Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) complained today that Congress will not be able to pass a legislative version of the President’s immigration directive because the “sense of urgency has been taken away.” Despite the temporary relief this gives hundreds of thousands of young people, Rubio can no longer use their plight to attempt to frame himself as the leading champion for fair immigration practices.

Appearing on MSNBC, Rubio argued that the President’s instructions to stop deporting young undocumented students who came to the country before 16 made it virtually impossible for Congress to enact that same policy into law. The Florida Senator complained that he couldn’t use their immediate livelihoods to use as leverage anymore:

We used to say, these kids want to go to college in September. Now that argument is gone. That sense of urgency has been taken away. The fact it’s all gotten mixed up in this election year and being used to attack Republicans has only made it harder. I’m still optimistic about the long term of this idea, but I think there’s a lot of work to do now because of the way the President did it.

Watch it:

Similarly, Rubio complained immediately after the directive was issued that the President didn’t call him first.

Graduation for undocumented students happens once a year — every May or June — and Congressional Republicans have not seemed to notice this urgency before. Indeed, very few of Rubio’s colleagues supported the President’s move despite the relief it brought to over 800,000 young people.

A Supreme Court’s ruling today, in the Knox v. SEIU case, makes it much harder for unions to carry out their activities, leaving workers in an even more tenuous position in the wake of Citizens United.

California law allows SEIU Local 1000 to represent nonunion members in contract negotiations, along with union workers. In exchange, the local collects dues from nonmembers but exempts them from paying for nonchargeable, or political, expenses and activities — around 44% of the budget. Midway through the 2006 election cycle, the union temporarily increased its monthly dues in order to create an “Emergency Temporary Assessment to Build a Political Fight-Back Fund” to fight against several propositions placed on the ballot. While non-union members were expected to pay only 56% of the increase, a non-union member sued, arguing that he and others should not have to pay any of the temporary assessment at all, including chargeable expenses.

The 7-2 decision held that the union was wrong to impose the increase on the non-member workers, as the non-members should have had the opportunity to opt out of any contribution intended to fund political lobbying efforts.

While seven justices agreed that forcing nonunion members to pay for political activities would be unconstitutional, the opinion of the court by Justice Samuel Alito and the four other conservative justices particularly undermine the union’s ability to function. Their opinion states that in order to impose any increase in dues for non-members, the union must go through bureaucratic hoops and get their specific consent.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, agreed with the result but not the opinion. Their opinion noted that once again, the Roberts Court had gone beyond the scope of the case to unnecessarily set new constitutional precedent: that the in some circumstances, workers must effectively opt-in to paying union dues — rather than just being able to opt-out of parts of those dues:

Petitioners did not question the validity of our precedents, which consistently have recognized that an opt-out system of fee collection comports with the Constitution. They did not argue that the Constitution requires an opt-in system of fee collection in the context of special assessments or dues increases or, indeed, in any context. Not surprisingly, respondents did not address such a prospect.

Sotomayor warns that the majority opinion “strongly hints” that constitutional protections for unions may be their next target.

The majority pronounces the Court’s explicit holding…that “dissent is not to be presumed[,] it must affirmatively be made known to the union by the dissenting employee”…nothing but an “offhand remark,” made by Justices who did not “pause to consider the broader constitutional implications of an affirmative opt-out requirement.” The reader is told that our precedents’ “acceptance of the opt-out approach appears to have come about more as a historical accident than through the careful application of First Amendment principles.

Conservatives on the Supreme Court, like conservative politicians and activists, are helping write unions out of existence.

– Todd Phillips, Legal Progress Intern at the Center for American Progress

In a win for transparency in the political process, Congressional Republicans have backed down from efforts to effectively nullify a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rule that will make some political advertising data available on the Internet. A Democratic aide told ProPublica that House Republicans have given up on blocking the measure because “the increasing attention on campaign finance after Citizens United made it difficult for Republicans to oppose the FCC’s transparency rule.”

While considering the FCC’s annual budget yesterday, a House Appropriations panel endorsed an amendment by Rep. Jo Ann Emerson (R-MO) to specifically prevent the agency from spending any money to implement the advertising disclosure rule. In a surprise move, Emerson (R-MO) later retracted the amendment.

The regulations will require that many television broadcasters post online information about how much political campaigns paid for advertisements, and aim to “shed light on the big money behind political ad campaigns by making the data more accessible.” Given that many outside groups political messages are not disclosed to the Federal Election Commission, this would bring some transparency to the post-Citizens United spending by corporations and tax-exempt groups.

