In Thursday’s paper, the New York Times ran the harrowing story of Tiffany Jackson, a female veteran grappling with the effects of military sexual trauma. Jackson had been violently raped while deployed overseas at the Suwon Air Base in South Korea, and upon her return to the states had difficulty finding and keeping a job, struggled with drugs and alcohol and fought uphill battles to keep her anger at bay. All of which, according to a growing consensus of researchers and psychologists, are common manifestations of post-traumatic stress disorder brought about by M.S.T.

But expert opinion is not enough to convince the scribes at National Review Online, which issued its own rebuttal to the Times piece and proclaimed — without a shred of evidence — that the hardships befallen upon Jackson and as many as 1 in 5 of all female servicemembers are attributable to their upbringing in underprivileged communities and not to their sexual assaults. And they engage in an especially pernicious form of victim-blaming in the process:

Now here is a tentative alternative hypothesis: Some of these women come from environments that made their descent into street life overdetermined, whether or not they experienced alleged sexual assault in the military. To blame alleged sexual assault for their fate rather than their own bad decision-making is ideologically satisfying, but mystifying. Having children out of wedlock, as a huge proportion of them do, also does not help in avoiding poverty and homelessness…

But let’s say that for these homeless female vets, it really was their sexual experiences in the military that caused their downward spiral into, as the Times puts it, “alcohol and substance abuse, depression and domestic violence.” Why then have those same feminists who are now lamenting the life-destroying effects of “MST” insisted on putting women into combat units?

Writer Heather MacDonald fails to acknowledge once in her almost 1000-word post that there is a problem at all, preferring instead to leverage the horrific rate of sexual assault and violent rape against women in the military as a means to attack gender equality in the armed forces. Nastier still, she attacks the “feminists” who are fighting for greater accountability and protections for the thousands of women who enlist.

Of course, the National Review Online has a strong lineage of sexist, misogynistic and racist remarks. In January, the conservative publication blamed the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting on the fact that women ran the school, and for years kept author John Derbyshire in their employ despite vocally questioning whether or not women should have the right to vote.

Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), who shed his own blood fighting for the passage if the Voting Rights Act in 1965, said he almost cried when he heard Justice Antonin Scalia’s comment Tuesday that the landmark civil rights law is a “perpetuation of racial entitlement.” Scalia made the comment during oral argument on the constitutionality of a key section of the law, suggesting that the law would always be passed by lawmakers too afraid to vote against it unless the court halted it. The Nation’s Ari Berman tweets:

Civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis told me he almost cried when Scalia called Voting Rights Act a ‘perpetuation of racial entitlement’

— Ari Berman (@AriBerman) February 28, 2013

And Lewis explained his disbelief to Al Sharpton on MSNBC:

It was unreal, unbelievable, almost shocking for a member of the court to use that language. I can see politicians and even members of Congress. But it was just appalling to me. It is an affront to all of what the civil rights movement stood for, what people died for, what people bled for, and those of us who marched across that bridge 48 years ago, we didn’t march for some racial entitlement. We wanted to open up the political process, and let all of the people come in, and it didn’t matter whether they were black or white, Latino, Asian-American or Native American.

The right to vote is precious, almost sacred. It is the most powerful nonviolent instrument that we have in a democratic society. And if the courts come to that point where they declare this section, section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, unconstitutional, it would be a dagger in the heart of the democratic process.

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Lewis was one among many court-watchers and commentators who were shocked and appalled by Scalia’s comment. And not just because he trivialized the civil rights movement. His suggestion that the court must intervene to overturn legislation with too much support is also anathema to his own rigid textualist approach to reading the Constitution. As Ian Millhiser recently pointed out, even if Scalia’s perverse racial entitlements theory had some merit, it is nowhere to be found in the text of the Constitution.

As soon as next week, the Senate is expected to consider Caitlin Halligan’s nomination to the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Halligan is a former Supreme Court clerk, a former Solicitor General of the state of New York, and is currently general counsel for one of the largest prosecutor’s offices in the country. She received the highest possible rating from the American Bar Association. And she was enthusiastically endorsed by a bipartisan group of some of the top Supreme Court advocates in the country.

Her nomination was also filibustered more than a year ago by Senate Republicans after the National Rifle Association sent them a letter complaining that she argued a position in court that the NRA disagrees with.

A lot has happened since then, however. The NRA spent the months after the Sandy Hook massacre engaged in what appears to be a very skillfully crafted campaign to eradicate its own credibility. The NRA went silent for a week after this tragedy occurred, only to send their CEO Wayne LaPierre forth from his bunker to claim that “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” More recently, LaPierre published an op-ed warning that a breakdown of civilization is coming, but you may not be around to see it because Latino gangs are also out to get you, and so is al-Qaeda, and the only way to save yourself is to buy a gun. The NRA’s opposition to universal background checks is less popular than communism, polygamy or human cloning. There are literally more Americans that believe they have personally seen a UFO than agree with the NRA’s stance on background checks.

