Pennsylvania’s biggest utility company, PECO, has admitted to sending incorrect voter ID information to 1.3 million customers in 7 Pennsylvania counties. Despite the recent suspension of the state’s strict voter ID law, PECO’s newsletter warned voters that they must present a valid photo ID in order to vote on Election Day. When customers complained about the inaccurate mailing, a PECO spokesperson explained the mailing was approved a week before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court sent the law back to the Commonwealth Court to reconsider the risk of disenfranchisement for low-income, minority, and elderly voters. “We were trying to do a service for our customers in Pennsylvania, to get the word out. Because of the press time of this particular publication, unfortunately the information in there is not entirely correct,” PECO rep Ben Armstrong told the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Though the mailing may have been a simple technical mistake, PECO plans to keep distributing its newsletter unchanged through October 28:

Armstrong said Peco intended to continue distribution of the faulty newsletter through its October billing cycle, running through Oct. 28. It’s not possible for its printer to schedule a corrected run, he said, and the newsletter contains information on other programs “that needs to get” to customers.

The other items this month include information on the utility’s home energy audits, how to make donations to its Matching Energy Assistance Fund, Fire Safety Month, and a cutout for customers to get discounts at the Please Touch Museum.

Peco’s next billing cycle begins Oct. 29, a week before the election, but the company has no plans to deal with voter ID in its next newsletter, Armstrong said.

One reason PECO has been slow to correct the error may have to do with the energy company’s CEO, Denis O’Brien. O’Brien has contributed to the campaigns of Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi (R-PA), who was “a key force in enacting the law,” and House Leader Mike Turzai (R-PA), who quickly became notorious after boasting that the ID law would “allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.” PECO’s President, Craig Adams, also donated to Pileggi’s campaign this year.

PECO isn’t the only source disseminating confusing information to Pennsylvanian voters. For a week after the court order suspended the ID requirement, at least 5 counties stated on their websites that voters must show an eligible ID to vote. A billboard targeting Spanish speakers as well as television ads continued to promote the ID requirement for at least a week after the law was invalidated.

Mitt Romney’s campaign just can’t figure out whether he supports equal pay for women or not. When asked last April about Romney’s view on the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which restored equal pay rights the Roberts Court cut back in 2007, Romney’s campaign responded with an awkward six second silence followed by a promise to “get back” with an answer to the question. The campaign never answered whether Romney supports the law, merely stating that he is “not looking to change current law.” That is, of course, until last night, when Romney’s senior adviser Ed Gillespie said that Romney “was opposed to it at the time” and would not have signed the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. And that admission lasted all of a few hours. Gillespie now claims that Romney “never weighed in on it.”

The truth, however, is that we do not have to wonder about what Romney’s view on equal pay for women is. We do not even have to wait for his campaign to reveal Romney’s unspoken view on this issue, because the question can be answered in just one picture. This one:

That’s Justice Samuel Alito, the author of the Ledbetter opinion stripping many women of their right to equal pay for equal work. When asked how he would select his Supreme Court appointments if elected president, Romney named Alito, along with Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia and Thomas, as his models. All four of Romney’s model justices voted against Lilly Ledbetter and against equal pay for women.

Romney’s promise to place more Alitos on the Supreme Court matters much more than his claim that he is not currently interested in enacting anti-woman legislation. Indeed, it would matter even more than if Romney affirmatively promised to sign pro-woman legislation if elected president. Here is why:

Federal law requires many employees who face pay discrimination to meet a very brief deadline—often as short as six months—or else they lose their ability to challenge their employer’s unlawful actions. The flip side of this, however, is that this clock starts anew every time an employee receives a lower paycheck than her or his coworkers due to unlawful discrimination. As a unanimous Supreme Court explained in its 1986 decision in Bazemore v. Friday, “[e]ach week’s paycheck that delivers less to [an African-American] than to a similarly situated white is a wrong actionable” under federal law. Because gender discrimination is banned by the same law that prohibits race discrimination, Bazemore’s holding also benefited women.

