The onslaught of state voter ID bills this year are quite literally robbing Americans of a way to vote come November 2012. In Wisconsin, the new photo ID requirement is creating obstacles that are so onerous, prejudicial, and even paradoxical that many Wisconsinites cannot obtain the necessary photo ID.

Jennifer “Rita” Platt and her boyfriend, for instance, have every intention of voting next year and decided to get a jump start on complying with the new law. Realizing they did not have the necessary forms of identification accepted at the polls, they traveled to a Department of Motor Vehicles 45 minutes away because the DMVs in their county only open one day a month.

Not only was the DMV system down but Platt was told that, even with an expired driver’s license and Social Security card, she didn’t have the right documents to get an ID:

The DMV office’s computer system was down, which meant they couldn’t get an ID processed. And they were told they didn’t have the proper identification to get a state ID card or a Wisconsin driver’s license, Platt said.

“They said I didn’t have a certified birth certificate or a current passport,” said Platt, who said she had asked the DMV what was needed before heading to Hudson.

She had brought an expired Iowa driver’s license, her Social Security card and a pay stub from the St. Croix Falls school district, where she works as a librarian, believing those items would satisfy the DMV’s requirements, she said.

Platt, of Osceola, said she is going to have to find her certified birth certificate or request a new one, take unpaid time off from work and again make the trip to the DMV.

Not only do new birth certificates cost at least $20 each, but obtaining a new birth certificate in Wisconsin is no easy matter due to misleading form that suggests applicants need a “current valid photo ID” to get a birth certificate, which they need to get a photo ID. Worse, by charging any fee whatsoever for a document people need in order to exercise their right to vote, Wisconsin violates the Constitution’s ban on poll taxes.

Platt’s state Rep. Erik Severson (R) is unsympathetic. “I don’t see how it’s going to disenfranchise anybody.” Right now, “we don’t have any idea..how many people are voting illegally,” he said. In reality, we do have an idea, at Severson’s supposedly high rate of voter fraud currently stands at 0.0002 percent.

So far, these laws are forcing people in Wisconsin to fight — and even pay — for their right to vote. Platt plans to join the NAACP in a lawsuit to be filed this week against the law. “We think that there’s thousands of stories like Rita’s around the state,” said NAACP attorney Richard Saks. “We know about a lot of them, but we don’t know about all of them.”

Last Friday, Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley (R) finally admitted that his state’s harsh anti-immigrant law “need[s] revision.” Yet he delayed actually taking action to correct any of the most harmful effects of the law until “the beginning of the next legislative session” next February. Simply put, the people of Alabama cannot wait this long for its leaders to correct the error they made in enacting this law in the first place. Bentley has the power to call a special legislative session right away and he should do so immediately to correct the most harmful aspects of his state’s assault on immigrant families.

Indeed, if Bentley had never signed this unconstitutional law in the first place, Alabama would have avoided numerous embarrassments — some of which could cost the state thousands of jobs. It is too late to turn back the clock, but here are just a few examples of errors that Bentley should immediately instruct the state legislature to correct in a special session:

- Embarrassing Arrests: Police arrested a German Mercedes Benz employee for not having the right documents when he was pulled over in November. The charges were later dropped, but almost two weeks later, the AP reported that police arrested a Japanese Honda employee for being in violation of HB 56 while driving even though he reportedly had his passport and international driver’s license. Charges were later dropped as well. Both international automakers employee thousands of Alabamians, and Bentley recently contacted four automakers with factories in Alabama to plead with them not to pull these jobs out of his state. Rather than trying to placate them with empty words, he should assure them that there will not be a repeat of these embarrassing arrests by instructing the legislator to correct Alabama’s law.

- No Water: Because of a provision of the immigration law preventing contracts between the state and undocumented immigrants, public utility companies have denied service to anyone who cannot prove they are a citizen or legally in the United States, effectively making it a felony for undocumented immigrants to take a bath in their own homes. No other state or developed nation has a ban this extreme on contracting with undocumented immigrants. A state judge found the provision to be unconstitutional, at least as applied to some contract.

- Working Families Flee: Politicians readily admitted that the goal of HB 56 was to make Alabama a hostile place for undocumented immigrants, but as a result, families have fled the state out of fear, leaving schools with high absenteeism rates among Hispanic students, businesses without workers, and stores without customers. Farmers watched their crops rot without enough workers to help harvest, and some said they were at risk of losing their farms. And owners of poultry processing plants and catfish farms say they have lost workers and are having trouble replacing the workers who left.

Bentley is not alone in believing the law needs to be changed. Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange (R) admitted parts of the law should be scrapped, and legislators like state Sen. Gerald Dial (R) agree the law needs to be changed. With so many conservative leaders within his state agreeing that this law goes too far, Bentley has no excuse for waiting until the legislature convenes for its regular session in February.

Although parts of the law were temporarily halted by the Eleventh Circuit, the law has already had a devastating effect on the state’s economy. Conservative estimates suggest the state’s economy could contract by $40 million. More than the economic effects, it is an unconscionable and unconstitutional law that, among other flaws, impedes undocumented students’ constitutional right to an education. If Robert Bentley seriously wants to change any of this, he should act now.

Earlier this year, the Iowa legislature enacted a budget that shields three dozen state unemployment offices from Gov. Terry Branstad’s (R) desire to close those offices. In response, Branstad used a line-item veto to remove the prohibition on closing these offices from the bill, and proceeded with a plan to shut them down and replace them with a series of computer kiosks. Unfortunately for Branstad, however, this targeted veto was just declared unconstitutional:

The lawsuit contended that a governor cannot redirect money struck through a line-item veto. The lawsuit cites a successful court case in 2004 when Republicans sued Democratic Gov. Tom Vilsack over line-item veto authority.