And yet the highest ranking minority member of the Senate Judiciary Committee still believes he should follow the NRA’s lead on judges. Earlier this week, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) announced he would rekindle the filibuster against Halligan when she comes to the Senate floor because “she’s got gun problems.” Grassley previously cited the NRA’s opposition to Halligan in a statement explaining why he was filibustering her.

In case there is any doubt, the NRA’s case against Halligan is exceptionally weak. As Solicitor General of New York, Halligan’s job was to advocate on behalf of the state’s legal positions whether she agreed with them or not. New York took a position that departs from the NRA’s maximalist views on guns, and Halligan did her job by arguing her client’s position in court.

Simply put, a government attorney’s arguments on behalf of the government they represent says virtually nothing about how they actually view a particular legal issue. President George W. Bush’s first Solicitor General, Ted Olson, successfully defended campaign finance reform while he was in the Justice Department, only to convince five justices to destroy most of our campaign finance regime when he argued Citizens United. Bush’s second Solicitor General, Paul Clement, argued and won one of the strongest cases establishing that the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional when he was in the government, and then spent more than a year undermining his victory once he was hired to claim that health reform is unconstitutional. So attacking Halligan for her gun arguments is a bit like attacking conservative movement’s top lawyer for being too friendly to Obamacare.

Ultimately, however, it shouldn’t be surprising that the NRA’s case against Halligan doesn’t hold water — this is, after all, an organization that believes we must arm ourselves to defend against scary Latinos and the collapse of civil society. Nevertheless, it is unfortunate that Grassley appears willing to give a group that holds these views a veto power over judges.

Justice Antonin Scalia quite deservedly came under fire yesterday for his claim that a key provision of the Voting Rights Act is a “perpetuation of racial entitlement.” If the justice were looking to confirm every suspicion that conservative opposition to the law that broke the back of Jim Crow voter exclusions is rooted in white racial resentment, he could hardly have picked a better way to do so.

Viewed in context, however, Scalia’s quote is actually even more disturbing than the initial headlines suggested. Beyond whatever resentments Justice Scalia may hold, his “racial entitlements” statement was also part of a broader theory about the proper role of judges in society. And if that theory were taken seriously by a majority of the justices, it would potentially undermine Medicare, Social Security and countless other programs. According to Scalia:

Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get out of them through the normal political processes. I don’t think there is anything to be gained by any Senator to vote against continuation of this act. And I am fairly confident it will be reenacted in perpetuity unless — unless a court can say it does not comport with the Constitution. You have to show, when you are treating different States differently, that there’s a good reason for it.

That’s the — that’s the concern that those of us who — who have some questions about this statute have. It’s — it’s a concern that this is not the kind of a question you can leave to Congress. There are certain districts in the House that are black districts by law just about now. And even the Virginia Senators, they have no interest in voting against this. The State government is not their government, and they are going to lose — they are going to lose votes if they do not reenact the Voting Rights Act.

As Scott Lemieux points out, this theory resembles some of the reasoning behind an 1883 decision which struck down an early precursor to the 1964 Civil Rights Act that banned many forms of segregation by private business. But the roots of Scalia’s legal theory are probably several decades more recent than the late Nineteenth Century.
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Two Senators are trying again to close a loophole in federal law that allows for the torturous treatment of potentially hundreds of thousands of puppies around the country. The Puppy Uniform Protection and Safety (PUPS) Act, sponsored by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), attempts to close a loophole in the Animal Welfare Act (AWA) of 1966 that allows for totally unregulated breeding of puppies for sale online. The AWA requires breeders that sell to pet stores to acquire licenses, but allows them to sell dogs directly to customers without oversight. The Internet has made it possible for breeders to connect directly to consumers, meaning that breeders now double as de facto online pet stores.

This loophole allows “puppy mills,” breeders who aim only at profit and keep puppies in cheap, utterly horrific surroundings, to operate legally and profit handsomely. They sell the puppies directly to happy pet owners, who are oblivious to the fact that their new family member came from a place with “inadequate food and water, [where dogs were housed in] in wire cages with wire flooring so their paws never touch the ground; [and] female dogs mated to produce litter after litter until they can no longer do so and are then killed.” Inspections of two puppy mills in Ohio found, respectively, that “dogs and pups [were] living in horrid conditions and many were sick, emaciated and had visible infections and sores” and “[dogs were] matted with urine, feces and fleas [whose] nails were curled under the pads of feet…Many [had] severe dental disease and 17 [had] eye infections.”

