In most states, ex-convicts have to wait years after their release to have their voting rights restored, and many are disenfranchised for life. Yet they often have their right to bear arms automatically reinstated when they leave prison, with little or no review by judges. A New York Times examination reveals that the gun lobby and their Republican allies have successfully eliminated hearings and common-sense restrictions on ex-cons’ ability to immediately reclaim their guns, with deadly consequences:

Under federal law, people with felony convictions forfeit their right to bear arms. Yet every year, thousands of felons across the country have those rights reinstated, often with little or no review. In several states, they include people convicted of violent crimes, including first-degree murder and manslaughter, an examination by The New York Times has found.

While previously a small number of felons were able to reclaim their gun rights, the process became commonplace in many states in the late 1980s, after Congress started allowing state laws to dictate these reinstatements — part of an overhaul of federal gun laws orchestrated by the National Rifle Association. [...]

This gradual pulling back of what many Americans have unquestioningly assumed was a blanket prohibition has drawn relatively little public notice. Indeed, state law enforcement agencies have scant information, if any, on which felons are getting their gun rights back, let alone how many have gone on to commit new crimes.

The NRA’s “restoration movement” on behalf of ex-cons has already cost lives, and continues to jeopardize public safety. Even felons with histories of stalking and mental health problems can get their gun rights back almost immediately. A man in Washington state used his Glock-17 semiautomatic handgun to commit another murder two months after he was released from prison for two felony convictions.

Ex-cons’ easy access to guns serves as a bizarre juxtaposition with the barriers they face trying to vote. All but two states restrict ex-cons’ ability to vote after they are released, with 36 prohibiting them from voting while they are on parole and three disenfranchising former felons for the rest of their lives. Ex-cons are the single biggest group of disenfranchised citizens in the country, with 4.7 million Americans — or one in 43 adults — having currently or permanently lost their right to vote as the result of felony conviction.

Hispanic and black communities are disproportionately effected by these laws, with 13 percent of adult black men barred from exercising their constitutional right to vote. Denying former felons the vote can also hold back their successful rehabilitation and reintegration into society.

Meanwhile, Margaret C. Love, a lawyer who has researched gun rights restoration laws, estimates that in more than half the states felons have a reasonable chance of getting back their gun rights.

As ThinkProgress has been reporting, Republican lawmakers have not only been limiting ex-prisoners’ voting rights, but disenfranchising broad swaths of the population that tend to vote Democrat. These are groups that have historically been overlooked and benefit more than most from having their electoral voices heard.

When justifying voting restrictions, Republicans inevitably say they are worried about electoral fraud, and claim that people who break the laws should have no say in making them. By their logic, millions of ex-convicts can be trusted with guns, but not with ballots.

The Affordable Care Act does not simply expand access to and participation in the private health insurance market, it also expands access to Medicaid — guaranteeing that all people who earn below 133 percent of the poverty rate can receive Medicaid. This expansion is unusually generous to the states. Although each of the fifty states runs its own Medicaid program, the federal government will pick up 90 percent of the new costs generated by expanding the program to millions more Americans. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court just agreed to consider a strange challenge to this expansion some time next year.

Despite the fact that this expansion will allow each and every state to provide millions more people with affordable health care, and despite the fact that it will do so at minimal cost to those states, the several conservative-led states challenging the Affordable Care Act claim that the Medicaid expansion is unconstitutional because it somehow “coerces” the states into participating in Medicaid. As ThinkProgress explained more than a year ago when this argument was originally raised, it essentially boils down to a claim that Medicaid is unconstitutional because it is too generous, and it has little chance of succeeding in court:

Congress has broad authority to entice states into action by offering them a federal grant which provides the state with money, but only if the state agrees to comply with certain conditions. The state is always free to turn down this grant, but if it takes the money, it has to comply with its agreement to also obey the conditions.

Medicaid is the largest existing conditional grant program, and [the plaintiffs] essentially argue that, even though they have decided to take the money that Medicaid offers, they can refuse to comply with the conditions on that money because Medicaid is such a good deal than they couldn’t possibly refuse it.

This novel claim is based in a statement in the Supreme Court’s decision in South Dakota v. Dole that “in some circumstances the financial inducement offered by Congress might be so coercive as to pass the point at which ‘pressure turns into compulsion.’” The justices, however, have literally never held that a conditional grant is “so coercive” as to be unconstitutional, and the lower courts universally reject the claim that Medicaid is unconstitutional just because it is a good deal for the states

Nothing has changed since we originally published those words. Indeed, every single judge to consider the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion has upheld it. Even Tea Party Judge Roger Vinson, the judge whose error-laden opinion tried to wipe out the entire Affordable Care Act, rejected the plaintiffs’ argument against the Medicaid expansion.

It is mildly troubling that the Supreme Court would agree to hear this issue in the first place, since federal/state partnerships like Medicaid are one of the backbones of America’s safety net. If the Supreme Court were to undermine Congress’ ability to give conditional grants to the states, everything from Medicaid to federal assistance to public schools could fall by the wayside.

