The White House has issued a veto threat (PDF) should the House version of the Violence Against Women Act reach the President’s desk.

In a statement just released, the administration said that the House version of the bill is unnacceptable. Sponsored by Rep. Sandy Adams (R-FL), the House version removes the protections for marginalized communities, stripping out provisions that were passed in the Senate version of the bill.

According to the statement from the White House, the House bill “undermine[s] the core principles of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA)”:

H.R. 4970 retreats from this forward progress by failing to include several critical provisions that are part of the Senate-passed VAWA reauthorization bill. For instance, H.R. 4970 fails to provide for concurrent special domestic violence criminal jurisdiction by tribal authorities over non-Indians, and omits clarification of tribal courts’ full civil jurisdiction regarding certain protection orders over non-Indians. [...]

If the President is presented with H.R. 4970, his senior advisors would recommend that he veto the bill.

The House version of VAWA would let abusers know that their victims called for help. It would also strip out the Senate’s protections for LGBT people and undocumented immigrants.

Our Guest Blogger is Amy Rosenbaum, a Senior Fellow with the Center for American Progress Action Fund

Last night, a three judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. circuit rejected a stay of a district court ruling on March 30, 2012, which essentially required groups running so-called “electioneering communications” ads to begin disclosing the donors who funded the ads. The original ruling, by Judge Amy Berman Jackson, struck down a Federal Election Commission (FEC) regulation that permitted groups to all but eliminate the disclosure of donors behind “electioneering communications.” A briefing on the appeal of the ruling at the DC Circuit Court of Appeals is scheduled to be completed by early August and the oral arguments are expected sometime in September.

Why is this case a win for disclosure?

Prior to the March 30th ruling, any group running an “electioneering communication,” or a broadcast advertisement that refers to a clearly identified federal candidate proximate to an election, generally did not have to disclose the funders of that advertisement, thanks to regulations promulgated by the FEC in violation of the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA). As a result, groups like Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS spent more than $1 million on broadcast advertisements during the last election cycle without revealing a single donor.

Recently, Crossroads GPS notified the FEC that it spent $500,000 on electioneering communications advertisements targeting President Obama in Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota, and Missouri, again without disclosing a single donor. The Crossroads GPS ad blames President Obama for the Solyndra bankruptcy, among other things. According to their tax returns, Crossroads GPS received two $10 million donations between June 1, 2010 and the end of 2011, but the identity of these donors has remained a secret, even though their money has been funneled into campaign advertisements.

Thanks to last night’s ruling, groups like Crossroads GPS making electioneering communications 30 days before a primary or 60 days before a general election will now have to disclose their donors. These groups will either have to set up a separate bank account to fund their ads – and disclose all the donors of $1,000 or more to that account or alternatively disclose all the donors of $1,000 or more to their organization.

So if Crossroads GPS goes after the President again in September, we’ll know who’s really behind the ads. And that is a win for disclosure.

That is, of course, unless the court reverses the lower court when it convenes to give the case a full hearing later this year. Although a majority of the three judge panel that considered whether to grant the stay rejected this plea, Judge Karen Henderson dissented from this rulling. The D.C. Circuit is notoriously conservative, and has several judges who are at least as far to the right as Henderson, so it remains to be seen whether last night’s decision has staying power.

In 2010, anti-gay groups such as the Mississippi-based hate group the American Family Association spent close to $800,000 to remove three Iowa Supreme Court justices who joined that court’s unanimous decision holding that marriage equality is required by the Iowa constitution. This fall, Justice David Wiggins is also up for a retention election, and Iowa’s GOP Gov. Terry Branstad recently announced that a similar campaign against Wiggins is likely. Wiggins, however, actually plans to fight back:

Iowa Supreme Court Justice David Wiggins vows he won’t stand quietly by if opponents of same-sex marriage launch a potent campaign to oust him from the bench.

“If someone wants to attack me, I’m not going to let them bully me,” Wiggins said in a telephone interview last week with The Des Moines Register. “If asked to, I’ll speak up for myself. The others didn’t do that last time. I will.”

Justice Wiggins’ statement that he actually plans to campaign to keep his job should not seem all that remarkable, if it were not for the fact that his three former colleagues essentially threw their retention races in 2010 by refusing to do the same:

[Former Justice David] Baker, in his speech accepting the Profile in Courage Award, said that he, Streit and Ternus made a deliberate decision not to form campaign committees in 2010.

“Our founding fathers chose wisely to not have judges in a political position,” Baker told the audience, which included Wiggins. “Had we chosen to form campaigns, we would have tacitly admitted that we were what we claimed not to be — politicians. … We strongly believed that the people of Iowa did not want us to be in the position of raising money for a campaign.”

Pretending that you are above the fray may be a lovely way to earn awards, but it is no way to win an election. Moreover, by effectively throwing their elections, Baker, Streit and Ternus did a whole lot more to undermine judicial independence than they did to protect it — their defeats only emboldened their opponents, and encouraged more efforts to apply political pressure to judges.

