The House has just passed a watered-down version of the Violence Against Women Act by a vote of 222 to 205. The GOP-backed iteration of the bill strips out the provisions to protect undocumented, Native American, and LGBT victims that were included in the Senate version.

VAWA is usually a non-controversial, bipartisan effort, but this year has become a political talking point, with Republicans trying to slow its passage and providing fewer protections for victims. A misogynistic ‘men’s rights’ group has even voiced its support for the GOP’s version of the bill.

Meanwhile, a female Republican joined other women Senators in pressuring the House GOP to pass the Senate’s version.

The House also voted down, by a vote of 187 to 236, a request to send the bill back to the Judiciary Committee. Rep. Gwen Moore (D-WI) introduced the motion, saying that the Republican’s bill violates the confidentiality a victim is entitled to by telling her abuser that she called the cops.

Now that the House has approved its version of the bill, it will go to conference to be negotiated by both the House and Senate. The President has issued a veto threat should the House version of the bill come to his desk.

The Alabama State Senate voted 20-7 today on changes to HB 56, the nation’s harshest immigration law. Unlike the replacement bill passed by the House, the Senate bill preserves most of the law, including a provision that requires schools to check the immigration status of their students. That provision led to 7% of the Hispanic students in Alabama public schools to miss school the day after the law went into effect for fear that the parents of undocumented students would be deported. Because the bill has scared so many students away from school, Alabama schools may lose funding that is dependent on attendance.

The provision scaring children away from schools is not the only harsh provision left intact by the new bill leaves. Unchanged provisions include one that bars undocumented aliens from renting property and another that allows law enforcement to check immigration status based on a “reasonable suspicion.” It also preserves a section that proscribes a variety of penalties, including permanent loss of license, for businesses that hire undocumented workers. Plus, the new bill piles on by adding another harsh provision requiring the state Department of Homeland Security “to post a quarterly list of the names of any undocumented alien who appears in court for a violation of state law, regardless of whether they were convicted.”

The one bright side of the bill is that it clarifies which “business transactions” undocumented immigrants are prevented from entering into with the state. The new bill only requires proof of citizenship for getting car tags and driver’s, business, and commercial licenses — a change that clarifies a provision that has been used to deny water to immigrants in their homes.

Because the regular session of the Senate ends at midnight tonight, the House and Senate much reach a compromise today for these changes to go into effect. Opponents of the law protested before and after the vote by the Senate, and protests are expected to continue. Four of seven protestors who blocked a Senate hallway were led away in handcuffs.

–Alex Brown

The House is set to vote today on a watered-down version of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) that the President has threatened to veto for its lack of coverage, particularly in regards to undocumented people, native women, and the LGBT community.

But while Republicans have accused the Democrats of playing politics with women’s domestic safety, the opposite may actually be true.

In a sit-down with bloggers on Capitol Hill today, DNC Chair and Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) told reporters that she’d heard House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) actually ordered his caucus to move VAWA as far to the right as possible:

RYAN GRIM of the Huffington Post: I’d heard that the Republican leadership wasn’t very happy with the committee for going how far right they went with this. Had you heard anything that–

WASSERMAN SCHULTZ: Actually, I’d heard that this was a direct directive from John Boehner himself. So…

GRIM: What’s the thinking in that?

WASSERMAN SCHULTZ: You know, I think their obsession with opposing immigration at every possible turn has permeated every single possible bill, including things that are normally as mom and apple pie as reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act.

VAWA has been passed and reauthorized twice with strong bipartisan support. Each reauthorization has expanded the bill and added new provisions. This year, the Senate passed VAWA in a 68 to 31 vote, after some debate, with the added provisions intact to protect LGBT, undocumented, and Native people. The House version of VAWA does not include these protections.

And while Republicans may have rectified the portion of their original bill that violated the confidentiality of victims by adding a manager’s amendment, the bill still seriously weakens the visa program extended to undocumented victims of domestic abuse, so that they are put in a position of fear in reporting assault.

