Louisiana education officials are requiring the Delhi Charter School to drop the “Student Pregnancy Policy” that bans pregnant students from attending classes on its campus. After the American Civil Liberties Union called the discriminatory policy unconstitutional and pressured the school with potential legal action, the Louisiana Department of Education has agreed that Delhi Charter School is in violation of federal law.

A letter from Michael Higgins, the director of law and policy in the Education Department’s Office of School Choice, asked the school to make an immediate change to the policy no later than August 16th:

In the letter, released to TODAY.com Tuesday evening, the state asks for a policy that “does not discriminate against pregnant students or students perceived to be pregnant” and says that “under no circumstances shall the school require any student to take a pregnancy test.”

The school, which has approximately 700 students from kindergarten to 12th grade, said earlier in the day that although there have never been any complaints about the policy, it was under legal review “to ensure that necessary revisions are made so that our school is in full compliance with constitutional law.”

After the ACLU’s letter to the Delhi Charter School on Monday brought public attention to the policy, the school was faced with significant backlash. An online petition urging the school to stop discriminating against pregnant students has garnered over 90,000 signatures in just over a day.

Part three of ThinkProgress’ profiles of right-wing groups that are taking advantage of the Citizens United ruling to flood the airways with independent attack ads. See Part 1 and Part 2.

Americans for Prosperity (AFP) is a tax-exempt 501(c)(4) organization.

Created in 2004 when Citizens for a Sound Economy (a conservative organization founded in 1984 by oil billionaires David and Charles Koch) split, AFP calls itself “an organization of grassroots leaders who engage citizens in the name of limited government and free markets.” Its goals include “cutting taxes and government spending in order to halt the encroachment of government in the economic lives of citizens,” “removing unnecessary barriers to entrepreneurship,” and “restoring fairness to our judicial system.”

Though generally associated with the Koch Brothers, the organization is led by president Tim Phillips. Phillips, a former chief of staff for Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), co-founded Century Strategies with Ralph Reed — the former Christian Coalition executive director and Jack Abramoff-scandal figure. Phillips has made a career in corporate “astroturfing.”

The group’s directors include controversial millionaire and former North Carolina State Rep. Art Pope (R) and former Reagan administration budget director James C. Miller.

The group has funded efforts to “incubate” Tea Party organizations and was highly visible in the Wisconsin gubernatorial recall election running ads and sending staffers in the state to support Gov. Scott Walker (R).

Sample AFP ad:

Affiliates:

• American for Prosperity Foundation, a 501(c)(3) educational organization

YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/AforP
Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/AFPhq

Graphics by Adam Peck. Christina Lewis and Ellie Sandmeyer contributed to this report

A Vermont man’s lawsuit alleging a state penitentiary forced him to work against his will has been allowed to move forward. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit found that the former inmate, Finbar McGarry, is entitled to a trial even though a lower court dismissed his case. McGarry is claiming his rights were violated under the Thirteenth Amendment, which outlawed slavery and involuntary servitude after the Civil War.

McGarry, who was at the time working on a chemistry PhD at the University of Vermont, was arrested in 2008 on a domestic disturbance charge and was sent to jail when bail was denied. As he awaited trial, he claims he was forced to work in a prison laundry at the Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility in South Burlington for three days a week up to 14 hours. He was paid just 25 cents an hour for six weeks.

When McGarry got an infection on his neck and refused to work, he was threatened with solitary confinement. A month before charges were dropped and he was released in 2009, McGarry sued for $11 million in damages. According to the Second Circuit, McGarry appears to have a pretty strong case:

The Thirteenth Amendment provides that “[n]either slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” Shortly after its passage, the Supreme Court held that the Amendment “is not a mere prohibition of State laws establishing or upholding slavery, but an absolute declaration that slavery or involuntary servitude shall not exist in any part of the United States.” Contrary to the district court’s conclusion, it is well-settled that the term “involuntary servitude” is not limited to chattel slavery-like conditions. The Amendment was intended to prohibit all forms of involuntary labor, not solely to abolish chattel slavery.

