Eight Senators on Monday voted not to consider the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, a bill that protects victims of domestic violence. The Senators who voted against moving to debate on the bill were: Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX), Mike Lee (R-UT), Tim Scott (R-SC), Marco Rubio (R-FL), Mike Johanns (R-NE), Rand Paul (R-KY), Pat Roberts (R-KS), and James Risch (R-ID).

VAWA’s reauthorization has been caught up in partisan gridlock over added provisions that would protect undocumented immigrants, as well as LGBT and Native American victims of domestic violence. Congress failed to reauthorize the bill by the end of 2012, and the Senate is now considering the same legislation again, in its new legislative session.

All of the women in the Senate, with the exception of Sen. Deb Fischer (R-NE), co-sponsored the legislation.

Once Senators consent to take up the measure, it will be voted on in its entirety. It is expected to pass, but will face a tougher battle in the House.

A Canadian man who beat out four million competitors to win a fantasy football league’s grand prize of tickets to last night’s Super Bowl was stopped at the border and denied entry because U.S. customs officials discovered he had a minor pot possession conviction on his record from 1981.

Myles Wilkinson was 19 years old when he was caught carrying two grams of marijuana and paid a $50 fine. Nearly 32 years later, he’s still paying for that infraction:

A Vancouver Island man who won an all-expenses-paid trip to the Super Bowl in New Orleans has been refused entry into the U.S. because of a marijuana possession conviction dating back to 1981.

Victoria resident Myles Wilkinson won the trip in a fantasy football league contest, competing against nearly four million other players for the chance to attend the National Football League championship, featuring the Baltimore Ravens and the San Francisco 49ers.

But when he got to Pearson International Airport in Toronto on Thursday, U.S. customs agents learned of a marijuana possession conviction in Vancouver in 1981 and told him he was not allowed to enter the country.

Though Wilkinson’s border ordeal is noteworthy, it’s one that affects a significant number of foreigners who want to visit the United States. “There’s hundreds of thousands of Canadians who have these criminal records for small amounts of cannabis and that results in a lifetime ban for accessing the U.S,” according to Dana Larsen, a Canadian group advocating for marijuana decriminalization. Not only are people like Wilkinson denied once-in-a-lifetime opportunities like going to the Super Bowl because they smoked pot as a kid, but the United States is also denied the economic benefit of their tourist dollars.

Following the episode, the fantasy football contest’s organizers offered Wilkinson a consolation prize: entrance to a private Super Bowl watch party in Vancouver.

On Friday, the Supreme Court of Wyoming struck down most of what remained of a 1992 ballot initiative imposing term limits on state elected officials:

Friday’s ruling covers the offices of secretary of state, auditor, treasurer and superintendent of public instruction. The court didn’t rule on the question of whether term limits for the office of governor are constitutional. . . . Friday’s decision follows a 2004 Wyoming Supreme Court decision that overturned term limits for state legislators.

Voters approved term limits by initiative in 1992. The court’s ruling on Friday states that qualifications for state offices are spelled out in the Wyoming Constitution and requirements can only be changed by constitutional amendment, not state statute.

Although term limits are often popular with voters, research suggests they have proved counterproductive in the states where they exist. Rather than injecting new blood into the lawmaking process and reducing corruption, term limits lead to less experienced lawmakers who spend much of their time in office learning to do their jobs. As a result, lobbyists often enjoy much more power in states with term limits because they understand policy and the lawmaking process far better than the lawmakers themselves. Indeed, as one early study of term limits suggests, “under term limits, there are more lobbyists, these lobbyists are working harder, their ethical behavior is sometimes worse, and they wield more influence in the legislative process, although this power is more evenly distributed.”

A study by NALP, a legal employment group previously known as the National Association for Law Placement, finds that the overwhelming majority of partners in law firms are white men. Moreover, an even larger disparity exists among equity partners — lawyers who own a stake in their firm’s profits and who tend to be the most well-compensated attorneys within that firm — where a massive 85 percent are male and over 95 percent are white:

Overall, based on those offices that provided information, 64% of male partners were equity partners as of February 2012, while somewhat less than half (46-47%) of both women partners and minority partners were equity partners, a differential of 17-18 percentage points. . . .

More dramatically perhaps, among equity partners, about 85% were men, 15% were women, and just under 5% were racial/ethnic minorities. (The minority figures include both men and women, so the three figures add to more than 100%.) Among non-equity partners, the respective figures were 73% men, 27% women, and 8% racial/ethnic minorities. . . .

Finally, among all partners, the equity/non-equity split is about 61%/39%. Just over half of partners were male equity partners; just over 9% were women equity partners; and almost 3% were minority equity partners (Again, minorities are also included in the counts by gender.)