One estimate suggests that several hundred thousand puppy-mill dogs per year are sold online because of the online loophole. Investigators at the International Fund for Animal Welfare asked several experts on puppy mill operations and dog breeding to examine the ads at major online sellers and develop an estimate, based on general characteristics common to puppy mill ads, of how many puppy mill dogs were sold through these websites per year. Their results were shocking:

Using the criteria developed by the expert panel, investigators found that 5,911 of the ads qualified as “likely puppy mill,” which equaled 62% of the ads analyzed from the six dedicated puppy sale websites. Further applying this 10% sample with the 62% “likely puppy mill” findings to the six websites would mean that as many as 57,447 ads and 107,425 individual puppies would potentially be classified as stemming from a “likely puppy mill” on that one day of the investigation…given the conservative nature of the determinations and the strong likelihood that many puppy mill ads were overlooked due to marketing manipulation, the expert panel and investigators felt that the total number of puppies coming from puppy mills may have been significantly underestimated.

The PUPS act would (judging from a draft proposed last legislative session) address this problem by extending the AWA commercial breeder rules to all breeders that sell 50 or more dogs per year and creating new exercise standards requiring breeders to let their dogs move around. The USDA recently proposed its own regulation accomplishing a similar effect last year, but it has yet to be implemented.

The overwhelming scientific consensus is that most animals, including dogs, are conscious, feel pain, and have complex internal and emotional lives.

After nearly a year of partisan infighting on Capitol Hill, the House of Representatives and the Senate have finally agreed to send a reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act to President Obama’s desk.

On Thursday, by a vote of 286 to 138, the House passed the bipartisan Senate-approved version of the bill — one that includes added protections for LGBT, Native American, and undocumented victims of domestic violence. All 138 votes against the bill were Republicans.

A watered down Republican version of the bill, which was offered as a substitute amendment, failed to garner enough votes to slow the process. It was struck down by a vote of 257 to 166. Sixty Republicans voted against their own party’s replacement measure.

Twenty-seven members of Congress, all Republicans, voted against both versions:

During the last session of Congress, the GOP-led House approved their watered-down VAWA, while the Senate included expanded provisions in the version it passed. The two were never reconciled, and Congress failed to renew the 18-year-old domestic violence law by the time it disbanded at the end of 2012.

The National Rifle Association and pro-gun politicians have amped up their fearmongering since the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, warning that President Obama’s push for gun regulations like universal background checks is a tyrannical plot to confiscate all guns and possibly impose sharia law over unarmed Americans.

One Idaho legislator is taking this threat seriously. State Sen. Jim Rice (R) proposed a state constitutional amendment on Wednesday to draft all adults into militias to combat any effort by the federal government to alter the Second Amendment and confiscate guns. While conscientious objectors would be allowed to opt out of service, Rice said on Twitter he would expand the draft to men and women of all ages:

While Rice hasn’t offered specific language for his proposed amendment, he indicated that the age and gender requirements would be dropped, making all adults eligible for service.

“Today we held a print hearing on my proposed state constitutional amendment that will eliminate age and gender discrimination from our definition of the state militia,” the lawmaker wrote in a message posted to Twitter. “This will allow the state to backstop the individual right to keep and bear arms in an effective way that is supported by the reasoning in all the U.S. Supreme Court decisions.”

Rice plans to put his proposal up for a vote on Idaho’s 2014 general ballot. The amendment is just the latest in state-level efforts against even basic federal gun regulation. Several states have passed laws to nullify federal law and criminalize police officers who try to enforce federal law. Despite the hysterical reactions from pro-gun lawmakers, the majority of Americans, including gun owners, support the measures included in Obama’s gun violence prevention plan, including universal background checks, a ban on high capacity magazine sales, and closing the gun show loophole. Nowhere in the president’s plan does he call for the confiscation of weapons.

A federal appeals court panel unanimously upheld a decision to halt a Florida law that imposed a mandatory drug test on all state applicants for welfare benefits. “The simple fact of seeking public assistance does not deprive a TANF applicant of the same constitutional protection from unreasonable searches that all other citizens enjoy,” the court held.

The only known and shared characteristic of the individuals who would be subjected to Florida’s mandatory drug testing program is that they are financially needy families with children. Yet, there is nothing inherent to the condition of being impoverished that supports the conclusion that there is a “concrete danger” that impoverished individuals are prone to drug use or that should drug use occur, that the lives of TANF recipients are “fraught with such risks of injury to others that even a momentary lapse of attention can have disastrous consequences.” Thus, the State’s argument that it has a special need to ensure that the goals of the TANF program are not jeopardized by the effects of drug use seems to rest on the presumption of unlawful drug use.

