Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) is tempering his previous support for a proposed plan to rig the Electoral College in favor of Republicans, saying that he has “real concern” about the idea.

The proposal would entail shifting the state’s electoral votes from a winner-takes-all system, as 48 states use, to a per-congressional district apportionment. The result would be that a blue state like Wisconsin, which gave its 10 electoral votes to President Obama in 2012, would instead split its votes evenly between both candidates.

Though Walker had previously said the idea was “interesting” and “plausible”, Walker seemingly backed off those comments in an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. His major concern was that the shift would make Wisconsin far less relevant in future presidential campaigns.

“You concede it would have a dramatic impact on the targeting of the state?” Walker was asked.

“Right. Exactly right … That’s why I qualified (my earlier statements) … I just said I hadn’t ruled it out. I’m not embracing it,” said Walker.

“The most important thing to me long-term as governor on that is what makes your voters be in play,” said Walker, voicing the concern that ending “winner-take all” would make the state “irrelevant” in presidential campaigns.

“You would agree it would have that effect?” he was asked.

“Yeah. I think that’s a real concern,” he said.

Even if Walker ultimately backs off the electoral rigging plan, another prominent Wisconsin Republican, RNC Chair Reince Priebus, still supports it.

After a poll of Texas’ Gatesville Independent School District’s employees found widespread support for allowing those employees to carry firearms on campus, district Superintendent Stewart Speer says he supports having two armed school officials for every 400 students on the district’s campuses. Other members of the Texas school district’s faculty and staff called for more moderate measures, such as having school employees carry pepper spray or Tasers.

In 2011, Senate Republicans tried to effectively repeal the law creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau by simply refusing to confirm anyone to lead this agency. Similarly, by leaving several seats on the National Labor Relations Board vacant, Senate Republicans could effectively shut down this agency as well. President Obama eventually blocked these efforts to shut down two agencies by recess appointing leaders to their ranks. So when the severely conservative United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit struck down Obama’s recess appointments, it held that the political party American votes did not chose to control the White House or the Senate (or, for that matter, the House) has the unilateral authority to shut down agencies created by an Act of Congress.

This is not an isolated incident for the D.C. Circuit, which, due to its steady diet of major national security and regulatory cases, is second in power only to the Supreme Court of the United States. Two judges on this powerful court recently signed an opinion claiming that all labor, business or Wall Street regulation is constitutional suspect — one of whom was the author of Friday’s attack on the recess appointments power. Meanwhile, four years after George W. Bush’s policies were soundly rejected by the American people, the D.C. Circuit may have done more than any other group to keep conservative environmental policies in place. At one point, the Republican court struck down regulations that would “prevent between 13,000 and 34,000 premature deaths, 15,000 non-fatal heart attacks, 19,000 hospital and emergency room visits and 1.8 million days of missed work or school for each year.”

Currently, there are four vacancies on the DC Circuit, which means that if President Obama fills all of these open seats, he would break the Republican Party’s hold on this court and Democratic appointees would enjoy a 7-4 majority among the court’s active judges. Unfortunately for people who think Republicans shouldn’t be able to unilaterally shut down agencies, Senate Republicans are working hard to make sure that doesn’t happen. They filibustered Caitlin Halligan, an outstanding attorney, former Supreme Court law clerk and Obama’s first nominee to the D.C. Circuit, because the state of New York once took a position the National Rifle Association disagrees with and Halligan argued that position as New York’s solicitor general. And now they appear to be building an even thinner case against the president’s second nominee to this court.

Sri Srinivasan should raise no red flags for a conservative senator acting in good faith. He clerked for conservative Reagan-appointed Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson and then for Reagan-appointed Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. O’Connor notes that Srinivasan is “not anybody who’s been politically active” and Wilkinson called him “balanced,” “moderate,” and “deeply knowledgeable about law.” But, of course, “balanced, moderate and deeply knowledgeable about the law” doesn’t describe the sort of judge who would give the GOP power to eliminate agencies they don’t like, or who think that all Wall Street regulation is suspect. And Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, appears determined to keep him off the federal bench.

