In 1979, the Supreme Court upheld a decision holding that it is unconstitutional to treat college students any differently than other voters in terms of residency requirements to vote. Three and a half decades later, some Republican lawmakers are still trying to prevent college students from voting.

The latest instance is in Indiana, where a state lawmaker just introduced legislation that would prevent students from considering their campus address as their place of residency. Instead, the bill would only allow students to claim the address where they grew up.

The Indianapolis Star has more:

Under House Bill 1311, students who pay out-of-state tuition would not be able to vote in Indiana.

Rep. Peggy Mayfield, the Martinsville Republican who filed the bill, said she’s trying to resolve an issue about determining who is an Indiana resident.

“We’re having people who are not necessarily residents voting in our elections,” she said.

Indiana’s constitution only requires that a voter establish residency for 30 days prior to an election in order to be eligible. Passing a bill that would impose a unique requirement on college students clearly violates the constitutional protections affirmed in Symm v. United States.

Over the past few years, Republicans have made a habit of trying to disenfranchise college students. In Maine, then-Secretary of State Charlie Summers sent a threatening letter to hundreds of college students in 2011 implying that many of them were illegally registered to vote simply because they had grown up out of state. The same year, then-New Hampshire House Speaker William O’Brien tried to discourage students from casting a ballot because he feared they’d vote “liberal.”

One Indiana Republican is already speaking out against Mayfield’s bill. State Rep. Randy Truitt (R) opposed the measure on the grounds that it would depress turnout among students. “We worked so hard on making the students a part of our community,” Truitt said. “And whether they’re there for a short period of time or not, from my perspective, they’re part of our community, and I’m just not in favor of disenfranchising them.”

Indeed, young Americans already vote at lower rates than the rest of the electorate. Even if this bill weren’t unconstitutional, its primary effect would be to drive down turnout among students.

The Arizona House is planning to take up an “English only” bill that would ban state agencies from mailing out information in any language other than English. HB 2283, cleared on Tuesday by the House Government Committee, purports to save money by only allowing non-English translations to be posted online.

Though voting materials are exempted, banning non-English mailings would essentially cut off Arizona’s substantial Spanish-speaking population from government services — particularly any Spanish speakers who receive any kind of service from the government, including Medicaid and Social Security. As of 2010, Arizona has the 8th largest population of limited English speakers, who comprise 9.9 percent of all Arizona residents. Rather than promote English language education, Arizona excluded these residents by making English the official state language in 2006.

This new bill’s sponsor, Rep. Steve Smith (R-AZ), has pushed several other radical anti-immigrant measures, most recently a bill requiring hospitals to check and report the immigration status of their patients. While he claims HB 2283 saves money by only printing documents in English, others anticipate costly lawsuits like the ones sparked by the state’s last attempt at English only legislation. In 1988, Arizona passed a constitutional amendment to require all official government business be conducted in English. The Supreme Court struck it down for violating state employees’ First Amendment rights. The 2006 measure passed muster because it only applies to official government business.

But Smith’s bill, by focusing on agencies’ abilities to disseminate information, could block non-English speakers’ access to government services and violate federal law:

“The bill as currently drafted is much broader than Rep. Smith suggests,” said attorney Ellen Katz with the William E. Morris Institute for Justice. “It violates Title 6 of the Civil Rights Act. Even in states that have an English-as-their-official-language policy, you still have to follow federal law.”

Title 6 prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color and national origin in programs and activities receiving federal funds. Katz said mailing out documents in English but not in other languages would violate that.

Even a fellow Republican, Rep. Doug Coleman, took issue with Smith’s proposal, noting that if the bill’s true purpose is to save money, all English publications should be restricted to websites as well.

English only laws exist in 16 states. Last year, Rep. Steve King (R-IA) unsuccessfully pushed a federal version of the English only law, the English Language Unity Act.

The practice has been deemed torture, cruel and inhumane, and worse than being held hostage in Iran. Yet in the United States, the country with far more prisoners than any other in the world, solitary confinement remains a common practice even for holding juveniles and the mentally ill. In the wake of a Senate hearing on the human rights, fiscal, and safety impacts of confining a prisoner in isolation for months or years at a time, the federal agency tasked with overseeing prisons has agreed for the first time to undertake a close examination of the practice.

