Former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R) distanced himself from his party’s effort to rig the election by appropriating electoral votes based on gerrymandered Congressional districts, telling MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell on Friday that he opposes the effort.

Republican party leaders in Virginia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan have proposed legislation that would change how most electoral votes are allocated, awarding more electoral votes to the winner of individual Congressional districts, rather than the winner of the state as a whole. Since Republicans plan to implement the proposal in states that are heavily gerrymandered to favor the GOP, the resulting maps would guarantee that Republican candidates would win a majority of each state’s electoral votes, even if the Democratic candidate wins the state as a whole.

A growing number of Republicans have rejected the plan. Barbour has now joined their ranks:

ANDREA MITCHELL (HOST): If it were done nationally, Mitt Romney would have been taking the oath of office on Monday.

BARBOUR: That’s true this time. Other time it might have been just the opposite. I’m a traditionalist myself. I really am a conservative. I’m a little bit skeptical of this. [...]

MITCHELL: Doesn’t it make it look as though the Republicans are trying to sort of game the system? [...]

BARBOUR: As I said, I would not be for it. I don’t think there’s any sort of national movement, and you have sort of convinced me that in Virginia there may not be even state movement. It may be an isolated legislator.

Watch it:

During Barbour’s appearance, Mitchell suggested that Gov. Bob McDonnell (R-VA) would also publicly oppose the election rigging scheme.

A federal judge ruled this week that Louisiana violated federal voting law in not offering voter registration opportunities to applicants and recipients of public benefits programs such as food stamps, WIC and Medicaid. In yet another court affirmation of unfettered access to voting, U.S. District Court Judge Jane Triche Milazzo faulted the secretary of state for taking no action “to ensure that the State comply” with its obligations under the National Voter Registration Act, intended to facilitate voter registration opportunities for all citizens.

After an election cycle characterized by dogged efforts to make it more difficult to access the ballot, attorney Ron Wilson said the value of the decision “cannot be overstated” in giving “due meaning to the purpose behind the enactment of the NVRA, to make it easier, and not more difficult, for individuals to register to vote.”

Republicans in several blue states are currently considering a plan to rig the next presidential election by changing the way electoral votes are allocated to candidates. Under the Republican Plan, key blue states such as Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania would assign electoral votes one-each to the winner of the state’s heavily gerrymandered congressional districts. If this plan had been in effect in Michigan last year, Mitt Romney would have won 9 of the state’s 16 electoral votes, despite losing the state as a whole by nearly 10 points.

Although the Republican Plan is picking up steam among GOP lawmakers right now, several of them backed the plan during the 2012 election cycle in an attempt to rig that race for Mitt Romney. According to Michigan Rep. Pete Lund (R), however, Republicans in Michigan decided not to back the plan largely because they misjudged Romney’s chances of winning Michigan:

Rep. Pete Lund, R-Shelby Township, confirmed this week he plans to reintroduce legislation that would award all but two of Michigan’s 16 Electoral College votes according to congressional district results. The remaining two would go to the candidate winning the statewide majority.

“I believe it’s more representative of the people — closer to the actual vote,” said Lund, who proposed a similar bill in 2012. “It got no traction last year. There were people convinced Romney was going to win and this might take (electoral) votes from him.”

So Republicans were unwilling to back Lund’s plan when they thought it would benefit Democrats. Now that it’s clear that the plan rigs the election for Republicans, however, it is suddenly experiencing a renaissance.

Nearly a decade before the GOP responded to President Obama’s re-election by proposing to rig the Electoral College in states like Pennsylvania and Virginia, Republicans vehemently opposed the plan and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars fighting its implementation.

In 2004, when Colorado was still a red state and then-President Bush was locked in a tight race with Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), the state had a ballot initiative that would have shifted its allocation of electoral votes from winner-take-all to proportional. Under the proposal, for example, even if Bush had won 60 percent of the vote, he still would only get 5 of the state’s 9 electoral votes instead of all 9.

However, the proposed Electoral College rig ended up getting trounced for one reason: Republicans strongly opposed the idea.

The push against Amendment 36, which failed by a 2-to-1 margin, was led by Republican Gov. Bill Owens, who lambasted the idea as a “transparently partisan movement”. Owens detailed his opposition in a USA Today op-ed:

There’s a transparently partisan movement afoot in Colorado to distribute our Electoral College votes proportionately. The goal? To give John Kerry a four-vote Electoral College boost, putting him ahead of President Bush in a close election.

