Iowa is joining the 26 states that are already looking to enforce harsher voter ID requirements this year. Succeeding to get a voter ID bill through the House last year, Iowa Secretary of State is set to try again and proposed a new measure last week. Quick with ready praise, Republican Gov. Terry Branstad declared the photo ID requirement a “good idea” to combat the apparent problem of people who “falsely vote”:

“I think it’s a good idea to protect the integrity of the voting process and prevent theft of personal identification,” Branstad, also a Republican, said during his weekly news conference Monday.

Under Schultz’s proposal, voters would be required to present a government- or university-issued photo ID before being allowed to cast a ballot, although it also contains exemptions allowing people without IDs to vote under certain circumstances. The Legislature has taken no formal action on the bill.

“We have had efforts in past elections where people falsely vote in an area where they’re not eligible,” Branstad said. “I think it’s important. I do support requiring identification.”

Of course, those “efforts” are conspicuously absent from Iowa’s — or even the U.S.’s — voting history. As Chairman of the State Government Committee Sen. Jeff Danielson (D) noted, “There’s no evidence that voter fraud is a problem in Iowa or has ever affected the outcome of an election.” Indeed, the Brennan Center for Justice noted that someone is statistically more likely to get struck by lightning than commit voter fraud. Even Schultz admitted when he unveiled the bill that “he didn’t know how common voter fraud was in Iowa but said it was important to close potential loopholes.”

What photo ID requirements like this do actually close is the opportunity for a significant number of Americans to use their right to vote. These voter laws disproportionately affect low-income voters, minorities, seniors, and students and could end up disenfranchising more than five million of them. But according to Branstad and Iowa Republicans, this ranks as just another “good idea.”

After previous attempts to decriminalize marijuana in New Hampshire were vetoed by Gov. John Lynch (D), the legislature in Concord will again take up two bills that would dramatically lessen the punishment for the possession, use, and cultivation of pot, this time with the hopes of securing a veto-proof majority:

House Bill 1526 would make possession of up to an ounce of marijuana punishable only by a fine of up to $100. Pot possession would no longer be considered a misdemeanor offense, as is the case in Massachusetts after voters there passed a ballot measure.
[…]
Another bill to be discussed at the hearing, HB 1527, would go even further, exempting the cultivation of marijuana under the controlled drug act.

Freshman Rep. Kyle Tasker (R) is one of the first bill’s primary backers, and expressed his hope that a compromise would be reached that would allow the House and Senate to secure enough support to override a likely veto from the governor. “This is a bipartisan issue. Everyone agrees there’s a need for change,” Tasker told the Union Leader.

The pro-legalization advocacy organization NORML lists 14 states that have decriminalized pot “to some degree,” though several of the states listed still treat possession as a misdemeanor. In New Hampshire, as with many other states, marijuana convictions are almost always pleaded out, resulting in lesser sentencing while still attaching a criminal record to violators, law enforcement officials say.

Yet liberalizing state marijuana laws will only achieve half of what’s necessary to reform America’s overreaching drug laws. Even if every single state repealed their marijuana laws tomorrow, that would do nothing to change the federal government’s strict prohibition. Despite a study by the Centers for Disease Control which revealed that 15,000 people died in 2008 from overdosing on legal prescription painkillers, the federal government still treats the much less dangerous drug marijuana as a Schedule I controlled substance — in the same category as cocaine and heroin. Legal prescription drugs like OxyCotin and Vicodin remain in lower classifications with fewer regulations.

Polling in New Hampshire that was conducted the last time the legislature debated these bills in 2008 indicates that a large majority of voters support reforming the state’s pot laws. That’s similar to a national Gallup poll in 2011 that showed for the first time a majority of voters support legalizing the use of marijuana.

Yesterday, Restore Our Future, the pro-Mitt Romney super PAC, released its year-end campaign finance disclosure forms. A ThinkProgress analysis of the 147 individual donors to the independent expenditure-only committee reveals that more than 85 percent of them also contributed the legal maximum to Romney’s presidential campaign committee. And like Romney, a large portion of those donors were private equity managers or other financial-sector figures.

Of the 127 Restore Our Future donors who had also given $2,500 contributions to Romney’s campaign, two gave the super PAC $1 million contributions (hedge fund investors Julian Robertson and Paul Singer), two gave $50,000 contributions (home builder Bob Perry and venture capitalist Steven Webster), and another five gave $25,000 contributions. In all, about $9 million came from donors who had “maxed out” to Romney.

The majority of the “double donors” were venture capitalists, real estate developers, bankers, and investors — with those contributors accounting for about $6 million.

Restore Our Future has already spent a stunning $17 million on expenditures attacking Romney’s primary opponents — making them the most active super PAC to date — in addition to over $800,000 on activities to support the Romney campaign.

