Yesterday, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) named the first victim in his plan to retaliate against President Obama for naming recess appointees by seeking revenge against Obama’s nominees. Because DOJ Office of Legal Counsel head Virginia Seitz wrote an opinion that correctly reasoned that the president has the power to make recess appointments when the Senate is not available to confirm nominees, Grassley claimed that Seitz’s confirmation to this role is “likely to be the last confirmation that she’ll ever experience.”

To their credit, two former Bush Administration attorneys quickly denounced Grassley’s misguided campaign of vengeance:

“The Senator’s name-calling is misplaced,” said Jack Goldsmith, who served as head of the Office of Legal Counsel during President George W. Bush’s administration. “The legality of the Obama recess appointments is, as the Seitz opinion acknowledged, a close question. But much of Seitz’s opinion followed long-settled executive branch legal precedent, and when she encountered novel issues, she addressed them honestly in a reasoned analysis that she published for the world to see and criticize.”

“These OLC opinions involve very difficult constitutional issues as well as separation of powers,” said Richard Painter, a White House ethics lawyer during the Bush administration. “OLC lawyers should be free to render their honest opinion and not be threatened with adverse career consquences by either the White House or Congress.”

Seitz’s opinion did indeed confront a very difficult legal question, and she did indeed rely heavily on well-settled precedents. Ultimately, however, she forgot the first rule of keeping right-wing senators mollified — the Constitution only says what conservatives wish it said.

South Carolina raced to be among the first GOP-led states to pass a radical voter ID bill that stands to disenfranchise “nearly 180,000 voters” in the state, “most of whom are elderly, student, minority or low income voters.” Indeed, the Associated Press found that the law hits majority-black precincts the hardest as “the percentage of minority voters without the right identification is higher in those areas than other precincts statewide.”

But apparently, requiring a photo ID to cast a vote is not enough proof of eligibility for state legislators. Now, they’re considering a bill that requires proof of citizenship to register to vote:

South Carolina legislators want to require more proof of citizenship when people want to register to vote under legislation a panel plans to discuss.

A Senate Judiciary subcommittee plans to take up a bill Thursday that says citizenship proof can come from documents that include a driver’s license, birth certificate, United States passport or tribal identification.

Proof of citizenship may seem like an intuitive requirement for voter registration. However, a requirement to provide a driver’s license or birth certificate will impair voter registration drives, especially when people may not readily have that identification on hand. Coupled with the voter ID law, this requirement will serve to disproportionately disenfranchise minorities in the state.

The current voter ID law isn’t even legal, and it was blocked by the Department of Justice for leaving South Carolina’s non-white voters “significantly burdened” in violation of the Voting Rights Act. The VRA requires voter laws in states that have a long history of discrimination to be “precleared” by DOJ or a federal court in DC before they may take effect. Instead of assuring that the photo ID law doesn’t violate basic civic rights of their constituents, these legislators are hoping to further suppress voting rights by making it more difficult to even register, let alone vote.

Several other states are picking up the 2011 anti-voter trend and seeking to implement their own voter ID laws. Despite repeated failure to impose one in the past, Missouri is pushing through a voter ID bill despite the fact that “no one testified in favor” of it. Iowa’s Republican secretary of state also plans to unveil a new voter ID bill as well.

Since the 1970s, New Hampshire police have operated under a progressive policy for handling domestic violence cases that has saved countless lives. Under current law the presumption is that an arrest will be made when police observe evidence of abuse. They have a large degree of discretion and don’t need to witness the assault firsthand or obtain a legal warrant before they can separate the alleged attacker from his victim.

All that will change if Republicans get their way. The state’s GOP legislators are pushing two bills that will reverse a half century of progress, the Concord Monitor reports:

Domestic violence is no longer taken lightly legally or by society. That’s the way it should be, but two bills under consideration by this most unusual of legislatures, would undo that progress and put lives in danger. Both deserve a speedy defeat.

