Congressman Joe Heck (R-NV) on Tuesday agreed that he considers former Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-AZ), who was a victim of an assassination attempt two years ago, a “prop” in the debate over gun regulations.

Jon Ralston of Ralston Reports, uncovered the audio of Heck, speaking with conservative radio talk show host Alan Stock, agreed that Giffords was nothing more than a “prop” at the State of the Union:

STOCK: At the end of the president’s State of the Union when he said have a vote for Gabby Giffords, have a vote for this and that. I found that to be nauseating and you know what else is nauseating too is putting Gabby Giffords up there, who can’t even clap her hands, as a figure of somebody being — having shot her. I think it’s a shameful act putting her up there as a prop. I’m sorry. I really do.

HECK: Yeah, no I agree. I think again in the cloud of emotion surrounding Connecticut those who are anti-gun want to use that to limit their Second Amendment rights.

Listen to it:

Giffords has made a remarkable recovery since she was shot through the head at a town hall in a parking lot in Tucson, AZ, two years ago. In fact, the experience has prompted Giffords, along with her husband Mark Kelly, to found an organization called Americans For Responsible Solutions, devoted to combating gun violence.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld the validity of an alert by a drug-sniffing dog whose certification had expired. In a unanimous decision on one of two drug-sniffing dog cases before the court this term, Justice Elena Kagan said the Florida Supreme Court imposed requirements far too onerous on police to establish the reliability of police dogs. She wrote:

The question—similar to every inquiry into probable cause—is whether all the facts surrounding a dog’s alert, viewed through the lens of common sense, would make a reasonably prudent person think that a search would reveal contraband or evidence of a crime. A sniff is up to snuff when it meets that test.

The decision was narrow in its scope, holding only that Florida’s “strict evidentiary checklist” for establishing the reliability of a dog was inconsistent with flexible standards for establishing the probable cause necessary to justify an arrest. In particular, it criticized the court’s reliance on records of a dog’s performance, noting that determinations of “success” may not account for dogs’ sniffing of trace amounts of drugs or well-hidden drugs that the police never find. Justice Souter found otherwise when he documented the pervasive use of dogs with error rates as high as 60 percent in a 2005 dissent. He wrote then:

The infallible dog … is a creature of legal fiction. Although the Supreme Court of Illinois did not get into the sniffing averages of drug dogs, their supposed infallibility is belied by judicial opinions describing well-trained animals sniffing and alerting with less than perfect accuracy, whether owing to errors by their handlers, the limitations of the dogs themselves, or even the pervasive contamination of currency by cocaine. … In practical terms, the evidence is clear that the dog that alerts hundreds of times will be wrong dozens of times.

Today’s decision does not revisit the majority’s opinion in that 2005 case, and thus does not question the expansive police authority to use the dogs without reasonable suspicion of drug offenses. Another police dog case coming down the pike this term, however, will question whether use of such dogs can be expanded to the front door of someone’s home without probable cause.

While today’s decision is narrow and reasonable, holding only that the court may not impose a too-onerous requirement on police, it leaves open the policy concern that police maintain broad discretion in their use of dog sniffs, with no national standards and little oversight to ensure that these dogs are even reliable. In 2011, more people were arrested for drugs than for anything else, according to FBI statistics. And without more rigorous standards, police maintain the discretion to use drug sniffs as a cover for stops and searches that could not otherwise be justified by police.

When Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) announced he would no longer support his own plan to do away with same day voter registration in Wisconsin, he struck a blow to voter suppression and may have saved millions of taxpayer dollars in the process.

A new report from the Government Accountability Board suggests that ending the state’s same day voter registration program, which allows eligible voters to register to vote at the polling station on election day, would cost several state agencies a combined $14.5 million:

The staff of the GAB, which oversees the state’s elections, studied the idea and in a preliminary report in December estimated its costs for the first two years after a change would increase by $5.2 million.

The estimate increased dramatically Monday for two reasons.

Since December, four affected state departments — transportation, workforce development, health services and children and families — have submitted their own cost estimates totaling between $9.9 million and $10.5 million, said GAB spokesman Reid Magney.

