After Florida voters had to spend up to seven hours waiting to vote last Tuesday, Gov. Rick Scott (R) and the Republican-legislature have come under heavy criticism for their efforts to suppress the vote. But while much of the focus has been on their unconstitutional restrictions on voter registration and their reductions in early voting, Florida officials note another major factor behind the long lines: 11 lengthy state Constitutional amendments.

Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher told ThinkProgress that the length of the ballot played a huge role in the slow-moving lines on election day and during early voting. The six-page ballot, she noted, took voters “30 to 45 minutes” for voters to read and comprehend. “There were 11 amendments and no one knew what they were,” she observed, noting that one voter took two hours in a poll booth. With such a long ballot, the lines moved slowly. “Our last voter, the Saturday early voting ended, was at 2:30 in the morning,” Bucher said, adding, “It’s atrocious someone had to wait 7 hours.”

The amendments — mostly defeated by the voters — dealt with implementation of Obamacare, restrictions on abortion rights, and allowing public funding for religious institutions. All were placed there by the Republican-controlled Florida legislature and many could have been accomplished by legislative action.

Two Florida state representatives told ThinkProgress they believe the larger than usual number of ballot initiatives were part of an intentional strategy aimed precisely at creating long lines and discouraging citizens from voting.

State Rep. Perry Thurston, the incoming House Democratic Leader, said:

Without a doubt it was intentional. The items in those amendments were not items that needed to be placed in our constitution. Such a long ballot that requires so much reading, you see so many of them were defeated. That, along with the cutting back on the days for early voting, the hours. You could just see it coming and it was gonna be turmoil. … It clearly was [the Republican majority's] intention to make it more difficult, and to discourage individuals. There is no way people should be waiting six to seven hours, but four to five hours is too long as well. It’s a sad reflection on our state when you require that kind of time to do something that’s not a privilege but a right.

Rep. Mark S. Pafford (D), agreed that the amendments were designed to slow down voting:

Basically what they did was load up the ballot so more people would have to take time either reading through or standing in lines of five to six hours in Palm Beach County— and make a decision after a long wait. I don’t think there’s any question that what occurred was designed to suppress voters in FL. … We had amendments – the ballot was full of things that, during the holidays, you don’t talk about at home. Religion and politics.

Pafford said that he believes that the amendments were designed to bring out voters in conservative counties — and keep them away, in more populous Democratic counties. “I knew what was on the ballot very well,” he added, “and I took probably 10 minutes to make sure I wasn’t putting an arrow somewhere I shouldn’t have put it.”

At least one state senator all-but-admitted that voter suppression was a priority for the Republican majority. Sen. Mike Bennett (R) said last year that voting should be a more difficult process: “I wouldn’t have any problem making it harder. I would want them to vote as badly as I want to vote. I want the people of the state of Florida to want to vote as bad as that person in Africa who’s willing to walk 200 miles…This should not be easy.”

For the second time this year, Justice Sonia Sotomayor appeared on Sesame Street. Yet while her first appearance provided fairly tame moral guidance to the show’s young viewers — that there are two sides to every case and that people should work together to solve their disagreements — her latest trip to Sesame Street provides far more of a window into the justice’s life and the kind of America she aspires to live in.

Strong egalitarian and feminist notes underlie Sotomayor’s appearance, which is framed as a conversation between the nation’s first Latina justice and the child fairy character Abby Cadabby about what it means to have a career. When Abby asks Sotomayor “what kind of job can a girl like me have?” Sotomayor responds that she can “go to school and train to be a teacher, a lawyer, a doctor, an engineer and even a scientist.” Yet the most important exchange comes when Abby initially tells the justice that she “wants a career as a princess.” No, Sotomayor explains, a career is a job that you “train for and prepare for, and plan on doing for a long time.” Watch it:

A person cannot earn royalty — they can only be born or marry into it. Sotomayor’s dialogue with Abby is a reminder that we do not live in that country. Or, at least, that America aspires to be far more. The fact that it comes less that a week after America narrowly chose a self-made man over the millionaire CEO former governor son of a millionaire CEO former governor makes this reminder all the more important.

