Senator Marco Rubio missed the mark on the DREAM Act today when he said that he’d consider offering a path to legal status, but not citizenship, for undocumented students. As a Latino Republican, Rubio has been criticized for his stance against the DREAM Act, which in its original form would permit students who had completed high school and either gone to college or joined the military, a path to eventual citizenship.

During a radio interview with Geraldo Rivera today, Rubio teetered between defending his current opposition to the DREAM Act and trying to find a way to appease Latino voters who will prove an important demographic for Republicans during the election season. Rubio delved into his new position on the DREAM Act:

The DREAM Act, as it is currently structured, has a series of problems that not only denies it the support that it needs, but I think would be counterproductive to our goal of having a legal immigration system that works. … It could be expanded to millions of people, which is problematic. But I do think that there is another way to deal with this. And I think that one of the debates that we need to begin to have is there is a difference between citizenship and legalization. You can legalize someone’s status in this country with a significant amount of certainty about their future without placing them on a path toward citizenship. And I think that is something that we can find consensus on and it is one of the ways to address the issue of chain migration.

Rubio’s suggestion for a DREAM Act would mean that potentially millions of kids who grew up in the United States without the right papers would be forced to be non-voting residents of their home country. Rubio may be using the rhetoric of defending Latinos against right-wing attacks, but the Republican policies don’t play out well for Latinos, specifically on the DREAM Act. The Republican presidential candidates are running on extreme immigration policies, and it would take a lot for Latinos to regain trust in the party. Offering a path to second-class citizenship is not exactly the olive branch Latinos are looking for.

Earlier this afternoon, the Senate confirmed Judge Michael Fitzgerald to a federal court in California by a 91-6 vote. Fitzgerald is President Obama’s fourth openly gay nominee to the federal courts, although one of these four nominees, attorney Edward DuMont, withdrew his nomination last year in frustration over Senate Republican obstructionism. The other two out nominees, Judges Alison Nathan and Paul Oetken were both confirmed to federal trial courts.

Sadly, Fitzgerald’s confirmation only highlights how rare an event the confirmation of an openly gay federal judge is. Fitzgerald joins Nathan, Oetken and a Clinton appointee named Deborah Batts as one of the only four openly gay lifetime tenured federal judges in American history.

Nearly three years ago, the Supreme Court rolled back decades of precedent to make it harder for older workers to stand up to age discrimination in the workplace:

Employment discrimination cases are difficult to prove because the plaintiff ultimately must show what their boss was thinking at the time they were fired or demoted–it is illegal for an employer to fire a worker because they think the worker is too old or too black or too female, but not because they think the worker is incompetent or poorly dressed. Since workers don’t have ESP, the Supreme Court long ago put certain procedures in place to make sure that laws banning discrimination amount to more than just empty promises.

“Mixed motive” suits are an example of these procedures. To win a mixed motive case, a plaintiff had to prove that discrimination was one of the reasons behind their boss’ decision to fire or demote them. It was then up to their boss to prove that they would have made the same decision regardless of the worker’s race or gender or age. Workers are spared the nearly impossible task of having to prove that that their boss was thinking only of bigotry when they lashed out at their employee; and employers are given a fair chance to prove that discrimination is not the real reason why the worker was cast aside. . . .[Gross v. FBL Financial Services] eliminates such claims in age discrimination cases. Thanks to Justice Thomas’ majority opinion, victims of age discrimination are helpless unless they can get inside their boss’ head and show that their boss would have behaved differently if the victim had been a little younger.

A bill introduced Tuesday by Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Tom Harkin (D-IA) will overturn Gross and restore to older workers the same ability to fight discrimination that they agreed before a 5-4 Supreme Court took it away from them. Although many Senate Democrats have long supported undoing the justices’ mischief in this way, this is the first time a Republican has signed on to the effort — Grassley’s endorsement of the bill is a hopeful sign that it could become law.

Enacting this bill is not simply important because it will restore necessary rights to older workers, it also is important to push back against a Supreme Court that openly flouts its own precedents. Justice Thomas’ majority opinion in Gross acknowledged that his decision was at war with longstanding precedent, but he dismissed this fact by simply saying “it is far from clear that the Court would have the same approach were it to consider the question today in the first instance.” In other words, Thomas believes that, because the Supreme Court is now dominated by five far right justices, it should no longer have to follow precedents from a more sensible era.

With a stroke of a pen, hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvanians were potentially disenfranchised last night.

Gov. Tom Corbett (R) signed into law HB 934, which requires all Pennsylvanians to show a certain form of photo ID in order to be allowed to vote, after the Republican-controlled state legislature approved the bill this week. It will have a disastrous impact on the 700,000 Pennsylvanians who currently lack photo ID, half of whom are senior citizens. With the new voter ID law in place, they would not be permitted to cast a vote in the November general election. (In 2008, a watershed Democratic year, Barack Obama only won the state by 600,000 votes.)

The Montgomery News details which forms of photo ID are acceptable under the new law:

A valid ID would include a driver’s license, military ID, passport, and ID card from state-accredited colleges and universities and state-licensed care facilities. Pennsylvania residents who attend college out-of-state could not use their student IDs to vote.

Not all student IDs are considered acceptable, however. Only student IDs with expiration dates are permissible; those that lack them will not be accepted at the polls.

The law, which will be in effect for November’s presidential election, makes Pennsylvania the ninth state since 2008 to pass a strict voter ID law. A number of other states, like Michigan and Louisiana, request a photo ID at the polls, but unlike strict voter ID states, they still allow people who lack photo ID to vote once they sign an affidavit affirming their identity. In Pennsylvania, those who show up without photo ID will be allowed to vote on a provisional ballot, but it will only be counted if they present acceptable photo ID within the next six days.

Voter ID laws in Texas and South Carolina were recently blocked by the Justice Department because of their biased effect on minorities. Those two states have a history of discrimination and must get federal clearance for any changes to their elections under the Voting Rights Act. Pennsylvania, however, is not subject to the Voting Rights Act and does not need preclearance from the Justice Department.

Though voter fraud is as non-existent in Pennsylvania as it is elsewhere in the nation, Republicans in the Keystone State have nevertheless used fraud as justification to enact a law that could bar hundreds of thousands, predominantly minorities and the elderly, from the ballot box.

Earlier this week, disgraced former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore won the GOP primary in the race for his old seat on the state’s highest court. Moore was removed from the same job in 2003 after he defied a court order requiring him to remove a Ten Commandments monument from the state judiciary building.

In November, Moore will face Harry Lyon, a perennial candidate who has run for various state offices as both a Democrat and a Republican. As it turns out, Lyon may actually outdo Moore in the race to find the most inappropriate candidate for a state’s highest court:

Lyon, 54, is a perennial candidate for various offices, including a former Supreme Court candidate as a Republican.

Recently he was quoted by the Montgomery Advertiser as proposing to hang a few illegal immigrants to get the attention of the rest.

“My idea is to bring attention to the problem and let the Legislature [and courts] decide,” Lyon said. “I’d give them 90 days to make arrangements to make them leave and if after that, you’d have to go to public execution.

“I admit it does have some shock value,” he said.

Lyon was also once shot in the neck after a neighbor caught him pouring Hershey’s Chocolate Syrup on the neighbor’s car.