Just hours after Rep. Joe Heck (R-NV) found himself in hot water over his agreement with a conservative radio host that former Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-AZ) was a “prop” in the gun debate, the Congressman voiced his support for universal background checks on all gun sales.

In a statement to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Heck joined a host of other Republicans who have come forward in support of the measure:

“I think the idea of background checks across the board, I’m not opposed to them,” Heck said. “I disagree with people who say that this is going to be the first step to gun registration, which leads to gun confiscation.”[...]

“For law-abiding citizens that want to own a weapon, I don’t see why they would be adverse to undergoing that check just like you would if you walked into the gun store,” Heck said.

Being against universal background checks is a little bit less popular than the United States going communist, so the policy is an easy go-to for a Congressman trying to change the subject. Still, his support signals potential progress on legislation to pass such checks into law.

The Columbus, Ohio school district has a track record of horrible behavior toward mentally disabled children, and a new report reveals the extent of the problem: One in 25 special education students has been “held down, physically removed from class or put in closetlike rooms to calm down.”

According to a state review of the Columbus school district, 371 students had suffered such punishment a total of 1,829 times. Students were secluded for as long as three hours. One report from a particular student offered a chilling insight into how the school operated beyond parental permissions:

14. The parent indicated in the communication book on November 11, 2011 that she did not want the student to be placed in the time out room.
15. The parent again indicated on November 14, 2011 in the communication book that she did not want the student to be taken or forced into the seclusion closet.
16. On November 14, 2011, the staff indicated that the student placed himself in the time out room.
17. On November 17, 2011, the parent indicated in the communication book that the student was scared of the light in the seclusion closet. She again stated that she did not want the student to be placed in the seclusion closet.

NPR’s State Impact also highlighted a letter from special education attorney Aimee Gilman, where she blasted the departmental report:

The descriptions in your findings read like a horror story. Children were repeatedly restrained and secluded, some for as long as 3 hours. And frankly, the tone of your letter suggests that the difficult behaviors are the fault of the child which justifies the district’s response. What evidence-based interventions were brought to bear to assist these children in managing their behaviors? There is no evidence to suggest that seclusion and restraint interventions do anything except to escalate behaviors.

Gilman was right to worry that the state was not properly scrutinizing the issue: The state investigator actually used to work for the school district. She is also right to question the validity of seclusion in general. Studies suggest that such methods are terrible for the emotional health of children, and have prompted some to inflict physical harm on themselves.

As the U.S. private prison industry has grown over the last several years, studies have shown that private prisons are incentivized to lobby for more incarceration. During an investor call this week, the CEO of private prison operator Corrections Corporation of America signaled that incarceration rates would remain high, assuring investors that immigration detention would be a strong source of business for the foreseeable future, ColorLines reports. Addressing the prospect of federal immigration reform, CEO Damon Hininger said Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have said there will “always be a demand for beds”:

It’s too early to tell exactly what the impact [of reform] is going to be, but again, ICE has always said that there’s going to be a demand for bed space here in the US because of all the things they’re doing both within the interior, on the border, from the people that are released from state prisons that are ultimately need to be deported. […]

There is always going to be strong demand regardless of what is being done at the national level as far as immigration reform.

Hininger’s assurances suggest a disturbing financial interest in more incarceration. And this is not the first time CCA officials have expressed optimism about higher incarceration rates. A 2011 report bragged that the industry is resistant to recession and that there is the “potential of accelerated growth in inmate populations following the recession.” CCA facilities have been deemed riddled with violations of state law, and have seen deadly riots break out.

The Violence Against Women Act reauthorization cleared the Senate last week 78-22, and VAWA’s fate is left to the House of Representatives. VAWA will likely face more opposition in the House, where conservatives object to provisions that protect Native American, LGBT, and undocumented victims.

