U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is well known for ardently opposing the view that the Constitution is a “living document,” meaning its text should be interpreted in light of modern societal conditions. Reinforcing the extremity of his own view, Scalia accurately identified just what the opposite of a living document is during remarks at Southern Methodist University, disparaging children who come to the court and refer to the Constitution as “living”:

It’s not a living document. It’s dead, dead, dead.

Scalia has made similar comments before. In 2006, he said “you would have to be an idiot” to believe the Constitution is alive, and in 2008, he told NPR, “Let’s cut it out. Let’s go back to the good old dead Constitution.” In fact, given reports of similar comments just this past December at Princeton, his “the Constitution is dead” refrain seems to now be a standard part of his book tour. While there are reasonable interpretations of the Constitution that are defined as something other than “living,” Scalia’s extreme suggestion that the Constitution is “dead” reflects how ill-equipped his own brand of originalism is to address problems that are quite alive and well. But on this occasion, Scalia seemed to have realized the absurdity of his own claim, backtracking later in the event to say that “dead” was not a good description after all. “It’s an enduring document, not a dead one,” he said.

The prospects of a proposal to rig Michigan’s electoral votes in favor of Republicans took a nosedive on Tuesday as Gov. Rick Snyder (R) came out against the plan this year.

Snyder had previously been considering the plan to shift Michigan’s presidential system from a winner-take-all system to divvying electoral votes by congressional district.

However, in an interview with Bloomberg, Snyder backed off, saying he was “very skeptical” of the idea, noting it would “change the playing field so it’s an unfair advantage.” He finished by saying, “I don’t think this is the appropriate time to look at it.”

HUNT: There is a move in your state by some Republican legislators to change the presidential electoral system from a winner-take-all to doing it by congressional districts. If that happened last November, Barack Obama–who carried this state by a huge margin, almost double-digits–would have won only 4 of the 14 congressional districts. It would tilt the tables tremendously in the Republicans’ favor. You have said you wanted to look at it, let’s see what it is. Gov. McDonnell of Virginia, Haley Barbour and others have said it’s a bad idea. Are you still neutral or are you becoming convinced it’s a bad idea?

SNYDER: I’m very skeptical of the idea and the timeframe that would be done, because I really view it as a question of you don’t want to change the playing field so it’s an unfair advantage to someone. A lot of ways, we want to make sure we’re reflecting the vote of the people, and this could challenge that. So in many respects, the right time to do it is if people are looking as, we should do it before census is taken and before redistricting takes place and it should be a bipartisan effort.

HUNT: So if you do it, you do it much later.

SNYDER: Yeah. I don’t think this is the appropriate time to look at it.

Watch it:

State Senate Majority Leader Randy Richardville (R) also cast doubt on the proposal Tuesday, saying of the current system, “I don’t know that it’s broken, so I don’t know that I want to fix it.” The state’s House Speaker, Jase Bolger (R), supports the plan.

This is potentially a major victory for opponents of the electoral rigging plan. In addition to holding the governorship, Republicans currently enjoy an 8-seat majority in the State House and a 15-seat majority in the State Senate.

ProgressVirginia reported Tuesday afternoon that the Virginia Senate’s Privileges and Elections Committee killed Sen. Charles “Bill” Carrico Sr.’s electoral college-rigging bill, despite an offer by Carrico to amend the bill to award electors in proportion to the state’s popular vote. The vote was 11-4 against the bill, although it will not be official until the close of the committee meeting.

The bill, as written, would have awarded 11 of Virginia’s 13 electoral votes to the winner of each of the state’s 11 heavily gerrymandered Congressional Districts. The remaining two electors would have been awarded to whoever won the majority of Congressional Districts. Under this scheme, Mitt Romney would have received 9 Virginia electors to Obama’s 4, even though Barack Obama won the state by four points.

Shots were fired inside an office building that houses Concordia University in Grand Prairie, Texas on Tuesday afternoon and police have “ordered those inside to lock their doors and stay where they are.” At least one person was “removed from the building and taken by ambulance to a hospital.”