The Federal Bureau of Prisons will hire an independent auditor to examine U.S. use of solitary confinement, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) announced this week after meeting with officials from the National Institute of Corrections, which will carry out the study. There are more than 80,000 people in some sort of isolated U.S. confinement at any given time, and in Durbin’s home state of Illinois, 56 percent of the population has spent time in isolation. Since the Senate hearing spearheaded by Durbin, the Bureau of Prisons says it has reduced the federal segregated population by 25 percent, and that the national agency that oversees state prisons has worked with Mississippi and Colorado to reduce their isolated populations.

Solitary confinement often involves holding prisoners in isolation for 23 hours a day in a small, often windowless cell with a steel door. When prisoners are let out of the cell for showers at least 3 times a week, they are taken to another small, isolated space where they are sometimes locked for extended periods of time. 

This treatment is not reserved for the most dangerous offenders. Solitary confinement is applied to children as young as 13, some of whom are in prison for charges as minimal as nonviolent burglary or drug possession. Sometimes people are placed in isolation as punishment, but other times it is merely for their own protection from other prisoners or as a purported mental health treatment. While many prisoners are held for months or years at a time in solitary, studies show the treatment has detrimental long-term psychological impacts after just ten days. Shane Bauer, who was taken hostage while hiking in Iran, called his experience in isolation – whether in Iran or at the notorious California supermax facility Pelican Bay — a “a living death.” What’s more, a remarkable piece of reporting by Bauer for Mother Jones reveals the process by which inmates are placed in isolation to be arbitrary, secret and virtually irreversible.

Virginia House of Delegates Speaker William Howell (R) killed the Inauguration Day sneak attack by Senate Republicans who hoped to pass a massive mid-decade gerrymander. Howell ruled that the Senate’s amendment to a House bill making minor technical corrections to the House legislative maps were not germane, as it was a “vast rewrite” and would “stray dramatically” from the legislation’s original purpose.

When a Republican colleague requested a ruling on the amendment’s germaneness, Howell told his colleagues:

[Germaneness] prevents the presentation to the House of propositions that may not be reasonably anticipated, and for which they may not be properly prepared. A proposition of a narrow or limited scope may not be amended by a proposition of a more general nature… even though they might be related… I am going to rule that Senate amendments are not germane and out of order.

The Senate passed the controversial maps on January 21 on a party-lines vote. The measure passed 20-19 because Senator Henry Marsh (D), a legendary civil rights leader, was absent attending President Obama’s inauguration.

Since then-Delaware Senator Joe Biden first authored the law in 1994, the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) has earned bipartisan praise for providing vital protections against domestic violence and assistance to victims. But of the eight Senators — all Republicans — who voted Monday against even considering VAWA renewal, at least four apparently did so because they believe the bill is unconstitutional.

Several of these senators have expressed similarly radical views about the constitutional role of the federal government in other contexts. Sen. Mike Lee’s (R-UT) claimed that national child labor laws, Social Security and Medicare violate the Tenth Amendment, for example; and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) once led a Tenth Amendment project at a conservative think tank and co-authored a paper proposing an unconstitutional process to nullify the Affordable Care Act. The four senators who claim that the Violence Against Women Act is unconstitutional are:

• 1. Sen. Jim Risch (R-ID): In a statement, Risch explained: “It is at the state and local level where I believe enforcement and prosecution must remain. The federal government does not need to add another layer of bureaucracy to acts of violence that are being handled at the state and local level. In addition to my 10th Amendment concerns, this legislation raises additional constitutional questions regarding double jeopardy and due process. I opposed this legislation, however well intended it was, because it is another effort of the federal government extending its reach into the affairs of state and local jurisdictions.”
• 2. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY): In a 2012 letter explaining his opposition to last year’s VAWA re-authorization attempt, Paul wrote: “Under our Constitution, states are given the responsibility for prosecution of those violent crimes. They don’t need Washington telling them how to provide services and prosecute criminals in these cases. Under the Constitution, states are responsible for enacting and enforcing criminal law. As written, S. 1925 muddles the lines between federal, state, local and tribal law enforcement.”
• 3. Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT): In 2012, Lee claimed VAWA “oversteps the Constitution’s rightful limits on federal power. Violent crimes are regulated and enforced almost exclusively by state governments. In fact, domestic violence is one of the few activities that the Supreme Court of the United States has specifically said Congress may not regulate under the Commerce Clause. As a matter of constitutional policy, Congress should not seek to impose rules and standards as conditions for federal funding in areas where the federal government lacks constitutional authority to regulate directly.”
• 4. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX): A Cruz spokeswoman told ThinkProgress: “For many years, Senator Cruz has worked in law enforcement, helping lead the fight to ensure that violent criminals—and especially sexual predators who target women and children—should face the very strictest punishment. However, stopping and punishing violent criminals is primarily a state responsibility, and the federal government does not need to be dictating state criminal law.” While the statement does not explicitly call VAWA unconstitutional, his previous comments leave little doubt that that is what he means.