According to the Chattanooga Times Free Press, Rep. John Duncan (R-TN) has not decided where he will fall on reauthorizing VAWA. But he said he will not be misled by the bill’s title, even though it is named for what it does — protecting women from domestic violence:

“Every bill is given a motherhood-and-apple-pie title,” Duncan said outside the House chamber. “But if you voted [based] on the title, you’d vote for every bill up here. If we’d all done that, the country would have crashed a long time ago.

“So this is another bill with a motherhood-and-apple-pie title,” he added.

While Duncan claims he opposes domestic violence against women because “most men can handle [violence] a little better than a lot of women can,” he said his vote will come down to the cost.

Of course, VAWA is not simply conveniently titled. Since its inception in 1994, VAWA has driven down violence by creating community programs for women, improving the prosecution of sex offenders, and assisting victims with legal costs and resources. The Senate’s version includes new, expanded protections that cover LGBT individuals and Native Americans.

As a private prison corporation with a history of alleged abuses and violations continues to lobby for more privatization of incarceration in Florida, it has found a new way to brand itself. In exchange for a $6 million gift, Florida Atlantic University will rename its football stadium GEO Group Stadium, after the second-largest U.S. corporation that runs criminal detention facilities. The New York Times reports:

For this partnership, there is no obvious precedent.

The university’s president described the deal as “wonderful” and the company as “well run” and by a notable alumnus. But it also left some unsettled, including those who study the business of sports and track the privatization of the prison industry. To those critics, this was a jarring case of the lengths colleges and teams will go to produce revenue, of the way that everything seems to be for sale now in sports — and to anyone with enough cash. […]

“It’s startling to see a stadium will be named after them,” said [Bob Libal, the executive director of Grassroots Leadership]. “It’s like calling something Blackwater Stadium. This is a company whose record is marred by human rights abuses, by lawsuits, by unnecessary deaths of people in their custody and a whole series of incidents that really draw into question their ability to successfully manage a prison facility.”

The $6 million gift paid out over 12 years is the largest one-time gift in the history of FAU athletics, signaling both the monetary influence of the private prison industry, and its willingness to wield that influence to secure a better reputation. Just this past week, a Florida bill proposing the largest private prison expansion in history died in the state Senate, in spite of $1.3 million in campaign contributions by GEO Group to Florida legislators since 2006. And a move to privatize prison health care has been twice declared unconstitutional by a Florida court. But it’s not just prison privatization that companies like GEO Group lobby for. Several studies have shown that private prison companies have a direct incentive to lobby for more incarceration, even as the U.S. maintains its title as the world’s number one jailer.

GEO Group and its subsidiary GEO Care have faced fines for “serious shortcomings in patient care” at its mental health facilities and has been the subject of numerous reports of juvenile abuse, deaths, and riots. A federal judge even found that the group had “allowed a cesspool of unconstitutional and inhuman acts and conditions to germinate, the sum of which places the offenders at substantial ongoing risk” at a juvenile detention facility. A high-level GEO executive testified under oath in a lawsuit alleging witness tampering and intimidation that lying to a federal agency such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement would be just fine.

The deal also raises questions about the limits of college sports sponsorships. Sports administration professor David Ridpath questions whether educational institutions are “prostituting ourselves to the highest bidder regardless of what they represent.”

Yesterday, less than one hour before he was scheduled to be executed and after he had accepted sedatives to reduce his suffering during his impending death sentence, a divided panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit stayed the planned execution of Warren Lee Hill. Multiple mental health experts evaluated Hill and determined him to be “mentally retarded,” the legal term for intellectually disabled people who, under the Supreme Court’s decision in Atkins v. Virginia, cannot constitutionally be executed.

A Georgia state appeals court also issued a stay, although that decision was based on a challenge to Georgia’s lethal injection procedure and is unlikely to result in a permanent stay of execution.