After the GAB’s initial report in December, when the projected cost of ending ending same day registration was a third of the latest estimates, Gov. Walker told reporters that he would stop his pursuit to end the program, citing the cost. But other Republican legislators in the state may still opt to pursue a bill to strip away same day registration, and Walker has not signaled that he would veto a potential bill. Nationwide, Republicans have waged war on voter rights in the last several years, supporting discriminatory voter ID laws while simultaneously seeking to end early voting and same day registration with little regard for the costs, both financial and otherwise.

A middle-aged couple driving through Tennessee on their way home from a funeral were pulled over by a police officer who mistook their Ohio Buckeye bumper stickers for marijuana leaves.
The Columbus Dispatch reports:

Two officers approached, one on each side of the car.

“They were very serious,” [the driver, Bonnie Jonas-Boggioni] said. “They had the body armor and the guns.” […]

“What are you doing with a marijuana sticker on your bumper?” [an officer] asked her.

She explained that it is actually a Buckeye leaf decal, just like the ones that Ohio State players are given to put on their helmets to mark good plays. […]

The officer then explained that someone from outside his jurisdiction — apparently another officer — had spotted the leaf sticker and thought it might indicate that the car was carrying marijuana, Jonas-Boggioni said. […]

The reporter quoted a spokeswoman for the West Tennessee Drug Task Force, who accurately explained that a marijuana sticker is clearly not a sufficient reason to stop a car. To justify a stop, police officers must meet the standard of “reasonable suspicion” that an individual has committed a crime or violation. And a sticker – a classic example of First Amendment expression and nothing more – is nowhere close to reasonable suspicion that the couple were drug traffickers.

This same type of flimsy evidence has justified the hundreds of thousands of “stop-and-frisks” applied arbitrarily and discriminatorily in New York City and elsewhere. A court recently found that police officers in the Bronx lacked that necessary reasonable suspicion for their frequent stops of individuals outside residences for alleged trespassing.

What’s particularly troubling about this incident is that police did not simply spot the stickers in the course of their route and stop the car. They went out of their way to respond to a call reporting “marijuana” stickers and sought that car out. Had the stickers actually portrayed marijuana leaves, and not a football symbol, the officers’ reaction might have been different, although the lack of reasonable suspicion would have been exactly the same. And while the inconvenience of a stop may seem minor, federal district judge Shira A. Scheindlin articulates in her recent stop-and-frisk decision why unconstitutional stops — in and of themselves a harm subject to Fourth Amendment protection – have increasingly “dire and long-lasting” consequences:

The stakes of “field interrogation” by the police have dramatically risen since Terry [v. Ohio, which established the legal standard for stop and frisks,] was decided in 1968. The use of incarceration has increased, sentences have grown, the threat of lengthy incarceration has created new incentives to plead guilty, and the collateral consequences of a conviction — on employment, housing, access to government programs, and even the right to vote or serve on a jury — have become more common and more severe.

The War on Drugs has also since emerged, and with it, a host of other  justifications for disproportionately subjecting particular populations to the criminal justice system.

The Supreme Court’s election-buying decision in Citizens United v. FEC enabled wealthy corporations to spend unlimited money to change the course of American elections, and a subsequent lower court decision gave the green light to super PACs funded by unlimited donations from millionaires, billionaires and corporations. Today, the Supreme Court announced it would hear another case — brought by none other than the Republican National Committee — that would go even further towards transforming American democracy into the Wild West.

Despite recent election-buying decisions permitting unlimited donations to super PACs and other groups that exist independently of campaigns and political parties, federal law still limits individual donations to candidates and to the parties themselves. In the next election cycle, these limits include a $2,600 cap on individual donations to a single candidate, and an overall limit of $123,200 in contributions to candidates, political party committees and similar organizations. The Republican Party’s lawsuit seeks to eliminate most of these limits on election-buying — most importantly, by removing the $123,200 cap on total contributions.

As the unanimous lower court decision upholding this cap explained, removing it would corrupt our election system even more by allowing billionaires to launder as much money as they want through political party committees to individual candidates:

Eliminating the aggregate limits means an individual might, for example, give half-a-million dollars in a single check to a joint fundraising committee comprising a party’s presidential candidate, the party’s national party committee, and most of the party’s state party committees. After the fundraiser, the committees are required to divvy the contributions to ensure that no committee receives more than its permitted share, but because party committees may transfer unlimited amounts of money to other party committees of the same party, the half-a-million-dollar contribution might nevertheless find its way to a single committee’s coffers. That committee, in turn, might use the money for coordinated expenditures, which have no “significant functional difference” from the party’s direct candidate contributions. The candidate who knows the coordinated expenditure funding derives from that single large check at the joint fundraising event will know precisely where to lay the wreath of gratitude.

