Unlicensed drivers are three times more likely to cause a fatal car crash compared to licensed drivers, according to a new report from the California Department of Motor Vehicles. And requiring drivers to pass a written test and driving test before they can obtain licenses plays a major rule in reducing traffic fatalities. In California, where the majority of unlicensed drivers are undocumented, this is reviving the debate about whether or not undocumented immigrants should be able to apply for driver’s licenses:

Immigrant rights groups say that granting such licenses would reduce fatalities and costly uninsured motorist claims. Insurance companies paid out $634 million in claims for collisions related to uninsured motorists in 2009, according to the most recent data from the state.

It “really goes against public safety because the current law forces people who would otherwise be properly licensed to drive without one,” said Angela Sanbrano, board president for the Central American Resource Center in Los Angeles. [...]

The DMV report looked at 23 years of data on fatal accidents. Its conclusions were similar to the last such report in 1997, which looked at accident data from 1987 to 1992. The latest report was also the first analysis since a 1994 change in the state law that required all licensed drivers show proof of legal residency, which significantly increased the number of unlicensed drivers.

Maria Galvan, a 42-year-old undocumented immigrant living in Los Angeles, told the Los Angeles Times that she continues to drive without a license because she has to get to work and take her children to school. “We need driver’s licenses to be comfortable and be trusted and follow the law,” she said.

There are roughly 2 million unlicensed drivers in the state, compared to 24 million licensed drivers. Previous legislative efforts to allow undocumented immigrants to apply for driver’s licenses failed, but the Los Angeles Times points out that the issue might be gaining support. For the 2013 legislative session, one Democratic member of the state assembly has introduced a bill to allow anyone who can prove they pay taxes to apply for a driver’s license, regardless of their immigration status. Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck and L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca previously have said they would support a measure like that.

Last fall, Gov. Jerry Brown (D-CA) signed a bill allowing young undocumented immigrants who are granted temporary legal status under a deferred action policy President Obama announced in June 2012. Sixteen other states have also agreed to allow deferred action beneficiaries to apply for driver’s licenses, but at least six states are preventing them from becoming licensed drivers.

In 1981, the Republican National Committee allegedly engaged in an illegal campaign to intimidate minority voters, in some cases even enlisting armed, off-duty law enforcement as part of a “National Ballot Security Task Force.” The RNC eventually settled the lawsuit by agreeing to several conditions, including a promise that they would “refrain from undertaking any ballot security activities in polling places or election districts” for the purpose of targeting voters by race and discouraging them from voting.

Last year, a federal appeals court rejected the RNC’s request to lift this ban on voter intimidation. Under the lower courts’ decisions, the anti-intimidation order will remain in effect until at least 2017. The Supreme Court turned down the RNC’s petition to review this case Monday. Thus the Republicans will likely remain subject to the order’s ban on voter intimidation for at least one more presidential election cycle.

Although the RNC remained subject to this court order last November, other Republican Party groups actively partnered with Tea Party organizations to target African-American neighborhoods for anti-voter fraud witchhunts. Similarly, the Tea Party group True The Vote encouraged its members to circumvent the court order by engaging in voter suppression tactics independently of the Republican Party.

Gov. Rick Snyder (R) signed a bill this week that authorizes Michigan to contract with private prison operators, and to re-open a now-vacant state facility run by a corporation that has been accused of enabling juvenile abuse, deaths, and riots at its facilities.

The Michigan facility was operated by GEO Group until 2005 as a juvenile detention center, which an investigative report found had high rates of serious incidents like assaults and suicide attempts. After the state closed the facility because it was losing money, GEO Group invested even more resources into its vacant prison:

After Michigan canceled the contract in 2005, GEO Group continued to try to fill the prison and recoup costs. Beginning in 2008, the company embarked on a $60 million plan to expand the prison from 500 beds to more than 1,700 — even though there were no prisoners. [...]

In 2010, California signed a deal with GEO to send more than 2,500 prisoners to the Michigan facility. But less than a year later, the state reversed course and asked for its inmates back — part of a California prison realignment plan that brought out-of-state inmates home.