Todd Ruger at Legal Times has more detail on the fig leaf Grassley appears to be using to cover up his obstruction of Srinivasan, but the short of it is this: Last year, the Supreme Court was expected to hear a case that could have eviscerated fair housing law, until the case unexpectedly settled before the justices could resolve it. Grassley thinks someone at the Department of Justice might have encouraged this settlement by not participating in other claims against the same defendant, but he has no proof this happened. He also admits that there’s no evidence that Srinivasan, who played a minor role in the case, “did anything inappropriate or improper.” Nevertheless, Grassley somehow believes that this confused morass of conspiracy theories and speculation justified blocking Srinivasan’s nomination from moving forward last week.

If your head is spinning after reading the previous paragraph, you’re not alone. Indeed, it’s unlikely that even Chuck Grassley believes that there’s a valid reason to block Srinivasan’s nomination. It’s far more likely that Grassley and his fellow Republicans simply view Srinivasan as a threat to their lockhold on the D.C. Circuit — and that they are willing to do everything in their power to maintain that grip.

A new Fox News poll finds that two-thirds of Americans support comprehensive immigration reform, with a clear pathway to citizenship based on certain conditions. That includes a majority of Republicans, at 56 percent.

The polling confirms broad public backing for the immigration reform debate kicking off this week.

Other polls this month show similar high levels of support: An SEIU/America’s Voice poll found 73 percent favor citizenship over deportation, while an Associated Press-GfK survey found 62 percent support.

As the Virginia Senate’s Privileges and Elections Committee prepares to take up a bill to rig bill the state’s electoral college vote, Democrats and even Republicans are distancing themselves from the effort, calling it “a bad idea,” “skewing,” and a “partisan bill aimed at defying the will of the voters.” A ThinkProgress analysis of Virginia voter demographics reveals another major flaw with the proposal: it would significantly dilute the influence of minority voters.

The 2012 Virginia Congressional maps, authored by Delegate Robert Bell (R) based on the 2010 U.S. Census, divided the state’s estimated 8,001,024 people into 11 Congressional districts. Though the state population is more than 20 percent African American — and more than 31 percent non-white — just one Congressional district contains a majority of non-white voters (the Third District, which is majority African American). Though white non-Hispanic Virginians makeup just 68.6 percent of the population, they comprise at least 58 percent of the population in all of the other 10 districts.

While many of the electoral college-rigging schemes being pushed by Republicans nationally would still allocate two electors based on the popular winner in the state — the Virginia plan would not even do that. State Sen. Charles “Bill” Carrico Sr.’s Senate Bill 723 would allocate 11 electors based on the popular winner in each of the House districts and two to whichever candidate won the majority of those gerrymandered House districts.

So, with more than one-fifth of the population, African American Virginians would go from having about 20 percent of the say to just controlling one-thirteenth of the state’s electoral votes under the Carrico plan. And racial minority voters overall would go from having about 31 percent of the say, to also controlling just 7.7 percent of the state’s electors.

And while African American voters would of course have some say in districts where they do not make up a majority, more than a quarter of them them are packed into the 3rd district, meaning the remaining 73 percent would be in districts where they comprised, on average, just about 16 percent of the population. This would be a significant retrogression of influence for minority voters. Given Virginia’s history of racial discrimination and the fact that much of the state remains a Voting Rights Act covered jurisdiction, this maneuver might well be not just anti-democratic, but also illegal.

Legislation aimed at reducing gun violence is “a limitation on a God-given right of man that has existed throughout the history of civil society,” according to an article published in the leading conservative opinion journal National Review.

The author, David French, interprets the Christian Bible as granting everyone a right to self-defense. He suggests that this, if true, means that God’s will is that people have access to guns, as they are the means for self defense:

In fact, Jesus’s disciples carried swords, and Jesus even said in some contexts the unarmed should arm themselves…What does all this mean? Essentially that gun control represents not merely a limitation on a constitutional right but a limitation on a God-given right of man that has existed throughout the history of civil society. All rights — of course — are subject to some limits (the right of free speech is not unlimited, for example), and there is much room for debate on the extent of those limits, but state action against the right of self-defense is by default a violation of the natural rights of man, and the state’s political judgment about the limitations of that right should be viewed with extreme skepticism and must overcome a heavy burden of justification.

