In 2010, San Diego police officers investigated the death of a Mexican man who border patrol agents shocked with a Taser and struck with a baton at the Mexican border. Although the San Diego coroner’s office ruled the death a homicide, the federal officers said the 42-year-old undocumented immigrant, Anastacio Hernández-Rojas, was not handcuffed and resisting deportation when he was Tasered, and no one has yet be charged in Rojas’ death. Rojas was one of several immigrants killed by border patrol agents.

But almost two years later, a new video of Rojas’ death counters the border patrol agents’ account, according to a PBS and Nation Institute joint investigation. Rather than showing him resisting arrest, Rojas is seen lying on the ground with several agents surrounding him when he is shocked by the Taser. Watch a clip of the report from PBS’ Need to Know:

When Rojas’ family saw him in the hospital, they could tell he had been beaten. His family filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government after Rojas’ death. They argue that “at one point, there were approximately 20 to 25 agents, taking part in beating, kicking or punching” Rojas.

But because border patrol agents work under the Department of Homeland Security, they are not subjected to the same scrutiny as police officers. No one has been charged with Rojas’ death. And the lack of prosecution in cases like Rojas’ death and others raises more questions about if agents are properly trained to safely protect the border.

In a somewhat unexpected move today, the conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court denied expedited review to a pair of trail court decisions blocking that state’s Voter ID law, despite the fact that two courts of appeals asked the justices to take the cases right away. Although this decision says nothing about how the Wisconsin justices view the voter ID law, their decision not to fast track the case increases the likelihood that the fate of the state’s voter ID law will not be decided until after Gov. Scott Walker (R) faces a recall election on June 5th.

If there is no further action on Wisconsin voter ID until after the recall election, that will be a serious blow to Walker’s efforts to save his job. Voter ID laws disproportionately disenfranchise minorities, low-income voters, students and other groups that tend to vote for Democrats, and thus Wisconsin’s law will boost Walker and other Republicans within that state if it is allowed to go into effect. In March, however, one of the judges who ruled against the voter ID law also held that the law could not be enforced while it is on appeal. Thus, unless this order is reversed by a higher court, Walker will not benefit from voter ID’s disenfranchisement of left-leaning demographics.

More than twenty state legislatures are considering bills that ostensibly prohibit judges from following foreign law, but which are actually part of a nationwide Islamophobic campaign to combat the nonexistent problem of American courts relying on Sharia law. As the Topeka Capital-Journal explains, however, this effort has been much less effective in convincing Kansas lawmakers’ actual constituents to support an anti-Muslim bill than it has been in simply harassing those lawmakers with out-of-state emails:

“I had a large number of emails — like in the thousands — during the last couple weeks of session (before the current break),” said Sen. Jeff King, R-Independence.

King said he had to instruct his assistant to funnel them into a separate folder and further separate the emails that actually came from his constituents, which he said narrowed the number to “dozens.”

Sen. Tim Owens, R-Overland Park, recently said his inbox also was full of anti-Sharia emails, most of them from out-of-state.

It’s really no surprise that there aren’t many actual Kansans worried about the threat of creeping Sharia. As ThinkProgress previously explained, a judge is about as likely to replace American law with “the laws of ancient Rome or the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons second edition rules” as they are to suddenly decide to embrace Sharia law.

Yet, while the anti-Sharia bills being pushed by national Islamophobes are completely unnecessary, that does not mean that they are harmless. Initially, anti-Muslim activists pushed bills and ballot initiatives that expressly forbade the courts from applying Islamic law in any circumstance. This kind of law is unambiguously unconstitutional, and it fared poorly in federal court. So the latest round of anti-Sharia bills have removed expressed references to Sharia or Islam, and they have expanded their scope to include bans on other foreign law.

These bans, however, can have serious consequences for a state’s businesses and for non-Muslim residents. Businesses frequently contract with foreign companies to resolve their disputes according to foreign law, which is why business groups came out against a Virginia anti-Sharia bill to prevent it from hurting their ability to do business overseas. Similarly, a Florida anti-Sharia bill’s overbroad language likely would have prevented Florida courts from enforcing many Orthodox Jewish divorces.

And for all the anti-Muslim lobby’s effort’s to save their pet bills from unconstitutionality by not being entirely candid about what these bills are intended to accomplish, their efforts are likely to amount to nothing. As the Supreme Court held in Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye v. Hialeah, the Constitution forbids laws that “regulate[] or prohibit[] conduct because it is undertaken for religious reasons” — even if the law banning religious conduct is written without referencing a particular faith.

During the primary, when he only needed to appeal to hard right Republican voters, Mitt Romney promised to veto the DREAM Act, which provides young people who have lived much of their lives in the United States a path to citizenship. Now that Romney needs to appeal to Latinos in order to win the general election, however, he’s already breaking out his Etch-a-Sketch. This weekend he told a crowd at a private (but very audible) fundraiser that he would support a version of the DREAM Act.

This is a significant turnaround for Romney, who was extremely anti-immigrant for the bulk of the primary season. Indeed, Romney even campaigned with an anti-immigrant leader who has ties to hate groups and helped pen Arizona’s “show us your papers” bill — on Martin Luther King Day. But now, facing abysmal poll numbers among Latinos, Romney is changing his tune. “We’re going to be able to get Hispanic voters,” he said, “We’re going to overcome the issue of immigration”:

Mr. Romney was frank in both his policy prescriptions and his obstacles as he addressed donors. He said he expected Mr. Obama to use the immigration issue against him as both sides of the aisle pursue Hispanic voters, a key demographic group in 2012. Mr. Romney said he and other Republicans will have to make the case that they are the party of “opportunity.”

