Last month, even after news of Trayvon Martin’s shooting broke nationally, 29 conservative senators introduced a bill that would have allowed Martin’s shooter George Zimmerman to carry a concealed firearm in nearly any state before he was arrested. The bill, which has the strong support of the NRA, allows anyone who has a concealed carry permit from any state to carry a concealed weapon in virtually any state, no matter how lax the laws are in the state where the permit was issued. Florida, for example, refused to take away Zimmerman’s concealed carry permit for weeks after he shot and killed Martin.

In a letter to Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and Judiciary Chair Pat Leahy (D-VT) yesterday, Sen. Dianne Feinstein placed a hold on this and a related bill:

These dangerous bills — which are opposed by leading law enforcement organizations — would undermine states’ rights by forcing nearly every state to accept the concealed-carry permits issued by other states, even if the permit holder could not qualify for a permit in the state to which he is traveling. By this letter, I respectfully place a hold on these bills and request that you do not allow them to be considered on their own or as an amendment to other legislation . . . .

In recent weeks, our nation have witnessed tragic gun violence in Sanford, Florida and in Oakland, California, which is only a short drive from my home. Notably, George Zimmerman, the man who shot and killed 17 year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, had been issued a concealed carry permit under Florida law, even though he had previously been subject to a court order for domestic abuse of his ex-fiancee. Congress should heed the warnings of law enforcement and not force states to recognize the permits issued to individuals in other states.

Now that Feinstein crossed the gun lobby, she is all but certain to be barraged with attacks claiming she is the enemy of the Second Amendment. But if that is true, then so is Republican Justice Antonin Scalia. As Scalia established in D.C. v. Heller “the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited,” and laws regulating or even prohibiting concealed carry are entirely consistent with the Second Amendment.

Investigators at the Florida Department of Law Enforcement identified “possible criminal and ethical violations” by freshman Rep. David Rivera (R-FL). Among these were filing erroneous personal financial reports while a member of the Florida House of Representatives, falsely amending those disclosures after media criticism, and using campaign and government accounts to reimburse his own personal expenses.

The report says:

Analysis of documents obtained to date supports the contention that Mr. Rivera purposely falsified his financial disclosure forms in an attempt to legitimize other source of income beyond his salary as a State Legislator. First, Mr. Rivera provided information on his initial financial disclosure submissions that wasfalse and then amended the forms to remove the information. Second, Mr. Rivera amended his financial disclosure forms claiming that $132,000 received from Millennium Marketing were liabilities (loans), when, in fact, documentary evidence indicates that it was compensation for being employed as a consultant to the Flagler Dog Track for the gaming referendum.

The Miami Herald reported yesterday that state prosecutors will not charge Rivera, as the statute of limitations has expired. IRS and FBI investigations into Rivera’s alleged tax evasion and failure to disclose $132,000 in “loans” from a company co-owned by his mother are reportedly ongoing. Rivera has denied the allegations and his campaign said in statements that Rivera “at all times acted in compliance with both the letter and spirit of Florida and federal campaign finance laws and has timely and properly reported all personal income” and that the investigation was an “unprofessional waste of taxpayer dollars.”

In 2010, now-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) promised that if his party won the majority in the midterm elections, he (as majority leader) ‘institute a zero-tolerance policy‘ on ethics violations. In light of these serious charges, the Republican leadership could show its commitment to this policy by beginning an Ethics Committee investigation, stripping him of his committee assignments, calling for his resignation or even moving to remove him from Congress. It has done none of these things. Even with these apparent ethical breaches, they continue to let Rivera serve on the House Foreign Affairs Committee (and, ironically, its Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee) and the Committee on Natural Resources.

This is yet another in a growing series of examples of just how little Cantor’s promised “zero tolerance” policy for ethical scandals really means.

During the GOP presidential primary, Mitt Romney staked out the most extreme position on immigration of any Republican candidate. Romney even campaigned with his immigration policy adviser Kris Kobach, the author of Alabama and Arizona’s harsh immigration laws, on Martin Luther King Day.