But that in and of itself is not the reason proposed Amendment 36 on the Nov. 2 ballot is bad for Colorado. The fact is that if Amendment 36 passed, it would forever make it easy for presidential candidates to ignore Colorado, since our state would be an Electoral College “lone ranger” among states.[...]

Here’s why: Colorado is a state with a slight Republican majority, but which, nevertheless, has a longstanding tradition of electing Democrats to statewide and national office. If Colorado split its electoral votes, leaving just one or two electoral votes in play, future presidential candidates — and presidents — would ignore Colorado and its interests in favor of states with more electoral clout. They would skip over us and move on to more fertile ground.

If that sounds like the same argument Democrats and anyone opposed to GOP’s electoral rigging efforts are currently making, that’s because it is.

Owens was joined by all his fellow state GOP officials in opposing the plan. Republican consultant Katy Atkinson, who organized the anti-36 effort under the umbrella group “Coloradans Against a Really Stupid Idea”, noted that it would undermine the state’s clout. “[If Amendment 36 passes], Colorado will effectively have 1/3 of the power of Alaska, Delaware or Wyoming,” Atkinson wrote. State newspapers roundly criticized the initiative; the Pueblo Chieftain even called the proposed electoral rig a “quest for pure, raw political power by the left.”

National conservatives also criticized the idea. George Will wrote a scathing article in Newsweek, calling it a “pernicious proposal”. Major GOP funders also rallied against the referendum; Sheldon Adelson alone contributed $100,000 against Amendment 36.

In 2004, Republicans fervently opposed manipulating the Electoral College when the Democratic candidate stood to benefit. A decade later, after Obama won his second term and pundits discuss a long-term electoral realignment, Republicans are abandoning that principled stand in an attempt to rig future presidential elections.

Virginia state Sen. Ralph Smith (R) said today that a Republican plan to rig the next presidential election by changing the way electoral votes are counted is a “bad idea” and that he would oppose it. Smith joins state Sen. Jill Holtzman Vogel (R-VA), who told ThinkProgress earlier this week that “I am generally not in favor right now of the bill and it’s very unlikely that I will vote for it in full committee or the Senate floor.” As the Virginia Senate is evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, Smith and Vogel’s opposition is likely sufficient to kill this election-rigging scheme in this state.

[HT: Benjy Sarlin]

A panel of Republican-appointed judges struck down President Obama’s appointment of three members to the National Labor Relations Board during the winter 2012 congressional recess in an expansive ruling that invalidates more than a century of presidential practice. The ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit will now likely be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, but has the potential to also affect Obama’s concurrent appointment of Richard Cordray to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It could also invalidate every ruling by the NLRB during the period between January 4, 2012 and today, as well as many actions by the CFPB during that period. The opinion is the latest demonstration of the radical views of Judge David Sentelle, who authored this opinion and has previously suggested that all business, labor and Wall Street regulation is constitutionally suspect.

The Constitution gives the president the power to make executive appointments when Congress is out of session, but some Republican members of Congress attempted to claim the January 4, 2012 appointments did not actually occur during a recess. Obama resorted to the appointments following record obstruction of his nominees that left the NLRB without the quorum required to legally operate and the newly formed CFPB indefinitely without a leader, with Republicans claiming they would confirm no one to lead the organization unless its structure was fundamentally altered. The lack of a director also prevented the CFPB from performing several core functions, including regulating nonbank entities such as mortgage and payday lenders.

At the time of Obama’s appointments, Republican pushback had focused on a tactic to prevent Congress from ever really going into “recess” by holding “pro forma” sessions every several days. In response, Obama’s Office of Legal Counsel issued a cogent legal memo rejecting the ability of Republicans to change a recess into something less by holding sessions in name only. 

This technicality argument, however, turned out to be irrelevant to the court’s ruling. The D.C. Circuit’s opinion instead came to a far more radical conclusion that invalidates more than a century of accepted recess appointments procedure. Acknowledging that then-Republican Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty had advised in 1921 that a recess was any break in a congressional session of a “substantial length,” Sentelle rejects “that practice of more recent vintage” and holds that only breaks between congressional sessions, and not during sessions can be considered a “recess”:

In short, we hold that “the Recess” is limited to intersession recesses. The Board conceded at oral argument that the appointments at issue were not made during the intersession recess: the President made his three appointments to the Board on January 4, 2012, after Congress began a new session on January 3 and while that new session continued. Considering the text, history, and structure of the Constitution, these appointments were invalid from their inception.