Yet there are two reasons to doubt that the Supreme Court is poised to do so. The first is simply the nature of the plaintiffs in this case. It is very rare for this many states to join together on one lawsuit — even if the only real link between those states is the fact that they are currently run by Republicans — and the Supreme Court likely agreed to hear this issue simply out of deference to the extraordinary nature of these plaintiffs.

The second reason is that it is not at all clear how lashing out at federal/state partnerships fosters any real interest in preserving states rights. If the Supreme Court rolls back Congress’ power to provide conditional grants, nothing would prevent Congress from simply cutting the states out of the bargain entirely and assuming total control over programs like Medicaid. The likely outcome of a decision rolling back the ACA’s Medicaid expansion would be to increase the role of the federal government because it would no longer be possible for Congress to trust states to administer major safety net programs.

It is unfortunate that the justices chose to waste their time with a fringe issue that no judge has found to have merit. Nevertheless, there is no reason to doubt that the Affordable Care Act will be upheld.

In apparent efforts to keep up with GOP efforts across the country, Maine Republicans keep trying — and keep failing — to enact laws that make it harder for Mainers to vote. Efforts to pass a stringent voter identification law failed in the state Senate this fall, and voters offered a strong rebuke at the polls Tuesday, shooting down a GOP attempt that would have ended same-day registration, even as conservative donors funneled $250,000 in undisclosed donations in attempt to uphold the law.

Ignoring those failures, Maine Republicans –including Gov. Paul LePage — have pledged to continue their fight to restrict voting rights and will revisit their voter ID bill when a new legislative session begins in January, the AP reports:

But after a voter ID bill that passed the House failed in the Senate this year, lawmakers decided to carry it over to the session that starts in January. And Republican Gov. Paul LePage believes the issue needs to be revisited, notwithstanding Tuesday’s vote, said spokeswoman Adrienne Bennett. [...]

The voter ID bill had more than 80 co-sponsors — all Republicans — when Rep. Richard Cebra introduced it.

The Naples Republican sees his proposal as a reasonable, constitutionally sound means to protect Maine elections from fraud. He also dismisses assertions that such laws deprive citizens of their right to vote.

Republican attempts to “protect…elections from fraud” continue to ring hollow, however, as such fraud is incredibly rare. But in Maine, where city and town clerks monitor elections, fraud is even more uncommon. According to the ACLU, the state has had only two cases of voter fraud at the polls in the past four decades, and a recent study on Maine’s student voting fraud — one of the main problems cited by state Republicans — found that the “problem” didn’t actually exist.

“I don’t think, in the entire time I’ve been working the polls, I don’t think anyone has ever come in and claimed to be someone they weren’t,” Harlan Baker, an election clerk in Portland, told ThinkProgress’ Scott Keyes last week. “I’ve never witnessed it.”

The most powerful line in conservative Judge Laurence Silberman’s decision upholding the Affordable Care Act is his simple recognition that the law’s opponents “cannot find real support for their proposed rule in either the text of the Constitution or Supreme Court precedent.” Today, the Supreme Court agreed to follow in Silberman’s footsteps — considering whether the judiciary can appropriately strike down a landmark health care law despite the fact that there is nothing in the Constitution allowing them to do so.

There can be no question that Silberman is right about what the Constitution has to say about this law. The plaintiffs’ primary challenge is to the provision requiring most Americans to either carry health insurance or pay slightly more income taxes (there are other issues in this case, which will be discussed in a subsequent post). In their vision of the Constitution, this provision runs afoul of some unwritten rule against being told what to do. The federal government can regulate how people go about the business they are already engaged in, under this vision, but it is utterly powerless to push people to engage in commerce they would prefer to avoid.

There are many, many problems with this theory of the Constitution, but Silberman’s rebuttal of it is both the most simple and the most elegant. The Constitution says nothing suggesting that people can immunize themselves from the law by remaining passive, it simply provides that the United States may “regulate commerce…among the several states.”

Modern judges do not need to speculate what the founding generation understood these words to mean when they were written into the text of the Constitution. Chief Justice John Marshall — himself one of the ratifiers of the Constitution — told us what they mean in the 1824 case of Gibbons v. Ogden. Marshall wrote that there is “no sort of trade” that the words “regulate Commerce” does not apply to. He said that the power to “regulate” something “implies in its nature full power over the thing to be regulated.” And he told us that Congress’ power to regulate commerce “among the several states” applies to all trade that “concern[] more states than one.”

So when Congress passes a nationwide law regulating the entire national health care market, there is simply no question that the law is constitutional. The law regulates a form of trade — trade for health services — and it regulates a health services market that is both pervasive and nationwide. The Affordable Care Act cases are some of the easiest cases to cross the Supreme Court’s bench in a generation, and it is nothing less than shocking that even a handful of judges have struck the law down.

Indeed it is far worse than shocking — it is downright dangerous. Judges are not like members of Congress. They are unelected and they serve for life. As such, they cannot be checked by fear of a lost election and can only be checked by their loyalty to our written Constitution. If the federal judiciary has the power to ignore the text of the Constitution to strike down laws that they do not like, then there is literally nothing that they cannot do. If the Supreme Court defies our written Constitution just once, there is nothing preventing them from doing so over and over again. Indeed, if the justices strike down the Affordable Care Act, there is nothing preventing them from forcing every American to eat broccoli.