Republicans, led by Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) have strongly opposed the move toward greater disclosure. In a speech last week on “Growing Threats to our First Amendment Rights,” McConnell argued that making this already available information more accessible to citizens was somehow an attempt to restrict free speech. He told the conservative American Enterprise Institute:

And yet these are not the only ways the administration is aiming to restrict speech. In a standard tactic of the left, what they haven’t been able to achieve through the courts or Congress, they’re already attempting to achieve through regulations. Over at the FEC, the Democrat commissioners are pushing a rule to compel third-party groups to reveal their donors. They’re deadlocked at the moment, with all three Republican commissioners standing strong. But this effort isn’t limited to the FEC. The FCC just finalized a rule requiring broadcasters to list the names of any groups that pay for or want to pay for television ads online. The National Association of Broadcasters is fighting back right now in court.

The apparent change of heart by House Republicans seems to be the latest indication that the American public is strongly opposed to the opaque, anything-goes campaign finance system McConnell defends.

-Nina Liss-Schultz

This weekend, Mitt Romney and his campaign will host a retreat for top $100,000-and-up campaign bundlers and donors at a Park City, Utah resort. The event, dubbed the “First National Romney Victory Leadership Retreat,” will reportedly be an opportunity for “strategizing and fraternizing” between those bankrolling the campaign and those running it.

But one name has raised flags for campaign finance watchdogs. A Saturday panel on “media insight” will feature American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS co-founder Karl Rove. The Crossroads reportedly plan to spend a stunning $300 million to help Romney defeat President Barack Obama this November, but they are legally prohibited from coordinating this effort with Romney’s campaign.

Back in December, Romney decried the rise of Super PACs like Rove’s American Crossroads, saying they have been a “disaster” for the political system. He said at the time:

Super PACs have to be entirely separate from a campaign and a candidate. I’m not allowed to communicate with a super PAC in any way, shape or form… If we coordinate in any way whatsoever, we go to the big house.

Mary Boyle, vice president for communications at Common Cause, told ThinkProgress that having one of the leaders of an allied Super PAC at at campaign event with major donors “seems to make a mockery of the rule that bans coordination between a super PAC and a candidate.”

Tara Malloy, senior counsel at the Campaign Legal Center agreed that this presents appearance issues, but would probably not violate any coordination rules. She told ThinkProgress that “the coordination rule is a pretty slim reed between candidates and the SuperPACs that support those candidates. It’s not by any means and airtight barrier between those two.” In order to violate the rules, a candidate would have to have a “substantial discussion” about the Super PAC’s advertising strategies — something Romney and Rove are unlikely to do at this retreat.

“The scandal in Washington,” Malloy observed, “is what is legal, not what’s illegal.” As such, while Romney’s inclusion of Rove at the event open him up to questions of judgment and hypocrisy, is unlikely either will end up in the “big house.”

The criminal justice system in the United States is broken in more ways than one. Cece McDonald’s recent sentencing to 41 months in a men’s prison and evidence of the stark racial bias in New York City’s “stop-and-frisk” policy exemplify the criminal justice system’s institutionalized racism and transphobia. The system also facilitates violence within prisons, including sexual assault and harassment, and men now outnumber women among rape victims in the United States.

While these problems may be institutionalized and systematic, The Atlantic’s Anne Milgram offers at least a partial solution: “moneyball” the criminal justice system. Smart statistical analysis, she argues, has the potential to transform the criminal justice system — and already has in some parts of the country. In New York, law enforcement uses a program called ComStat, which is “widely credited with contributing to New York City’s dramatic reduction in serious crime over the past two decades.” The program is an alternative decision-making model that that uses statistical data as a way to reduce crime and prison populations. Unfortunately, the criminal just system has failed to incorporate data analysis more broadly. Milgram writes:

Even in jurisdictions where good data exists, a lack of technology is often an obstacle to using it effectively. Police, jails, courts, district attorneys, and public defenders each keep separate information systems, the data from which is almost never pulled together and analyzed in a way that could answer the questions that matter most: Who is in our criminal justice system? What crimes have been charged? What risks do individual offenders pose? And which option would best protect the public and make the best use of our limited resources?

Technology could help us leverage data to identify offenders who will pose unacceptable risks to society if they are not behind bars and distinguish them from those defendants who will have lower recidivism rates if they are supervised in the community or given alternatives to incarceration before trial. Likewise, it could help us figure out which terms of imprisonment, alternatives to incarceration, and other interventions work best–and for whom. And the list does not end there.

The truth is our criminal justice system already makes these decisions every day. But it makes them without knowing whether they’re the right ones. That needs to change. If data is powerful enough to transform baseball, health care, and education, it can do the same for criminal justice.

But would “moneyballing” the criminal justice system effectively decrease prison populations and save the country money? In light of the Supreme Court’s decision that the California prison system must release an estimate 37,000 inmates, and with a similar story evolving in Colorado, data-driven decision-making may offer an effective alternative to the current system — or a Foucaultian nightmare.

-Nina Liss-Schultz