Police are now looking for the suspect who opened fire.

A Republican plan to rig the next presidential race by changing the way electoral votes are allocated in several key blue states appears to be dead in Ohio — although it could still advance in other Republican-controlled states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania or Wisconsin. Several of the senior-most Republican officials in Ohio told the Cleveland Plain Dealer that they do not intend to push the GOP election-rigging plan:

Spokesmen for Gov. John Kasich, State Senate President Keith Faber and House Speaker William G. Batchelder told The Plain Dealer this week that they are not pursuing plans to award electoral votes proportionally by congressional district.

Batchelder went a step further, saying through his communications director that he “is not supportive of such a move.” And Republican Secretary of State Jon Husted, the state’s chief elections administrator, emphasized that he does not favor the plan either, despite Democratic suspicions based on reported comments that he said were taken out of context.

“Nobody in Ohio is advocating this,” Husted said in a telephone interview.

Although the death of this election-rigging plan in Ohio is an important victory for the principle that Americans choose their own leaders — and do not have them chosen for them by partisans in state capitols — there is still very real danger Republicans could push this plan in other states. Michigan House Speaker Jase Bolger (R) indicated he is open to the election-rigging plan late last week, and Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett (R) and state Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi (R) both support rigging the Electoral College.

Responding to President Obama’s plan to issue 23 executive orders on gun violence prevention, radical lawmakers in a number of states have re-upped their efforts to exempt their state from federal gun laws through the insidious and unconstitutional practice of nullification. Now, Tea Partiers in Mississippi want to institutionalize the nullification process, with a proposal to create a permanent committee devoted to nullifying all kinds of federal laws. The Dispatch reports:

The committee, composed of 14 state elected officials, would determine what is and isn’t within the federal government’s power when dealing with the state’s constitutional rights. … The bill, which is listed with the state as an “active bill” and will be taken up by the Constitution Committee, provides measures to “prohibit the infringement of the Constitutionally protected rights of the State of Mississippi, or its people, by means of federal statute, mandate, executive order, judicial decision or other action deemed by the State to be unconstitutional.”

“This was a bill that was requested for me to bring up,” Chism said. “It’s to solidify the 10th Amendment to the Constitution.”

Chism said the bill was drafted in response to 23 executive orders issued by President Barack Obama on gun control and weeks before the state is scheduled to begin implementing a national health system commonly known as “Obamacare.”

Having failed in their court challenges to the Affordable Care Act, state lawmakers started introducing nullification bills to purportedly eliminate that law.

The problem with the practice of nullification, once used to defend Jim Crow segregation, is that it rejects both the constitutional tenets that validly enacted federal laws are supreme over state laws, and that it is judges, and not state legislators, who determine whether those laws are valid or not in our system of checks and balances. Right-wing lawmakers revived the discredited tactic as a last-ditch means of fighting federal legislation they could not defeat in court. But a law that authorizes state legislators to review all federal legislation as a matter of course would open the door to a much broader swath of radical and defiant action, which is why James Madison warned that nullification would “speedily put an end to the Union itself” because it would allow the states to simply ignore any law they want.

Fortunately, the Mississippi bill was immediately greeted with hostility, and even Chism himself admitted the bill likely would not make it out of committee.  But bills pending in several other states by “tenthers” go so far as to propose that enforcing federal gun law would be penalized as a felony.

Republicans in as many as half-a-dozen blue states are considering a plan to rig the next presidential election by changing the way electoral votes are counted. Under this plan, blue states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin will no longer award all of their electoral votes to the winner of the state as a whole, but instead will award them one-by-one to the winner of each congressional district. Because the current district maps are gerrymandered to massively benefit Republicans, states such as Ohio or Virginia that backed Obama in 2012 would have awarded the overwhelming majority of their electoral votes to Mitt Romney under the GOP election-rigging plan.

To their credit, several Republicans oppose this plan to rig the Electoral College — here are ten examples:

Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell

Republican lawmakers in Virginia tried to make the Old Dominion the first state to approve the GOP election-rigging plan. Gov. McDonnell’s spokesperson, however, said the governor “believes Virginia’s existing system works just fine as it is.”

