Prompted by a petition campaign by the progressive advocacy group Color of Change, Coca-Cola has pulled its support from ALEC, a right-wing corporate-funded front group which has been pushing voter restriction efforts around the country. The company released this statement moments ago:

The Coca-Cola Company has elected to discontinue its membership with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Our involvement with ALEC was focused on efforts to oppose discriminatory food and beverage taxes, not on issues that have no direct bearing on our business. We have a long-standing policy of only taking positions on issues that impact our Company and industry.

Impressively, Coke’s retreat came just five hours after Color of Change announced its petition, which read: “ALEC has pushed voter ID laws which disenfranchise large numbers of Black voters. Along with the NRA, ALEC also pushed a bill based on Florida’s ‘shoot first’ law – which has shielded Trayvon Martin’s killer from justice – into two dozen states across the country.”

Just this morning, the Center for American Progress released a report highlighting ALEC’s role in voter suppression:

ALEC charges corporations such as Koch Industries Inc., Wal-Mart Stores Inc., and The Coca-Cola Co. a fee and gives them access to members of state legislatures. Under ALEC’s auspices, legislators, corporate representatives, and ALEC officials work together to draft model legislation. As ALEC spokesperson Michael Bowman told NPR, this system is especially effective because “you have legislators who will ask questions much more freely at our meetings because they are not under the eyes of the press, the eyes of the voters.”

Earlier today, the Center for American Progress released Voter Suppression 101, a report documenting conservative efforts to disenfranchise voters through state restrictions on voting. At a press call accompanying the release, former Civil Rights Movement leader and current Congressman Jim Clyburn (D-SC) was asked for his personal feelings on seeing another wave of voter disenfranchisement after he fought so hard to end Jim Crow. His response was grim:

I cannot remember — even sitting in an Orangeburg County jail — when I had as much anxiety as I’m experiencing today. Back then, even when we were at the back of the bus and we were not able to sit down at lunch counters, we really felt strong that what’s happening to me here in Orangeburg, SC or Columbia, SC, ah, if I can get my plight before the United States Supreme Court, the promise of this country will be delivered for me. That’s what we felt, and I can remember our discussions in meetings — yeah, we’re going to jail now. We are going to be convicted. But we know that that conviction is going to be overturned by the United States Supreme Court.

I don’t feel that today.

Listen:

Sadly, Clyburn is right to be anxious. When the first voter ID law came before the Supreme Court four years ago, the Court completely abdicated its responsibility to strike them down — despite the fact that they were only able to find one example of in-person voter fraud in the last 140 years that would have been prevented by a voter ID law. Four years before that, the Court’s conservatives abdicated its responsibility to strike down partisan gerrymandering of Congress and state legislatures. Yet, when George W. Bush saw the presidency slipping out of his fingertips, the Court’s conservatives suddenly deemed that to be a massive constitutional violation worthy of their attention.

WASHINGTON, DC — Texas Attorney General Greb Abbott (R) dismissed concerns that his state’s new voter ID law could disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of Texans, predicting instead that it will lead to an increase in voter turnout.

As many as 800,000 Texans currently lack a driver’s license or personal identification card. The likelihood that a Latino voter won’t have the necessary photo ID is as much double that of a non-Latino. Because of this disproportionate effect on Hispanic voters, the Justice Department blocked the Texas’ voter ID law under the Voting RIghts Act.

In an interview with ThinkProgress last week, Abbott dismissed these concerns, arguing instead that no one will be disenfranchised because of voter ID. Abbott went further, insisting that with voter ID in place, turnout will actually increase in Texas.

KEYES: Do you think that goal will be achieved that no one will be disenfranchised with the voter ID law?

ABBOTT: I do believe that both the safeguards and the structure put in place by Texas will ensure that it achieves the same thing that was achieved by Georgia and Indiana, and that is after these laws were implemented, you actually saw an increase in voter participation as opposed to a decrease.

Watch it:

Voter ID doesn’t just discriminate against racial minorities. It also hurts poor people and those who live in rural areas. First, for people who lack an official photo ID, obtaining one in order to vote is an unconstitutional poll tax. One such individual is Jessica Cohen, whose story ThinkProgress documented in November. After she lost her identification during a robbery, the only way to get a voter ID was to pay a fee to Missouri officials in order to obtain her birth certificate.

In addition, rural folks are hit disproportionately hard by a voter ID requirement. For many people living in rural west Texas, for instance, the nearest ID office is as much as 100 miles away. That barrier is all the more difficult because people who lack ID by definition don’t have a driver’s license. Unable to obtain a photo ID, they would be stripped of their voting rights under the state’s voter ID law.

It’s not difficult to see why hundreds of thousands would likely be disenfranchised in Texas if voter ID were reinstated. What is difficult to see is precisely how a major new barrier to voting will result in more Texans being able to vote, as Abbott asserts.

To learn more about voter ID and other suppression efforts, read CAP’s new report on recent attacks on voting rights across the country.

FORT DODGE, IOWA — At a town hall meeting yesterday with his constituents, Rep. Steve King (R-IA) made an unexpected revelation — he attended the Affordable Care Act oral arguments in the Supreme Court as the personal guest of Chief Justice Roberts. In King’s words, his seat was “not the cheap seats, but the chief’s seat.” Watch it:

Although there are a limited number of seats reserved for personal guests of the justices in the Supreme Courtroom, there are fewer total seats in the room than there are members of Congress, and the reserved seats were difficult even for Members of Congress to come by. So it is a bit curious that Roberts would give one of his seats to King of all people.