House Bill 1581 would turn the clock back 40 years to an age when a police officer could not make an arrest in a domestic violence case without first getting a warrant unless he or she actually witnessed the crime. That’s an exceedingly dangerous change. Consider the following scenario, one outlined for lawmakers by retired Henniker police chief Tim Russell:

An officer is called to a home where she sees clear evidence that an assault has occurred. The furniture is overturned, the children are sobbing, and the face of the woman of the house is bruised and bleeding. It’s obvious who the assailant was, but the officer arrived after the assault occurred. It’s a small department, and no one else on the force is available to keep the peace until the officer finds a judge or justice of the peace to issue a warrant. The officer leaves, and the abuser renews his attack with even more ferocity, punishing his victim for having called for help. [...]

It’s impossible to say how many lives the policy, in place since the 1970s, has saved or how many injuries it’s prevented. If they adopt House Bill 1581, lawmakers might find out, but the price paid could be extraordinarily high.

The other bill Republicans have proposed, HB 1608, limits judges’ ability to order the arrest of someone who has violated a domestic violence restraining order by contacting or abusing the person named in the order. It would also prevent judges from ordering defendants to surrender their weapons or block them from buying guns.

Police say the bill stops them from intervening to protect victims. For instance, they would be stripped of their power to arrest someone who is threatening to use violence against a victim or child. It’s unclear why New Hampshire Republicans have set their sights on repealing protections for abuse victims when promised to focus on economic priorities.

MIAMI, Florida — A group of undocumented students gathered outside a Mitt Romney campaign stop yesterday to protest the former Massachusetts governor’s pledge to veto the DREAM Act if he were elected president.

The DREAM Act would allow certain qualified youth, most of whom were brought here as children, to apply for residency and citizenship in the United States after completing high school and two years of college or the military. The bill was passed by the House of Representatives in December 2010 and received 55 votes in the Senate, but failed due to a Republican filibuster.

Last month, Romney promised an Iowa audience that even if Congress sent the DREAM Act to his desk, he would veto the measure.

The student protestors on Wednesday were outraged by the presidential hopeful’s pledge, which would hinder their future prospects in the country they’d grown up in. Led by Felipe Matos, an aspiring biology teacher who was elected president of the student government at Miami Dade College Wolfson Campus and named one of the top 20 community college students in the country, the students chanted, “veto Romney, not the DREAM Act!” and “education, not deportation!”

Watch highlights from the protest:

Ironically, the venue of the event was Miami’s Freedom Tower — “a monument to the Cuban immigrant experience” where “thousands of Cuban exiles were processed when they first entered the United States.” Inside, Romney’s speech focused almost exclusively on bringing “freedom” to Cubans. “I will use the power of America to spread freedom in Latin America,” he said. This apparently does not apply to people who come to the United States from Latin America or elsewhere looking for freedom.

Earlier this year, Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) signed a radical elections law that shortens the state’s early voting period, bans in-person early voting on Sundays, and prohibits boards of election from mailing absentee ballot requests to voters. If this law had been in effect in 2008, over 200,000 voters in Columbus, Ohio alone would not have been able to cast their ballot in the way that they did.

Kasich’s plan to make it harder to vote is now facing a surprising dissenter, however, his fellow Republican and Ohio’s secretary of state:

Ohio’s top election official says state lawmakers should repeal and replace a controversial new elections law rather than allowing voters to weigh in on it in November.

Republican Secretary of State Jon Husted told a gathering of election officials Wednesday that he believes Ohio should start over on the process after the 2012 presidential election. He made the call despite the legislation containing many of his own ideas.

The new election law shortened Ohio’s early voting period, among other changes to the state’s election procedures.

If the state legislature doesn’t follow Husted’s advice, it is fairly likely that the people of Ohio will. Kasich’s anti-voter law is currently suspended after hundreds of thousands of Ohio voters signed petitions seeking to have the law overturned by referendum. The law will go before the voters this November, where it could face the same fate as Kasich’s anti-union law that was defeated in a similar referendum last year.