Earlier today, the Chicago Sun-Times accidentally posted a pre-written story on tomorrow’s pending Affordable Care Act decision in the Supreme Court, which included ready-to-go intro paragraphs for several possible outcomes:

if whole law is struck down

The U.S. Supreme Court, in a historic decision Thursday, struck down President Barack Obama’s signature legislation commonly known as “Obamacare,” dealing a huge election-year setback to the president and calling into question health-care options for millions of Americans.

if part of the law is struck down

The U.S. Supreme Court, in a historic decision Thursday, struck down part of President Barack Obama’s signature legislation commonly known as “Obamacare,” dealing an election-year setback to the president.

if whole law is upheld

The U.S. Supreme Court, in a historic decision Thursday, upheld President Barack Obama’s signature legislation commonly known as “Obamacare,” handing the president a huge election-year victory — and giving Republican opponent Mitt Romney and other Republicans a target for the rest of the presidential campaign.

It is, of course, mildly interesting to speculate upon how tomorrow’s decision could influence whether a man who currently lives in a luxurious house in Washington will continue to live there for several more years or will instead be forced to move to a different luxurious house in Chicago. But you know what matters a whole lot more? Whether the Supreme Court decides to strip millions of Americans of their future access to health care.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of Americans file bankruptcy because they cannot afford their medical bills. Thousands more are locked into jobs their hate because they cannot risk losing their employer-provided health insurance while they have a preexisting condition. According to one study, about 45,000 people die every year because they do not have health insurance. So, in a very real sense, the Supreme Court is deciding tomorrow whether to allow tens of thousands of people to die every year until Congress is able to pass another health care bill. Something, by the way, which took seventy years to accomplish the first time around.

That’s a bit more important than whether or not Barack Obama is slightly more or slightly less likely to keep his job.

Look, the outcome of the presidential election is important. Millions of lives will change for the better or for the worse depending on who occupies the White House next year. But the Supreme Court is not deciding Romney v. Obama tomorrow. They are deciding whether to eviscerate Congress’ single most life-saving accomplishment since the 1960s. That needs to be the lede in any story reacting to tomorrow’s opinion.

Tell Congress that you stand with Obamacare by adding your name here.

Yesterday, New York Republicans voted to nominate Wendy Long as their candidate for the U.S. Senate seat held by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY). Long, a former law clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas, is best known for spearheading several inaccurate and race baiting attacks against Justice Sonia Sotomayor during Sotomayor’s confirmation process.

Despite an impressive legal resume, Long also appears unable to distinguish the United States Constitution from the Tea Party’s policy preferences. In 2008, Long penned a book review praising an opinion by Justice Thomas which would lead to everything from national child labor laws to the federal ban on whites-only lunch counters being declared unconstitutional. If elected, Long would join at least two other current senators, Sens. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Rand Paul (R-KY), who share Long’s misreading of our nation’s founding document.

Federal Judge Robert Hinkle rejected the Justice Department’s request for a temporary order suspending Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s (R) effort to purge tens of thousands of names from his state’s voter roles. According to the AP, Judge Hinkle relied on highly questionable reasoning in order to do so:

The U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit earlier this month to halt the purge, saying it was going on too close to a federal election. U.S. officials also said the list used by Florida had “critical imperfections, which lead to errors that harm and confuse voters.”

Hinkle in ruling from the bench said federal laws are designed to block states from removing eligible voters close to an election. He said they are not designed to block voters who should have never been allowed to cast ballots in the first place.

If this AP report is accurate, it then Judge Hinkle is simply wrong. Here is the text of the federal law at issue in this case:

A State shall complete, not later than 90 days prior to the date of a primary or general election for Federal office, any program the purpose of which is to systematically remove the names of ineligible voters from the official lists of eligible voters.

Although the law does include exceptions for voters who ask to be removed, felons, the mentally incapacitated and dead voters, none of those exceptions apply to this case. The law says that no state may engage in a Florida-style voter purge seeking to remove ineligible voters within 90 days of an election. Period.

Judge Hinkle’s apparent decision is not simply wrong as a matter of statutory text, it also defies common sense. No state should ever purge eligible voters from its voter rolls for reasons that should be obvious. The purpose of the federal law preventing purges of ineligible voters within 90 days of an election is to avoid a situation where a state wrongly flags an eligible voter as someone who cannot lawfully vote without providing that voter enough time to demonstrate that the state made a mistake. Hinkle’s apparently misreads this law to suggest that Florida is perfectly free to kick legal voters off its voter rolls so long as it does so more than three months before an election.

This week’s ruling on Arizona’s anti-immigrant law SB 1070 by the U.S. Supreme Court left the bill’s most controversial measure — the so-called papers please provision — untouched, and Representative Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) is not happy about it.

The Huffington Post picked up on remarks from the congressman on the House floor this morning:

“Arizona politicians will tell you with a straight face, no less, that they can apply this law without using racial profiling,” Gutierrez said, “without assuming that someone named Gutierrez isn’t less likely to be in this country legally than someone named Smith. That’s an amazing skill.”

And to prove the point, Gutierrez issued a challenge for C-SPAN viewers, which we’ve recreated below:

Medical marijuana is already legal in 17 states and the District of Columbia, and seven more states will decide whether to legalize it by the end of this year. As public support for medical marijuana grows, however, some misconceptions about marijuana remain — as illustrated in a recent exchange with a Drug Enforcement Agent official who refused to admit that marijuana is less harmful than crack cocaine.

A new UCLA study helps to ease some of the misguided fears about the danger of medical marijuana, pointing out that medical marijuana dispensaries don’t lead to any increase in crime rates in the areas where they’re located. Although other environmental factors like unemployment are clear contributors to rising crime rates, the study concludes that medical marijuana shops are not linked to violent or property crime:

Places such as medical marijuana dispensaries provide an opportunity where the conditions for crime outlined by routine activities theory can also converge. [...] Percentage of a census tract that was commercially zoned, percentage of housing units in a census tract that were one-person households, and unemployment rate were positively related to violent and property crime rates. However, no crosssectional associations were observed between the density of medical marijuana dispensaries and violent or property crime rates, controlling for ecological variables traditionally associated with routine activity theory.

The study, which examined 95 different areas around Sacramento, builds upon similar findings from another California-area study. Although the study’s author points out that the research will paint a broader picture once extrapolated to different areas of the country, it is yet another sign that fears about marijuana leading to increased violence, crime, and drug use are overblown. In fact, there is evidence to suggest that legalizing marijuana actually leads to positive effects, including the potential to decrease teens’ use of drugs like cocaine.

Our guest blogger is Anh Phan, Manager of the Anti-Hate Table at the Center For American Progress Action Fund

It’s time to get to know Kris Kobach, the author of Arizona’s SB1070 law and Romney immigration advisor, whose work was largely gutted by the Supreme Court on Monday. Unfortunately the one portion upheld by the Court may still encourage racial profiling by Arizona police during traffic stops and other minor infractions. Codifying racial profiling is essential to Kobach’s long-term strategy of “attrition through enforcement”. But just who is Kris Kobach and what does he really believe?

Here are the top five things you should really know about Kobach,

1.       He works for an arm of a racist hate group whose stated purpose is to reduce the number of people of color in the United States. Kris Kobach is of counsel for the Immigration Reform Law Institute, which is the legal arm of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which the Southern Poverty Law Center labels a hate group. Kobach’s boss at the Immigration Reform Law Institute, Michael Hethmon, openly argues that the United States’s transition to a country where the majority of its citizens are people of color will lead to violence. And the founder of Federation for American Immigration Reform, John Tanton wrote, “I‘ve come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority and a clear one at that.”

2.       He is virulently anti-gay. Kobach uses divisive politics and has grouped gays and lesbians together with pedophiles. During his 2004 run for Congress, Kobach accused the a leading gay rights group, the Human Rights Campaign, of promoting “homosexual pedophilia” in an attempt to smear his opponent.

3.       He’s birther-curious. In his run for Kansas Secretary of State, Kobach raised the question of whether President Barack Obama’s “short-form” birth certificate was sufficient to prove his citizenship. Later, when called on it, Kobach backtracked and said that he believed in the president’s citizenship but still maintained that questioning his birth certificate was valid.

4.       He’s cashing in. When Kobach takes his anti-immigrant show on the road, he makes a pile of money representing local communities, often running up huge bills. Kobach co-wrote anti-immigrant laws across the country from Farmer’s Branch, Texas to Fremont, Nebraska to Prince William County, Virginia to Hazelton, Pennsylvania to Valley Park, Missouri to Arizona and Alabama. Kobach’s efforts have netted him more than $6.6 million in legal fees. And while serving as Kansas Secretary of State, Kobach appeared on out-of-state media at least 101 times in just one year, with an astonishing 31 appearances just on Lou Dobbs’ shows.

5.       He’s anti-democracy. Kobach ran for Kansas chief elections officer on a flimsy voter fraud platform. Using non-existent cases of alleged voter fraud as an excuse, Kobach pushed a law that will disenfranchise thousands of Kansans. He claimed that his voter ID law does not suppress the vote of citizens and especially minority citizens when in reality the opposite is true. After getting this law passed, Kobach resisted efforts necessary to make it possible for citizens who lacked an ID to get one for free, as the law required.