As Mitt Romney continues to avoid expressing a clear position on immigration policy, one Republican Congressman is tiring of the Romney campaign’s vagueness on the issue. Rep. David Rivera (R-FL) told BuzzFeed this week that presidential candidates should “put out your proposals and let voters judge them on their merits.”

He said he will not act as a surrogate unless the campaign provides some specifics on how to protect undocumented immigrants who came to to the country as children:

I’m not willing to participate in any Hispanic outreach efforts without seeing more details on a permanent solution for these kids … Right now, his Hispanic supporters and Hispanic surrogates don’t have the ammunition to combat the Obama attacks on him.

Last week, Romney reportedly told supporters that he will not moderate the hard-line anti-immigrant positions he took in the primaries as he does not want to be viewed as a “flip-flopper.” But his current path seems likely to risk the support of Hispanic Republicans like Rivera.

The New York Police Department has put out a “police advisory” flyer warning cops and residents to look out for two “professional agitators,” a Harlem couple who film officers stopping and frisking young New Yorkers of color.

DNAinfo reports that Matthew Swaye, 35, and his partner Christina Gonzalez, 25, came across the poster, complete with mugshots and the official seal of the NYPD’s intelligence division, taped to a podium in the 30th precinct’s public hearing room while attending a precinct council meeting. The flyer listed the home address of the couple and warned:

Be aware that the subjects are known professional agitators that live at [home address]. Above subjects mo is that they video tape officers performing routine stops and post on youtube. Subjects purpose is to portray officers in a negative way and too deter officers from conducting there responsibilities. Above subjects also deter officers from being safe and tactical by causing unnecessary distractions. Do not feed into subjects propaganda.

Swaye and Gonzalez have been arrested several times in the past year for civil disobedience. Swaye was detained at a stop-and-frisk protest in Harlem, along with a a group of advocates including Cornel West. Gonzalez was arrested at a Father’s Day stop-and-frisk march and, on a separate occasion, spent a few days at Rikers on a contempt charge after refusing to apologize for calling conservative Brooklyn Judge John H. Wilson a “white racist pig.”

The couple post videos on a YouTube channel showing NYPD officers conducting stop-and-frisks and assaulting demonstrators. Swaye explained, “We see ourselves as peace activists. The mug shots were for civil disobedience. They have us here like we robbed a bank.”

Another person attending the meeting told DNAinfo, “I thought: ‘Why isn’t anyone arresting them? When you see something like that, you think there’s a reward out for the person on the flyer.”

According to DNAinfo, the New York Civil Liberties Union recorded 7,550 total stops in the 30th precinct last year, 3,987 which involved a frisk, ranking it 38th in total number of frisks city-wide. On June 20, the NYPD invited reporters to a press conference and demo of an updated stop-and-frisk program after coming under fire for the racially-skewed practice.

Last week, a federal judge permanently blocked Florida from enforcing a law that banned doctors from discussing gun ownership with their patients. The law, the Firearm Owners’ Privacy Act, signed last year by Gov. Rick Scott (R-FL), prohibited “inquiries regarding firearm ownership or possession…by licensed health care practitioners” and “discrimination…based solely on upon a patient’s firearm ownership or possession.”

Because the law’s exceptions, which allow inquiries about guns if a doctor believes in “good faith” that it is relevant to a patient’s care or safety, fail to provide standards for physicians to follow, the law violates the First Amendment rights of doctors:

In her ruling, Cooke clearly sided with the physicians, saying evidence showed that physicians began “self-censoring” because of the “chilling” effect of the legislation.

“What is curious about this law — and what makes it different from so many other laws involving practitioners’ speech — is that it aims to restrict a practitioner’s ability to provide truthful, non-misleading information to a patient, whether relevant or not at the time of the consult with the patient,” Cooke wrote, citing the benefit of such “preventive medicine.” [...]

Cooke, the judge, said the legislation was based on anecdotal information and unfounded conjecture. Her decision was praised by the groups of plaintiffs, which included the Florida Pediatric Society and Florida Academy of Family Physicians.

Not only did the NRA-backed Firearm Owners’ Privacy Act violate doctors’ First Amendment rights, it interfered with routine, meaningful discussion between a doctor and a patient. Questions concerning safety and the home environment are a key part of preventative medicine, and the American Academy of Pediatrics believes that guns constitute a public health issue and that doctors have a duty to ask about ownership.

Out of the 65 children shot in the U.S. every day, eight are killed. And of the one-third of homes with children that have firearms in them, 40 percent store them unlocked. Guns unquestionably affect the health of American children, just as “the presence of open containers of bleach, swimming pools, balloons, and toilet locks” do.

