The National Rifle Association spent much of President Obama’s first term touting increasingly paranoid claims that the United Nations is coming for everyone’s guns, and that President Obama’s non-existent record of new gun regulations is actually “a massive Obama conspiracy to deceive voters and hide his true intentions to destroy the Second Amendment in our country.” If last Tuesday’s election results are any sign, America was not buying what the NRA was selling.

According to data from the Sunlight Foundation, candidates supported by the NRA performed miserably this election cycle — just 0.81% of the NRA’s American Political Victory Fund’s spending backed winning candidates. In addition to about $9.3 million spent to elect Mitt Romney, the NRA’s top money-getter was Richard Mourdock — the Indiana U.S. Senate candidate who disqualified himself after suggesting that pregnancies resulting from rape are a “gift from God.” Other senate candidates who did not get elected despite the NRA’s best efforts include Ohio’s Josh Mandel, Virginia’s George Allen, Florida’s Connie Mack and Mourdock’s biologically challenged co-ideologue Todd Akin.

Meanwhile, the most successful groups evaluated by Sunlight were the Planned Parenthood Action Fund and Planned Parenthood Votes, both of which spent about 98 percent of their money on successful candidates.

The U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts has not looked kindly on class action lawsuits and arbitrations. In a series of decisions, the court has eroded the ability of individuals to hold large corporations accountable through the only feasible, cost-effective mechanism, and they have two more chances to continue that trend with cases argued before the high court this week. (A third case this term challenges the similar collective action mechanism).

Arguably the worst case in the line, AT&T v. Concepcion, upheld a provision in AT&T contracts that forces consumers to waive all rights to class arbitration – preventing individual consumers from challenging a fee so small that it is far outweighed by the expense of filing a challenge. In the wake of this decision, federal courts relied upon the precedent to block no less than 76 class actions, and companies such as Netflix, PayPal and Sony are adding similar class arbitration waivers to their contracts.

Now, two plaintiffs’ lawyers have developed a nonprofit crowdsourcing website that they hope will foster a work-around to the limits set in Concepcion. Reuters’ Terry Baynes explains:

Just as Groupon measures consumer enthusiasm for a deal, ConsumersCount.org gauges how many consumers are willing to file arbitration claims against an offending company, with the goal of being able to inundate businesses with such claims.

“Browse. Submit. Act. Are You Outraged? Did It Happen To You? You Build The Crowd, We’ll Make The Case,” reads ConsumersCount.org, which elicits consumer responses on a variety of situations, including Sirius XM’s use of “unwanted robocalls” and Nissan failing “to refund vets lease payments.”

Beneath each type of claim is a percentage bar, measuring the level of consumer interest. Once enough people indicate they have had the specific problem, the bar turns from red to green. That’s the cue for Friedman and Mason, or lawyers they work with, to move forward, filing masses of individual arbitrations against the company. Friedman and Mason don’t give a specific number but are hoping to be able to overwhelm a company with hundreds or even thousands of complaints.

ConsumersCount.org’s goal is to show corporations that, even if the system were fair and consumers could typically file complaints easily and free of charge, individual claims would be overly burdensome and inefficient for corporations – not to mention arbitrators and the courts. It’s hard to believe this alone will prompt corporations to change the waiver provisions in their contracts, but at the very least, it may hold a few more corporations accountable.

One ballot initiative that received comparatively little attention this week is Louisiana’s successful expansion of the state’s already-generous gun rights. The new NRA-backed constitutional amendment arguably makes protection of gun rights under the state constitution even stricter than under the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment.

The amendment removes language that authorized the legislature to “prohibit the carrying of weapons concealed on a person” and subjects any law that infringes on the right to bear arms to “strict scrutiny” – the highest level of skepticism courts apply to legislation. The U.S. Supreme Court justices have indicated that concealed carry restrictions generally don’t violate the Second Amendment. In addition to endangering the state’s law requiring permits to carry a concealed weapon, the law also puts at risk the state’s stun gun ban, and gun bans on campuses and in bars. Conservative blogger and law professor Eugene Volokh warns that even the state’s requirement of concealed carry permits for those 18-20 years old may be at risk. A wholesale ban on the sale of guns to people ages 18-20 was just last month upheld under the U.S. Constitution by the very conservative U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit — the circuit that encompasses Louisiana.

Earlier this year, a series by investigative outlet ProPublica found that whites are four times more likely than minorities to receive a presidential pardon, and that the rates over the past few presidencies for both pardons and sentence commutations are jarringly low. The coverage prompted the White House to announce that it would reopen the commutation application of one particular individual, Clarence Aaron, whose story of his nominal role in a cocaine deal that earned him a triple life sentence was highlighted by ProPublica.

With harsh mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes, and a continuing disparity between crack and cocaine sentences, there are countless individuals like Aaron who are serving exorbitant time for nonviolent drug offenses, or who, even after their sentence ends, have been haunted by an early criminal record as they attempt to find employment, adopt children and regain their right to vote.