Beginning in late 2011, legislators in Michigan started introducing bills that would allow the GEO Group to house state prisoners again. According to state lobbying records, the GEO Group spent nearly $30,000 lobbying during the first half of last year, a more than tenfold increase from the same time period a year before. One of the company’s lobbyists is Rick Johnson, a former speaker of the Michigan House.

The new law was among a spate of eleventh-hour bills quietly pushed through the Michigan legislature during its lame-duck session in December. It authorizes only those private prison contracts that save the state at least ten percent. But the GEO Group facility initially shut down because the facility was actually costing the state too much due to a so-called “shortage of maximum security prisoners.”

GEO Group has since expanded the size of its vacant Michigan facility, further incentivizing it to lobby for policies that incarcerate more people and impose longer sentences. Studies in several other states have shown that privatized prisons actually end up costing the state more, even in states whose laws require savings for private prison contracts.

In Michigan, there are several now-vacant prison facilities that are “mothballed” – maintained in working condition should the prison population go up. It is unclear whether the fixed cost of maintaining these vacant state facilities would even be considered in calculating the cost savings of contracting with a private prison.

Days before President Obama is even sworn in for his second term, some House Republicans are already starting to coalesce around a response: impeachment.

Earlier this week, Rep. Steve Stockman (R-TX) warned that he would introduce articles of impeachment against Obama if the president used executive actions to implement gun violence prevention measures. Now, Stockman’s threat is generating a following in the Republican Caucus.

Freshman Rep. Trey Radel (R-FL) spoke with Javier Manjarres of The Shark Tank, a Florida-based political blog, about a possible impeachment. Radel said he was amenable to the idea, saying that “All options should be on the table, undoubtedly.”

MANJARRES: Congressman Stockman said an interesting thing the other day. I don’t know if you agree with this. Is President Obama making the case for a possible impeachment? [...] Like you mentioned, he’s putting out all these executive orders and he’s overstepping his bounds. If he continues this, could that build up to make a case for possible impeachment?

RADEL: All options should be on the table, undoubtedly. It’s one of those times in our history. To be bipartisan for a second, the thing I would stress to Democrats and Republicans. Let’s say you’re a big fan of President Obama and you support everything that he’s doing and you don’t mind these executive orders and you want an executive order to ban guns, to take guns away, to raise the debt ceiling with unlimited amounts of spending or to ignore law. What I would say to Democrats who are friends of President Obama right now is ask yourself, what are you going to do when a Republican gets in that you may not agree with or like very much and begins doing the same thing. We have completely lost our checks and balances in this country.

Watch it:

Despite Radel’s fear-inducing claim, literally no one is proposing an executive order to “ban guns.” The 19 possible executive orders relating to gun safety are measures relating to enforcement of existing gun laws, research into gun violence trends, and sharing of databases. In addition, though Manjarres and Radel insist that the president has been rampantly issuing executive orders and undermining other laws, Obama has actually issued fewer executive orders than any other president in the last century.

This afternoon, after watching President Obama’s speech on preventing gun violence, Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) dismissed the administration’s proposals and suggested that only prayer can lower gun crime rates. Perry said Obama’s remarks “disgust” him and that, instead of responding to violence with new policies, we should “pray for our children.”

Perry’s remarks came in a press release on the official Governor’s website:

Guns require a finger to pull the trigger. The sad young man who did that in Newtown was clearly haunted by demons and no gun law could have saved the children in Sandy Hook Elementary from his terror.

There is evil prowling in the world – it shows up in our movies, video games and online fascinations, and finds its way into vulnerable hearts and minds. As a free people, let us choose what kind of people we will be. Laws, the only redoubt of secularism, will not suffice. Let us all return to our places of worship and pray for help. Above all, let us pray for our children.

In fact, the piling on by the political left, and their cohorts in the media, to use the massacre of little children to advance a pre-existing political agenda that would not have saved those children, disgusts me, personally. The second amendment to the Constitution is a basic right of free people and cannot be nor will it be abridged by the executive power of this or any other president.