–Alex Brown

One of the heroes of the fight to save the Affordable Care Act from conservatives on the Supreme Court was Charles Fried, a former Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court justice and former Solicitor General of the United States under President Reagan. Fried did not simply condemn the legal attacks on health reform in the strongest possible terms, he was one of the few prominent Republicans who filed a brief defending the law in the Supreme Court.

In a brief post on SCOTUSBlog yesterday, the former Reagan official had harsh words for Chief Justice Roberts’ decision to include several gratuitous sops to the Tea Party in his opinion before eventually concluding that the Affordable Care Act is largely constitutional:

The fact is that not since 1937 has the Court turned down the use of the Commerce Clause as a basis for Congressional intervention in a major national economic concern — which of course neither the Gun-Free School Zones Act nor the Violence Against Women Act were. Activity/inactivity is a new basis for limitation and has no anchor in our jurisprudence. That is why Roberts’s opinion was not conservative but radical. I have my doubts about the political and economic virtues of the ACA, but am appalled at this radically reactionary new doctrine.

Fried’s reaction to this law is exactly the right response from a conservative who objects to it. Conservatives have every right to oppose the Affordable Care Act. They likewise are free to vote in November for candidates who object to the law — but the remedy for Americans who simply disagree with a law is elections and not lawsuits which have no basis in the Constitution or longstanding precedents.

The biggest revelation in CBS News reporter Jan Crawford’s piece on the Supreme Court’s health care deliberations isn’t that Chief Justice John Roberts originally voted to strike down the Affordable Care Act and then changed his mind — Crawford merely confirmed what many people already expected based on evidence in the opinions themselves. Rather, the biggest revelation is that fact that, in order for her piece to exist at all, someone inside the Court must have leaked confidential information to her.

Yesterday, the New York Times‘ Adam Liptak strongly implied that the leak could be Justice Clarence Thomas:

[T]he possibility that conservatives had victory within reach only to lose it seemed to infuriate some of them. The CBS News report, attributed to two sources with “specific knowledge of the deliberations,” appeared to give voice to the frustrations of people associated with the court’s conservative wing. It was written by Jan Crawford, whose 2007 book, “Supreme Conflict: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Control of the United States Supreme Court,” was warmly received by conservatives.

In a 2009 interview on C-Span, Justice Thomas singled her out as a favorite reporter. “There are wonderful people out here who do a good job — do a fantastic job — like Jan Greenburg,” Justice Thomas said, referring to Ms. Crawford by her married name at the time.

Watch Thomas praise Crawford:

Thomas’ affection for Crawford is mutual, and Crawford has spent years defending Thomas against his critics. At times, these defenses have been thoughtful and compelling, such as when she shot down the ridiculous idea that Thomas is merely a lapdog for his less conservative colleague Justice Antonin Scalia, or when she defended Thomas’ wife’s Ginni’s right to have her own career regardless of what her husband does for a living. At other times, they have been much less thoughtful, such as when Crawford accused Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) of racism for criticizing Thomas. Crawford has also conducted high-profile interviews of Thomas in the past.

None of this, of course, proves conclusively that Thomas is one of Crawford’s two sources. But it does demonstrate that the two of them have a strong working relationship based on mutual admiration for each other. If Thomas were looking to leak confidential information to a member of the Supreme Court press, it is likely that he would choose the one reporter he has publicly revealed to be his favorite. The fact that that reporter is a well-regarded conservative journalist who also works for a high profile outlet is gravy.

If Thomas is the leak, that would be a shocking escalation from the justices normal tactics — and one which could have lasting consequences for the future. Appellate courts function because of the assumption that their members can openly discuss their thoughts and misgivings about individual cases without fear that those discussions will later be used to embarrass them. If that assumption no longer prevails in Supreme Court conferences, the Court will morph into a far less deliberative, more factional institution.

Yet Thomas has shown no indication in the past that he cares about the sanctity of institutions or the consequences of his actions. Thomas continually finds himself embroiled in ethics scandals, including a high-profile gifting scandal similar to the one that forced Justice Abe Fortas to resign from the bench in 1969. Thomas’ jurisprudence is equally reckless, as he would declare everything from national child labor laws to the federal ban on whites-only lunch counters unconstitutional.

If Thomas did leak the Court’s deliberations, that still leaves open who the second leaker is (Noam Scheiber makes a strong case that the second leak could be Justice Kennedy). At the moment, however, we know that Thomas is the justice who is most likely to cast long-established practices aside due to a personal crusade. And we know that he already has a good relationship with the reporter who received the Supreme leak.