Last month, James Eagan Holmes allegedly stood up in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado and opened fire on the audience, killing 12 people and wounding 58 others. A year and a half earlier, a different gunman opened fire in a Safeway parking lot in Tuscon, Arizona, wounding then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), killing federal Judge John Roll, and wounding or killing sixteen others. Both shooters used high-capacity magazines to maximize their ability to kill as many people in as short of a time as possible.

In the wake of these two high-profile mass killings, the Republican Party nonetheless decided to include a line in their party platform demanding that access to high-capacity magazines be protected:

Gun ownership is responsible citizenship, enabling Americans to defend their homes and communities. We condemn frivolous lawsuits against gun manufacturers and oppose federal licensing or registration of law-abiding gun owners. We oppose legislation that is intended to restrict our Second Amendment rights by limiting the capacity of clips or magazines or otherwise restoring the ill-considered Clinton gun ban.

The GOP’s interpretation of the Second Amendment is questionable at best. Even Justice Scalia acknowledged in DC v. Heller that bans on “dangerous and unusual weapons” are permissible, and high-capacity magazines almost certainly qualify as such. Unlike regular capacity handguns, which can be used for personal self-defense in the home, massive magazines like the 100 round drum used in the Aurora shooting serve little purpose other than to rain bullets on many, many victims. As one gun show attendee told ThinkProgress, “If ten rounds of ammunition can’t do the job you probably shouldn’t own a gun. I don’t want to live next to that guy.”

Last month, President Obama’s reelection campaign filed a lawsuit claiming that a recently enacted Ohio law eliminating early voting in the three days before an election, except for members of the military, violates the Constitution’s guarantee that all voters enjoy equal access to the franchise. The campaign’s lawsuit called for the right of all voters to cast an early ballot be restored in Ohio — it explicitly stated that expanding the franchise, not taking early voting away from military personnel as well, was the appropriate outcome.

In an opinion by Judge Peter Economus, a federal court agreed with the Obama campaign on Friday that the Ohio anti-voter law must be suspended:

“A citizen has a constitutionally protected right to participate in elections on an equal basis with other citizens in the jurisdiction.” In Ohio, that right to participate equally has been abridged by Ohio Revised Code ‘ 3509.03 and the Ohio Secretary of State’s further interpretation of that statute with regard to in-person early voting. In 2005, Ohio expanded participation in absentee balloting and in-person early voting to include all registered Ohio voters. Now, “in-person early voting” has been redefined by the Ohio legislature to limit Plaintiffs’ access to the polls. This Court must determine whether preliminary injunctive relief should be granted to Plaintiffs on their claim that Ohio’s restriction of in-person early voting deprives them of their fundamental right to vote. Following Supreme Court precedent, this Court concludes that Plaintiffs have stated a constitutional claim that is likely to succeed on the merits. As a result—and as explained below—this Court grants Plaintiffs’ motion for preliminary injunction.

Amusingly, the court’s opinion relies on the Supreme Court’s infamous decision in Bush v. Gore to reach this holding, citing Bush‘s statement that “[h]aving once granted the right to vote on equal terms, the State may not, by later arbitrary and disparate treatment, value one person’s vote over that of another.” Judge Economus’ decision will be appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, a Republican-leaning court with a history of legally-challenged partisan decisions benefiting the Republican Party. So it remains to be seen whether Economus’ decision will have staying power.

The Romney campaign, for its part, opposed the Obama campaign’s position in this lawsuit. Had the Romney position prevailed, as many as 900,000 military veterans could have had their right to vote impeded.

Almost immediately after President Obama took office, many Republican politicians seized upon a distorted vision of the Constitution’s Tenth Amendment that would leave America nearly incapable of governing itself. Indeed, top Republicans — including U.S. Senators, governors and members of Congress — have claimed that everything from Social Security to Medicare to federal disaster relief to national child labor laws all violate the Constitution. A similarly erroneous vision of the Constitution has now infected the GOP’s party platform:

We support the review and examination of all federal agencies to eliminate wasteful spending, operational inefficiencies, or abuse of power to determine whether they are performing functions that are better performed by the States. These functions, as appropriate, should be returned to the States in accordance with the Tenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. We affirm that all legislation, rules, and regulations must conform and public servants must adhere to the U.S. Constitution, as originally intended by the Framers. . . . Scores of entrenched federal programs violate the constitutional mandates of federalism by taking money from the States, laundering it through various federal agencies, only to return to the States shrunken grants with mandates attached. We propose wherever feasible to leave resources where they originate: in the homes and neighborhoods of the taxpayers.

The GOP platform closely echoes a brief filed by GOP mega attorney Paul Clement on behalf of several Republican elected officials challenging the Affordable Care Act in the Supreme Court. According to Clement, because federal revenues are “composed of tax dollars collected from the States’ own residents,” it somehow follows that state governments have a claim on federal revenue. The GOP platform suggests that this claim is so strong that any federal program which grants money to the states is unconstitutional if it also requires the states to comply with certain rules in order to receive that money.

There are many federal programs which fit this description, but the biggest one is Medicaid. Medicaid offers funding to the states to provide health services to the poor. States are free to take this money or to leave it, but they must agree to follow certain rules before they can take the money. In other words, Medicaid is exactly the same kind of grant “with mandates attached” that the GOP finds constitutionally objectionable.

Medicaid also covers more than 62 million Americans, all of whom would lose their health coverage if the GOP’s apparent vision of the Constitution were to prevail.

Tom Smith must not be banking on women’s votes to win his Senate bid. The Pennsylvania Republican got in hot water last week when he suggested that having a baby out of wedlock is a rough equivalent to to giving birth to a rapist’s child.

Then last week, on the campaign trail, Smith suggested that the only thing two women might have to talk about is shoe shopping. Approaching two women at a campaign stop, Smith called them “girls,” then added:

SMITH: What are we talking about here, two girls together talking?

WOMAN: We’re talking about the power of petite women.

SMITH: My guess would’ve been you were talking about shoes.

Watch it:

After his suggestion about children born out of wedlock, Smith earned himself the title of “The Next Todd Akin,” a reference to the Republican Missouri Senate candidate who suggested women can’t get pregnant from “legitimate rape.”

But anti-woman attitudes are far from limited to candidates such as Akin or Smith. Akin partnered with GOP vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan to cosponsor the bill that introduced the country to the term “forcible rape” — along with most Republican members of the House.