Or, at least, it did until Justice Alito got his hands on it. Alito’s majority opinion in Ledbetter established that, if a woman’s employer makes a decision early in her career that undermines her earning power for decades, the woman must challenge that decision almost immediately or her rights are lost—and they are lost even if she did not discover she was a victim of pay discrimination until years later. Notably, in reaching this decision, the 5-4 majority relied heavily on a 1989 decision, Lorance v. AT&T Technologies, even though Lorance was overruled by an Act of Congress in 1991.

So Justice Alito’s Ledbetter opinion did not simply reject a woman’s claim that could enforce her right to equal pay, it thumbed its nose at a unanimous Supreme Court precedent and relied, at least in part, upon a precedent that had been overruled by an Act of Congress. The sort of justice that would do this does not care whether Congress enacted a law protecting equal pay for women, and Romney wants to put even more of them on the Supreme Court.

So Romney can say what he wants to say about equal pay. He can even outright endorse the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act and promise to never, ever sign a law repealing it. Until he takes back his promise to give America more Sam Alitos, anything else he says about equality is empty words.

Justice Bernette Johnson is poised to become the first black chief justice of the Louisiana Supreme Court, now that her colleagues have rejected a racially charged challenge to her seniority.

Johnson, who was appointed to the court as part of a settlement over civil rights violations under the Voting Rights Act, has been serving on the court longer than any other judge, and was prepared under the state’s seniority system to take on the court’s top spot when Chief Justice Catherine Kimball retired. Even today, Johnson is the only black Supreme Court justice in a state in which nearly one third of residents are black. As part of the 1994 settlement, an eighth seat was initially added to the court, but because the state Constitution capped the number of justices at seven, Johnson was appointed to the appellate court, though she served as a member of the high court for her entire tenure.

When Kimball announced she would retire, some of Johnson’s colleagues alleged that because Johnson was first appointed as a judge on the state’s appellate court and was only later elected directly to the Supreme Court, her first years serving on the court did not count towards her seniority. Johnson sued in federal court, seeking enforcement of the initial consent decree. District Judge Susie Morgan sided with Johnson, finding that the consent judgment calls for her six years serving the court as an eighth member “to be credited to her for all purposes under Louisiana law.”

Gov. Bobby Jindal appealed the ruling to the federal appeals court. But while that appeal was pending, Chief Justice Kimball asked her state Supreme Court colleagues not involved in the dispute to issue their own decision. In an opinion released Tuesday, the justices sided with Johnson, holding that “Justice Johnson is presently most senior for purposes of succeeding to the office of chief justice.” The decision appears to have rendered the appeal moot, but remarkably, even with the federal trial court and the majority of the state Supreme Court justices siding definitively with Johnson, the state’s lawyers have apparently asked for more time to consider how to proceed, according to Reuters. Hopefully, this is just procedural caution, and not an even bolder manifestation of hostility toward racial justice.

George W. Bush is not the president. His last EPA Administrator is warming two seats on corporate boards. Yet the dead hand of the Bush Administration continues to choke environmental protection in its grave:

[A] divided three-judge panel threw out rules requiring states to control the air pollution that wafts over their borders into other states. These rules were first ordered up by Congress back in 1970, have been more than 20 years in the making and had already been the subject of two challenges before the D.C. Circuit.

According to estimates by the Environmental Protection Agency, these regulations would prevent between 13,000 and 34,000 premature deaths, 15,000 non-fatal heart attacks, 19,000 hospital and emergency room visits and 1.8 million days of missed work or school for each year. The projected annual compliance cost is $2.4 billion, compared with the annual health benefits of anywhere from $120 billion to $280 billion.

But in reading the 60-page opinion by Judge Brett Kavanaugh, you’d have no clue of this historical, political, economic or health context.

Judge Kavanaugh was appointed to the DC Circuit by President Bush, and is widely viewed as a likely Supreme Court nominee in a Republican administation. His opinion was joined by Judge Thomas Griffith, another Bush appointee to the same court.

Nearly half of the eight active judges on this court, which is more powerful than any tribunal other than the Supreme Court due to the large number of major regulatory and national security decisions on its docket, are Bush appointees. The third is Judge Janice Rogers Brown, who recently wrote an opinion suggesting that all labor, business or Wall Street regulation is unconstitutional and who once compared liberalism to “slavery” and Social Security to a “socialist revolution.” Bush’s fourth appointment to the DC Circuit no longer sits on it because he was later promoted to Chief Justice of the United States.