So Hill’s life has momentarily been spared, but he is far from out of the woods. The order saving his life was written by moderate Judge Stanley Marcus and liberal Judge Rosemary Barkett, and while recent retirements and a couple of new Obama appointees mean that the Eleventh Circuit is no longer the bastion of conservatism it was just a few years ago, Marcus and Barkett are probably still to the left of this court’s center. As if to drive this point home, 18 of the 24 pages of opinions accompanying the court’s order are devoted to a dissent by Judge Frank Hull, the deeply conservative judge who co-authored a just-as-deeply erroneous opinion striking down the Affordable Care Act.

Hill also faces an uphill battle thanks to a 1996 law intended in no small part to make it easier for states to kill people. Under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), prisoners are typically not allowed to file what is known as a “second or successive habeas corpus application, ” meaning that someone convicted of a crime gets one attempt to seek relief from federal courts — and if they lose they are shut out forever. AEDPA does contain exceptions, including one for newly discovered information that could not have been previously discovered by a reasonable diligence, but it is unclear whether Hill can take advantage of this exception.

Hill points to affidavits from three state experts, all of whom testified that he is not intellectually disabled in 2000 — and all of whom have since recanted this testimony and claimed that he meets the legal criteria for “mental retardation” — as exactly the sort of new facts enabling him to raise a second claim. The problem he faces is that, while AEDPA sometimes permits new evidence to be considered if it shows that the prisoner is actually innocent of the crime they were convicted of, it is far less clear that new evidence can be admitted in Hill’s case. Hill does not claim that he is innocent. He claims that he has a mental disability that prohibits the state from executing him, and this may not be enough to penetrate AEDPA’s harsh rule.

So Hill is almost certainly intellectually disabled, and every mental health professional to evaluate him says as much. Moreover, the Supreme Court held in Atkins that it is unconstitutional to execute someone with Hill’s disability. Nevertheless, Hill remains likely to be executed in large part because of a federal law passed to prevent courts from considering whether it is unconstitutional to execute someone.

Earlier this week, Missouri state Rep. Eric Burlison (R) posted a video where he criticizes proposed legislation banning assault rifles and large capacity magazines, and then emphasizes his point by using the bill as target practice:

Burlison’s antics closely resemble an ad then-Gov. Joe Manchin (D-WV) ran during his first bid for the United States Senate, where he demonstrated that he would not support environmental legislation that was unpopular in his coal-mining state by firing a hole in the bill with a hunting rifle.

You can watch Burlison’s video below: Read more

The Seventeenth Amendment, which guarantees that voters will elect their own U.S. senators — rather than having those senators chosen for them by the state legislature — is strangely unpopular in Tea Party circles. Both Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) believe their own elections to the United States Senate should be unconstitutional. Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) called empowering voters to elect senators a mistake, and even Justice Antonin Scalia lamented the “decline of so-called states’ rights throughout the rest of the 20th century” as a result of the Seventeenth Amendment.

Earlier this month, six Georgia state lawmakers, Reps. Dustin Hightower (R), Mike Dudgeon (R), Buzz Brockway (R), Josh Clark (R), Kevin Cooke (R) and Delvis Dutton (R) decided to get in on this action, introducing a resolution calling for the Seventeenth Amendment to be repealed:

[T]he United States Senate was designed to protect the rights and interests of the individual states, and the repeal of the Seventeenth Amendment would help to prevent the many unfunded mandates and unconstitutional laws passed onto those states by the federal government . . . . NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED BY THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF GEORGIA that the members of this body request the United States Congress to repeal the Seventeenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Of course, in reality, state lawmakers themselves agreed to enact the Seventeenth Amendment in the first place because the previous system resulted in a kind of Citizens United on steroids. As David Gans explains, the previous system “led to rampant and blatant corruption, letting corporations and other moneyed interests effectively buy U.S. Senators, and tied state legislatures up in numerous, lengthy deadlocks over whom to send to Washington, leaving those bodies with far less time to devote to the job of enacting the laws their states needed for the welfare of the people.”