The ruling upholds a lower court decision that also concluded the law was likely unconstitutional and should be halted. But even in the wake of this decision and many others that have held other random drug testing programs unconstitutional, the Indiana House passed a measure just this week to require all welfare recipients to undergo drug testing. And in 2011 and 2012 , six other states have passed laws that impose some drug testing or screening, although only Georgia imposes mandatory drug testing on all applicants.

Florida’s experience with the program suggested that welfare applicants are less likely to abuse drugs than the general public, with only two percent of applicants testing positive. The laws have also been shown to cost states even more money. Nonetheless, Florida Rep. Scott Plakon told The Daily Show last year that the law was justified by the principle that those receiving taxpayer funds should be willing to submit to a drug test. When asked whether Plakon, as a taxpayer-funded employee, would submit to a drug test, he said, “If a law passed requiring legislators to do so, I’d be happy to.” But, he added, he would not make it a priority to introduce any such law.

Nine Congressmen — all male Republicans — voted Wednesday against a resolution to allow the U.S. House to consider re-authorization of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). The vast majority of House Republicans (214) and all 200 House Democrats voted for rule, which will allow votes Thursday on the watered-down GOP version of the bill and (assuming that fails), the bipartisan Senate plan.

The nine Republicans were Representatives Paul Broun (GA), Scott Garrett (NJ), Louie Gohmert (TX), Tim Huelskamp (KS), Walter Jones (NC), Steve King (IA), Thomas Massie (KY), Tom McClintock (CA), and Matt Salmon (AZ).

Three of the nine — Gohmert, Jones, and King — voted for the watered-down Republican version of the bill last May, making their opposition to even bringing up the bill now a surprise. King said of the 2012 bill, “I supported VAWA in 2005 and am doing so again to see to it that victims of domestic violence and sexual assault have access to the resources and protection when they need it the most.”

While apparently none of the opponents has released a statement on today’s vote, some explained their opposition to last year’s bill. Huelskamp, in a letter to constituents, noted that he does not believe the federal government has a role in funding protection against domestic abuse. “This is a matter that should be left to our states,” he wrote, and Congress “should not be in the business of handing out grants conditioned on how states do or do not prosecute criminals.”

McClintock, in explaining his 2012 vote against VAWA, argued: “This is a feel-good measure that uses ‘Violence Against Women’ as an excuse to vastly expand a dizzying array of government grant programs, hamstring judges who are attempting to resolve and reconcile highly volatile relationships, add $1.8 billion to the nation’s debt and generally insinuate the federal government into matters the Constitution clearly reserves to the states. Federal grants of all kinds (essentially gifts of public money with little or no oversight) are out of control and ought to be abolished — not expanded.”

The landmark 1994 law, authored by then-Senator Joe Biden, expired more than a year ago.

WASHINGTON, DC — The Voting Rights Act did not have a very good day today. Chief Justice John Roberts suggested that a key provision of the law is rooted in the idea that “citizens in the South are more racist than citizens in the North.” Justice Antonin Scalia accomplished the unusual task of making Roberts look like a moderate by labeling the law a “perpetuation of racial entitlement.” Justice Anthony Kennedy, whose undeserved reputation as a moderate leads Court-watchers to pay particularly close attention to his questions, compared a landmark voting rights provision to the Marshall Plan as an example of a good idea that has now run its course.

Nothing, of course, is certain after an oral argument. Arguments in the Affordable Care Act case did not go well for the law or the Constitution, but Roberts ultimately blinked and voted to uphold the lion’s share of the law. When the same provision of the Voting Right Act — the provision requiring some parts of the country to “pre-clear” new voting laws with the Justice Department or a federal court before they take effect — was before the justices four years ago, that argument did not go very well either. Yet the justices ultimately upheld the law, albeit under circumstances suggesting another shoe would drop soon.

Though the shoe seems likely to drop this term, the four Democratic appointees made it clear they would not allow it to fall lightly. Justice Sonia Sotomayor was a star today, demonstrating a masterful understanding of the record and of the history of voter suppression in the South. When Scalia uttered his offensive claim that the law is a racial entitlement program, Sotomayor placed the lawyer challenging voting rights in the uncomfortable position of having to explain whether he agreed or disagreed with Scalia. With an assist from Justice Elena Kagan, Sotomayor pointed out that the plaintiff in this case, Shelby County, Alabama, “may be the wrong party bringing this” because of their dismal past record on voting rights. Alabama as a whole ranks as one of the worst offenders of federal voting rights laws in the country, and thus, as Kagan pointed out, should be subject to additional review of its voting laws “under any formula that Congress could devise.”

