Last week, CNN aired a lengthy report on the case of Daniela Pelaez, a senior from Miami who is appealing an immigration court’s decision that would send her and her younger sister Dayana back to their native Colombia. Pelaez is the senior valedictorian at her south Florida high school, and she is waiting to hear from several Ivy League schools where she hopes to enroll in the fall. Watch the report:

Daniela’s situation is the latest in a long line of cases that demonstrate the need for immigration reform, especially for young students who were brought to the United States as children.

When Republicans in Congress filibustered the most recent attempt to pass the DREAM Act in the summer of 2010, President Obama responded by instructing his administration’s Department of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement to adjust its criteria for pursuing the deportation of undocumented students in an attempt to curb what had become a string of very public attempts to expel students from the country. To their credit, ICE said they will delay deporting Pelaez at least as long as her appeal is pending.

But without legislative action, President Obama’s new policy directive falls well short of true immigration reform. A spokesperson for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement said on Monday that the President’s new policy is in place, yet cases like Pelaez are still cropping up on a regular basis.

Late last year, after the Department of Justice announced it was cracking down on several medical marijuana dispensaries that allegedly were dealing the drug to people who had no medical need for it, several dispensaries fought back with lawsuits claiming that this crackdown is unconstitutional. At the time, ThinkProgress lamented the crackdown as an unfortunate waste of limited prosecutorial resources on an activity that nearly half of all Americans — including our last three presidents — will at some point engage in.

At the same time, however, the fact that a law is misguided does not make it unconstitutional — the consequence of living in a democracy is that our elected leaders will sometimes do foolish things — and a federal court just did the right thing by tossing out the first of these lawsuits:

A federal judge in Sacramento this week dismissed a federal lawsuit filed in November by members of the NORML Legal Committee against the US Department of Justice, US Attorney General Eric Holder, and DEA Director Michele Leonhart. The lawsuit (read it here), one of four filed simultaneously in the state’s four federal districts, argues that the Justice Department’s ongoing crackdown against medical marijuana providers and distributors in California is in violation of the Ninth, Tenth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the US Constitution because the use of cannabis therapeutically is a fundamental right. Petitioners also argue, using the theory of judicial estoppel, that the Justice Department had previously affirmed in public memos and in statements made in federal court that it would no longer use federal resources to prosecute cannabis patients or providers who are compliant with state law.

On Wednesday, US District Judge Garland Burrell, Jr., rejected those arguments and and granted the respondent’s dismissal motion.

The fact that constitutional litigation is not an appropriate vehicle to move America towards more reasonable drug laws does not mean that medical marijuana dispensaries should simply hang up their heat lamps and go home — or even that they need to lobby Congress to enable themselves to operate legally. Currently, marijuana is classified as a Schedule I controlled substance, which means that it has “no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States.” Meanwhile, many common painkillers that cause thousands of deaths every year are classified at Schedule II or Schedule III and can be prescribed by a physician.

The Obama Administration has the power to reschedule marijuana to allow doctors to decide when it is the right treatment for their patients, and, indeed, a bipartisan group of Members of Congress have called up it to do so.

Tomorrow, the U.S. Senate will turn its attention once again to judicial confirmations. With 84 federal judgeships currently vacant — about one in 10 — and the courts struggling to handle their caseloads, Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has been pushing for votes on 19 people nominated by President Barack Obama and endorsed by the Senate Judiciary Committee — most with unanimous or near-unanimous bipartisan support. Unfortunately, only two of these completely uncontroversial nominees will receive votes tomorrow.

Senate Republicans who persist in obstructing these nominees would do well to listen to the advice they received from Christian conservative leaders* such as Pat Robertson, James Dobson, Lou Sheldon, Rod Parsley, Frank Pavone, Miguel Rivera, Tony Perkins, Gary Bauer, and Rick Scarborough, who slammed judicial filibusters as, in Dobson’s words, a direct attack on “the future of democracy and ordered liberty.”

Watch some highlights here:

*These religious leaders made these claims when George W. Bush was president. But, of course, that doesn’t matter because — in the words of Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) — “we need to treat all nominees exactly the same, regardless of whether they’re nominated by a Democrat or a Republican president.”**

**Cornyn’s statement was also made when George W. Bush was president.

Center for American Progress Action Fund intern Linda Benesch contributed to this report.

The Supreme Court’s election-buying decision in Citizens United v. FEC left lawmakers with few options to reign in wealthy interest groups’ attempts to buy and sell American democracy. Citizens United did not simply enable corporations to dump unlimited funds into their efforts to influence elections, it also enabled the birth of Super PACs, which allow billionaires to pool their own unlimited donations into groups intended solely to elect or defeat a particular candidate.

Yet while Citizens United hamstrung many longstanding efforts to keep the very wealthy from dominating elections, it did not render lawmakers completely impotent. Later today, the New York Senate’s State Senate Corporations Committee is expected to vote on bill sponsored by state Sen. Daniel Squadron (D) that will invoke many of the few remaining tools left to elected officials concerned about big money’s impact on democracy:

“As we all look on in horror at the effect of Citizen’s United on the political process, here in New York, we have a chance to do something about it. This bill would reign in unchecked corporate influence in a way that the Supreme Court still allows,” Mr. Squadron told The Politicker. “It would require shareholders of corporations to approve political spending, it would require disclosure of political spending and it would require corporations to justify the corporate purpose of that spending. Too often people are using corporations to grind their own political axe. It’s not good for shareholders and it’s not good for the political system.”