Last year, Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) admitted that he “never struggled . . . at all” with whether someone his state executed might have been innocent. Yet a new book written by Columbia Law Professor James Liebman shows that Carlos DeLuna, executed by Texas in 1989, was innocent. According to Liebman, DeLuna was wrongfully convicted and executed for the murder of Wanda Lopez following a botched investigation. DeLuna and the man believed to have committed the murder, Carlos Hernandez, looked so much alike that they were mistaken for each other in photographs by family members. However, DeLuna, who was clean-shaven and wearing a white shirt, did not fit the description of the eyewitness who said that the murderer was wearing flannel and had a mustache. Police arrested DeLuna anyway and failed to do a formal lineup. Police also failed to formally examine the crime scene, ignoring foot and fingerprints, not taking blood samples, and allowing the scene to be cleaned by gas station employees.

Not only did DeLuna maintain his innocence throughout the investigation and his subsequent incarceration, he told investigators that he knew Hernandez had committed the crime. DeLuna was ignored, and during his trial prosecutors ridiculed his claim:

They told the jury that police had looked for a “Carlos Hernandez” after his name had been passed to them by DeLuna’s lawyers, without success. They had concluded that Hernandez was a fabrication, a “phantom” who simply did not exist. The chief prosecutor said in summing up that Hernandez was a “figment of DeLuna’s imagination”. …

By the end of [a] single day the investigator had uncovered evidence that had eluded scores of Texan police officers, prosecutors, defense lawyers and judges over the six years between DeLuna’s arrest and execution. Carlos Hernandez did indeed exist.[…]

Hernandez had a criminal background that included several violent assaults. He eventually died in prison after attacking his girlfriend with a knife.

DeLuna is not the only man to be wrongfully convicted and executed by the state of Texas. There is persuasive evidence that Cameron Todd Willingham, convicted in the death of his three daughters and executed in 2004, was innocent and DNA tests have undermined the evidence used to convict and execute Claude Jones. Texas continues to lead the nation in executions, accounting for over one-third of US executions since 1976, despite the fact that there were 41 DNA exonerations there from 2002-2011.

Moreover, DeLuna’s case highlights the difficulties inherent in the permanence of the death penalty — despite conservative efforts to dismiss these difficulties. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said in 2005 that there was not “a single case—not one—in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit.” It’s now hard to doubt that’s not true.

–Alex Brown

In conservative filmmaker James O’Keefe’s latest video, he features two “non-citizens” who have supposedly committed voter fraud in North Carolina. As ThinkProgress reported yesterday, one of the men, Zbigniew Gorzkowski, has actually been an American citizens for decades.

Now, it turns out that the second “non-citizen,” William Romero, is actually a citizen as well, according to his family.

The video opens with O’Keefe’s cameraman walking up Romero’s driveway and confronting a member of his family about whether he is a citizen. O’Keefe points to court records from 2010 where Romero was excused from jury duty because he was not a citizen at the time. Therefore, as O’Keefe argues, Romero’s voter registration dated December 5, 2011 is fraudulent because Romero “is not a United States citizen.”

Watch it:

In fact, Romero’s family told ThinkProgress he became a naturalized citizen in early 2011.

What’s more, Romero’s family told ThinkProgress that they had began receiving harassing telephone calls two weeks before the incident in the video asking if Romero was a citizen. They confirmed to the caller — it’s unclear whether they were speaking with O’Keefe himself or another individual — that Romero is indeed a citizen. Nevertheless, O’Keefe proceeded to ambush the family at their home and publish this video claiming he’s not a citizen.

One member of his family, who was confronted in O’Keefe’s video as he came home to care for his sick son, was incensed by the charge, calling it “completely absurd.”

O’Keefe appears to have blatantly misled viewers when he declared that Romero “is not a United States citizen” who was therefore committing voter fraud. According to the most recent information, Romero is a citizen who is participating in our most basic democratic right, yet he was attacked and smeared by O’Keefe’s outright falsehoods.

