The Republican Party’s decision to host their presidential nominating convention in Florida this year could have an unexpected consequence — armed protesters:

Hoping to head off violent protesters during the Republican National Convention, Mayor Bob Buckhorn has proposed a litany of items that will be considered security threats during the week-long event.

The list runs from air pistols to water pistols and also includes items such as masks, plastic or metal pipe and string more than six inches long.

Conspicuously absent from the list of potential weapons: Firearms.

That’s because state law bans local governments from placing any restrictions on the carrying of guns in public spaces.

Fortunately, Florida lacks the power to prevent federal officials from doing their job, so the Secret Service will still be able to ban guns in a smaller “security zone” surrounding the convention site itself. Lest there be any doubt, there is no legitimate Second Amendment issue here. As Justice Scalia explained in District of Columbia v. Heller, the Constitution does not limit “laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings.” Certainly, a convention that includes a major party’s presidential nominee and a significant percentage of the nation’s elected officials should qualify as such a “sensitive place.”

In the lead up to last week’s health care arguments, most eyes turned to Justice Anthony Kennedy as the vote most likely to cross party lines in order to follow the Constitution and uphold the Affordable Care Act. And it is certainly true that Kennedy’s record is somewhat less conservative than his fellow partisans on the Supreme Court. According to a 2008 study, the other four conservative justices are among the five most conservative in modern American history — Kennedy, by contrast, is ranked tenth.

Kennedy’s apostasies, however, are not distributed evenly across all areas of the law. On the death penalty, for example, Kennedy cast a number of votes that cheer progressives — declaring that juveniles and the mentally retarded cannot be executed and that, for the most part, the state cannot kill people for non-homicide crimes. Kennedy also has a strong record on gay rights, and he even departs from his fellow conservatives on abortion. Although Kennedy has consistently voted to restrict abortion rights, he turned aside a direct assault on Roe v. Wade early in his career on the Supreme Court.

Once Kennedy departs from areas such as criminal justice or gay rights, however, his record turns hard right. Although there is no perfect metric for how often a justice sides with entrenched wealth and power before the 99 Percent, the progressive Constitutional Accountability Center recently examined how often each justice votes with the nation’s top corporate interest group — the United States Chamber of Commerce. By this metric, Kennedy is only slighly less pro-corporate than his fellow partisans:

Notably, Kennedy joined the Court’s most conservative members in many of their most lavish gifts to the already wealthy and powerful:

• Citizens United: Probably Kennedy’s most significant opinion on the Court is his “rejection of the common sense of the American people” in Citizens United — which unleashed unlimited corporate and big money donations into American democracy.
• Forced Arbitration: Kennedy is a zealous supporter of forced arbitration, a practice that allows corporations to force their workers and consumers into a privatized arbitration system that overwhelmingly favors corporate parties.
• Job Insecurity: Kennedy cast the key vote against Lilly Ledbetter and against equal pay for women in the workplace. Even after this decision became a national embarrassment that was eventually overruled by Congress, Kennedy again cast a similar vote against equal opportunities for older workers.
• Every Man For Himself: Kennedy cast the key fifth vote empowering corporations to immunize themselves from consumer class actions, a decision that effectively gives corporate America a license to cheat its customers a few dollars at a time.
• The Entire George W. Bush Presidency: Lest we ever forget, Kennedy also voted to install George W. Bush as president, quite possibly the single greatest gift any judge has ever given to the wealthiest and most powerful Americans.

None of this, of course, means that Kennedy is certain to vote to strike down President Obama’s signature health care bill. It would be impossible for Kennedy to square such a vote with the decision he joined in Gonzales v. Raich, and the case against the Affordable Care Act is so weak that it is laughable. Nevertheless, the fact remains that Kennedy has shown no inclination towards moderation when basic economic justice is on the table. He has, almost as consistently as Chief Justice Roberts or Justice Scalia, behaved as a creature of the one percent.

Yet another death row inmate in Texas may in fact not be guilty of the crime that put him there. Robert Gene Will was convicted in the 2000 slaying of Deputy Sheriff Barrett Hill in Harris County, Texas. Will and another man, Michael Rosario, were caught trying to break into a car in December 2000. Both men fled, but Will says he was apprehended and placed in handcuffs by police. That’s when someone shot Deputy Sheriff Hill.

Will says that the shooter couldn’t have been him, on account of his hands literally being tied behind his back. And his lawyers argue that Rosario, the accomplice in the attempted car burglary, has admitted to at least five people that he was the one who pulled the trigger that morning. And now, Will’s case is attracting even more attention after a U.S District Judge voiced his own reservations about the initial conviction and the appeal that was conducted. The Houston Chronicle reports:

“The questions raised during post-judgment factual development about Will’s actual innocence create disturbing uncertainties …,” [Judge Keith] Ellison wrote in a Jan. 17 memorandum. “On top of the considerable evidence supporting Will’s innocence and the important errors in the trial court, there must also be addressed the total absence of eyewitness testimony or strongly probative forensic evidence. With facts such as these, and only circumstantial evidence supporting Will’s conviction and death sentence, the court laments the strict limitations placed upon it.”