Law firm partners, of course, are not just the most well-compensated members of their firms, they are also the ones with the most authority over the firm’s activities and the most control over the arguments the firm will present to judges in legal briefs. As judges rely on briefing in order to familiarize themselves with the best arguments for each position in a case, the fact that senior law firm attorneys are overwhelmingly white men means that judges are overwhelmingly more likely to be confronted with legal arguments presented from a white man’s perspective.

Monday afternoon, President Obama will deliver his first speech on a tour promoting his plan to reduce gun violence in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The choice of location is anything but accidental: Minneapolis has, in recent years, developed a progressive, highly effective approach to gun violence prevention that has seen firearm crime plummet.

As in most places in the United States, violent crime in Minneapolis peaked in Minneapolis in the mid-90s — 1995, to be precise, two years after the national peak. Minneapolis’ murder rate was bad even for the early-90s crime epidemic, earning the city the name “Murderapolis.” So it was particularly worrisome that, while most of the country was enjoying a “steady and spectacular decline” in violent crime from the mid-90s going forward, Minneapolis’ firearm crime rate began to tick back up around 2000. By 2006, homicide was “the leading cause of death for young people in the city.” The kids were mostly being killed by guns.

In 2006, Mayor R.T. Rybak (who’s still in office today) and the city council voted to designate youth violence as a “public health” problem rather than simply an issue for law enforcement, an approach pioneered in Boston in the 90s. The public health approach suggests that youth violence is caused principally by a surrounding environment — lack of adult support, economic incentives to join gangs, easy access to guns — rather than “bad kids” who need to be locked away. The point is to identify the environmental causes in the same way one might identify, say, pollution as a cause of lung disease, and then develop appropriate treatments.

Rybak and the council created a “steering committee” that would attempt to align Minneapolis police, public health, and social work problems in a joint effort to address the public health roots of the crime problem. The end result was a document titled “Blueprint for Action: Preventing Youth Violence in Minneapolis,” which laid out four principles and 34 concrete recommendations based on them for addressing the youth violence problem. The principles were 1) ensuring all youth have access to trusted adults through things like city-funded mentoring programs, 2) help incentivize youth who are “at-risk” for committing violence through things like city job programs, 3) help reorient kids who’ve already committed violence through steps like orienting probation around reintegrating youth into the community rather than surveillance, and 4) working against the broader culture of violence by, among other things, “seeking stronger penalties for people who sell and distribute illegal guns.”

And it worked. Jon Roesler, an epidemiologist at the Minnesota Department of Public Health who studies deaths from gun violence, told ThinkProgress that “If there’s one thing [that caused youth gun violence to decline] –- and of course, there’s never one thing –- but if there’s one thing, it’d be [the Blueprint].” Violence did, indeed, decline: here’s a chart of hospitalizations for “assaultive” gun wounds in Minneapolis:

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Last week, four people in Colorado offered to sell me Smith & Wesson M&P15 assault rifles, the same weapon used by James Holmes in the Aurora theater massacre last year. In each case, the seller neither required nor requested a background check to make sure I wasn’t a criminal or mentally ill.

If that sounds bizarre, it should. 91 percent of Americans support a law requiring anyone who purchases a gun anywhere to first pass a background check. And yet, in Colorado and most states, private gun sales are exempted from such a requirement.

This was on full display last week when we visited ArmsList.com, a Craigslist-style site that deals solely in firearms. We searched “Smith & Wesson M&P15″ in the Colorado listings and instantly found dozens of sellers. A few emails later, we had four people willing to sell us the gun that same day, no questions asked. When we inquired whether we’d need to do a background check or any paperwork to obtain the assault rifle, we met the same response every time: no.

When I asked one man whether a background check was required, he said he was simply “assuming” I am not a felon and am “a good and decent person that will not use this carbine to commit a crime and of course a sane and normal human being.” “If that is indeed the case,” he continued, “no background check is required by law in the state of Colorado.” A few wanted to do a “bill of sale,” a personal document showing that they had sold the gun to me “in the event you do something stupid with the rifle,” as one seller wrote. However, they were careful to note that this is only for their own records, not the government’s.

See samples from their responses below:

Seller #1:

Seller #2:

Seller #3:

Seller #4:

We did not ultimately purchase any of the weapons, both because we didn’t want assault rifles and because Colorado law requires you to be a resident in order to make such a purchase. The inquiries are illustrative, though, of just how easy it is for someone to legally obtain a firearm.

To reiterate, none of these sellers broke the law. Background checks are required at gun shows and gun stores, but not for private online sales, which account for 40 percent of gun transactions in the United States. That’s why closing the gun show loophole isn’t enough. Requiring background checks in some places but not others is like locking three of your car doors, leaving one unlocked, and expecting that car to be secure. Unless background checks are universal, criminals are able to buy weapons online without a single red flag going up.

