Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) signed a law cutting early voting days in what was widely viewed as an effort to frustrate voters who tend to vote both early and Democratic from casting a ballot. Indeed, in the wake of the six hour voting lines created by Rick Scott’s law, several Republicans openly admitted that the goal of Scott’s changes to Florida voting law was to prevent Democrats — and, in particular, African-American Democrats — from casting a vote.

Immediately after election day, Scott was unapologetic for the lines his policy caused, claiming that he “did the right thing” by standing against early voting. Since then, his polling numbers have cratered, with 52 percent of Floridians saying he does not deserve a second term. So Scott decided to hum a different tune in an interview with CNN’s Soledad O’Brien this morning — suggesting that the long lines were somehow someone else’s fault:

SCOTT: We got to go back and look at the number of days of early voting we have.

O’BRIEN: There’s some people who said you could have extended early voting. I mean, I guess I’m asking how much of blame do you hold in this — do you hold yourself accountable for? Because there are people who blamed you, very vociferously frankly, for not extending early voting . . . .

SCOTT: Well Soledad, you know, I complied with the law. We had an election bill that was passed, um, my first year in office by the legislature. It was approved by the Justice Department. So I complied with the law.

Watch it:

Of course, the anti-voting law that Scott supposedly “complied” with was not simply passed by the Florida legislature. It was also signed into law — by Rick Scott! If Scott objected to suppressing the early vote, he could have demonstrated that fact by vetoing this law instead.

Later in the interview, Scott admits that “we do need change,” and he calls for a “bipartisan” plan to restore confidence in his state’s elections. If he is serious about this, State Sens. Arthenia Joyner (D-FL) and Gwen Margolis (D-FL) already have a bill he can endorse. Their bill would reinstate two full weeks of early voting days and would require 12 hours of early voting per weekday and 12 hours total on weekends.

Since the tragic shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, gun advocates have, by and large, wisely kept out of the spotlight. Even the National Rifle Association, hardly a bastion of liberal thinking, was self-aware enough to temporarily suspend their social media accounts and exercise restraint before finally issuing a statement four days after the tragedy.

The Asheville Tea Party has no such moral quandaries. On Monday, the group posted a flyer for a fundraiser they are calling “The Great Gun Giveaway.” They link back to a donate page where supporters can enter for a chance to win one of two semi-automatic guns, a .22 magnum handgun and an AR-15 assault rifle with two 30-round clips.

If that second gun sounds at all familiar, it’s probably because the same gun was used in Newtown to murder 20 children and six others less than a week ago.

Only after word of the gun raffle began circulating on social media sites did the group post a letter in response to charges of insensitivity and disrespect for the dead — many of whom have yet to be buried. But rather than reschedule their fundraiser or even offer an apology for their poor timing, the chair of the group’s PAC instead defended the raffle and argued for introducing more guns into public schools:

We have given the Federal Government permission to disarm school officials by force of law and threat of imprisonment. They are now incapable of defending the children under their care. This is the reality. Does this not need to be changed?…ATPAC decided to go through with this raffle at this time because everyone is paying attention. We refuse to allow the Left and the Liberal mindset to once again hijack the conversation as they have and allow the political hacks to pass laws that continue to limit our inalienable right to protect ourselves and the most defenseless among us.

If in fact gun control advocates are able to pass legislation to help keep military-grade assault rifles out of Kindergarteners’ classrooms, it will hardly be a continuation of any kind. During the first four years of President Obama’s administration, gun owners have actually seen a steady increase in their ability to purchase, carry, and conceal handguns and gun manufacturers have sold more weapons than any other time in U.S history.

The Asheville Tea Party has a history of inflammatory rhetoric, previously comparing President Obama to Hitler, sounding the alarm over the impending threat of Sharia law, and advocating for nullification, the thoroughly debunked and unconstitutional theory that a state can simply decide to ignore federal law within its borders.