Yet Sotomayor’s trip to Sesame Street is also more personal. As a child growing up in a Bronx housing project, the young Sotomayor was as far as one can be from being a princess. Yet she became one of the most accomplished and powerful people in the country because, in her own words, she “went to school and studied long and then became a judge.”

This is, of course, an oversimplification. No one becomes a federal judge, much less a Supreme Court justice, without a deep understanding of politics, powerful benefactors, and a good deal of luck. Sotomayor also glosses over many of the sad realities of our education system, where a child who grows up in a poor school district too often enters adulthood at a disadvantage no matter now hard they focused on their studies. Indeed, Sotomayor herself had to spend her summers “reading children’s classics she had missed in a Spanish-speaking home and ‘re-teaching’ herself to write ‘proper English’ by reading elementary grammar books” even after she matriculated at Princeton University. Her predecessors on the Supreme Court bear much of the blame for these inequalities, and it may someday fall upon Sotomayor and four of her colleagues to fix them.

So her advice to Abby is more aspirational than it is a comprehensive guide to how a child watching PBS today can be a Supreme Court justice when they grow up, but it is also a far more powerful message for the child growing up in the south Bronx today than the “work out your differences” message of her first Sesame Street appearance. The children left to languish in inadequate schools by the forty year old decision in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, which ruled that poor children are not constitutionally entitled to the same education as rich children, can do little now to fix the systemic injustices that plague our education system. Nevertheless, Sotomayor is telling those children that every time they aim high and study hard, they choose an America where you do not have to be a princess to be prominent — and that they should decide now to do their part in building that country.

Until five members of her Court are willing to reconsider Rodriguez, that may be the best that she can offer them.

After President Obama cleaned house among Latino voters last week, Republicans are already considering how they can reach out to this growing demographic that showed little interest in what the GOP was selling this election cycle. Polling data from the state of Texas, where Latino Republican Sen-elect Ted Cruz was on the ballot, suggests that Republicans will not be able to close this gap simply by running Hispanic candidates. Although there is no exit polling from Texas in the 2012 election, polling data from Latino Decisions indicates that Texas Latinos overwhelmingly favored Cruz’ opponent:

Although Cruz did outperform GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney among Latinos, Cruz actually performed slightly worse among Latinos than white Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) did in 2008 — when Cornyn received 36 percent of the Latino vote.

The likely lesson of these results is that candidates such as Cruz or Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) do not possess a magic wand that can vanish away the Republican Party’s electability problem. If Republicans want to attract Latino voters, they will need to do so by embracing policies that Latinos actually want to see enacted.

Last week, Los Angeles voters approved Measure B, which requires adult film stars to wear condoms during sex scenes. Shortly after the measure passed, a trade group supporting the porn industry announced their intention to sue to have it struck down. According to a letter from the industry-affiliated Free Speech Coalition, “[w]e believe that the law is not only unconstitutional on the grounds of forced expression, but also falls within the jurisdiction of the state of California rather than local government. Therefore, we will file suit and challenge this intolerable law in court.”

As Antonio Haynes points out, the legal arguments backing this lawsuit are not implausible. To the extent that the ballot measure is understood as a restriction on adult filmmaker’s expression — as opposed to being viewed as a workplace safety regulation — the First Amendment does not often look kindly upon attempts to ban certain kinds of expression. Ultimately, however, the fate of the law may rest upon a factual disagreement between the law’s supporters and the adult film industry. Haynes claims that the porn industry’s existing testing regime is so effective that “rates of [STD] infection appear to be smaller in the adult film industry than in the population at large.” Meanwhile, a forthcoming study in the Journal of Sexually Transmitted Diseases found that “roughly a third of the 168 adult film actors who participated in the research project were found to have a previously undiagnosed STD.”

To the extent that the ballot measure can be justified as a relatively unintrusive way to cure a genuine public health problem, it is much more likely to survive constitutional scrutiny.