Four Members of Congress, Reps. John Lewis, (D-GA), Michael Michaud, (D-ME), Hank Johnson, (D-GA), and Keith Ellison, (D-MN) filed a lawsuit yesterday claiming that the filibuster is unconstitutional and must be blocked by federal courts. According to their complaint, the Constitution specifically lists only a handful of instances where a supermajority is required for Congress to act, and this list precludes such a requirement from being applied in other cases:

In the end, the Constitution proscribed six instances in which Congress would require more than a majority vote: impeaching the president, expelling members, overriding a presidential veto of a bill or order, ratifying treaties and amending the Constitution. . . . “The Framers were aware of the established rule of construction, expressio unius est exclusio alterius, and that by adopting these six exceptions to the principle of majority rule, they were excluding other exceptions.” By contrast, in the Bill of Rights, the Founders were careful to state that “the enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

As a textual matter, this is a strong constitutional argument. Yet it is likely not to get off the ground because of something known as the “political question doctrine.” As the Supreme Court explained in Baker v. Carr, federal courts generally should avoid deciding questions where there is a “textually demonstrable constitutional commitment of the issue to a coordinate political department” — meaning that the Constitution’s text suggests that an issue should be decided by the executive or legislative branch and not by the judiciary. Because the Constitution provides that “[e]ach House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings,” the courts are likely — although not entirely certain — to dismiss this case because the Constitution reserves questions of Senate procedure to the Senate itself.

In other words, this lawsuit is likely to highlight why it is so important for the Senate itself to reform the filibuster to prevent the minority from shutting down America’s ability to effectively govern itself. And the Senate will have an opportunity to do so in about seven months. Once every two years, when the newly elected senators are sworn in, a brief window opens up when the Senate can reform its rules with only 51 votes.

Conservative filmmaker James O’Keefe released a new video today supposedly exposing voter fraud in North Carolina by highlighting non-citizens like Zbigniew Gorzkowski who have voted in recent elections.

The problem: Gorzkowski is an American citizen.

In fact, if O’Keefe had done a simple Nexis search for “Zbigniew Gorzkowski”, he would have found a single article from the News & Observer in 2008 noting that Gorzkowski and his wife are naturalized citizens:

Customers flock through the red door of Zbigniew “Ziggy” and wife Halina Gorzkowski’s European grocery and flower shop to buy one of the 12 varieties they sell. The pierogis and 400 eastern European food items and flowers are also punching the naturalized citizen couple’s ticket for their version of the American Dream.

ThinkProgress spoke with Gorzkowski this morning. He verified that this information was indeed correct and he had been an American citizen since the late 1980s. Therefore, his votes in the 2008 and 2010 elections were not only perfectly legal, but encouraged as a civic duty.

In other words, the one instance in the video where O’Keefe purports to show that a non-citizen had actually voted, in fact shows that a citizen voted.

The episode does speak to a larger underlying problem with most accusations of voter fraud. It’s what I call the “Scooby Doo routine”. People like O’Keefe make wild voter fraud accusations like non-citizens voting, only to discover a much simpler explanation for the situation.

In this case, O’Keefe is using “evidence” of foreigners voting in American elections to supposedly demonstrate the need for draconian security measures like voter ID, which could disenfranchise 20 million citizens across the country. However, his evidence actually shows nothing more than an American citizen exercising his civic duty. Earlier this year, South Carolina went through the same Scooby Doo routine after Attorney General Alan Wilson claimed to have unearthed evidence of 953 dead voters, only for his state investigation to ultimately find no dead voters — and zero voter fraud — but rather a handful of clerical errors.

O’Keefe has a responsibility as a journalist to ensure the veracity of his facts before he makes wild charges like these. A simple phone call or Nexis search would have sufficed, yet doing so would have undercut his spurious argument that voter fraud is a widespread problem in the United States.

The State of Florida has charged George Zimmerman with murdering Trayvon Martin. But that might not be the end of his legal problems.

According to WFTV, an affliate of ABC in Orlando, Zimmerman may soon be charged with a hate crime by the FBI:

WFTV has learned charges against George Zimmerman could be getting more serious. State prosecutors said Zimmerman, a neighborhood watchman, profiled and stalked 17-year-old Trayvon Martin before killing him, so the FBI is now looking into charging him with a hate crime. [...]

FBI investigators are actively questioning witnesses in the retreat at the Twin Lakes neighborhood, seeking evidence for a possible federal hate crime charge.

WFTV notes that “if Zimmerman is charged and found guilty of a federal hate crime involving murder, he could face the death penalty.” FBI officials confirm to ABC News that the investigation is ongoing but say the “hammer won’t be dropped” anytime soon.

Most of the evidence against Zimmerman has yet to be disclosed. Late yesterday, Florida prosecution delivered 67 CDs of evidence against Zimmerman to his attorney. Under Florida law, most of it should be available to the public soon.

Tracy Thorne-Begland served his country for 20 years in the Navy. After his discharge, he then rose to become one of the top prosecutors in the city of Richmond, Virginia. He was sponsored for a low-level trial judgeship by a bipartisan mix of state lawmakers, and seemed a shoo-in for the job. And then this happened:

Delegate Bob Marshall said he will seek to remove the name of Richmond prosecutor Tracy Thorne-Begland from a list of proposed District Court judicial appointments.

“I don’t even think it’s proper to put his name forward because of his behavior,” said Marshall, who called Thorne-Begland “a homosexual activist,” in a press release.

Thorne-Begland has been nominated to serve as a judge for Richmond’s General District Court, but, Marshall challenges the nomination on the grounds of the prosecutor’s sexual orientation.

“We have a constitution which says marriage is between one man and one woman and if he’s taking an oath, he has to uphold and defend that as a judge,” said Marshall.

“If his lifestyle is exactly contrary to that… I don’t see how he could do that,” he said.

Last night, the Virginia House of Delegates fell 18 votes short of the 51 needed to appoint Thorne-Begland to the state bench, effectively killing his opportunity to become a judge. Had he been appointed, Thorne-Begland would have been the only openly gay judge on the Virginia bench.

Moreover, its worth noting that the General District Court is the very lowest court in Virginia, hearing little more than misdemeanors and small dollar civil suits. So it’s unlikely that a gay rights issue could even come before Thorne-Begland if he joined this court.