In a report suggesting that Senate Democrats are likely to have the 51 votes necessary to reform the filibuster next month, Ryan Grim reports that Senate Majority Leader Reid (D-NV) has embraced an important reform to prevent obstruction of judicial and other nominees. According to Grim, Reid, “wants to streamline the nomination process, and cut out some of the time it takes to move judges through by limiting debate once a filibuster has been defeated.”

This is a significant addition to the package of reforms Reid already endorsed, which include eliminating the minority’s ability to filibuster the same bill more than once and requiring a senator to speak on the floor in order to maintain a filibuster. Under current Senate rules, the minority can force up to 30 hours of floor time to be wasted even after a supermajority of the Senate votes to break a filibuster on a nominee. When multiplied across the many hundreds of nominees the Senate must confirm, these 30 hours of wasted time allow the minority to bring the Senate to a virtual standstill.

Of course, it remains to be seen just how deeply Reid is willing to cut these 30 hours — in an ideal world, he will embrace Sen. Jeff Merkley’s (D-OR) suggestion to eliminate all of them. Nevertheless, the fact that Reid appears to be on board with cutting short these 30 hours of waste is a significant positive development in the negotiations over filibuster reform.

A Florida man defended his decision to shoot an impatient pizza customer over the weekend, citing the state’s infamous “Stand Your Ground” law.

Michael Jock, a 52-year-old resident of St. Petersburg, was standing in line behind 49-year-old Randall White at a local Little Caesars on Sunday when Jock grew angry over White’s complaints about the speed of service. The two began to shove one another, prompting Jock to pull out a .38 Taurus Ultralight Special Revolver that had been concealed on his person and fire twice, hitting White both times in the lower torso.

The Tampa Bay Times has more:

After the shooting, both men went outside and waited for police. Jock told officers the shooting was justified under “stand your ground,” [police spokesman Mike] Puetz said.

“He felt he was in his rights,” Puetz said. “He brought it up specifically and cited it to the officer.”

He told officers he feared for his life. He mentioned that he thought White had an object in his hand, then backed off that when officers pressed him. Florida’s “stand your ground law” says people are not required to retreat before using deadly force.

Police, however, disagreed with Jock’s interpretation of the law and arrested him on charges of aggravated battery and firing a weapon within a building.

The Stand Your Ground law that Jock referenced came under intense scrutiny this year after George Zimmerman invoked it to justify his shooting of teenager Trayvon Martin. Multiple studies have found that Stand Your Ground laws increase the number of homicides in a state. Still, such laws are a crown jewel for the National Rifle Association, which has been working tirelessly for years to spread them from state to state.

Over two years, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have deported more than 200,000 undocumented immigrants whose children are U.S. citizens, according to data obtained by Colorlines. That number accounts for 23 percent of all deportations between July 1, 2010, and Sept. 31, 2012. And the number of parents who are deported has remained roughly the same since Congress required ICE to track the number of parental deportations, despite “prosecutorial discretion” guidelines from 2011 to prioritize the deportations of people with serious criminal convictions over mothers and fathers:

The guidelines, released on June 17, 2011, in a memo from ICE director John Morton, instructed ICE agents to focus deportation efforts on people with serious criminal convictions, those picked up crossing the border into the U.S., and those who had previously been deported from the country.

The memo also ordered agents making deportation decisions to weigh “the person’s ties and contributions to the community, including family relationships,” and “whether the person has a U.S. citizen or permanent resident spouse, child, or parent.”

In answer to questions about the parental deportation data, ICE officials told Colorlines.com the continued pace of deportations does not reflect a failure to implement prosecutorial discretion, because most deported parents have other factors weighing against them.

“Evaluation of this data in the past has repeatedly shown that the overwhelming majority of these individuals have significant criminal and/or immigration histories placing them within ICE’s enforcement priorities,” wrote agency spokesperson Gillian Christensen in an emailed statement, “therefore making them ineligible for an exercise of prosecutorial discretion.”

