current federal marijuana policy is unambiguously constitutional, but that does not make it right.

The birther movement, thought dead by multiple debunkings and the release of President Obama’s actual birth certificate, was thrust back into the national spotlight this week when Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R), a former frontrunner in the race for the GOP’s presidential nomination, called birtherism “a good issue to keep alive” and claimed he wasn’t sure where Obama was born. Perry later dismissed his flirtation with birtherism as a distraction, but inside the movement, there are still those who refuse to give up in their futile quest to prove that the president was born anywhere other than the United States.

This week, birther queen Orly Taitz joined radical Arizona immigration sheriff Joe Arpaio — who is conducting his own investigation into Obama’s birthplace — at a Tea Party town hall in Arizona, where she sought to provide Arpaio with further evidence to bolster his case. Arpaio, however, surprised the crowd by telling Taitz that he has evidence even she doesn’t have. And though he can’t tell her, or anyone else, what it is, he promises it will surprise even the harshest critics of the birtherism movement:

TAITZ: Sheriff Arpaio, all I’m asking you, all you need to do, if you please forward this officially to your governor, to your secretary of state, so they can see this before they allow him to go on the ballot in 2012. (applause) [...] Sheriff Arpaio, the whole country depends on you. (applause)

ARPAIO: Thanks for your info. We’re looking at this very closely. I can’t tell you everything, but there could a shock somewhere my guys came up with, and we’ll see how that — again, I can’t talk too much about it. [...] I gotta be careful sometimes, because it’s very complex.

Watch it:

Another kingpin of the birther movement, real estate tycoon and former potential presidential candidate Donald Trump, is trying to keep the birther movement alive as well, saying Perry’s reigniting the birther flame was a “positive thing.”

Pizza mogul Herman Cain desperately wants to be a “pro-life” candidate, but he just can’t seem to figure out exactly what that means. After weeks of contradictory positions on whether abortion should be legal, Cain finally seemed to land on the idea that he is “pro-life, no exceptions.” In an attempt to clarify if that indeed means “no exceptions,” CNN reached out to Team Cain to get a definitive answer. As it turns out, “no exceptions” does not mean “no exceptions” to Cain. According to the campaign, Cain now believes that abortions should be allowed in cases of “rape, incest, and when the life of the mother is at stake”:

[A] campaign adviser said Cain follows the same policy used by the George W. Bush administration, which said abortions should be allowed in the instances of rape, incest and when the life of the mother is at stake.

“He has learned more about the issue,” including the number of women affected in those instances, the adviser told CNN, explaining Cain’s view.

Cain’s latest position will undoubtedly roil anti-choice activists who have been leading the country down a radical road towards bans on abortions under any and all circumstances. That walk is not so easy for Cain, who struggles to reconcile his “pro-life from conception” stance with his belief that government should stay out of people’s private lives. As such, he’s left a confusing trail of conflicting abortion positions that complicate any consistency or conviction he claims to have. In fact, Cain has traveled from one side of the issue to the other over the span of one month:

Abortion Is ‘Her Choice’: Over the course of one Fox News interview on Oct. 11, Cain insisted that “people shouldn’t be free to abort because if we don’t protect the sanctity of life from conception, we will also start to play God relative to life at the end of life.” But when asked whether a rape victim should have the choice, Cain said, “That’s her choice. That’s not government choice.”

Don’t Tell Women What To Do: On Oct. 19, Cain seemed to further his seemingly pro-choice position. “It’s not the government’s role, or anybody else’s role, to make that decision” on whether a sexual assault victim should seek an abortion, he said. “It ultimately gets down to a choice that that family or that mother has to make. Not me as president.”

A Family Can Have An ‘Illegal’ Abortion: On Oct. 20, Cain tried to shut out the uproar over his confusion: “I am 100 percent pro-life. End of story.” But the very next day, he added another chapter to his position. “Look, abortion should not be legal. That is clear. But if the family made a decision to break the law, that’s that family’s decision. That’s all I’m trying to say,” he said on Fox.

Pro-Life, No Exceptions: In that same interview, Cain finally declared that he was “pro-life from conception, no exceptions.” Apologetic for his “problematic” answers, he stated with finality, “I don’t know how much more I can say that if I am pro-life from conception no exceptions.

Pro-Life, With Exceptions: As noted, Cain’s campaign clarified yesterday that Cain actually does believe in exceptions and that “Abortions should be allowed in the instances of rape, incest and when the life of the mother is at stake.”

Cain’s confusion has already caused “real damage” with anti-choice activists who see him as holding a “pro-choice” position. The only thing that can be confidently stated is that whatever position he holds now, it is unlikely to be his position in the next few days.

Last June, the Supreme Court tossed out a class action lawsuit brought by over a million Walmart employees alleging that the company systematically discriminates against women. The Court did not allow the women to try to prove that such discrimination exists, instead holding that the women did not have enough in common with each other to come together in one lawsuit. Yesterday, the women responded to this setback with the first of several cases breaking them down into smaller groups:

The lawyers promised an “armada” of other lawsuits in the next six months making discrimination claims in other regions of the country, as opposed to nationwide. “The case we are starting today is the first of many,” said Brad Seligman, one of the lead plaintiff lawyers. He added that the new lawsuits are “what we like to call Wal-Mart 2.0.” [...]

The lawsuit filed Thursday in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California contends that Wal-Mart’s discriminatory practices on pay and job promotion affected more than 90,000 women currently or formerly employed at Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club stores in four regions in California and neighboring states.

This tactic could ultimately prove successful, and it is possible that many hundreds of thousands of women could receive long overdue justice by joining together in somewhat smaller groups. Even if they win, however, the sad truth is that this victory could probably never be repeated thanks to an enormous gift the Supreme Court gave powerful corporations last April.

When the Supreme Court’s Wal-Mart case was handed down, ThinkProgress called it only “the second worst class action case this Supreme Court term.” The worst decision — indeed, one of the very worst Supreme Court decisions in the last decade — was AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion. Concepcion built off a long line of misguided decisions allowing corporations to force their consumers and workers to sign away their right to sue the company in a real court and shunt any disputes into a secretive, privatized arbitration system that overwhelming favors corporate parties. Under Concepcion, corporations can not only take away your right to hold them accountable in a real court, they can also take away your right to join together with other victims of the corporation’s lawbreaking to form a class action lawsuit.

Thanks to this deeply erroneous decision, Walmart can now force each and every one of their workers to sign away their rights or they are fired. And without the ability to bring class actions in the future, many of these workers will be completely powerless against their megacorporate employer.

The class action one of the very few tools enabling vulnerable Americans to stand up to a wealthy and influential corporation. If a major corporation cheats a thousand of its workers out of a thousand dollars each, for example, very few of them will decide it is worth the hassle and expense of a major lawsuit and virtually no lawyer will be willing to take such a low dollar case on a contingency fee basis — meaning that the plaintiffs will have to pay more for legal counsel than they are likely to win in the end. If these thousand workers are able to join together into a class action, however, their million dollar claim suddenly becomes very attractive to top litigators — and the hassle of litigation will be virtually non-existent for most of the plaintiffs. Thanks to Concepcion, however, that is probably no longer an option.

Concepcion was an earthquake, and it shook one of the foundations of our civil justice system to the ground. Walmart may still be held accountable for its past actions, but it is doubtful that any of its workers will ever be able to join a class action against them again.