The Corporate Political Accountability to Shareholders Act would require “that corporate contributions to a political candidate or party committee or in support or opposition to a candidate or ballot referendum be approved by a majority of shareholders.” Mr. Squadron believes his legislation could be a model for other states to address the growing controversy over corporate influence on the political process.

Requiring corporations to disclose their political spending is a common goal of post-Citizens United campaign finance proposals in light of the fact that the Supreme Court expressly held that disclosure laws are still allowed. The most intriguing part of Squadron’s bill, however, is the requirement that a corporation’s shareholders approve its political spending before the corporation is allowed to attempt to influence an election.

Despite the Supreme Court’s naive claim that corporate spending is necessary to preserve the First Amendment’s guarantee that all speakers be allowed to participate in the marketplace of ideas, the reality is that Citizens United forces millions of Americans to spend their own money on corporate speech they disapprove of. When a publicly-traded corporation lends its vast wealth to elect candidate X, it does so even though a majority of its shareholders could prefer candidate Y. Squadron’s bill would go a long way toward ensuring that shareholders do not have their investment dollars spent to elect candidates they despise.

To be sure, Squadron’s bill is only a modest step in this direction — a stronger bill could forbid corporations from attempting to buy an election absent the unanimous consent of their shareholders, or require shareholders to approve each and every ad a corporation wants to lend financial support to before it may run. Nevertheless, his focus on shareholder democracy is an important step towards mitigating the harm caused by Citizens United. Lawmakers in the other 49 states and in Congress would do well to follow Squadron’s example and introduce similar bills.

As ThinkProgress reported last week, energy barons Charles and David Koch recently filed a lawsuit attempting to seize majority control over the libertarian Cato Institute. According to Jerry Taylor, a senior fellow at Cato, this effort is part of a longstanding effort by the Kochs to transform Cato from a warehouse for radical libertarianism into something more purely concerned with electoral politics:

Last year, [the Kochs] used their shares to place two of their operatives – Kevin Gentry and Nancy Pfotenhauer – on our board against the wishes of every single board member save for David Koch. Last Thursday, they used their shares to force another four new board members on us (the most that their shares would allow at any given meeting); Charles Koch, Ted Olson (hired council for Koch Industries), Preston Marshall (the largest shareholder of Koch Industries save for Charles and David), and Andrew Napolitano (a frequent speaker at Koch-sponsored events). [...]

Why are they forcing out Cato board members, all strong, principled libertarians who have been heavily involved with Cato – financially and organizationally – for years? The answer was given in early November of last year when David Koch, Richard Fink (he of many Koch hats), and Kevin Gentry met with Cato board chairman Bob Levy. They told Bob that they intended to use their board majority to remove Ed Crane from Cato and transform our Institute into an intellectual ammo-shop for American for Prosperity and other allied (presumably, Koch-controlled) organizations. That statement of intent is certainly consistent with what we’ve been hearing from both Kevin Gentry and Nancy Pfotenauer. They’ve frequently complained during their short time on our board that Cato wasn’t doing enough to defeat President Obama in November and that we weren’t working closely enough with grass roots activists like those at AFP.

In its present incarnation, Cato combines a kind of Randian social Darwinism with several less extreme positions on issues such as defense and gay rights. Cato doesn’t just oppose Social Security and Medicare, it believes that they are unconstitutional. Yet Cato is also a genuine ally in the fight for marriage equality and it has at times been the most pacifistic major DC think tank. Among other things, Cato opposed the 1990 Gulf War.

Taylor is clearly concerned that Cato will abandon its commitment to a modest defense policy and potentially even its progressive views on gay rights if the Kochs take over. Koch-sponsored board member Nancy Pfotenauer is a former spokesperson for the McCain campaign who argued in support of both the Iraq War and Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell. Koch front man Kevin Gentry is a “social conservative activist.” The Kochs also tried and failed to install John Hinderaker on the Cato board, a right-wing blogger who supports the Patriot Act and the Iraq War and who once called George W. Bush “[a] man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius.” If this is reflective of the Kochs’ vision for Cato, then they want Cato to be nothing more than a mouthpiece for the Republican Party.

If the Kochs truly are committed to transforming America’s top libertarian organization into the Campaign To Defeat The President, however, then Cato will need to moderate many of its more extreme positions on domestic policy. Jerry Taylor’s job as one of Cato’s top climate science deniers will no doubt be safe — as the Koch energy juggernaut is unlikely to cut back on an issue so near and dear to its bottom line — but Cato’s miserly view of the Constitution is wholly inconsistent with an effort to develop a winning electoral agenda for President Obama’s opponent and would have to be abandoned.

Even in 2010, when President Obama’s popularity was at its lowest ebb and America’s economic woes seemed to stretch on for years to come, candidates like Joe Miller (R-AK), Sharron Angle (R-NV), John Raese (R-WV) and Ken Buck (R-CO) — all of whom share the Cato view of the Constitution — were creamed at the polls, each of them significantly underperforming Republicans with less radical stances on the Constitution. Now, by contrast, President Obama’s polls are experiencing a sharp upturn, and our economy is likely to experience meaningful growth in 2012 absent an economic disaster in Europe. If the Cato constitutional vision was toxic in 2010, it will be downright deadly in 2012.