Sotomayor also asked the best question of the morning: why should Shelby County be allowed to bring this lawsuit as what is known as a “facial challenge,” instead of a much more limited “as-applied” challenge. A facial challenge is a broad lawsuit claiming that a law must utterly cease to exist and can never be applied to anyone. As Sotomayor pointed out, they are also disfavored under current law (or, a least, that Supreme Court likes to say they are disfavored). Generally, the Supreme Court claims to prefer narrower “as-applied” challenges that claim a law is invalid with respect to a specific plaintiff, but that it may still lawfully be applied to many other parties.

When individual voters bring lawsuits claiming disenfranchisement, the Roberts Court has wielded this distinction between facial and as-applied challenges to devastating effect. Most significantly, in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, a plurality of the Court established that challenges to voter ID, a common voter suppression law, can only be brought on an as-applied basis. The upside of this is that each voter who feels they may be disenfranchised by the law has to hire a lawyer, go to court, and sue for the right to vote. And if they win, their victory applies only to them, not to the potentially hundreds of thousands of other voters who could be disenfranchised by voter ID.

What’s good for the goose should be good for the gander. If a voter disenfranchisement scheme that is popular with conservatives can only be subject to narrow, plaintiff-specific challenges, than the same rule should apply when a landmark voting rights law is challenged by conservatives. There was little doubt after oral argument today, however, that at least four of the Court’s conservatives do not see it that way.

The thin ray of hope is Justice Kennedy. Although Kennedy’s comments were largely hostile to the law, he did at one point join into the more progressive justices’ questions about whether Shelby County can try to destroy this law entirely — “if you would be covered under any formula, why are you injured under this one?” Kennedy asked the lawyer for Shelby County at one point. Suggesting either that he could ultimately agree with Sotomayor, or at least that he does not think that Shelby County is the right plaintiff to bring this case.

Nevertheless, if Kennedy does not agree with Sotomayor — or at least to put off the fate of the law until a future date — it will mean that there is one rule that applies to individual voters, and another, more favorable rule that applies to people who oppose voting rights.

In the wake of conservative Justice Antonin Scalia’s claim that a key provision of the Voting Rights Act amounts to a “perpetuation of racial entitlement,” former President Bill Clinton offered a very different vision of the law in an exclusive statement emailed to ThinkProgress today:

The Voting Rights Act is one of the most powerful tools Americans have to fight injustice, and its protection is fundamental to our democracy. Since the Act’s enactment in 1965, disciplined, systematic efforts to undermine its safeguards by disenfranchising younger, poorer, minority, and disabled voters—some even more determined today than they were 48 years ago—are reminding us of the fragility of this very precious right. As America becomes younger, more diverse, and more vibrant, our response must be to embrace our common humanity, to widen the circle of opportunity, and to build a country where every American has a voice in the future—a voice that our vote provides and our government must protect. This is not the time to weaken those protections, but rather an opportunity to redouble our efforts to affirm them.

President Clinton previously described efforts by Republican governors and lawmakers to undermine voting rights the most determined effort to restrict the franchise ” since we got rid of the poll tax and all the other Jim Crow burdens on voting.”

In a rant on the floor of the Illinois House of Representatives Tuesday, State Rep. Jim Sacia (R) objected to statewide gun violence prevention efforts comparing them to castration.

As the right-wing Red Alert Politics reported, Sacia screamed that the bill was being forced by Chicago legislators because they have a “runaway gun problem.”

SACIA: Don’t blame the rest of us. This isn’t about Democrats, it’s not about Republicans. It’s because Chicago wants a warm fuzzy. “Let’s pass a bill that will eliminate assault rifles.” Last year, there were more people killed with hammers than with assault rifles. Here’s an analogy folks, I ask you to think of this: You folks in Chicago, want me to get castrated because you’re families are having too many kids. It spells out exactly what is happening here! You want us to get rid of guns. … You bet I used Chicago as an example, because you’re the folks that want this craziness.”

Watch the video:

While gun violence is a huge problem in Chicago, the problem is by no means limited to the Windy City. In 2012 alone, a school shooting rocked Normal, a gunman shot five people in a Decatur nightclub, and a gunfight broke out a Rockford nightclub. In 2008, five students Northern Illinois University students were killed by a gunman in DeKalb, Illinois.

Sacia joins a long list of Republicans who dismiss gun violence prevention efforts by suggesting guns are less dangerous than everyday household items.