Now that Romney is the presumptive nominee, he’s trying to soften his immigration rhetoric to win over Hispanic voters. The Romney campaign even tried to publicly downgrade Kobach from “adviser” to mere “supporter” yesterday — an effort that failed after Kobach refused to play along.

Nor is this the only example of Kobach refusing to let Romney etch-a-sketch away his harsh positions on immigration. After Romney said over the weekend that Republicans need to embrace a Republican DREAM Act to win over Hispanic voters, Kobach told the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent that the former Massachusetts governor will not support any version of the DREAM Act that offers a path to legal status — like the GOP version Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) plans to introduce. And he added that no Republican should support such a proposal:

[Kobach] stated flatly that he didn’t think Republicans — or Romney — should, or would, support any version of the DREAM Act that provides undocumented immigrants with any kind of path to legal status.

If Romney sticks to this — and Kobach said he would — there’s very little room for him to moderate his approach to immigration. In addition to advising Romney on immigration, Kobach is a national GOP voice on the issue, suggesting the right would not permit any move of this kind.

“I’d absolutely reject any proposal that would give a path to legal status for illegal aliens en masse,” Kobach said. “That is what amnesty is. I do not expect [Romney] to propose or embrace amnesty.”

Details of Rubio’s proposed DREAM Act have not been announced, but the first-term senator has outlined a plan that would not offer a direct path to citizenship but would enable them to remain in the country legally. Despite his promise to veto the DREAM Act earlier in his campaign, Romney told a crowd at a private fundraiser that he wants a Republican DREAM Act to make the GOP the party of “opportunity.”

But if Rubio’s plan includes a path to legal status, or if Romney supports a plan that does, then Kobach said it would be an “unacceptable” proposal. “A path to legal status for someone who is here illegally is amnesty by definition,” he said. “It gives the alien what he has stolen.”

Last year, Senate Republicans tried to effectively repeal the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau by refusing to confirm anyone President Obama nominated to lead that agency. In response to this attempt to sabotage the new agency, Obama recess appointed Richard Cordray over the Senate GOP’s objections, and he also recess appointed several people to the National Labor Relations Bureau to prevent a likely filibuster of those officials from shutting down that agency as well.

Needless to say, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is not happy that President Obama thwarted his power grab, so he’s once again trying to get judges to roll back decisions made by the people the American people elected to govern:

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Tuesday that his conference has hired conservative attorney Miguel A. Estrada to file a brief in a case brought by Noel Canning, a Washington state businessman who operates a bottling company. Canning plans to challenge an NLRB ruling that said his company must establish a collective bargaining agreement with a labor union.

McConnell once again called Obama’s appointments an “unconstitutional action” and said his colleagues had been seeking a strong legal challenge to the appointments to support.

McConnell’s legal arguments are not strong. Although the Senate minority claimed that it could thwart recess appointments by having a single senator hold a pretend Senate session every three days, the Senate simply does not have the power to block appointments simply by hosting a meeting in the Neighborhood of Make Believe. As two of President George W. Bush’s top constitutional advisors explained in 2010, the Senate is in recess when it is “not capable of acting on the president’s nominations.” Because no nominees can actually be confirmed in a make believe session, these fake sessions do not defeat Obama’s recess appointment’s power.

Moreover, even if they did count as real sessions, it’s not at all clear that the Senate was not in recess during the three days between the pretend meetings. As the highest federal court to consider the question explained in Evans v. Stephens, “[t]he Constitution, on its face, does not establish a minimum time that an authorized break in the Senate must last to give legal force to the President’s appointment power under the Recess Appointments Clause. And we do not set the limit today.”