“We are in a crisis situation in which we need to start taking action immediately to prevent these needless and often-times permanent separations of American children from their families,” Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-CA) told Colorlines. Roybal-Allard introduced a bill last year to protect the parental rights of parents who have been detained and deported. According to a 2011 report by the Applied Research Center, at least 5,100 U.S. citizen children are stuck in the foster care after a parent was deported. Within five years, researchers estimate that number could triple to 15,000 at the current rate of deportations.

If there were fewer women and more “male aggression” in Sandy Hook Elementary School, the massacre there never would have taken place, according to a contribution to a leading conservative magazine.

National Review, whose in-house editorial suggested Newtown was the price of the Second Amendment, published a piece on Wednesday from anti-feminist Charlotte Allen suggesting the reason the shooter was able to kill so many students was because Newtown was a “feminized setting:”

There was not a single adult male on the school premises when the shooting occurred. In this school of 450 students, a sizeable number of whom were undoubtedly 11- and 12-year-old boys (it was a K–6 school), all the personnel — the teachers, the principal, the assistant principal, the school psychologist, the “reading specialist” — were female. There didn’t even seem to be a male janitor to heave his bucket at Adam Lanza’s knees. Women and small children are sitting ducks for mass-murderers. The principal, Dawn Hochsprung, seemed to have performed bravely. According to reports, she activated the school’s public-address system and also lunged at Lanza, before he shot her to death. Some of the teachers managed to save all or some of their charges by rushing them into closets or bathrooms. But in general, a feminized setting is a setting in which helpless passivity is the norm. Male aggression can be a good thing, as in protecting the weak — but it has been forced out of the culture of elementary schools and the education schools that train their personnel. Think of what Sandy Hook might have been like if a couple of male teachers who had played high-school football, or even some of the huskier 12-year-old boys, had converged on Lanza.

Via Jessica Valenti, who notes that this is extraordinarily “disrespectful to the female teachers and staff at Sandy Hook. Allen mentions their heroism as an anomalous aside rather than exceptional bravery that saved lives. The bravery of the women in Newtown – principal Dawn Hochsprung and psychologist Mary Sherlach who rushed the shooter before being killed, teacher Victoria Soto who died protecting her students, Kaitlin Roig and Abbey Clements who hid their students and calmed them – is remarkable.”

Allen went on to blame Lanza’s mother, saying “You simply can’t give a non-working, non-school-enrolled 20-year-old man free range of your home, much less your cache of weapons…Unfortunately, the idea of being an ‘adult’ and a ‘man’ once one has reached physical maturity seems to have faded out of our coddling culture.”

A Tennessee county with a history of discriminatory juvenile lock-ups that a 2009 Department of Justice report called unconstitutional has reached an agreement with the DOJ to deemphasize detention of youths and instead build up rehabilitation programs.

The agreement, the first to address a juvenile court system that the DOJ hopes will become a model for other counties, comes as more reports emerge of schools criminalizing student discipline and funneling predominantly minority students into the criminal justice system. In Shelby County, Tenn., black children are more than twice as likely to be detained than white children, and once detained, they were most likely to receive more serious sanctions and adult sentences for minor offenses. The New York Times explains:

Black or white, teenagers locked up by the county attempted suicide at record rates and were sometimes strapped to deep, wide restraint chairs and left alone up to five times longer than the law allowed.

They languished over long weekends without proper hearings, were not read their Miranda rights and received crucial court documents just before hearings, if they received them at all, investigators found.

“What we saw was an assembly line with very little quality assurance,” said Tom Perez, an assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s civil rights division.

Nationwide, the number of juvenile delinquency cases has dropped significantly since 1997 from 1.9 million to 1.5 million. The drop, however, has occurred disproportionately, with a 20 percent decrease for whites and a decline of less than 3 percent for blacks. What’s more, incidents of abuse for those that are detained have continued. Just last week, a Florida prison guard was videotaped for the third time in recent memory viciously assaulting a 15-year-old inmate. In Meridian, Miss., the DOJ is suing to address incarceration for offenses as minor as school dress code violations. And many detention facilities continue to hold youths as young as 13 in solitary confinement for weeks or months at a time.