The Hill reports that Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) is expected to take over the chairmanship of the House Judiciary Committee in January, replacing Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) who will lose his gavel due to term limits. Goodlatte is a hardliner on immigration who is expected to oppose immigration reform bills that fall under his committee’s jurisdiction, and he also embraces a far right “tenther” vision of the Constitution that would render most of what the United States government does unconstitutional. Indeed, in a town hall meeting in 2011, the incoming House Judiciary Chair claimed that Medicare and Social Security both violate the Constitution.

As video of the town hall meeting reveals, Goodlatte called these landmark programs unconstitutional in response to a question from a constituent regarding a chart Goodlatte displayed breaking down federal spending:

CONSTITUENT: I have three points I’d like you to elaborate on if you could. I’ve searched my Constitution for 20 years and I can’t find Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security in there. Those are forced on the American people by the courts. Now, we’ve all accepted that and American people have bought into that, but it’s unconstitutional simple as that, to me, I can’t find it –

GOODLATTE: Well, it’s not in the Constitution. The courts have stretched the Constitution to say its in the general welfare clause.

Just in case there was any ambiguity to Goodlatte’s understanding of our founding document, he reiterated his belief that Medicare and Social Security are unconstitutional in a later exchange with a different constituent:

CONSTITUENT: Everything that the federal government does on that pie chart is unconstitutional [...] If I violated my marriage contract the way the federal government violates the Constitution I’d be in divorce court tomorrow!

GOODLATTE: I hope you’re not. Here’s the deal. You’re absolutely right! But you have one problem, the Supreme Court ruling that these programs are constitutional.

Watch both exchanges:

To be fair to Goodlatte, he later states that it would not be practical to “just say we’re throwing out Medicare because its unconstitutional,” but this does little to change the fact that the man House Republicans want to place in charge of constitutional matters does not have even the most basic understanding of the Constitution. As ThinkProgress previously explained, The Constitution gives Congress the power to “to lay and collect taxes” and to “provide for the . . . general welfare of the United States.” There is no plausible interpretation of the words “general welfare” that does not include programs that ensure that all Americans can live their entire lives secure in the understanding that retirement will not force them into poverty and untreated sickness.

Moreover, Goodlatte’s constitutional objections to Medicare and Social Security are not his only admission that he does not understand the Constitution as written. In January of 2011 he was asked whether he believes the federal minimum wage is constitutional. He said that he did not know.

Citing a misreading of the U.S. Constitution and overblown fears of a collapsing U.S. currency, Montana State Rep. Jerry O’Neil (R) claims that he should be paid his legislative salary in gold and silver:

In a letter sent to Montana Legislative Services this week, O’Neil cites Article 1, Section 10 of the U.S. Constitution, which states in part that no state shall “make anything but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts.”

He said that in his 10 years as a legislator, he considered it a “trivial matter” and he “did not want to be branded as a fanatic over an issue of no consequence.” But now he says he is looking at the value of the dollar “in a new light.” . . .

In his letter, O’Neil points out that he does not want to be paid at the face value of $50 American Eagle gold coins or $1 silver American Eagle coins. He stipulates that he should be paid at their market values, currently $1,801 for the gold coin and $35.28 for the silver coin.

“Let’s say I made $1,800 in a month. They could give one gold American Eagle” or multiple silver American Eagles, he said.

Fears that the U.S. dollar is caught in a spiral of disastrous inflation are common among the tea party fringe, as are similar claims that the way to defend against such inflation is to horde gold and silver. Indeed, these misguided fears are widespread enough that scam gold dealers, such as Goldline, allegedly take advantage of them by selling overpriced gold to tea partiers and others gripped by false fears of inflation. In reality, inflation is currently both very low and quite stable — and it is well below the rate of inflation under most of President Reagan’s two terms.

Additionally, O’Neil’s reading of America’s founding document is constitutional gobbledygook. The Constitution does indeed provide that “No state shall . . . coin money; emit bills of credit [or] make anything but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts,” a provision intended to prevent the states from printing their own paper currencies, but the key words in this constitutional provision are “no state shall.” Nothing prevents the federal government from printing currency which, as anyone who has ever read the front of a dollar bill knows, is “legal tender for all debts, public and private.” That includes the salaries Montana pays its lawmakers.