Now, another installment in this series is highlighting the particularly abysmal clemency record of President Obama, who has granted fewer pardons and commutations than any president in modern history. President Obama granted just 1 in 50 applicants a pardon, compared to 1 in 3 by this point in President Reagan’s first term, and 1 in 8 under President Clinton. When it comes to commutation – the early release of an individual still serving their sentence – the numbers are equally stark. President Reagan and Clinton granted commutations to 1 in every 100 people, whereas President Obama has granted a commutation to 1 in every 5,000.

Clemency is an essential part of our federal criminal justice system. When the founders incorporated the pardon power into the U.S. Constitution, they tasked the president with what a 1925 Supreme Court case described as affording “relief from undue harshness or evident mistake in the operation or enforcement of the criminal law.”

The change in clemency rates is arguably not because there are less deserving applicants, but because of a change in attitude or approach. Administration officials who spoke to ProPublica anonymously suggested that the Office of the Pardon Attorney, part of the Department of Justice, is simply recommending less clemency. They say that in President Obama’s first two years, he took almost every recommendation he was given by Pardon Attorney Ronald Rodgers. There are now pending a dozen positive recommendations and hundreds of negative recommendations.

In a strikingly forthright piece for the American Constitution Society’s ACSblog, former Office of the Pardon Attorney staff lawyer Samuel Morrison explains that this change has come out of a shift in attitude on the part of prosecutors from one of rehabilitation to one of retribution. The Department of Justice, charged with prosecutions, is institutionally inclined to want to preserve those prosecutions. This is an inherent conflict of interest that prominent figures including former White House Counsel Greg Craig have identified as cause for the creation of an independent office outside of the DOJ to assess pardon applications. As Morrison describes the process:

Having served as a staff attorney in the pardon office for more than a decade, I can say with some confidence that the office does not view its role as a neutral arbiter. Instead, it exploits the asymmetry of information to protect the Department’s institutional prerogatives, churning out a steady stream of almost uniformly negative advice, regardless of the merits of any particular case. In effect, this amounts to little more than an effort to restrain (rather than inform) the President’s exercise of discretion. The implicit message is clear: you will either do as we suggest, Mr. President, or you’re on your own.

It is a singularly efficient system. Generally speaking, the President feels compelled to adhere to the Department’s advice, even while privately chaffing at the bit. […]

Historically, the pardon advisory function has been housed in the Department entirely as a matter of administrative convenience … Whatever utility this arrangement once had, the structural deficiencies in the existing advisory system have rendered it dysfunctional.

There is, of course, also a political hesitation on the part of the president to use his discretionary power in a way that could be perceived as improperly influenced, which is all the more reason why the system for uniform recommendations must be reformed. With the U.S. holding the title of the world’s highest incarceration rate, the last thing our executive should be doing is granting increasingly less mercy.

California voters did not abolish the state’s death penalty Tuesday night, but they overwhelmingly passed another ballot initiative that may have an even greater impact on the state’s criminal justice system. With the passage of Proposition 36, state residents voted to ease what is known as the “three-strikes law” — thought to have been the harshest of its kind in the country. The original law required judges to sentence third-time offenders who have committed two violent or serious felonies to 25-year-to-life convictions for any felony, regardless of its severity. The Mercury News explains:

The measure, which passed handily by more than a 20 percentage-point margin, revises the Three Strikes Law to impose a life sentence only under two circumstances — when the new felony conviction is “serious or violent,” or for a minor felony crime if the perpetrator is a murderer, rapist or child molester. Under the existing Three Strikes law, only California, out of 24 states with similar laws, allows the third strike to be any felony.

As a result, offenders who have committed such relatively minor third strikes as stealing a pair of socks, attempting to break into a soup kitchen for food, or forging a check for $146 at Nordstrom have been sentenced to life in prison.

The new measure also enables some prisoners who have already been sentenced to apply for early release. More than 4,000 Californians are now serving life sentences under the three-strikes law, 2,000 of those for having committed a minor offense such as possession of a small amount of drugs or petty theft, according to Human Rights Watch. The law is estimated to benefit about 3,000 prisoners, or about a third of those incarcerated for three-strikes offenses.

The vote comes 18 years after the original harsh law was passed by ballot initiative, and times have changed since then. Now, the state is facing prison overcrowding so severe that the U.S. Supreme Court deemed the state’s prison conditions unconstitutional in 2011. As the Los Angeles Times points out, the state is banking on the fact that this initiative will get it closer to reaching its federally mandated prison cap, but not close enough to meet the target by the July deadline. The state has continued to argue that it can find other ways to make its prisons constitutionally adequate, in part by opening a new prison hospital intended to improve access to scant medical care. This is a humane step for prisoners, but one that neither decreases costs nor curbs the mass detention that has earned the United States the highest incarceration rate in the world. More reforms like Proposition 36 that limit excessive sentences for minor nonviolent crimes would accomplish both.