Significantly, this opinion was written by Judge Janice Rogers Brown, who is one of the most conservative judges in the country. Brown previously authored an opinion suggesting that all labor, business or Wall Street regulation is constitutionally suspect, and she once compared liberalism to “slavery” and Social Security to a “socialist revolution.”

As a lower court judge, however, Brown was also required to follow Supreme Court precedents. The five conservative justices who gave us Citizens United, by contrast, are not.

At one Virginia pizza shop, customers who bring in a gun or show a gun permit get 15 percent off their order. The pro-gun owner of All Around Pizzas and Deli claimed that 80 percent of his customers have walked in carrying a gun since he offered the discount last week, including one carrying an AK-47. “It’s been awesome,” the owner, Jay Laze, said.

All Around Pizzas isn’t the only business encouraging customers to tote guns two months after the Newtown shooting. Earlier this month, a Utah ice cream business offered concealed carry permit-holders $1 off of their ice cream.

Thanks to Virginia’s open carry laws, customers can not only enjoy their pizza next to a gun, but they can also go to the bank, hospital, store, and a bar with firearms.

Yesterday, Missouri state Rep. Mike Leara (R) proposed legislation making it a felony for lawmakers to so much as propose many bills regulating guns. Leara’s bill provides that “[a]ny member of the general assembly who proposes a piece of legislation that further restricts the right of an individual to bear arms, as set forth under the second amendment of the Constitution of the United States, shall be guilty of a class D felony.”

There are many problems with this bill, not the least of which is the fact that the scope of the Second Amendment is very much in flux. Last week, the NRA announced it would launch of blizzard of litigation intended to expand gun rights while the courts are still controlled by very conservative judges. So a lawmaker who introduces legislation that is perfectly constitutional could conceivably find that their bill suddenly violates a new understanding of the Second Amendment after the NRA wins another lawsuit — and thus could suddenly be hit with felony charges.

The biggest problem with the bill, however, is that it almost certainly violates the Missouri Constitution, which provides that “[s]enators and representatives . . . shall not be questioned for any speech or debate in either house in any other place.” Although there are very few court decisions interpreting this clause in the Missouri Constitution, the United States Constitution contains a parallel clause guaranteeing that federal lawmakers shall not be called to account for “any Speech or Debate in either House” of Congress, and courts commonly interpret parallel provisions of state and the U.S. Constitution to have similar meanings.

In United States v. Johnson the Supreme Court explained that this “Speech or Debate” clause of the Constitution is intended to prevent the “instigation of criminal charges against critical or disfavored legislators by the executive in a judicial forum” by giving them broad immunity to prosecutions for their official actions. Moreover the clause does not simply protect lawmakers engaged in literal speech or debate, but it also ensures that they will remain unmolested for actions “generally done in a session of the House by one of its members in relation to the business before it.” Thus, a lawmaker’s decision to introduce a bill for consideration by the legislature is protected by the Speech and Debate clause, and they cannot be subject to prosecution for this act.

(HT: Rebecca Berg)

Eleven years ago, the Supreme Court held in Atkins v. Virginia that “death is not a suitable punishment for a mentally retarded criminal.” Yet, despite the fact that a court determined death row inmate Warren Lee Hill to be intellectually disabled in 2002, Hill is scheduled for execution today in the state of Georgia.

Hill’s execution could take place despite the Supreme Court’s decision in Atkins because of an potential loophole in that opinion. Although Atkins forbids executions of the intellectually disabled, it also left “to the State[s] the task of developing appropriate ways to enforce the constitutional restriction upon [their] execution of sentences.” Georgia essentially decided to “enforce the constitutional restriction” on the execution of intellectually disabled inmates by creating a standard that makes it nearly impossible for an inmate to prove that they are constitutionally ineligible for execution.

The Supreme Court could still intervene to prevent Georgia from flouting Atkins. If a court does not intervene soon, then Hill is scheduled to be executed at 7pm today.