Federal campaign laws, enacted around the time of the Watergate scandal and indexed to inflation a decade ago, limit the amount an individual can contribute to each candidate for president, Senate, or the U.S. House of Representatives. For the 2012 campaign, that limit is $2,500 per election.

But with the Speechnow.org ruling in 2010, those same individuals may now give as much as they want to independent-expenditure-only “super” political action committees, like Restore Our Future PAC, on top of the $2,500. Since the super PACs claim they will not “make contributions, whether direct, in-kind, or via coordinated communications” to federal candidates, donations to them do not count toward federal limits.

In an interview with ThinkProgress yesterday, Kris Kobach, the anti-immigrant Kansas secretary of state who drafted Arizona and Alabama’s harmful immigration laws, claimed that his handiwork leads to no harmful effect on state economies. “I don’t think there is any negative impact,” Kobach claimed. “I think the studies have yielded one overwhelming conclusion and is that unemployment drops when states develop some of these laws.”

The facts are not on Kobach’s side, however. Numerous studies and reports have shown the economic harm from HB 56, Alabama’s anti-immigrant law. Farmers are losing their crops or not planting as much because they don’t have workers, and even the state’s own governor has said that the state’s dropping unemployment rate cannot be pegged on the immigration law.

In the fall, preliminary research from the Center for Business and Economic Research showed that, conservatively, HB 56 could cost the state $40 million. Now that the researcher behind that original estimate has had more time to study the law’s full impact, however, he concludes that this initial estimate is far too low. According to a new study, Alabama’s law will cost the state up to 140,000 direct and indirect jobs. And state GDP losses could total $2.3 to $10.8 billion and reduce local sales taxes by $20.0 to $93.1 million.

One key problem is any benefit for businesses from the exodus of immigrants is counteracted by the loss of demand. And the report points out that clearly legal residents are not filling all the jobs left behind:

It is generally accepted that unauthorized immigrants work for low wages. As such, the absence of illegal immigrants is likely to improve competitiveness for businesses that found it extremely difficult to compete because they do not use such labor. This might make the business climate attractive for out-of-state businesses that do not use illegal immigrant labor to consider relocating to the state. Such benefits for some businesses do not translate into a benefit for the aggregate economy because they cannot fully make up for the reduced demand caused by the absence of unauthorized immigrant workers.

It is also argued that illegal immigrants take jobs that should have gone to citizens and other legal residents. If that were true, farmers and businesses that employed these workers and other business interests as well should not have complained about the law especially given the state’s high unemployment rate. There was very little worker substitution and most of the few that considered the jobs previously performed by unauthorized immigrant workers did not have the requisite skills and productivity. With a focus on preparing the workforce for high-skill, high-wage and fast-growing jobs, it is unreasonable to expect people to flock to lower wage jobs that are performed under tough conditions.

Backers of Alabama’s law and similar versions in Arizona, South Carolina, and Georgia will continue to argue that making conditions horrible for undocumented immigrants so that they, in Mitt Romney‘s words, “self-deport,” will be a boon for the economy. But as reports tally the economic damage in Alabama, these supporters are only burying their heads in the sand to avoid the economic ruin that follows in these anti-immigrant laws’ wake.

Washington state Reps. Matt Shea (R), Cary Condotta (R), Jason Overstreet (R) and Jim McCune (R) apparently believe that the U.S. dollar itself is unconstitutional because it is not gold or silver. Worse, if a bill they introduced late last week should become law, this strange vision of the Constitution would be written directly into their state’s law. According to their bill,

Only gold and silver may be recognized as government legal tender under Article I, section 10 of the United States Constitution, which gives the states the power to enact gold and silver based legal tender laws, “no state shall . . .; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts.” . . . The general government has failed to abide by Article I, section 8 of the United States Constitution: “To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof and of foreign Coin, . . .” and provide market value for gold and silver coins for circulation as currency among the states.

All of this, of course, is constitutional gobbledygook. While it is true that the Constitution does forbid states from making something other than gold or silver into legal tender, the American dollar is a creation of the federal government — which is an entirely different thing than the states! Likewise, there is nothing in the Constitution that requires the federal government to “coin” gold or silver money. The Constitution gives Congress the power to mint such coins if it wants to. It also, however, permits the United States to “regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes.” Creating a national currency that can be used for all commercial transactions throughout the United States easily fits within this power. The Supreme Court also upheld America’s power to use a paper currency as recently as the 1800s, although it relied upon somewhat more complex reasoning.

Nevertheless, strange bills intended to undermine the U.S. dollar have popped up across the nation — many of which attempt to make bizarre changes to how a state or its citizens do business. A Georgia bill, for example, forbids anyone from doing business with the state unless the transaction is conducted with gold or silver coins. Similarly, a Utah bill would allow citizens to mint their own gold and silver coins.