However, that could soon change. In Colorado, State Rep. Rhonda Fields (D), whose district includes the Aurora theater, has introduced a bill that would close the private sales loophole and require universal background checks for firearms purchasers. Such a move is also being debated in Congress.

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), the 2012 GOP vice presidential candidate and author of a 2011 plan to phase out Medicare, was a leader of the Republican Party’s right-wing long before Gov. Mitt Romney tapped him as his running mate. Yet even he opposes a Republican plan to rig future presidential races for Republicans by changing the way electoral votes are counted:

Wisconsin’s U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, the unsuccessful 2012 GOP vice presidential nominee, is the latest Republican to throw cold water on the notion of switching the way Wisconsin apportions its Electoral College votes — a shift that would have benefited his running mate, Mitt Romney. . . . Ryan, R-Janesville, said he would prefer that Wisconsin stay a winner-take-all state.

“I’ve always kind of liked the idea of being targeted as a state,” Ryan told the Wisconsin State Journal editorial board on Tuesday. “I’d hate to be a flyover state. I’d like to be in the hunt for being a targeted state. I think it’s good for us.”

Notably, Ryan’s argument — that allocating all of Wisconsin’s votes to the winner of the state as a whole ensures that presidential candidates pay more attention to the state — is an argument against both versions of the GOP election-rigging plan.

Republicans originally proposed rigging the Electoral College by allocating electoral votes in key blue states one-by-one to the winner of each congressional district, rather than to the winner of the state as a whole. This month, however, Pennsylvania Republicans are expected to introduce a modified election-rigging plan in that state which would allocate electoral votes proportionally according to the popular vote — so that a Republican candidate who receives 40 percent of the vote would also receive a little less than 40 percent of the state’s electoral votes, even if the Democratic candidate wins the state as a whole. Significantly, the Pennsylvania plan would not apply in red states, so those states would continue to award 100 percent of their electors to the Republican.

(HT: Amanda Terkel)

As ThinkProgress previously reported, Republicans so effectively gerrymandered congressional maps before the 2012 election that Democratic House candidates would need to win the national popular vote by over 7 points in order to win back the House. Last November, the American people preferred Democratic House candidates to Republican House candidates by almost 1.4 million votes, yet Republicans still hold a substantial House majority due in large part to partisan gerrymandering.

A new study by Princeton molecular biologist and neuroscientist Sam Wang digs deeper into the effect of the Republican gerrymander, and finds that the gerrymanders in seven states were so powerful that they are the equivalent of 1.7 million Democrats simply deciding not to show up at the polls:

[G]errymandering is a major form of disenfranchisement. In the seven states where Republicans redrew the districts, 16.7 million votes were cast for Republicans and 16.4 million votes were cast for Democrats. This elected 73 Republicans and 34 Democrats. Given the average percentage of the vote it takes to elect representatives elsewhere in the country, that combination would normally require only 14.7 million Democratic votes. Or put another way, 1.7 million votes (16.4 minus 14.7) were effectively packed into Democratic districts and wasted.

Such gerrymanders can exist because five conservative justices refused to block partisan redistricting in a case called Vieth v. Jubelirer.

Last month, Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus called up “states that have been consistently blue that are fully controlled red” to rig future presidential elections by changing the way electoral votes are allocated. Under Priebus’ proposal, blue states such as Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania would stop awarding electoral votes to the winner of the state as a whole, and instead would award them one-by-one to the winner of each congressional district. Meanwhile, red states would continue to award 100 percent of their electors to the Republican. This plan appears to have lost steam, however, as several top Republicans in key states announced they will not support it.

Even as Republicans in key states such as Michigan, Ohio, Florida and Virginia came out against this election-rigging plan, however, Pennsylvania Republicans have been eerily quite. We now know why. According to the New Castle News a local paper in western Pennsylvania, Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi (R) will introduce legislation this month that will effectively give away a large chuck of Pennsylvania’s electoral votes to the Republican presidential candidate, regardless of who wins the state as a whole.

How This Election-Rigging Plan Works

Unlike the plan Priebus backs, the New Republican Plan would not tie electoral votes to congressional districts. Instead, it would award the overwhelming majority of Pennsylvania’s electoral votes proportionally according to the popular vote, with two additional electoral votes going to the winner of the state as a whole. If the New Republican Plan had been in effect in 2012, Mitt Romney would have received 8 of Pennsylvania’ 20 electoral votes, despite losing the state by a substantial margin.

The problem with the New Republican Plan is that it would only be enacted in blue states such as Pennsylvania — the Democratic candidate for presidential won Pennsylvania in every single election for the past two decades — while red states would continue to award all of their electoral votes to the Republican. Thus, the plan gives away Democratic votes to the Republican for free, while letting the Republican candidate keep all the votes they earn legitimately in other states:

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