Contrary to Perry’s suggestion, the Constitution permits a broad range of gun safety measures. In the landmark Second Amendment case, Heller v. DC, Justice Scalia argued that the state can restrict ownership of “dangerous and unusual” weapons and that “nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”

Texas’ lax gun policies, as compared to nearby California, have caused a significant number of deaths along the Mexican border.

As he unveiled his comprehensive package of gun safety regulations on Wednesday afternoon, President Obama urged Americans to stand up to irrational opponents of restrictions on military-style weapons, noting that even President Ronald Reagan supported sensible restrictions on assault weapons. “And by the way, so did Ronald Reagan, one of the staunchest defenders of the Second Amendment, who wrote to Congress in 1994 urging them — this is Ronald Reagan speaking — urging them to listen to the American public and to the law enforcement community and support a ban on the further manufacture of military-style assault weapons,” Obama said.

Asked about Reagan’s position during an appearance on MSNBC shortly after Obama’s remarks, Erich Pratt of Gun Owners of America, suggested that Reagan only supported greater restrictions because he was senile:

ANDREA MITCHELL (HOST): What’s the problem with registering a gun? If you have a bushmaster, first of all, why would you have one?

PRATT: President Reagan owned an AR-15.

MITCHELL: And he supported gun control. He advocated…

PRATT: In his later years. We have to keep that in account.

MITCHELL: In his later years he was almost killed by John Hinckley.

PRATT: But all through his presidency he opposed gun control, that’s my point.

Watch it:

Reagan supported gun safety measures throughout his political career. In 1986, he signed into law the Firearm Owners Protection Act, which “banned ownership of any fully automatic rifles that were not already registered on the day the law was signed.” He later backed the Brady bill, expressing support for “a seven-day waiting period before a purchaser could take possession of a handgun, an even more stringent restriction than the five day cooling-off period that was included in the final legislation, and less stringent than the 15-day cooling-off period he signed into law as governor of California.”

President Obama introduced a comprehensive plan to tackle gun violence on Wednesday, surrounded by children who wrote to him after the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre. Rep. Steve Stockman (R-TX), who has already threatened to impeach Obama over his efforts, attacked Obama for inviting concerned children to his press conference.

Speaking with Fox News host Greta Van Susteren on Tuesday night, Stockman explained his intent to pursue impeachment if Obama tried to use executive orders to combat gun violence. Stockman ended the interview by comparing Obama’s “use” of children to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, a claim so absurd that even Van Susteren rejected it:

STOCKMAN: If he thinks his bills are good, his law is good, then he should go through Congress, not just issue it. He’s not a king.

VAN SUSTEREN: Well, we’ll find out tomorrow whether or not he’s going to do executive orders or whether or not he may ultimately seek to work with Congress on something.

STOCKMAN: He’s even using children. It reminds me of Saddam Hussein when he used kids.

VAN SUSTEREN: Uh, well that’s a little bit of a stretch, but anyway, Congressman, always nice to see you.

Watch it:

Since Sandy Hook, Republicans and pro-gun advocates have compared Obama to various dictators, including Hitler, Stalin, and Castro, while painting gun owners as civil rights heroes.

While the NRA has drawn widespread bipartisan criticism for its post-Newtown intransigence, its current opposition to virtually any gun safety measure also flies in the face of its positions from the late 1990s.

Days after the Columbine school shootings in 1999, the NRA made the controversial decision to hold its national convention in neighboring Denver, Colorado. At that convention, Executive Vice President and CEO Wayne LaPierre embraced some commonsense rules to prevent similar future tragedies.

1999	2013
Supported Gun Free Zones: “First, we believe in absolutely gun-free, zero-tolerance, totally safe schools. That means no guns in America’s schools, period … with the rare exception of law enforcement officers or trained security personnel.	Opposes Gun Free Zones: “Politicians pass laws for Gun-Free School Zones. They issue press releases bragging about them. They post signs advertising them. And in so doing, they tell every insane killer in America that schools are their safest place to inflict maximum mayhem with minimum risk.“
Open To Closing Gun Show Loophole: “We will consider instant checks at gun shows when, and only when, this Administration stops demanding new gun taxes and stops illegally compiling the records of millions of lawful gun buyers. Government list-keeping surveillance of law-abiding citizens is never a good idea.”	Denies Loophole Exists: NRA-IL Executive Director Chris Cox: “To be sure, it`s not a ‘loophole,’ because FOPA made clear no license is required to make ‘occasional sales, exchanges or purchases of firearms for the enhancement of a personal collection or for a hobby,’ or to ‘[sell] all or part of [a] personal collection of firearms.’”