Ultimately, however, this case is likely to turn less upon what the Constitution actually permits than on the outcome of the high-profile challenge to the Affordable Care Act. The case against health reform is significantly weaker than the case against Obama’s recess appointments. Nearly 200 years of Supreme Court precedent conclusively establish that the Affordable Care Act is constitutional, not to mention the text of the Constitution itself. In the words of Judge Laurence Silberman, a leading conservative who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from George W. Bush, the case against the ACA has no basis “in either the text of the Constitution or Supreme Court precedent.”

Yet despite the fact that the health care challenge is so weak that it borders on frivolous, several of the Supreme Court’s conservatives appeared more interested in doing the Republican Party’s bidding than they did in actually following the law when the health care case was argued last month. If the justices ultimately strike down the Affordable Care Act, they will send a clear signal to every judge in the country that the Constitution does not apply any more when there is an opportunity to embarrass Barack Obama.

So Mitch McConnell might have a chance of winning his case after all — at least if the judiciary decides to put partisan politics ahead of the law.

While Republican members of Congress are opposing a popular, bipartisan bill reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act, the Ohio GOP is doing his part to make sure that victims of domestic violence get fewer benefits from the bill in their state.

Using Ohio Governor John Kasich (R) budget blueprint, Ohio Republicans added language that takes away all federal funding to “abortion providers,” including Planned Parenthood. But Planned Parenthood does more than provide abortions (that’s only 3 percent of their work). The amended Ohio budget would strip away much of Planned Parenthood’s ability to fight domestic violence, and deny them funds for cancer and HIV/AIDS prevention as well:

In addition to restricting the flow of federal “family planning” funds, House Bill 487, sponsored by Representative Ron Amstutz and adopted without a recorded vote by members of the House Finance and Appropriations Committee, completely prohibits the distribution to Planned Parenthood of Ohio or any of its affiliates from any of the following federal programs:

• Violence Against Women Act
• Breast and Cervical Cancer Mortality Prevention Act
• Infertility Prevention Project (US Dept of Health & Human Services)
• Minority HIV/AIDS initiative funds (Centers for Disease Control)

In 2010 (the latest year available), 105 victims of domestic violence were killed in Ohio. There were a total of 40,283 arrests of people who physically harmed their partner or family members. The Violence Against Women Act works to prevent incidents of rape and sexual assaults, and ensures that people who are victims of domestic violence get the health care and legal protection they need in the wake of a domestic violence incident. It’s wrong, and harmful, for lawmakers to drag domestic violence victims into their political vendetta against Planned Parenthood.

South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson was spotted at a sparsely attended event and fundraiser with conservative filmmaker James O’Keefe on Tuesday, raising questions about whether the state’s top law enforcement official should be helping raise money for someone who appears to have committed voter fraud.

O’Keefe’s latest round of videos, where his band of actors succeed in claiming ballots belonging to well known figures like NAACP President Benjamin Jealous and HBO comedian Bill Maher, was gleefully distributed around the right-wing echo chamber, but even O’Keefe seemed to acknowledge on Tuesday the videos didn’t reveal much:

O’Keefe told the gathering he intends to make more videos, in which he pledged to “actually catch voter fraud as it actually happens.”

“We plan to actually catch non-citizens voting,” O’Keefe said, but he didn’t say where or when he thought that might happen.

O’Keefe is thought of in conservative circles as some kind of investigative reporter. In fact, O’Keefe’s recent gimmick, sending agents to pose as registered voters in primary elections around the country, has succeeded only in creating the kind of problem that he seeks to expose. As has been thoroughly documented, despite the right’s insistence that voter fraud is a widespread problem, a voter is more likely to get hit by a bolt of lightning on his or her way to the polling place than to commit voter fraud.

AG Wilson’s support for voter ID laws is not new. In January, Wilson leapt into action when it was brought to his attention that 900 dead South Carolinians had supposedly shown up to vote. The investigation that he ordered though turned up exactly zero cases of voter fraud. Undeterred, Wilson continued to insist that the threat of zombie voters was so great as to warrant the passage of discriminatory voter ID laws that succeed only in disenfranchising lower income, younger, and elderly voters.