He said the GOP will have to propose its own initiatives to win support from Hispanic voters, such as a Republican version of the Dream Act. As offered by Democrats, the act offers a path to permanent residency for those illegal immigrants who entered the U.S. as minors and serve in the military or earn a college degree.

In a sense, Romney is taking the right approach if he comes out in favor of DREAM: 91 percent of Latinos support the DREAM Act. It is likely, however, that Romney will only support a pale shadow of the real DREAM Act that enjoys such widespread support.

The leading Republican alternative to DREAM is currently being crafted by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL). While real DREAM provides an eventual path to citizenship to students who were brought to this country and either attended college or joined the military, Rubio says that his watered-down DREAM Act will not, in fact, provide a path to citizenship.

If the Republicans rally behind a DREAM Act that does lead to eventual citizenship, it would prove an etch-a-sketch moment not just for Romney, but for Rubio, who has said that he would not vote for a full path-to-citizenship bill. If Romney’s proposal does not include a path to citizenship, then the half-hearted appeal for the Latino vote likely won’t suffice: Latino groups have deemed the watered-down bill the “DREAM Act without a dream.”

For more than two years, ThinkProgress has tracked “tentherism,” a radical misreading of the Constitution which claims that pretty much everything the federal government does is unconstitutional. Tenther lawmakers — who include members of Congress, senators, governors and at least one sitting Supreme Court justice — have claimed that child labor laws, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, clean air laws and the federal highway system all violate the Constitution.

Even tentherism has a limit, however. While tenthers would all but eliminate our national leaders’ ability to solve national problems, they concede that state governments are still free to serve their citizens. Which is why a recent concurring opinion signed by U.S. Court of Appeals judges David Sentelle and Janice Rogers Brown is so disturbing. Under Sentelle and Brown’s vision, any attempt to protect workers, investors or consumers from unscrupulous businesses is in jeopardy:

America’s cowboy capitalism was long ago disarmed by a democratic process increasingly dominated by powerful groups with economic interests antithetical to competitors and consumers. And the courts, from which the victims of burdensome regulation sought protection, have been negotiating the terms of surrender since the 1930s.

First the Supreme Court allowed state and local jurisdictions to regulate property, pursuant to their police powers, in the public interest, and to “adopt whatever economic policy may reasonably be deemed to promote public welfare.” Then the Court relegated economic liberty to a lower echelon of constitutional protection than personal or political liberty, according restrictions on property rights only minimal review. . . . Thus the Supreme Court decided economic liberty was not a fundamental constitutional right, and decreed economic legislation must be upheld against an equal protection challenge “if there is any reasonably conceivable state of facts that could provide a rational basis” for it.

To translate this a bit, Sentelle and Brown disagree with the fact that representatives chosen by the American people, rather than unelected judges such as themselves, get to decide America’s economic policy. At best, their opinion calls for a return to a discredited era when judges could simply toss out laws protecting workers or consumers that the judges did not like.

Yet Sentelle and Brown also appear to be arguing for something even more radical than that. Their opinion complains that “economic liberty [is] not a fundamental constitutional right.” “Fundamental rights” are the very most protected rights under the Constitution. The right to be free from race discrimination is a fundamental right. As is the right to criticize the government. Sentelle and Brown’s opinion, however, concerns a law that removes a loophole exempting certain dairies from a 70 year-old system regulating the milk industry. In their apparent view, a law that regulates how dairy executives operate their business is exactly as offensive as a law that bans black people from voting.

Nor would their opinion stop there. The minimum wage regulates how dairy executives operate their business. As do child labor laws. Or workplace safety laws. Or laws that prevent dairies from selling spoiled or tainted milk. In Sentelle and Brown’s America, these laws likely would also be just as constitutionally suspect as a law that gives special rights to white people and not to black people.

Nor would their opinion stop there, for, indeed, their opinion laments that “economic legislation” as a whole is left to the people’s representatives and not to judges. The likely implication of Sentelle and Brown’s vision is any attempt to protect workers, or to regulate Wall Street, or to ensure that food and drugs sold in the marketplace are safe, or to enact any law protecting ordinary American consumers must be treated with exactly the same constitutional skepticism judges would bring to a law that tosses people who speak out against President Obama in jail.

Yet for all the many, many laws they would strike down, for all the anarchy they would create by sweeping away literally centuries of regulation in a single constitutional whirlwind, one thing is conspicuously absent from Sentelle and Brown’s opinion. At no point do they cite a single word of the Constitution which supports their sweeping assault on America’s power to govern itself.

This is not a coincidence. Those words do not exist.

The Miami-Dade Fire and Rescue Department opened an investigation into a racist post on one of its captains’ Facebook page. According to The Grio, Brian Beckmann, a captain in the Miami-Dade fire department, posted a rant on his Facebook page suggesting that Trayvon Martin shooter George Zimmerman was unjustly accused and that Martin’s killing can be blamed upon poor parenting by “urban” parents who are “welfare dependent”:

For the record, Trayvon Martin’s mother is a program coordinator at the Miami-Dade Housing Authority. His father is a truck driver. So neither parent is “dependent” on welfare.