These senators’ apparent belief that the federal government cannot constitutionally play a role in preventing violence against women is not even shared by most Republican members of Congress. 216 House Republicans agreed just last year that the Constitution does not prohibit a version of the Violence Against Women Act. The Supreme Court did strike down one piece of VAWA in 2000, but it left most of the law intact.

While the other four Senators who voted against the “motion to proceed” did not respond to a request for an explanation of their votes, Sen. Tim Scott (R) voted for the watered-down House version of VAWA last year and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) claims he supports a scaled-back version of the legislation.

If stronger gun laws are passed in the United States following an unthinkable list of tragedies, from Columbine to Blacksburg to Aurora to Newtown, it will be in large part because of support from people like Dave Hoover.

Hoover is a lifelong Republican. He grew up hunting, has owned firearms most of his life, and enjoys taking his daughter out shooting. “We’ve been given the right to own and bear arms,” he told ThinkProgress.

“But,” he followed up, “we also need to show that we are responsible in how we deal with the gun issue.”

Gun violence is not an abstract concept to Hoover. On July 20, 2012, when James Holmes entered an Aurora theater minutes from Hoover’s home and shot 70 people in a matter of minutes, one of those killed was his nephew, 18-year-old AJ Boik.

If anyone knows the awful reality of gun violence it’s Dave Hoover. Watch him explain in 80 seconds why we need stronger gun laws:

It’s hard to think of a position that’s more mainstream than Hoover’s. Universal background checks are supported by 91 percent of Americans and 92 percent of Republicans. One of the only groups that publicly opposes universal background checks are the NRA’s lobbyists.

If Congress succeeds in passing universal background checks and other commonsense gun laws, it will be because it’s not a polarizing issue, but one that’s nearly universally supported.

Transcript below the fold:
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Yesterday, NBC News released a Department of Justice white paper concerning the “Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen Who Is a Senior Operational Leader of Al-Qa’ida or An Associated Force.” Most of the white paper echoes a speech Attorney General Eric Holder delivered last year laying out the Obama Administration’s criteria for authorizing such a targeted killing, although the paper provides significantly more detail than Holder’s speech about when the administration may deem a targeted attack to be warranted.

It should be noted, as Holder did a year ago, that targeted killings of “specific senior operational leaders” are neither novel nor forbidden by the customary law of war. The United States had the right to target Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto during World War II, and we were not forbidden from targeting Osama bin Laden because he merely directed attacks against the United States instead of participating in those attacks himself. The DOJ white paper concerns a somewhat more challenging legal question, however — what would have happened if Yamamoto or bin Laden had been born in the United States, and thus enjoyed all rights accorded to U.S. citizens?

Holder previously stated that a high-ranking U.S. citizen enemy combatant would not be targeted unless they pose “an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States,” and much of the commentary on DOJ’s white paper has focused on its expansive definition of what constitutes an “imminent” threat. Under DOJ’s framework, “an individual poses an ‘imminent threat’ of violent attack against the United States where he is an operational leader of al-Qa’ida or an associated force and is personally and continually involved in planning terrorist attacks against the United States.” Ultimately, however, the wisdom of the memo does not flow from whether or not it uses the word “imminent” in the literal sense — it does not — but from whether it provides constitutionally and morally adequate safeguards on top of the “imminence” standard that ensure no American citizen can be killed outside of a narrowly defined, exceptionally rare set of circumstances.

The Constitution provides that no person may be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” but it gives no further guidance on exactly how much or what kind of process is “due” to a U.S. citizen who becomes a senior leader of our enemies. Normally, Americans look to the judiciary to provide procedural rights, but federal judges are ill-suited for the kind of swift decision within a narrow window of opportunity that is required in this context. The only circumstances in which the targeted killing of a U.S. citizen could ever hypothetically be justified are ones where the citizen is directly engaging in hostilities against the United States — and there’s a reason judges don’t review generals’ targeting decisions before they’re made. Judges specialize in thoughtful, languid decision-making of the kind that often takes months to consider all arguments on both sides of a dispute. And they typically rely on briefing on both sides of an issue — something that is obviously impossible when one party to a dispute is a top-level terrorist about to be targeted by a military strike. It is true that judges do sometimes handle swifter matters, such as authorizing search and arrest warrants, but judges typically have a deep understanding of criminal law and are familiar with the issues that often arise in the criminal context. Few judges are prepared to make a quick judgment on military matters.