Polk County Judge Brad McCall agreed, saying that for Branstad’s veto to be valid he must also veto the allocation.

To clarify, the Iowa constitution allows Gov. Branstad to either refuse to take a chunk of money appropriated by the legislature, or to take that money and spend it as the legislature directs him to. Instead, however, Branstad tried to have it both ways by taking the money the state legislature appropriated to keep the 36 unemployment offices open, and then reallocating it to computer kiosks. It remains to be seen whether Branstad will appeal this decision.

Republican voters seem quite taken with the idea factory that is Newt Gingrich. But, as conjurer of “moon colonies and space mirrors” and “invented people,” the idea Gingrich seems most taken with is the reinstatement of child labor. Believing child labor protection laws are “tragic” and “truly stupid,” Gingrich wants to replace “unionized janitors” with poor children who can learn legal work habits by cleaning the bathroom, or better yet, as “apprenti” for attention-seeking tycoon Donald Trump.

While it is now somehow politically advantageous for Gingrich to push for child laborers, it was — at one time — politically advantageous for him to rebuke them. As USA Today reports, in a 1996 ad called “Cookie,” Gingrich accused his congressional opponent of “unscrupulous” business practices for hiring children under the age of 18:

But in a 1996 ad titled “Cookie,” Gingrich slammed his then-congressional opponent, Michael Coles, former CEO of Great American Cookie Co., as an “unscrupulous businessman” partly because of a 1993 violation of child labor laws and accused him of using children “for hazardous labor,” according to a transcript of the ad in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Coles fired back with his own ad that said the 1993 incident involved two teenagers and that the company was cited for “violating safety codes that prohibit workers under 18 from operating freight elevators” when the teenagers were taking out the trash at a suburban Atlanta mall.

Indeed, it turns out that Gingrich has a long history of using child labor policy to opportunistically score political points. Lambasting then-President Bill Clinton’s idea for a summer youth jobs program in the public sector, Gingrich said, “if what you want to do is employ 700,000 kids, you would get much more ban for your buck by having a tax credit” for small businesses that hire them. As the Washington Monthly’s Paul Glastris notes, Gingrich’s main objection here is that “Clinton’s program would hire kids to work in the public rather than the private sector, the difference being that the latter represents ‘real work’ that is ‘incredibly more demanding than the work habits of a public bureaucracy.’”

But now, Gingrich is pushing to replace unionized janitors in schools (aka the public sector). The change of heart towards the public sector is more likely reflective of the political winds rather than long-standing principle. As Glastris muses, “[c]ould it be that he opposes [jobs programs for poor teens] only when they’re offered up by Democrats, and supports them only when they involve firing unionized workers?”

While the reasons behind Gingrich support for child labor are unclear, there is no doubt that his latest policy is severely misguided. Coles, now the CEO of an onboard airline advertising company, noted that Gingrich’s current proposal not only would employ children under 18 but would take away jobs from the number of adults today who need them: “There are so many unfortunate people who would fill those jobs.”

In a brief order this morning, the Supreme Court announced that it will hear Arizona’s appeal of a lower court decision blocking much of its unconstitutional anti-immigrant law SB 1070:

11-182 ARIZONA, ET AL. V. UNITED STATES

The petition for a writ of certiorari is granted. Justice Kagan took no part in the consideration or decision of this petition.

The most interesting news here isn’t the fact that the Court took this case — with so many unconstitutional laws popping up in states with anti-immigrant governments, the Supreme Court owes the nation some clarity on whether it will permit these laws to stand. Rather, the most interesting revelation here is that Justice Kagan will not hear this case.

As a practical matter, Kagan’s recusal is unlikely to change the outcome of this lawsuit — at least in the short term. If all five of the Court’s conservatives join together to overrule the long line of Supreme Court precedent establishing that Arizona’s law is unconstitutional, then Kagan will change little by simply adding another vote to the dissent. By contrast, if the Court splits evenly, then the Court’s rules establish that the lower court’s decision will stand — meaning that SB 1070 remains under a preliminary injunction.

One thing today’s order should put to rest, however, is the ridiculous suggestion that Justice Kagan needs to recuse from the Affordable Care Act litigation. Since joining the Court, Justice Kagan has scrupulously avoided sitting on any case she worked on while Solicitor General — even though this took her off of dozens of cases. Today’s order shows that Kagan is no less attentive to her ethical obligations even when they arise in high profile cases that carry a great deal of political baggage for the president that appointed her.

Earlier this year, Florida’s Tea Party Gov. Rick Scott (R) signed a law drastically reducing local governments’ power to regulate firearms. Among other things, the law strips local governments of their authority to require a waiting period before someone may purchase a gun. The bill’s most radical provision, however, gives Scott the power to unilaterally fire lawmakers who do not share his absolutist view of gun policy:

A knowing and willful violation of any provision of this section by a person acting in an official capacity for any entity enacting or causing to be enforced a local ordinance or administrative rule or regulation [regulating firearms or ammunition] shall be cause for termination of employment or contract or removal from office by the Governor.

It’s tough to view this law as anything other than a direct assault on Florida’s democratic process, since it would lead to democratically elected lawmakers being stripped of their office simply because they enacted policies that the state’s current government disagrees with.

Moreover. as a lawsuit filed last week explains, the law also runs headlong into Florida’s constitution. That constitution provides only six grounds by which an official can be suspended and eventually removed from office: “malfeasance, misfeasance, neglect of duty, drunkenness, incompetence, permanent inability to perform official duties, or commission of a felony.” None of these six grounds are “passing a gun law that Rick Scott disagrees with.”