An estimated 40 percent of gun sales in the United States to occur without any criminal background check, thanks to the “gun-show” loophole.

The 1999 LaPierre assured the nation that the NRA believed felons “should get no guns any month.” The 2013 LaPierre seems to think that rather than taking steps to prevent felons from getting guns, the solution is to put more guns in schools and hope they can kill all of the shooters.

Earlier this week, Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus endorsed a Republican plan to rig the next presidential election to make it nearly impossible for the Democratic candidate to win the White House, no matter who the American people vote for. The election-rigging plan, which would allocate electoral votes by congressional district rather than by states as a whole in a handful of states that consistently vote for Democratic presidential candidates, would have allowed Mitt Romney to narrowly win the Electoral College last November despite losing the popular vote by nearly four points.

On Monday, seven Pennsylvania Republican state representatives introduced a bill to make this vote-rigging scheme a reality in their state. Under their bill, the winner of Pennsylvania as a whole will receive only 2 of the state’s 20 electoral votes, while “[e]ach of the remaining presidential electors shall be elected in the presidential elector’s congressional district.”

Pennsylvania is a blue state that voted for the Democratic presidential candidate in every single presidential race for the last two decades, so implementing the GOP election-rigging plan in Pennsylvania would make it much harder for a Democrat to be elected to the White House. Moreover, because of gerrymandering, it is overwhelmingly likely that the Republican candidate will win a majority of Pennsylvania’s electoral votes even if the Democrat wins the state by a very comfortable margin. Despite the fact that President Obama won Pennsylvania by more than 5 points last November, Democrats carried only 5 of the state’s 18 congressional seats. Accordingly, Obama would have likely won only 7 of the state’s 20 electoral votes if the GOP vote rigging plan had been in effect last year.

One mitigating factor is that only 7 of the Pennsylvania House’s 109 Republicans are original sponsors of the election-rigging bill, so it is unclear that this is a major priority for the GOP state house caucus. Nevertheless, both Gov. Tom Corbett (R-PA) and state Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi (R-PA) support the plan, so there is a real risk that Pennsylvania Republicans will try to write the voters out of the next presidential election.

As the Obama administration prepares to release a set of comprehensive recommendations for limiting gun violence, the National Rifle Association (NRA) has produced an ad attacking President Obama as an “elitist hypocrite” for maintaining Secret Service protection of his daughters while expressing skepticism for stationing armed guards or volunteers in schools. The provocative spot comes less than a month after the NRA hosted a press conference blaming video games and the media for the shooting in Newtown, Connecticut and advocated for eliminating gun free zones.

“Are the president’s kids more important than yours?” the narrator of the group’s 35-second video asks. “Then why is he skeptical about putting armed security in our schools when his kids are protected by armed guards at their school? Mr. Obama demands the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes, but he’s just another elitist hypocrite when it comes to a fair share of security.” Watch it:

Obama has expressed skepticism about the NRA’s proposal to put armed security guards in schools, though many Democrats have said that the decision should be left to local school officials. Lawmakers across the country have proposed arming school officials and at least one-third of the nation’s 99,000 schools already employ armed security.

“I am skeptical that the only answer is putting more guns in schools,” Obama said during an appearance on Meet The Press. “And I think the vast majority of the American people are skeptical that that somehow is going to solve our problem.”

The White House also condemned the ad as “repugnant and cowardly,” which the NRA countered by saying “Whoever thinks the ad is about Pres. Obama’s daughters are missing the point completely or they’re trying to change the subject.”

The NRA’s ad has predictably sparked bipartisan outrage, but the group’s right-wing leadership has a long history of making inflammatory comments that elicit public condemnation. The organization portrays the resulting reaction as elitest hostility towards gun owners and raises funds off the response.

Sign our petition telling the NRA to pull the advertisement: