Today in GQ, Marc Ambinder reports on Obama’s second-term plans to tackle the War on Drugs. But Colombia may have already jump-started the process. On Friday, Colombia’s Constitutional Court approved a government proposal decriminalizing possession of small amounts of cocaine and marijuana.

This reform has been in the works for at least a year, when the Supreme Court threw out former President Alvaro Uribe’s draconian drug laws, including a ban on personal recreational use. Now that the government’s proposal has been approved, anyone caught with less than 22 grams of marijuana or one gram of cocaine for personal use may be treated for intoxication but may not be prosecuted or detained.

Colombia also has a bill in the works to legalize drug crops like marijuana, coca and poppy. Since 1961, the U.S. has led the mass herbicide spraying of coca and poppy crops in Colombia. By legalizing the crops, Colombia would almost certainly halt this practice, as Peru did last year, perhaps forcing the U.S. to rethink its tactics.

In the meantime, Obama might look at Colombia’s decriminalization as a model for U.S. policy reform. Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, pointed out how current U.S. drug policy is out of step with the rest of the world:

The United States clearly lags far behind Europe and Latin America in ending the criminalization of drug possession. Momentum for reform is growing with respect to decriminalization of marijuana possession, with Massachusetts reducing penalties in 2008, California in 2010, Connecticut in 2011 and Rhode Island earlier this year. All states, however, treat possession of other illegal drugs as a crime.

The tide is turning rapidly. Last year, a Gallup poll found support for marijuana legalization at a record-high 50 percent. Just a few months ago, New York Governor Anthony Cuomo tried to decriminalize small amounts of marijuana earlier this year, with the blessing of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the NYPD. Last week, Rahm Emanuel and Chicago’s City Council succeeded in a vote to decriminalize 15 grams or less of pot. Even one of Obama’s top advisers on drug policy recently said that drug addiction should be treated as a public health issue, not a crime. And Colombia, along with other Latin American countries increasingly hostile to the War on Drugs, are not likely to let the issue lie for long.

For more than two years, House Oversight Chair Darrell Issa (R-CA) has tried to exploit the tragedy of a federal law enforcement agent’s death as part of a crusade against Attorney General Eric Holder, most recently by successfully pushing to hold Holder in contempt of Congress despite objections from the House Republican leadership. Last week, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) upped the ante even further by suggesting that the House GOP could unilaterally attempt to have Holder arrested:

Chaffetz, a member of the House Judiciary Committee, told Fox News that there are three options moving forward — going through the U.S. attorney, taking civil action or instructing the House sergeant at arms to “take control of the situation” with an arrest.

However, he acknowledged the House had received a letter from Department of Justice instructing the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia to not pursue legal action.

The Utah congressman predicted that some people will call for Holder’s arrest, but said the House would “try to exhaust” its other options first.

Watch it:

As a reminder, this entire incident concerns Republican anger that Holder has not complied with a subpoena to turn over documents that are not subject to congressional subpoena. Surely, that is an offense worthy of arresting a sitting cabinet official.

Marc Thiessen, the Bush Administration torture apologist turned Washington Post columnist, uses his column today to proclaim that Chief Justice Roberts was a failed nominee and Republicans need to ensure that future Robertses never reach the high Court again:

We don’t know if he was suddenly convinced by his liberal colleagues, or simply had a failure of nerve. But the challenge for conservatives is clear: We need jurists who not only have a philosophy of judicial restraint, but the intestinal fortitude not to be swayed by pressure from the New York Times, the Georgetown cocktail circuit and the legal academy.

Roberts’s defenders point to his many other conservative decisions and argue that he is not another David Souter or even another Anthony Kennedy. That may be true. But is that really the standard we want for a Supreme Court justice — they are not another Souter or Kennedy? Shouldn’t conservatives expect Republican presidents to do better and appoint another Scalia, Thomas or Alito? That shouldn’t be too much to ask.

First of all, Thiessen can hardly claim to support judges who embrace “judicial restraint” when he is slamming Roberts for refusing to eradicate the entire Affordable Care Act, toss the entire national health system into chaos, and do so on a theory that rejects nearly 200 years of established law.

Moreover, President George W. Bush, who appointed Roberts in 2005, can hardly be blamed for not anticipating that conservatives in 2009 would suddenly decide that a policy proposal that was conceived at the conservative Heritage Foundation and signed into law by Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney would be declared a heresy simply because President Barack Obama embraced it. Indeed, Bush nominated Roberts to the Supreme Court less than two months after Justice Scalia published an opinion which establishes that the Affordable Care Act is constitutional.