So Republicans fought hard to stack this court with some of the most consistently ideological judges in the country, and President Obama and his allies have not met this effort with equal force. His first nominee to the court, a brilliant former Supreme Court clerk named Caitlin Halligan fell victim to a Senate Republican filibuster despite the fact that her opponents have struggled to articulate a case against her. When Janice Rogers Brown faced a Senate filibuster, her supporters simply bulldozed her through by threatening to abolish judicial filibusters altogether.

Even if President Obama is reelected and Democrats hold the senate this November, the GOP’s campaign to hold onto key courts through filibusters is unlikely to end. There is a silver lining, however. When the newly elected senators take their seats in January, a brief window will open up allowing the Senate to reform or abolish the filibuster altogether by a simple majority vote. If Senate Democrats do not seize this opportunity, it is likely that the dead hand of the Bush Administration will continue its hold on key courts for many years to come.

More than 40 years after Congress tentatively classified marijuana as an unsafe drug with no medical benefits, the federal government is continuing to play a game of “gotcha” by precluding the required research to demonstrate those benefits, argued the lawyer for medical marijuana advocates in federal appeals court Tuesday morning.

During oral argument before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, the second-most powerful U.S. court, lawyer Joseph Elford cited more than 200 studies that demonstrate the medical benefits of cannabis. He argued that the Drug Enforcement Administration’s decision not to remove marijuana from the Controlled Substances Act’s Schedule I, the most restrictive of the five schedules, was not supported by the evidence.

The studies cited by Elford have been rejected by the Drug Enforcement Administration as insufficiently rigorous. But Americans for Safe Access, a medical marijuana advocacy group, has argued that the federal government largely refuses to invest in additional studies precisely because the drug is listed as Schedule I. The Schedule I designation also means no prescriptions can be written for the drug, and Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee cited the designation as the reason for blocking that state’s medical marijuana law. Both Chafee and Washington Gov. Christie Gregoire have called for the drug to be rescheduled.

The classification of marijuana as a drug with no medical value appears increasingly at odds with the opinions of many doctors who attest to the medical benefits of the drug, and of patients, who take advantage of dispensaries in the 17 states where they are now legal. A 1970 House report initially recommended that Congress classify marijuana as Schedule I on  the grounds that uncertainty remained about the effects of the drug, and suggested the classification “at least until the completion of certain studies now underway to resolve the issue.”

A number of highly addictive and potent drugs, such as cocaine, opium poppy, morphine and codeine, are listed as Schedule II, designated for those drugs that have a high potential for abuse and dependence, but which have “a currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States or a currently accepted medical use with severe restrictions.” And the synthetic version of THC, known as dronabinol, is listed as Schedule III, even though THC is the ingredient in cannabis that causes psychoactive effects.

The D.C. Circuit is one of several fora for the escalating public battle over marijuana. Public support for ballot initiatives to legalize marijuana in three states continues to rise, with even higher support for medical marijuana initiatives, and the city of Oakland last week sued the federal government over prosecution of medical marijuana dispensary Harborside Health Center.

Regardless of the merits of the science supporting rescheduling, this case faces significant procedural hurdles. The three judges on the D.C. Circuit panel expressed some sympathy for claims that plaintiffs were harmed by the Schedule I classification, necessary to establish standing to sue in the first place. Judge Harry T. Edwards said at least one of the plaintiffs, Michael Krawitz, had established a strong argument that he had standing based on his inability to obtain medical marijuana through his Veterans Administration doctor to treat chronic pain and trauma. But neither the parties nor the judges devoted much time to an even tougher hurdle: overcoming the court’s traditional stance of extreme deference to the decisions of administrative agencies like the DEA.

Even if the court did side with the plaintiffs, it would likely return the case to the DEA to reconsider its decision or require a hearing on the issue, and the agency has already declined to reclassify marijuana several times before in 1972 and again in 1988, even after an Administrative Law Judge ruled that the drug should be reclassified.