Even in an era of conservative radicalism, King is an unusually radical conservative. He does not simply believe that that the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional, and he has not simply led a single-minded crusade to repeal or defund it, he’s suggested that any national effort to regulate the insurance industry would violate our Constitution. He also denies that the Constitution protects access to contraception, and has expressed strange views on contraception generally — at one point suggesting that President Obama’s plan to ensure all women have access to birth control will make America a “dying civilization.” He’s claimed that unemployment benefits will transform America into a “nation of slackers,” he called for congressional hearings after President Obama’s estranged uncle was arrested for a DUI, and he’s openly admitted that he believes congressional hearings should be used to “publicly humiliate” President Obama.

Then again, after last week’s Affordable Care Act hearing, it wasn’t entirely clear that the five conservative justices understand that the purpose of a Supreme Court hearing isn’t simply to “publicly humiliate” Obama — so King and Roberts might actually have more in common than it seems.

Two Wisconsin state courts have declared Wisconsin’s Voter ID law unconstitutional under the state constitution. Moreover, as one of the two judges to do so pointed out, the law already disenfranchised voters during the short time it is in effect — including a Marine veteran and a 84 year-old former elected official. Yesterday, it also appears to have disenfranchised one more elderly voter, despite the fact that the law is supposed to be suspended due to the multiple court decisions against it:

It took persistence – and a second trip to her Waukesha polling place – by a 63-year-old Waukesha woman to vote Tuesday. But she said her 87-year-old mother who couldn’t make the trip back was disenfranchised by a poll worker who asked to see a photo ID.

Wisconsin’s new voter ID law was in place for the February primary but not for Tuesday’s general election after a judge ruled it was unconstitutional. The photo ID requirement is on hold while the matter is appealed. . . .

The woman said she and her mother had moved to Waukesha last May and registered to vote at Waukesha City Hall in January. They went to their Waukesha West High School poll Tuesday but were asked to show identification – which her mother hadn’t brought with her. Her own driver’s license had an out-of-date address on it, she said.

“We were listed on their friggin’ poll list,” she said, “and yet we had our names highlighted.” The poll worker said maybe they didn’t register in time, though they clearly had.

As a new Center for American Progress Report points out, elderly voters are frequently the victims of Voter ID laws. A short list of older voters who have been kept from the polls by these laws include Paul Carroll, a 86-year-old World War II veteran from Ohio; Dorothy Cooper, a 96-year-old African-American woman from Tennessee, and Thelma Mitchell a 93-year-old woman who cleaned the Tennessee Capitol for 30 years.

Yesterday, however, probably marks the first time an elderly voter was disenfranchised by a voter ID law that isn’t even supposed to be in effect.

Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam (R) announced yesterday that he will “probably” sign a bill that attacks the teaching of “biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning” by giving broad new legal immunities to teachers who question evolution and other widely accepted scientific theories. Under the bill, which passed the state legislature last month:

Neither the state board of education, nor any public elementary or secondary school governing authority, director of schools, school system administrator, or any public elementary or secondary school principal or administrator shall prohibit any teacher in a public school system of this state from helping students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories covered in the course being taught.

Although the bill is written to seem benign, as it neither specifically authorizes the teaching of creationism nor permits teachers to do more than criticize scientific theories “in an objective matter,” the practical impact of this bill will be to intimidate all but the heartiest of school administrators against disciplining teachers who preach the most outlandish junk science in their classrooms. Because the bill provides little guidance as to what constitutes an “objective” criticism of a scientific theory, any principal who reigns in teachers who force creationism or Pastafarianism upon their students risks finding themselves on the wrong side of the law.

In reality, of course, there are few, if any, “objectively” valid objections to the theory of evolution (or, for that matter, to global warming). Rather, as Travis Waldron explained when this bill passed a legislative committee nearly a year ago, “Scientists have reached a consensus that evolution is ‘one of the most robust and widely accepted principles of modern science,’ and as such, it is ‘a core element in science education.’”

Last night, Fox News host Greta Van Susteren – an accomplished former trial attorney and legal analyst – criticized the 5th Circuit panel for making an illogical demand of the Department of Justice.

Yesterday, Republican Judge Jerry Smith, speaking presumably for the entire panel, demanded a 3-page, single-spaced letter from the Department of Justice on whether it agrees with President Obama that it would be inappropriate for “unelected judges” to strike down Obamacare. Obama himself clarified yesterday that, “[w]e have not seen a court overturn a law that was passed by Congress on an economic issue like health care,” which is correct.

Judge Smith asked the DoJ attorney whether courts have the power to overturn an act passed by Congress and signed by the President. The lawyer, Dana Lydia Kaersvang, straightforwardly answered yes and referenced the landmark case affirming such power of judicial review — Marbury v. Madison. Van Susteren said last night, “What I see, first of all, the judge doesn’t need this information, and she [DoJ attorney] answered the question. It really should be over at that point.” Explaining “I’ve never seen anything like this,” she urged the DoJ to refuse to comply with the Judge’s request:

VAN SUSTEREN: I imagine the discussion tonight at the Justice Department – I would certainly be having this discussion – is to refuse to do it. Because it really is beyond what is necessary in the case. It has nothing to do with the case. And the lawyer answered the question in court. And it’s clearly just, you know, the judge is mad. And to refuse to do it, maybe you draw a contempt charge but then I would then take it up with the full court. I’m not so sure the Department of Justice has to comply with this.

Watch it:

As Ian Millhiser observed, the 5th Circuit is mostly interested in trying to “embarrass the president.” He writes, “This is not how judges behave. This is how politicians behave. If Judge Smith and his co-ideologues cannot refrain from such purely political tantrums, they should resign their seats and run for office as Republicans.”