A day after Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) said he would be open to arming school faculty, a state legislator is taking the idea a step further. Virginia Delegate Bob Marshall (R) has submitted a bill that would not only permit faculty to bring concealed guns into schools, but would require schools have armed staff.

The Washington Post reports:

Marshall’s proposal goes beyond the governor’s comments, which were made in the course of a radio interview Tuesday. Marshall would not only allow staff with concealed handgun permits to carry them in schools, but require school districts to designate some staff members to do so. Those employees would have to be certified in gun safety and competence, Marshall said.

Marshall told the Richmond Times Dispatch, “I’ll bet there are people who have concealed-carry permits in most every school in the commonwealth. They’d be the ones to volunteer to get certified.”

While a growing list of pro-gun lawmakers have indicated that they will reconsider gun control in the wake of Friday’s tragedy, some are using the tragedy to push for even more guns. McDonnell, Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) and Republican legislators in Oklahoma, Nevada, and South Dakota have embracing the idea of arming adults in schools.

Virginia Senate Minority Leader Richard Saslaw strongly objected to McDonnell’s suggestion, saying, “And when that fails to stop this, what’s next? Arm the students? If teachers wanted to carry guns in order to do their day job, they would have become policemen.”

President Obama on Wednesday morning announced a new White House task force aimed at discovering solutions to allay the epidemic of gun violence in the United States.

The commission, which will be headed up by Vice President Joe Biden, must come up with “concrete solutions” by January, Obama said Wednesday. He went on to praise Biden for proposing the assault weapons ban in 1994. He also mentioned background checks as an area for improvement.

During the speech, Obama called on political leaders to show “one tiny iota of courage those teachers in Newtown summoned on Friday.”

“If there is even one thing we can do to prevent any of these events,” Obama said. “we have a deep obligation — all of us — to try.” :

This time the words need to lead to actions. We know this is a complex issue that stirs deeply-held passions and political divides… We’re going to need to work on making access to mental healthcare at least as easy as getting access to a gun.. Any actions we must take must begin inside the home and inside our hearts. But the fact that this problem is complex cannot be an excuse for doing nothing.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney indicated on Tuesday that the President would entertain the idea of reviving the assault weapons ban, closing the gun show loophole, and limiting high-capacity ammunition clips.

This commission is hopefully the first step toward new policy proposals, which may go hand-in-hand with measures being proposed in both the House and Senate by long-time gun control advocates.

Salt Lake City’s NBC affiliate, which is operated by the Mormon Church-owned company Deseret Digital Media, announced last night that it would temporarily stop listing classified ads for gun sales. According to a statement published on the website,

Like everyone else in the country, the management of KSL is profoundly saddened by the tragedy in Connecticut. In the wake of this and other similar incidents, important questions have been raised about the ease of access to guns. These questions deserve time for careful consideration and we are confident that an appropriate resolution will be found. Accordingly, KSL has temporarily suspended firearms listings on KSL.com classifieds. We recognize that this may inconvenience responsible citizens who have used this service, but we feel this is an important step while these broader societal issues are examined.

Robert Bork, the hard right former judge and failed Reagan Supreme Court nominee, has died. Despite coming just eight senators’ votes away from the Supreme Court, Bork quickly faded into obscurity after his failed confirmation vote. He resigned his seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit shortly after losing his shot to sit on the Supreme Court, and then reemerged into the public eye only occasionally to publish books with Biblical titles such as The Tempting of America or Slouching Towards Gomorrah.