Former RNC Chair Mike Duncan

Duncan attacked the election-rigging plan as an admission that the GOP is no longer a national party: “This is not a viable pathway for the party to win nationally. We have to learn to win with statewide coalitions, not just to win congressional districts.”

Florida House Speaker Will Weatherford

According to Weatherford, the Republican election-rigging scheme is “like saying in a football game, ‘We should have only three quarters, because we were winning after three quarters and they beat us in the fourth.” He added “I don’t think we need to change the rules of the game, I think we need to get better.”

Former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour

Barbour not only opposed the plan, he tried to downplay its popularity within the GOP: “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.”

Tea Party Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli

Virginia’s tea-partying top lawyer offered a somewhat surreal explanation for why he opposes the plan: “I think winner-take-all is part of how a state matters as a sovereign entity. You know, our side would have gotten more votes this go-round, but I want people to have to fight to win the whole state. It makes the state, as a state, matter more. If it’s one more thing that whittles down the role of states independently of the people who live in them, and we need to build them up, not to Balkanize America, but because it’s the states that created the federal government. Not the other way around.”

Virginia state Sen. Jill Holtzman Vogel

Sen. Vogel was the first elected Virginia Republican to oppose the plan, telling ThinkProgress “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.”

Florida Senate President Don Gaetz

Gaetz is not only unenthusiastic about the election-rigging scheme, he proposed scrapping the entire system that allows such a rig to occur: “I think we should abolish the Electoral College . . . If James Madison had asked me, and I had been there, I would have said a popular vote is a better way to do it.”

Former RNC Chair Michael Steele

Steele warned his fellow Republicans that “you’ve got to figure out other ways to balance the system out. You just can’t gerrymander it.”

Virginia state Sen. Ralph Smith

Smith called the election-rigging plan a “bad idea” and warned that if Virginia embraces election-rigging, other states might follow.

Conservative columnist George Will

Will slammed the GOP plan as “partisanship masquerading as altruism about making presidential elections more ‘democratic’”

Bonus: Former Colorado Gov. Bill Owens

In 2004, when Democrats proposed a similar election-rigging scheme in Colorado, Owens led the charge against this “transparently partisan movement.” His fellow Republicans rallied behind him under the banner of an aptly named organization — “Coloradans Against a Really Stupid Idea.”

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) sounded a supportive note about President Obama’s proposal to require background checks at all gun shows, saying gun sales to criminals is an “obvious” problem that needs to be addressed.

Ryan’s comments, picked up by the Raw Story, came in an interview with Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. In the conversation, Ryan traced his concern about the loophole — which allows “private gun sales,” including those between gun show attendees, to legally happen without any criminal background check for the purchaser — back to his first days in Congress:

I think what we should look into is someone who’s not legally allowed to buy a gun buying one, and let’s figure that out. I think we need to find out how to close these loopholes…I remember thinking “there is an area in which you can make this work.”

Ryan would not commit to any particular form of expanded background checks, saying “I don’t know the answer to how to make this work — that’s what committee hearings are for.” He also strongly opposed a renewed and revamped Assault Weapons Ban as well as bans on high-capacity magazines. Nonetheless, Ryan’s answer is notable in that a Republican of his prominence is voicing opposition to the National Rifle Association’s longstanding position that the gun show loophole does not exist and does not need to be closed.

Roughly 90 percent of Americans support closing the gun show loophole — perhaps in part because while 40 percent of guns are sold in private sales, 80 percent of guns used in crimes are purchased in this fashion. Obama calls correcting current policy “common sense.”

As the perpetual emergence of new psychoactive drugs presents yet another challenge to pursuing the failed “War on Drugs,” prominent groups in the United Kingdom are calling for decriminalization of drug possession and even legal regulation of the market. Among those who have concluded after in-depth study that drug criminalization is counterproductive are the nation’s professional association for doctors and a parliamentary commission on drug use that includes members from all three of the UK’s predominant political parties.

