A victim of M.S.T. profiled by the New York Times.

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.

John Lewis being beaten by state troopers, March 7, 1965

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.