There are many reasons why Bork was clearly ill-suited to the Supreme Court, but he was also an intellectual giant with a keen understanding of both political and judicial process. At his best, Bork was a voice for the kind of judicial restraint that conservatives all but abandoned the minute President Obama took office. Progressives will find little to like in Slouching Towards Gomorrah — which is, at it’s heart, a rejection of cultural modernity — but Bork is right to warn in that book against an ideology that “think[s] democracy is tyranny and government by judges is freedom.” Bork intended those words as an attack on social liberals, but they aptly describe the kind of conservatism that would declare Obamacare unconstitutional.

At times, Bork was even willing to direct his calls for judicial restraint at the decisions most beloved by the far right. Lochner v. New York, the 1905 decision which held that basic laws intended to protect workers are unconstitutional, is experiencing a renaissance among the conservative legal movement’s most ideological thinkers, but Bork wanted no part of it. He called Lochner an “abomination” that “lives in the law as the symbol, indeed the quintessence of judicial usurpation of power.”

Similarly, in 1983, at a time when Republicans were ascendant and eager to write their policy preferences into our founding document, Bork penned a thoughtful essay warning that a Balanced Budget Amendment would do little more than transfer power to a judicial branch that was poorly-equipped to set budget policy. As Bork explained, the result of such an amendment “would likely be hundreds, if not thousands, of lawsuits around the country, many of them on inconsistent theories and providing inconsistent results. By the time the Supreme Court straightened the whole matter out, the budget in question would be at least four years out of date and lawsuits involving the next three fiscal years would be slowly climbing toward the Supreme Court.” The 234 members of the House who voted for much more intense version of the same amendment would have done well to listen to Bork’s counsel.

Bork came of age at a time when liberal judges dominated the courts. He spent the formative years of his career watching the Supreme Court hand down decisions that he hates — and, lest there be any doubt, the targets of his ire vindicate the bipartisan coalition of senators who kept him off the high Court. Bork once said the federal ban on employment discrimination and whites-only lunch counters is rooted in a “principle of unsurpassed ugliness.” He called a Supreme Court decision holding that married couples have a right to contraception “utterly specious” and a “time bomb.” And he recently called the very idea that gender discrimination exists “silly,” adding that women “aren’t discriminated against anymore.”

And yet, Bork’s early years taught him a healthy caution against a too-powerful judiciary. Today’s conservatives, by contrast, have only known one thing — an ideological Supreme Court eager to achieve the conservative movement’s goals from the bench. So they have always seen overreaching judges as their allies. There is a lot not to like about Robert Bork’s record, but America would be a better place if modern conservatives recognized what Bork did — that the courts are a terrible place to push your economic agenda.

According to an official complaint filed by the Georgia Commission on Judicial Qualifications, state trial Judge J. William Bass, Sr. is a disaster of a judge. The eleven count complaint accuses Judge Bass of routinely singling out Hispanic defendants for private conversations “without a court reporter or the prosecutor present.” Judge Bass allegedly appointed his own son to serve as a county judge in his absence. He is accused of telling “the audience that [he] had been falsely accused of having a sexual relationship with a member of [his] staff” during open court. He allegedly once made an “inappropriate reference based upon [his] perceived sexual orientation” of a male defendant during a sentencing proceeding. And then, there is this accusation:

In court, you were verbally hostile to an attorney after he made a financial contribution to your opponent in the election. You made a loud and threatening statement in court to the attorney: “l know you gave money to my opponent. Don’t come back[.]“

The fact that Judge Bass is the subject of an official complaint suggests that he may actually suffer consequences if the allegations against him prove true. Nevertheless, judges who engage in inappropriate conduct regarding their donors often suffer few, if any, consequences. Former Texas Supreme Court Justice Priscilla Owen took thousands of dollars worth of campaign contributions from Enron and then wrote a key opinion reducing Enron’s taxes by $15 million. Several years later, President George W. Bush gave her a lifetime appointment to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Similarly, when a West Virginia coal baron spent $3 million to place a sympathetic justice on the state supreme court, and that justice then went on to overturn a $50 million verdict against the coal baron’s company, four of the current Supreme Court justices joined a dissent finding no constitutional problem with this judge-for-sale arrangement.