From the All-Party Group on Drug Policy Reform’s report:

Currently we have a drugs control regime underpinned by an irrational drugs classification system, which is ignored by young people; and a banning process which drives the rising tide of new psychoactive substances into this Country. […]

Banning substances within the current system has not, and in our view will not, reduce their use overall. Evidence presented here indicates that, paradoxically, the banning of one drug can make the situation worse by stimulating the production of yet more new, unknown and potentially dangerous substances. […]

Drug policies which criminalise young people generate higher levels of unemployment, homelessness and relationship problems, and cost the taxpayer considerable sums.

The British Medical Association concludes in a report also out this month:

• Criminalisation increases the health risks of illicit drugs by encouraging use in unsafe environments and through dangerous methods of administration. It also deters users from approaching health professionals for treatment.
• A prohibitionist approach creates a lucrative opportunity for criminality and leads to high levels of acquisitive crime among dependent users.
• The stigmatisation of vulnerable populations of drug users also has significant public health implications. […]
• The national budget required for law enforcement, the criminal justice system and dealing with the costs of drug-related crime is several times higher than
  the amount spent on drug-related health interventions.

What’s more, top UK police officials testified to the parliamentary commission that the current infrastructure does nothing to reduce use of new psychoactive drugs, and that the government would be better off regulating low-risk psychoactive drugs, as New Zealand has done. “The solution to the particular challenges of legal highs does not lie in adding inexorably to the list of illicit substances,” Chief Constable Tim Hollis said.

The problem of what are known as “legal highs” involves the increasing manufacture of laboratory-produced drugs that mimic the psychoactive effects of popular but banned drugs. Because these new drugs are not immediately codified in the country’s drug ban laws, they are deemed “legal” by users, but that does not stop police from arresting and booking users of the unknown substances before testing the drug. The Parliament commission’s report found that consumers turn to these drugs particularly when they perceive illicit drugs to be laced with more dangerous substances, or of unpredictable strengths. But both their beliefs that these drugs will be safer, and that consuming the drugs is entirely “legal,” lead to perverse results and drive users to ever-more-unpredictable substances.

The phenomenon is the latest development to demonstrate the failure of harsh drug crackdowns to improve public health or safety. In spite of this growing consensus among experts, politicians in the UK – like U.S. politicians – are wary to implement recommended reforms or even undertake a more exhaustive review of current policies, with Prime Minister David Cameron maintaining, “I don’t support decriminalisation,” although he said in 2002 that the drug war “does not work.”

Increasing public support, however, has emboldened some state-level U.S. politicians to lead efforts to legalize and regulate marijuana in Washington and Colorado – a movement motivated by precisely the concerns identified in these two new reports, and intended to test alternative approaches that might actually improve public health and safety, while ending the shameful mass incarceration of U.S. citizens.

A surface-to-air missile launcher was among the items turned in to the Seattle Police Department during its gun buyback day on Monday. Police witnessed one person outside of the buyback purchasing the military-grade weapon, which is not legally available to civilians, from another for $100.

The scene was troubling, in part because it highlighted the ease with which heavy firepower can change hands under the radar. Though the device is single-use, and had already been deployed, state officials are also worried about how a civilian got his or her hands on the weapon in the first place. They are working to track down its origin, the AP reports:

Seattle police worked with Army officials Monday to track down the history of a nonfunctional missile launcher that showed up at a weapons buyback program and determine whether it was legal or possibly stolen from the military.[...]

“Once it’s brought on base and investigators have a chance to look at it, they’ll see what they can determine,” Army spokesman Joe Kubistek said Monday. “It’s too early to give any information on it until we have hands-on access to see it and take a look at it.”

Gun buyback programs are not the most effective method for getting guns off the street. Too often, people who turn in weapons that are broken or legally purchased simply because they need the money. The Seattle buyback unearthed four stolen guns total, out of the 716 collected.

Still, the appearance of a missile launcher — and the private sale of the weapon before it was turned over to the police — does serve to underline the danger of having no system in place to track military weapons or illegal firearms.