Even if French is right about the Christian view of self-defense (though Jesus did have choice words about “turning the other cheek“), it’s a logical fallacy to say this implies anything about restrictions on access to guns. Saying that people have a right to defend themselves if attacked isn’t the same thing as saying they should have a right to possess any conceivable means of defending themselves – presumably, French is fine with banning grenade launchers. The burden, instead, is on French to prove that universal background checks or limitations on assault weapon ownership somehow prevent people from defending themselves; to prove, in other words, that gun regulation is actually a restriction on the right of self-defense proper rather than a crime-prevention statute.
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Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) is one of the Senate’s most aggressive obstructionists. He’s wielded the Senate’s broken rules to block or stall literally hundreds of bills, earning the nickname “Dr. No” in the process. Indeed, Coburn is so far out on the right fringe, he thinks Medicare and Medicaid violate the Constitution. And yet, even Coburn recognizes that the National Rifle Association’s opposition to universal background checks is untenable:

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) is working with Democratic senators on a bill that would mandate background checks for all gun buyers, with some limited exceptions. . . . “I think there’s lots of good things that can happen in terms of mental health screening and checks,” Coburn told KRMG-TV Friday. “If you transfer your car, you have to have a license to transfer, it has to go through that. That’s a responsibility of freedom. I have no problems with us making sure that we don’t allow guns to get in the hands of either felons, or people who are a danger to themselves or other people. … I’m willing to work with Manchin and Schumer on that, and going to.”

A recent poll found that more than 9 in 10 Americans back “criminal background checks for all gun sales.” Just 8 percent agree with the NRA.

One day before President Obama kicks off his push for immigration reform in Las Vegas, a bipartisan group of eight senators announced their own deal. In a press conference on Monday, Sens. John McCain (AZ), Lindsey Graham (SC), Marco Rubio (FL), Jeff Flake (AZ), Chuck Schumer (NY), Dick Durbin (IL), Robert Menendez (NJ), and Michael Bennet (CO) will unveil a set of principles that will guide legislation introduced in the Senate.

The principles lay out a “a tough but fair path to citizenship” for the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. that will be “contingent upon securing our borders” and “tracking whether legal immigrants have left the country when required.” DREAMers and seasonal agriculture industry workers would be given a faster path to citizenship, according to the agreement.

A commission of border state governors and other officials will “monitor the progress of security our border” and make a recommendation for when when the bill’s security measures are met. Meanwhile, undocumented immigrants would register with the government and begin the process of background checks and paying a fine and back taxes to earn probationary legal status. But they would not be able to apply for permanent residency — and eventual citizenship — without meeting additional requirements and unless all border enforcement measures have been met. Undocumented immigrants will receive a green card only “after every individual who is already waiting in line for a green card” obtains one.

Yesterday, many of these senators took to Sunday shows to explain the necessity that reform include a road map for legal status.

“We can’t go on forever with 11 million people living in this country in the shadows in an illegal status,” McCain said on ABC’s “This Week.” “We cannot forever have children who were brought here by their parents when they were small children to live in the shadows, as well.”

Citizenship for the nation’s millions of undocumented immigrants also has strong backing from the public. Multiple polls that show a growing majority of Americans support a path to citizenship.

The bipartisan framework also includes provisions that reward green cards to immigrations who have earned Masters or PhDs in “science, technology, engineering, or math from an American university,” a new employment verification system that holds “employers accountable for knowingly hiring undocumented workers,” and would provide businesses “with the ability to hire lower skilled workers in a timely manner when Americans are unavailable or unwilling to fill those jobs.”

Late last week, democracy scored two important victories over a Republican plan to rig future presidential elections by changing the way electoral votes are counted in several key blue states. Two Virginia Republican state senators spoke out against the plan, effectively killing it. And Florida House Speaker Will Weatherford (R) attacked the election-rigging scheme as trying to “change the rules of the game.”

In Michigan, however, which is the bluest of the six blue states where the election-rigging plan has been discussed, state House Speaker Jase Bolger (R) appears quite open to rigging his state’s electoral college votes to benefit Republicans:

Michigan House Speaker Jase Bolger (R) said on Friday that he’s open to pursuing the strategy in his state. According to Gongwer (subscription required), Bolger believes a bill by state Rep. Pete Lund (R) — which has yet to be introduced — is worthy of strong consideration.

“I hear that more and more from our citizens in various parts of the state of Michigan that they don’t feel like their vote for president counts because another area of the state may dominate that or could sway their vote,” Bolger told Gongwer. “They feel closer to voting for their congressman or their congresswoman and if that vote coincided with their vote for president they would feel better about that.”

In other words, Republican voters in Michigan are upset that Democrats win elections simply because there are more of them. And Bolger wants to fix that by giving the few Republicans more votes than the majority.