Last month, Sacia wrote on his personal website that “Gun free zones are killing fields for the deranged.” He also lauded an Australian grandmother for engaging in vigilante justice with an illegal gun, noting that after her granddaughter was raped, “the grandmother personally hunted down the two rapists. She shot one’s manhood completely away and significantly shortened the other’s abilities.”

Fearing tighter gun violence prevention, Texans have bought guns in droves since the Sandy Hook tragedy. To accommodate the frenzy, state Rep. Dan Flynn introduced a bill to cut down the training required of concealed carry permit holders from 10 hours to just four.

Flynn claimed there would be no difference between the two classes. WFAA reports:

“You spend a lot of time taking breaks, you spend a lot of time hearing stories,” Flynn said. “A lot of people who try to get their license, they have to take a day off of work, or they have to take a whole Saturday to go do this where, four hours, range time, you can do the same thing and it accomplishes it.”

Naturally, shooting instructors call the change unsafe. “It takes me four hours just to go through one segment, which is the lawful use of deadly force,” Travis Bond, a National Rifle Association member who runs a firearm training academy, said. “There’s no way you can teach people what they need to know.”

Currently, the 10-hour class covers at least four required topics — “use of force; non violent dispute resolution; handgun use; and safe and proper storage of handguns and ammunition” — according to the Texas Department of Public Safety. It is far more likely the shorter class would omit material more substantial than water cooler breaks, especially when Texas’ neighboring states all require between 8-15 hours of training.

Gun accidents may make up a smaller portion of firearm deaths than homicides and suicides, but adding more poorly trained gun owners to the mix does not help a state where roughly 500,000 hold concealed gun permits.

Texas lawmakers will also consider a second bill that capitalizes on the increased demand for guns. This one would create a tax-free holiday for guns and ammunition on “Texas Independence Day.”

(HT: Raw Story)

The US Supreme Court heard a challenge to the 1965 Voting Rights Act today, attracting hoards of voting rights advocates, speakers, and a massive line of people vying for a spot in the courtroom. Today’s argument could lead to the elimination of Section 5, which protects minority voting rights in states with historically discriminatory election laws. Though Congress reauthorized the Voting Rights Act in 2006 by overwhelming margins of of 98-0 in the Senate and 390-33 in the House, many Republicans are now calling for the Supreme Court to strike it down, claiming the protections are obsolete in the post-Jim Crow era. In the last election cycle, however, the Justice Department used Section 5 to block new voter ID laws in Texas and South Carolina, early voting restrictions in Florida, and racially gerrymandered redistricting maps in Texas. The courts agreed that these laws would suppress minority voting power.

ThinkProgress spoke to five individuals waiting in line outside the Supreme Court. While the attorneys made their case inside the court, these supporters gave their own oral arguments for why the Voting Rights Act is still needed:

Priscilla Anderson, Lumberton, NJ and Emma Scott, Willingboro, NJ

“There are unfortunately some people who don’t want all Americans to have the right to vote for the person of their choice. And I believe that every American, no matter what you look like or what your background is, if you want to vote you should be allowed to vote for the person of your choice. It doesn’t matter what party you’re in. I think everyone should have that right. And I have grandchildren, and I want them to be able to have that same right wherever they live.” — Priscilla

“I think we need to keep moving forward. I think it’s fair the way it is. I was part of voter registration this year and some of the people I got registered, when I went down to vote, there was no record of them. It was very upsetting. They gave them a form to fill out and said they would get credit for voting, so I don’t know exactly how that turned out. But it was an effort to not let everyone vote. The Voting Rights Act is still very necessary. You can see some of the setbacks, even today.” — Emma

Jack Beard, Kalispell, MT

“I was in the Capitol yesterday. We have a record amount of women senators here, but when you look down at the floor, it’s basically an old men’s club with white hair. White men with white hair. To me, that’s just the proof right there that maybe voting rights aren’t as democratic as they should be in this country. I think it’s important. The voting restrictions today maybe aren’t as overtly racial, but there’s still many restrictions to voting.”

Gabrielle Griffin, high school government teacher and her students from Shenandoah Valley Academy, New Market, VA

“I think the Voting Rights Act, as well as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, are timeless. They have to be protected. I’ve read both sides of the argument, but if there’s any, any evidence at all that this would disenfranchise someone, then Section 5 needs to keep being renewed. That’s my personal feeling. As long as we have racism and bigotry in our country, then we need to protect those who can’t speak out for themselves.”

TJ Jackson, Jr, Shelby County, AL

“Sometimes I really feel like there’s been a change [in racism at the ballot box], but at the same time, when you try to manipulate things and not let the public be aware of it… We’re voters, too. We need to have knowledge to what is going on on the boundary lines. Our city council didn’t even have a clue that particular thing had be done, but they did it, and next thing we know they manipulated it to the point of bringing someone else in. And we didn’t have a clue! It’s very important. Even though it started in Shelby County, this is a nationwide kind of event. It could happen anywhere.”