According to White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, presidents from both political parties have made 285 “intrasession” recess appointments between 1867 and 2004.

Sentelle’s opinion also rejects the ruling of another federal appeals court that such “intrasession” appointments are entirely valid. In fact, his originalist analysis focuses only on the text of the clause, and overtly rejects any recent precedent, history, or context that would elucidate modern understanding of the words.

This opinion is the latest reminder of the influence of federal judges, particularly on the powerful U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. President Obama’s attempts to get a single nominee confirmed to that court have been met with extreme resistance and obstruction — of the same sort that moved Obama to fill several urgent executive branch vacancies through recess appointments.

[This breaking news post has been updated to include additional analysis.]

Florida House Speaker Will Weatherford (R) poured cold water on a Republican plan to rig the Electoral College that is being considered in a number of states to all but ensure that the next president will be a Republican.

A number of states that have voted consistently for Democrats at a national level but are currently controlled by Republicans at a state level, such as Virginia and Pennsylvania, are considering a change to the way they dole out presidential electoral votes. Currently, every state, except for Nebraska and Maine, uses a winner-take-all system. But a handful of Republican-controlled blue states are looking at a system of appropriating electoral votes by congressional district, based on maps gerrymandered to the GOP’s favor.

One possible state where this could happen is Florida, which has voted Democratic the last two presidential elections but is currently run by Republicans. However, Weatherford announced on Thursday that he opposed such a move. The Miami Herald has more:

Florida, the largest swing state, won’t go along with changing the Electoral College if Florida House Speaker Will Weatherford has any say (and he has a major say).

“To me, that’s like saying in a football game, ‘We should have only three quarters, because we were winning after three quarters and the beat us in the fourth,” Weatherford, a Republican, told the Herald/Times. “I don’t think we need to change the rules of the game, I think we need to get better.”

Fellow Republican leader, Senate President Don Gaetz, wasn’t favorable to the plan either. He said he would prefer a more progressive proposal: abolishing the Electoral College and replacing it with a national popular vote. Said Gaetz, “The farmer standing in his field in North Dakota should be just as important as the factory worker in Ohio.”

In a major change to how America’s largest tech companies handle online privacy, Google revealed this week that it requires warrants for users’ email content and data stored in the cloud, imposing hurdles to government access to data beyond the scope of a 1986 electronic privacy law.

But even as Google’s policy is a big step forward for digital due process advocates, it doesn’t extend to a significant portion of the information Google releases to law enforcement agencies such as IP addresses used to access Google accounts, message time stamps, and to and from fields. And Google’s recently released transparency data shows that getting information on your online activities can still largely be done without a warrant.

The report shows less than a quarter of the 8,428 government requests for U.S. user data they received in July to December 2012 were search warrants, and 88 percent of requests were fully or partially complied with. The U.S. led country rankings in terms of total number of requests made and the percentage of requests complied with.

Wired quotes Google spokesman Chris Gaither on Google’s newly outlined warrant policy, which has been in effect for an unclear amount of time: “Google requires an ECPA search warrant for contents of Gmail and other services based on the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which prevents unreasonable search and seizure.” Google’s interpretation is novel because under the Electronic Communication Privacy Act of 1986 (ECPA), messages over 180 days old stored in the cloud only require an administrative subpoena — rather than a warrant approved by a judge — largely due to how email technology worked in 1986: It was very unusual for data to remain on external servers because of hosting costs, leading to a belief that any data left on an external server for that could be considered abandoned.

While our use of technology has changed dramatically since 1986, the law has not: An attempt to update the law last year stalled over the holidays. And while the law does not require a warrant to access some data, two federal appellate courts came to differing conclusions on the issue in 2010, one stating that obtaining the content of email messages stored on an email provider’s server requires a warrant, and another allowing magistrate judges discretion to require warrants from the government when requesting location information from cellphone providers — although both rulings only apply to their judicial district.

Google’s public stance on warrants may signal that tech companies are no longer willing to quietly accept the lack of progress on technology policy. In many sectors it has become clear our laws have not kept up with the pace of technological innovation, yet the biggest success of the tech sector last year focused on preventing bad legislation rather than updating woefully outdated regulation.