More recently, three leading conservative judges rejected the purely partisan argument that Obamacare violates the Constitution. Judge Laurence Silberman, who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Bush, upheld the law because the case against it “cannot find real support . . . in either the text of the Constitution or Supreme Court precedent.” Judge Jeffrey Sutton, a former law clerk to Scalia who spent much of his pre-judicial career looking for ways to undermine federal power, nonetheless wrote his own opinion rejecting a challenge to the Affordable Care Act. And Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, one of the finalists for Roberts’ Supreme Court seat, called the case against health reform “a prescription for economic chaos that the framers, in a simpler time, had the good sense to head off.”

So believing that laws like Affordable Care Act are constitutional wasn’t just the mainstream view when Roberts joined the Court, it was the mainstream conservative view. Only a handful of radicals, such as Justice Clarence Thomas, would have rejected the Affordable Care Act if it had reached the Court in 2005.

But, of course, that is besides the point. The purpose of Thiessen’s column is not really to look back on a nomination that already happened, it is to send out a warning on judicial nominations yet to come. Ultimately, the intended audience for this column are the handful of conservative lawyers who will someday be entrusted with selecting nominees for a future Republican president. And the column’s message is clear: next time, pick someone who will follow conservative orthodoxy, regardless of what the Constitution actually says.

The American Legislative Exchange Council, a right-wing group responsible for state voter suppression laws, “stand your ground” laws and other far right initiatives, is a 501(c)(3) organization — meaning that it does not pay taxes and that its donors can deduct any donations they make to the organization from their taxable income. Thus, we the taxpayers essentially subsidize ALEC’s right-wing lobbying because the amount of money in the public treasury is reduced in order to pay for ALEC’s activities.

According to a letter by Marcus Owens, a former chief enforcer of federal tax law governing non-profits, however, ALEC does not deserve to have the taxpayers subsidize its activities. The letter lists several ways ALEC allegedly violated the requirements to maintain its tax exempt status — including by engaging in too much lobbying and by filing false disclosure forms — but the most interesting claim in Owens’ letter is an argument that ALEC should lose its preferred status because it violates a rule against “generating business or providing pecuniary support” for for-profit businesses:

ALEC’s operating procedures give its corporate donors authority to approve or veto every legislative and policy proposal developed by ALEC’s Task Forces, and the organization’s Bylaws give corporate members disproportionate authority to appoint and remove legislators from the Task Forces. This effectively ensures that the only model laws distributed to ALEC’s Legislative Members and disseminated nationwide are those that have been co-drafted and subsequently blessed by ALEC’s corporate donors. . . .

[T]he motivation behind these policies is undeniably private in nature. Furthermore, the overwhelming success of many of ALEC’s proposals confirms that the benefits ALEC confers on its corporate members are hardly “nonincidental.” They are substantial and quite valuable. Indeed, many corporations may find them invaluable. Because ALEC is operated to further the private interests of its corporate members, it is not entitled to exemption from tax under section 501(c)(3).

To be clear, Owens wrote this letter for a client, a progressive faith group called Clergy VOICE, so the letter should not be read to represent his neutral view of the tax code any more that former Solicitor General Paul Clement’s briefs claiming that the Constitution implements the Tea Party’s policy preferences should be read to reflect the views of the United States government. Nevertheless, it is the latest piece of bad news for a right-wing lobby that is increasingly under fire. At least twenty-four funders have abandoned ALEC, including twenty for-profit corporations.

At a rally in Florida yesterday, Rep. Allen West (R-FL) thought he found the perfect way to mock the Supreme Court’s finding that the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate — which requires individuals who do not carry health insurance to pay slightly more income taxes — constitutes a lawful application of Congress’ power to set tax policy:

What will be next? If you don’t buy a certain kind of green car, they will tax you. If you don’t buy a certain kind of food, they will tax you. Well I got a great idea. I believe that for personal security every American should have to go out and buy a Glock 9 mm, and if you don’t do it, we’ll tax you. Now I wonder how the liberals will feel about that.

Watch it:

First of all, there’s nothing even vaguely unusual about a law which allows people who take a certain action to pay lower taxes. People who take out mortgages, who buy fuel efficient cars, or even many families who have children all receive a tax break. By West’s logic, this means big government is unconstitutionally forcing people to breed.

Moreover, while requiring every American to “go out and buy a Glock” is indeed a stupid idea — unsurprisingly, research shows that gun ownership strongly correlates with gun homicides — the fact that a proposed law is really, really stupid does not make it unconstitutional. Indeed, President George Washington signed a law in 1792 that required most free male citizens to “provide [themselves] with a good musket or firelock.”

It’s a good bet that George Washington knew a little bit more about what the Constitution allows than Allen West.