Linda Perkins, Washington, DC

“I consider myself a “super voter” because I vote all the time, every election, even for dog catcher. It’s important to understand that voting is a fundamental, bottom-line, foundational right of any citizen, and it shouldn’t be impugned or even exempted from anyone. Voting and voting rights, as an African-American of course, has a tremendously significant role, being a part of this American citizenry. What we see from those who are trying to strike down voting rights is that there’s a realization of how powerful the vote is. So if you can restrict it, then obviously you can say it has some power to it. So being under attack by those who want to change it and have used things now with this new gerrymandering that’s going on, this locking votes in, is very, very important to understand that it is under attack. So those that believe in it have to defend it. That’s why I’m here today.”

WASHINGTON, DC — There were audible gasps in the Supreme Court’s lawyers’ lounge, where audio of the oral argument is pumped in for members of the Supreme Court bar, when Justice Antonin Scalia offered his assessment of a key provision of the Voting Rights Act. He called it a “perpetuation of racial entitlement.”

The comment came as part of a larger riff on a comment Scalia made the last time the landmark voting law was before the justices. Noting the fact that the Voting Rights Act reauthorization passed 98-0 when it was before the Senate in 2006, Scalia claimed four years ago that this unopposed vote actually undermines the law: “The Israeli supreme court, the Sanhedrin, used to have a rule that if the death penalty was pronounced unanimously, it was invalid, because there must be something wrong there.”

That was an unusual comment when it was made, but Scalia’s expansion on it today raises concerns that his suspicion of the Act is rooted much more in racial resentment than in a general distrust of unanimous votes. Scalia noted when the Voting Rights Act was first enacted in 1965, it passed over 19 dissenters. In subsequent reauthorizations, the number of dissenters diminished, until it passed the Senate without dissent seven years ago. Scalia’s comments suggested that this occurred, not because of a growing national consensus that racial disenfranchisement is unacceptable, but because lawmakers are too afraid to be tarred as racists. His inflammatory claim that the Voting Rights Act is a “perpetuation of racial entitlement” came close to the end of a long statement on why he found a landmark law preventing race discrimination in voting to be suspicious.

It should be noted that even one of Scalia’s fellow justices felt the need to call out his remark. Justice Sotomayor asked the attorney challenging the Voting Right Act whether he thought voting rights are a racial entitlement as soon as he took the podium for rebuttal.

A transcript of the oral argument will be available soon, and we will post Scalia’s quote in its full context. We will also post audio of Scalia’s words when they become available.

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A panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, which included a Reagan and a George W. Bush appointee, held unanimously on Friday that the Second Amendment does not protect a right to carry a concealed firearm:

[T]he Heller opinion notes that, “[l]ike most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited. From Blackstone through the 19th-century cases, commentators and courts routinely explained that the right was not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.” As an example of the limited nature of the Second Amendment right to keep and carry arms, the Court observed that “the majority of the 19th-century courts to consider the question held that prohibitions on carrying concealed weapons were lawful under the Second Amendment or state analogues.” And the Court stressed that “nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions.”

There can be little doubt that bans on the concealed carrying of firearms are longstanding. In Heller, the Supreme Court cited several early cases in support of the statement that most nineteenth century courts approved of such prohibitions. We note, however, that this view was not unanimous. Nevertheless, “[m]ost states enacted laws banning the carrying of concealed weapons” in the nineteenth century.

It should be noted that the court left open the question of whether a concealed carry ban is permitted in a jurisdiction that also bans open carry of firearms. Nevertheless, this decision is a reminder that, despite the Supreme Court’s decision in Heller expanding the scope of the Second Amendment, states and the federal government retain broad leeway to enact many gun safety laws.

Recently, it came to light that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) suggested that roughly a dozen professors at Harvard Law “would say they were Marxists who believed in the Communists overthrowing the United States government.” Through a spokesman, Cruz doubled down on these comments, saying “Senator Cruz’s substantive point was absolutely correct: in the mid-1990s, the Harvard Law School faculty included numerous self-described proponents of ‘critical legal studies’ — a school of thought explicitly derived from Marxism – and they far outnumbered Republicans.”

Not only is Cruz’s follow-up not a defense of his original statement, but it’s wrong in and of itself. Critical Legal Studies (CLS) isn’t “derived from Marxism;”although the movement was influenced by some Marxist ideas, it’s explicitly designed to be a critique of Marxist approaches to the law rather than an extension of them.