But if judicial pre-approval of military orders isn’t a realistic means of regulating targeted killings, DOJ’s framework calls for the other extreme — leaving the decision to kill a senior enemy combatant in the hands of “high-level” executive branch officials who are ultimately responsible to the President. This framework ensures both that decisions can be made swiftly and by officials with a broad understanding of both the details of a particular operation and of the laws governing war. But it also means that there is little external check on an executive branch eager to use its power irresponsibly. And even if you trust President Obama to not abuse a power to order targeted killings, there is no guarantee that the next president can also be trusted.

Between the two extremes, DOJ is probably right as a matter of law that the administration can act without independent oversight. Regardless of the wisdom of the broadly worded Authorization for Use of Military Force against Al-Qaeda and related terrorist forces, the AUMF is a duly-enacted Act of Congress, and the President’s wartime power is at its apex when he acts “pursuant to an express or implied authorization of Congress.”

But the current state of affairs is dangerous at best, and it does not have to be the only way. Since at least as far back as the Supreme Court’s 1804 decision in Little v. Barreme, Congress has had the power to prevent the president from waging war in certain ways. Without endorsing any particular proposal, here are five ways Congress could step into the breach:
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Yet another one-time owner of the Montana medical marijuana business that went from being an example of good state practice to made an example of was sentenced to five years in prison this week.

Chris Williams averted a mandatory minimum sentence of 85 years after he agreed to a last-minute plea deal. While mandatory minimum sentences for distributing marijuana alone are draconian, his minimum sentence was ratcheted up to 85 years because firearms were found at the dispensary, which allowed prosecutors to charge Williams with possessing a firearm in furtherance of drug trafficking.

Williams was part of a group of partners who ran a prominent medical marijuana business that is legal under Montana law. Among Montana Cannabis’ founders was lobbyist Tom Daubert, who helped write the state’s medical marijuana law, and entered the medical marijuana industry to provide an example for model compliance with state law. On the belief that federal prosecutors would not target dispensaries legal under state law, the partners ran their business openly and provided frequent tours to legislators. Instead, their dispensary and 25 others in Montana were raided by federal prosecutors in 2011.

While the other three operators of Montana Cannabis had accepted plea deals early on, Williams was committed to defending his case at trial and was convicted on several counts. In a rare move, prosecutors offered him a post-conviction deal to drop enough of the charges to bring the mandatory minimum sentence down to five years if Williams did not appeal. Williams accepted the deal, he said, on the chance that he might be out of jail in time to see his 16-year-old’s son’s graduation – if the judge showed enough mercy to sentence him to only the five-year minimum. U.S. District Court Judge Dana Christensen, whose hands were tied by federally mandated minimum drug sentences, showed both mercy and regret in sentencing Williams to five years, while calling the sentence “unfair and absurd.” The Independent Record reports:

Williams initially was convicted of four charges of possession of a firearm during a drug-trafficking offense, which could have netted mandatory minimums totaling 80 years. He also could have gotten another five years for the four drug counts on which he was also convicted in September.

But, said U.S. District Judge Dana Christensen in reviewing the facts of Williams’ case Friday, “it was my belief that an 85-year sentence in this case would have been unjust.”

In December, Christensen successfully urged a compromise that involved the feds dropping three of the gun charges and three drug charges against Williams in exchange for his agreement not to appeal.

Even this comparatively humane compromise is troubling – prosecutors essentially coerced Williams’ plea deal by lobbing at him an absolutely absurd prison sentence for his mere participation in a state-compliant business to provide medical marijuana to sick patients. And aside from losing the chance to defend his innocence, Williams will spend five years in jail. His partner Richard Flor died in prison after being sentenced to ten years, and both Daubert and fellow partner Chris Lindsey were sentenced — also by Christensen – to five years of probation. The story of these four partners is particularly prominent because it was the subject of the documentary Code of the West. But they are far from the only ones subject to federal crackdowns. In California, a medical marijuana defendant was sentenced to ten years in prison just last month.