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has been meeting with Democratic colleagues to discuss legislation to require disclosure for outside group political spending, he told The Hill yesterday.

“I’ve been having discussions with Sen. [Sheldon] Whitehouse [D-R.I.] and a couple others on the issue,” the one-time campaign finance reform advocate said, noting talks have been ongoing for a couple of months and that he wants any legislation to be “balanced and address the issue of union contributions as well as other outside contributions.”

McCain, who famously co-authored the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 with then-Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI), has been noticeably AWOL on these issues since the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling.

In 2010, after the high court ruled, McCain declared campaign finance reform dead and essentially washed his hands of the cause, telling CBS’s Bob Schieffer, “I don’t think there’s much that can be done.”

Without McCain’s help, Democrats created the Democracy Is Strengthened by Casting Light On Spending in Elections (DISCLOSE) Act. The bill — which sought to ban campaign expenditures by foreign-owned corporations and to require disclosure of the true sources of the money behind independent expenditures and electioneering communications — passed the House in June of 2010. When the bill came to the Senate, McCain refused to back the measure. Decrying provisions in it as “a bailout for the unions,” McCain attacked the bill as tougher on corporations than unions.

McCain joined a filibuster and the bill failed to achieve cloture by a single vote. Rather than offering amendments to the bill or working behind the scenes with sponsors to reach an agreement, McCain was the deciding vote to kill the bill without even allowing an up-or-down vote.

Now, with an even more closely-divided Senate and Speaker John Boehner running the House, the climb for any disclosure legislation will be steep.

If McCain is serious about rejoining the campaign finance reform fight, it is welcome news. But thanks to his earlier obstruction, he may find his efforts to be too little, too late.

Yesterday, Nebraska GOP primary voters nominated dark horse candidate and state Sen. Deb Fischer as their candidate for an open U.S. Senate race this November. In choosing Fischer, the Nebraska GOP aligns itself with a candidate who recently called for a very high stakes game of chicken — flirting with economic catastrophe in order to force Congress to permanently enshrine Tea Party fiscal policy into the Constitution.

During last year’s debt ceiling crisis, which Speaker John Boehner has threatened to repeat next year, House and Senate Republicans threatened to force the United States to default on its debt — an outcome that would have caused “a bigger GDP drop than that experienced during the Great Recession of 2008″ — unless President Obama agreed to an increasingly escalating series of demands for austerity. Even after this campaign of extortion forced the White House to make significant concessions, Fischer indicated that she would have simply let the economy blow up because Congress didn’t also agree to a constitutional amendment:

Nebraska’s 2012 Republican Senate candidates turned thumbs down Monday on the compromise debt reduction plan agreed to by the White House and congressional leaders.

“I would vote no on this specific bill because Congress needs to pass a balanced budget (constitutional) amendment first,” said state Sen. Deb Fischer of Valentine.

It’s not clear which version of the balanced budget amendment Fischer is referring to here, but even the mildest forms of such an amendment are terrible ideas because they prevent the United States from responding to economic downturns or unexpected disasters, while simultaneously turning control of the nation’s budget over to unelected judges who are ill-equipped to handle it.

Moreover, at the time that Fischer endorsed blowing up the economy unless Congress votes to change the Constitution, the leading Republican proposal for such an amendment imposed such draconian spending cuts that it would “throw about 15 million more people out of work, double the unemployment rate from 9 percent to approximately 18 percent, and cause the economy to shrink by about 17 percent instead of growing by an expected 2 percent.” The lead sponsor of this plan to trigger a new Great Depression, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), also called for forcing a debt default unless Congress gives him everything he wants.

In other words, while little is known about the obscure state lawmaker who wants to join the United States Senate, her willingness to play chicken with America’s prosperity strongly suggests that she would line up with the most hardline members of the Republican caucus.