First, it’s important to understand how CLS thinkers actually define their own beliefs — remember, Cruz said that they themseves “would say” that they were revolutionary Marxists. ThinkProgress reached out to Georgetown University law professor Louis Michael Seidman, a leading “crit” (the term CLS exponents use for themselves). Here’s what Seidman told us:

I don’t have anything that’s not obvious to say about Cruz’s disgusting comments. A lot of early crit work was designed to refute Marxist theories of law, although some crits were also influenced by Marx. I know of no crit who thought of himself as a communist or who supported the regimes in the Soviet Union or China.

A 1992 article by crit Richard Michael Fischl backs up Seidman. As if anticipating Cruz, he wrote “Those of us associated with cls think it grossly unjust when our critics make an analytically identical move and argue that Stalinist totalitarianism is the ‘best worked-out, most consummated’ version of our position — in the face of the fact that a common intellectual thread that ties together virtually all cls work is its rejection of the authoritarianism and vulgar determinism suggested by the Stalinist label.”

So it’s clear enough: crits aren’t revolutionary Marxists. But Seidman’s suggestion that CLS “was designed to refute Marxist theories” implies that even Cruz’ spokesperson’s reformulation was inaccurate: far from being “explicitly derived” from Marxism, CLS was explicitly seen as a critique of Marxist thought. So not only did Cruz get it wrong, but in a certain sense he got it backwards.

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It was debated for an entire year. It overcame a GOP filibuster. It was signed into law. It survived at least 33 repeal attempts. It won a Supreme Court challenge. Its namesake was re-elected president.

But at least one Republican isn’t ready to accept defeat on Obamacare just yet.

Appearing on Family Research Council’s Washington Watch Weekly radio show, Rep. Steven Palazzo (R-MS) discussed a new constitutional amendment he has introduced to outlaw Obamacare. Called the “Right To Refuse” Amendment, Palazzo’s idea is to enshrine in the Constitution that “it’s unconstitutional to force an American citizen to purchase a product or be taxed,” thus undermining the individual mandate that’s central to ensuring universal health insurance through Obamacare.

PALLAZZO: We’ve dubbed it the Right To Refuse Amendment. With the Supreme Court coming in and actually saying that they can actually tax Americans for refusing to purchase a product, there’s a lot of people out there, an overwhelming majority of the people, who still think that’s unconstitutional, or it’s unfair, or it’s a violation of their personal liberties or their individual rights. So what we did with help from a young man named Marshall Thomas in my office, who is my legislative counselor, we’ve crafted some legislation that is basically a constitutional amendment to say it’s unconstitutional to force an American citizen to purchase a product or be taxed. It’s that simple.

If undermining 30 million Americans’ health insurance isn’t enough, Palazzo’s amendment would completely rework the scope of federal power. There is simply nothing novel about the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that most people either carry insurance or pay slightly more income taxes. The tax code gives tax breaks to people who take out mortgages or who buy products making their homes more energy efficient. A law giving tax breaks to people who buy health insurance — which is what the Affordable Care Act does — is no different.

Yesterday, the Kentucky Senate overwhelmingly approved an unconstitutional bill forbidding the enforcement of new federal gun safety laws:

Any federal law, rule, regulation, or order created on or after January 1, 2013, including any amendment or other change made after January 1, 2013, to a preexisting federal law, rule, regulation, or order, shall be unenforceable within the borders of Kentucky if the law, rule, regulation, order, amendment, or other change attempts to:

(a) Ban or restrict ownership of a semi-automatic firearm, magazine, or other firearm accessory; or

(b) Require any firearm, magazine, or other firearm accessory to be registered in any manner.

Nullification, the Nineteenth Century idea that states can simply declare federal laws invalid, cannot be squared with the Constitution’s declaration that federal law “shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the constitution or laws of any state to the contrary notwithstanding.” Yet the sponsor of this unconstitutional bill, state Sen. Jared Carpenter (R-KY), claims that he can make an end-run around the Constitution because the command that duly-enacted federal law are supreme over state law “applies only if Congress is acting in pursuit of its constitutionally authorized powers, which he said wouldn’t apply to stricter gun measures.”

Even if it were true, however, that bans on assault rifles and large capacity magazines and other proposed federal reforms are unconstitutional — and it is not true — that still does not mean that Kentucky has the unilateral power to declare something unconstitutional and therefore invalid within the state’s borders. Indeed, if Kentucky did have the power Carpenter claims, there would be nothing preventing it from declaring any law unconstitutional, regardless of what the Constitution has to say about it.

Giving states such a power would, in the words of James Madison, “speedily put an end to the Union itself.”