McGarry’s allegations state a claim under the Thirteenth Amendment. He alleges that his work in the prison laundry was compelled and maintained by the use and threatened use of physical and legal coercion. He supports his allegations with well-pleaded facts that the defendants threatened to send him to “the hole” if he refused to work and that he would thereby be subjected to 23 hour-per-day administrative confinement and shackles. These allegations plausibly allege “threat of physical restraint or physical injury” within the meaning of Kozminski.

Exploiting prison populations as an involuntary work force seems to be common practice. Recent reports found a private prison in Georgia paid its convicted prisoners and civil detainees $1 an hour for manual labor around the facility. Many states facing budget crises are increasingly using prison labor to fill the jobs of public employees. Because McGarry’s case relies on the fact that he was not “duly convicted” of a crime before he was forced to work, however, it is unlikely that his case will set a precedent that will benefit prison laborers who are incarcerated post-conviction.

Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA)’s today lashed out at his opponent’s daughter and his home state of Massachusetts for ensuring that a federal law is properly followed. The freshman Republican charged that by helping to signing up welfare recipients to vote, the state was “clearly” aiding Democratic nominee Elizabeth Warren’s campaign.

The 1993 National Voter Registration Act — better known as the Motor Voter bill –requires that citizens be offered the opportunity to register to vote when they get a driver’s license or apply for social services. Voting rights groups — including Demos — filed a federal lawsuit alleging that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was not in compliance, after a 35-year-old woman was not offered the chance to register to vote when she filed paperwork with the state’s welfare office last June. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts, recognizing its obligation under federal law, settled the case out of court. As part of that settlement, the state government agreed to contact, by mail, the 477,944 welfare recipients who might also have been denied their right to be offered a chance to register to vote and give them that chance now.

Voting rights groups have brought similar suits in other states. But seizing on the fact that Warren’s daughter is chair of the board of one of the groups suing, Brown made the argument that this amounts to a conspiracy to elect his Democratic challenger. His statement today said:

I want every legal vote to count, but it’s outrageous to use taxpayer dollars to register welfare recipients as part of a special effort to boost one political party over another. This effort to sign up welfare recipients is being aided by Elizabeth Warren’s daughter and it’s clearly designed to benefit her mother’s political campaign. It means that I’m going to have to work that much harder to get out my pro-jobs, pro-free enterprise message.

It is surprising that a U.S. Senator would object to a state complying with federal law and attempting to remedy its mistake when it may not have done so. It is also surprising that Brown would, in effect, say that having more eligible welfare recipients registered to vote would automatically mean more votes for Warren.

Brown says on his campaign website that “Partisan bickering and political gamesmanship won’t help us save that America, and I refuse to participate.”

Florida has historically been the center of the illicit trade in prescription drugs like Vicodin and Oxycontin inside the United States. Yet it has responded to this trade with harsh enforcement that can transform even the most minor offenses into life-ruining mistakes. As Reason details, one man lost his entire career after he was caught with one Oxycontin pill by Florida police:

As a final punishment, the judge instructed James to immediately report his arrest to his employer, and to let his probation officer know when he had done so.

With his case settled, James returned to Jacksonville and told his boss at Merrill Lynch what happened. His supervisor told him not to worry. A week later, he was instructed to modify his broker’s license to reflect that he’d pled no-contest to drug possession. This is both a federal and a state-level requirement, generally meant to protect investors. It ended up ruining James’s career. The modification to his license triggered an internal warning at Merrill Lynch. The firm placed him on paid leave for two weeks, and then fired him.

Once James’s probation officer found out he’d been let go, she required him to bring with him to their meetings a list of every job for which he’d applied since they last met. His probation officer then called each and every company’s HR department to verify that James had actually applied.

“I am sure once the HR department at my prospective job talked to her, that my resume was thrown away,” James wrote in an email.

It took James a month to find a new job, but it wasn’t with a financial firm. Instead, he was hired on as a short order cook by a woman had opened a restaurant after an underage drinking charge prevented her from teaching.