Judge Ellison was limited in his ability to hear new evidence before making a decision on whether to grant an appeal to Will, and despite his expressed dismay over the lower court’s verdict, was forced to deny the appeal on a technicality. But Will and his defense attorneys still have avenues open to them, including a recent Supreme Court ruling that allows for convicted criminals to, in some cases, challenge the competency of their state-assigned appeals lawyers. For Will, whose appointed attorney filed a legal brief that copied extensively from one he filed previously for a completely different case, the Supreme Court decision offers a ray of hope.

Texas has a well-earned reputation for unsympathetic governors who are undeterred at overseeing more executions than any other state in the country. Current Gov. Rick Perry presided over 235 executions during his time in office, by far the most of any governor in the modern era. This despite several questionable convictions that call into question the use of the death penalty at all.

Two years ago, Arizona outlawed the teaching of some ethnic studies courses in K-12 schools, and now it may expand the prohibition to universities too.

Just weeks after the state passed its infamous immigration law, it also passed a law aimed at scuttling Tucson’s Mexican-American studies program, which critics claimed taught kids to resent white people. The argument, at the time, was that teaching subjects like critical race theory to kids in high school amounted to indoctrination because they were not old enough to question the teaching critically, like university students.

But now, Arizona’s chief education official sees university-level Mexican-American sudies programs as a danger too:

Arizona’s superintendent of schools, John Huppenthal, says Tucson’s suspended Mexican American studies curricula teaches students to resent Anglos, and that the university program that educated the public school teachers is to blame.

“I think that’s where this toxic thing starts from, the universities,” Arizona Superintendent of Schools John Huppenthal said in an interview with Fox News Latino. “To me, the pervasive problem was the lack of balance going on in these classes,” Huppenthal said.

Not surprisingly, a long list of Latino groups and education activists have protested the move, as they did when the state shut down Tucson’s program, decrying the imposition on free speech. “What we’re trying to do is expose children to a much broader perspective, so that we’re not indoctrinating,” said Augustine Romero, the former director of Tucson’s Mexican American Studies Department.

The ethnic studies law, which bans schools from offering courses designed for a specific ethnicity, had far-ranging consequences, including banning books like Shakespeare’s The Tempest and other seemingly anodyne works of literature.

And while many call the state prohibitions unprecedented, Devon Peña, the former director of the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies said, “There is a precedent, and it’s called McCarthyism.” “It’s just a witch hunt of a different color. Now, instead of going after the reds, they’re going after the browns.”

In 1939, the Supreme Court held that the Second Amendment only protects state militias — not an individual’s right to keep and bear arms. This decision remained good law until June of 2008, when it was overruled by the Court’s landmark decision in District of Columbia v. Heller. Which is why when Nevada Judge Elissa Cadish was asked whether she believes the Second Amendment protects such an individual right to firearms before the Heller decision came down, she gave the correct answer under then-existing Supreme Court precedent: “I do not believe that there is this constitutional right.” Any other answer would have been inappropriate since, as a sitting judge, she was obligated to follow the decisions of higher courts.

Flash forward four years, and Judge Cadish is a nominee to a federal court in Nevada, where she will fill a seat deemed a “judicial emergency” by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts due to state’s increasingly unmanageable federal caseload. Unfortunately, Nevada’s junior Sen. Dean Heller (R) appears more interested in using Cadish’s ability to accurately describe binding Supreme Court precedent against her than he is in actually making sure his state’s citizens have access to swift and necessary justice:

According to Capitol Hill sources, Republican staffers on the Senate Judiciary Committee came across the 2008 questionnaire [regarding the Second Amendment] when they were researching Cadish and reviewing her answers to a committee survey.

The GOP staff took the matter to Heller, who took it to Reid. The Senate majority leader then asked Cadish to explain.

Reid said Cadish’s nomination “cannot proceed without Sen. Heller’s support, and starting this process over with a new nominee is likely to leave this vacancy open for many more months.”

“Nevadans will be left with a crippled court system we cannot afford,” Reid said in a statement. “I very much hope Sen. Heller reconsiders his decision.”

At this very moment, while Heller appears to be using a Cadish’s completely noncontroversial description of previous law to score political points, thousands of Nevadans await justice in the state’s increasingly clogged federal judiciary. They likely include both workers who were wrongly fired and businesses who cannot afford to hire until after the looming threat of a meritless lawsuit is removed by a judicial decision. If Heller has a legitimate objection to Judge Cadish, then he should voice it. But there is no excuse for punishing a judge — and the people of Nevada — because the judge knows how to follow the law.