James was arrested in 2006, before Florida drug laws and enforcement intensified in response to recent fears about an increase in prescription drug abuse. Today, “he’d probably be charged with possession of a controlled substance, which is a third degree felony punishable by up to five years in prison and a level 3 offense under the Criminal Punishment Code,” according to Greg Newburn, Director of Florida’s chapter of Families against Mandatory Minimums. So on top of losing his job, having difficulty finding housing, and being forced to attend unnecessary treatment sessions, he’d also have a decent chance of going to jail — all for the crime of possessing a single pill he never used.

The victims of Florida’s most recent crackdown, spearheaded by Governor Rick Scott, extend well beyond James. Ordinary pill users, who require painkillers for legitimate medical reasons, are finding it increasingly difficult to get access to medication, and shutting down pain clinics believed to be responsible for spreading prescription drugs doesn’t appear to be eliminating illicit sales. One of Florida’s new laws, which shifts the burden of proof in certain drug cases onto the defendant, raises serious constitutional questions. Florida’s broader history with tough drug laws is also bleak — though the average prison sentence length for non-violent drug roughly tripled from 1990 to 2009 (the highest increase in the country), there appeared to be no significant reduction in terms of crime rate as a consequence.

Marvin Wilson, who has executed yesterday by the State of Texas, had a disability that should have rendered him constitutionally ineligible for the death penalty. In writing about Wilson’s final, unsuccessful appeals for his life, I made the editorial decision to refer to his disability by the name currently assigned to it by clinicians and by the Supreme Court. Unfortunately, that name reads much more like a hateful taunt than the kind of term that is appropriate in a scientific text or a courthouse — the clinical and legal name for Wilson’s disability is “mental retardation.”

As some writers that I respect a great deal questioned this editorial decision, I wanted to take a moment to explain why this decision was made, and why I believed it was necessary to avoid papering over a serious flaw in our justice system. I will also note that, after the Supreme Court decided not to halt Wilson’s execution last night, a colleague pointed out to me that, while the current edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders uses the term “mental retardation” to describe Wilson’s disability, the forthcoming edition of this manual will likely use the term “intellectual disability.” In the future, I will use this far less distressing term to describe Wilson’s disability, except when quoting court decisions or other documents that still use the soon-to-be-antiquated term.

Some news outlets chose to use terms such as “mentally impaired” or “mentally disabled” to describe Mr. Wilson’s disability, but these terms lack precision. Wilson was not just mentally disabled, he had a very specific mental disability that should have enabled him to invoke the Eight Amendment’s protections against cruel and unusual punishment. In Atkins v. Virginia, the Supreme Court did not hold that all mentally disabled persons cannot be executed, it held that “death is not a suitable punishment for a mentally retarded criminal.” And the relative narrowness of this holding can often leave other mentally disabled persons unable to claim the Constitution’s protection.
Read more

Yesterday, Missouri Republicans selected Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO) as their candidate to oppose Sen. Claire McCaskill’s (D-MO) bid for reelection. Akin, who like nearly every Republican in Congress voted for Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) plan to phase out Medicare, is a staunch opponent of Medicare in general. Indeed, he told a Tea Party group last year that he believes the program is unconstitutional:

U.S. Rep. Todd Akin said he has doubts about the constitutionality of Medicare and thinks global warming “is highly suspect.” [...]

Akin’s remarks questioning the constitutionality of Medicare came as he was explaining his vote against prescription coverage under the medical plan for seniors and people with disabilities. He said it was too expensive, and “it was expanding an entitlement I wasn’t too comfortable with to begin with.”

Asked about the remarks after the meeting, Akin said, “I don’t find in the Constitution that it is the job of the government to provide health care.”

Akin is hardly the first Republican nominated for the Senate this year who holds views that place him well outside the American mainstream. Recently nominated Texas Tea Partier Ted Cruz wants to privatize Social Security and believes that billionaire investor George Soros is leading a global United Nations conspiracy to eliminate the game of golf. Similarly, New York Republican candidate Wendy Long believes that national child labor laws and the federal ban on whites-only lunch counters are unconstitutional.

If elected, Akin would join at least two other Republican senators who believe that Medicare is unconstitutional. Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) delivered a lecture while he was campaigning for his current job in which he stated that “health care” is not something that can be addressed by the federal government. Likewise, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) told a town hall meeting in 2011 that protecting the “frail elderly” is “a family responsibility, not a government responsibility.”