Virginia’s gubernatorial election, is eight months away, but a leading anti-choice group is already spending big money to buy the governor’s mansion for Tea Party Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (R-VA). Susan B. Anthony List — an anti-abortion group that launched a program early this year to teach Republican candidates how to talk about rape without using words like “legitimate” or “gift from God” — pledged at least $1.5 million to Cuccinelli’s campaign, an amount that approaches the entirety of its spending on federal races in 2012.

Cuccinelli has not been captured on film expressing the kind of career-ending gaffe about rape that kept candidates Todd Akin (R-MO) and Richard Mourdock (R-IN) out of the United States Senate last year, but his stance regarding the rights of women who are raped is more or less identical to Akin and Mourdock’s. In his first campaign for elected office, Cuccinelli said that he “opposes abortions that are not for the purpose of saving the mother’s life.” So women who are pregnant because of rape or incest are out of luck.

Rape survivors aren’t the only people who face a bleak future in Ken Cuccinelli’s vision for America. In a book he published last month, he endorsed the view that Medicare is “despicable, dishonest, and worthy of condemnation.” He claimed that Social Security, Medicaid and Food Stamps are attacks on people’s freedom. And he suggested that we should stop spending money on these programs because “[y]our government will never love you.”

A Kansas bill to drug test recipients of welfare and unemployment benefits is advancing, but not without an attempt to equalize the burden the invasive tests impose. Although Democrats were unable to stop a drug-testing measure that supporters say is aimed at preventing state dollars from being used to buy illegal drugs, they were able to insert an amendment in the version that passed the state Senate Thursday intended to better achieve that goal: drug-test lawmakers, also. The Kansas City Star reports:

The proposal calls for drug tests whenever state officials have reasonable suspicion that someone receiving or applying for welfare or unemployment benefits is using drugs.

Suspicion could be raised during addiction screening by the Department for Children and Families or by missed meetings or criminal records. A proposal pushed by Democrats to also test any lawmaker suspected of drug use was added to the bill.

Suspicion of drug use by lawmakers could be identified by the Department of Administration based on criminal records or other complaints.

Benefit recipients who fail the test would lose state assistance until they complete drug treatment and job skills programs. Lawmakers who fail would also have to enter treatment and job skills training.

Of course, there are several gaping differences between the requirements for welfare recipients and lawmakers, including the circumstances that will trigger a drug test, and the fact that lawmakers who fail a test don’t lose their state funding — their salary – while they complete drug treatment. But the intent, as Democratic Sen. Oletha Faust-Goudeau said, is to assert that “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.” Holding lawmakers to the same standard is not something a proponent of Florida’s drug-testing law was willing to do.

The federal appeals court decision blocking Florida’s mandatory drug-testing law made clear that blanket testing of public assistance applicants is likely unconstitutional. In fact, blanket testing of legislative candidates has also been deemed unconstitutional, as is most suspicionless drug testing, absent significant public safety concerns. But the Kansas bill, like legislation passed in several other states over the last two years, is somewhat more selective. It requires “reasonable suspicion” – the required constitutional standard for performing a police “stop” under the Fourth Amendment – before a drug test can be performed.

A drug test, however, is considered a “search” under the Fourth Amendment — not a stop — and typically is only allowed “pursuant to a judicial warrant issued upon probable cause.” While the Supreme Court has made some exceptions to this rule for public safety and the protection of children while in public school, two federal courts reviewing these laws have found that neither of these exceptions apply. What’s more, factors constituting “reasonable suspicion” under the Kansas bill, such as missed appointments and previous employment in an industry that requires drug screening, seem to have no connection whatsoever to drug use or abuse. The bill will now be considered by the House, and Gov. Sam Brownback hasn’t said whether he would sign the measure.

State Rep. Ernest Hewett (D-CT) was stripped of his leadership position as Deputy Speaker of the Connecticut House of Representatives this week after he was caught on tape making an inappropriate remark to a high school student testifying before a legislative committee.

The 17 year-old student was at the hearing to ask the committee to continue a funding to the Connecticut Science Center, where she said she was “usually a very shy person” but the Center’s program enabled her to teach “children about certain things like snakes.”

When she was done testifying, Hewett told the teen “[i]f you’re bashful I got a snake sitting under my desk here.” Listen:

Hewett offered an odd explanation for his remark on Thursday, claiming that he meant to say “if you are shy then I have an acre of land in the Everglades.” He did, however, apologize for his comment.

If you’re having trouble finding the perfect automatic weapon, a Texas group headed by a self-described “crypto-anarchist” who wants to “build an organization” around “evading and disintermediating the state” soon might be able to help.

Cody Wilson’s non-profit organization, Defense Distributed, is dedicated to producing and publishing information related to the 3D printing of firearms–and according to the Department of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms, it’s all perfectly legal because “[t]here are no restrictions on an individual manufacturing a firearm for personal use.”

The group made headlines for an AR-15 lower (the regulated part) produced using 3D printing that failed after six shots last year, but released a video showing a more recent design successfully shooting off six hundred rounds this week, complete with dramatic soundtrack.

Using 3D printing to create firearms raises a a whole new slew of questions about the practical application of gun violence prevention measures. If you can download plans and print them in the privacy of your home, how will background checks be enforced? Indeed, given the current costs of 3D printing, it’s not clear why anyone would produce a gun this way other than to evade gun safety laws. Wilson claims his plans would work on printers that cost as little as $1,500, but the printer he used to produce the part costs closer to $30,000. Meanwhile, the raw materials necessary to produce Wilson’s AR-15 lower cost between $150-200. The same part can already be purchased elsewhere for less than $135. So lawful gun purchasers can buy their merchandise for cheaper elsewhere, while illicit guns could be printed for significantly more money.

In the long term, however, it is possible that Wilson’s plans could simply enable anyone to produce a cheap firearm in the comfort of their own home. While 3D printers are expensive now, cheaper models are on the horizon even as owners are experimenting with person to person rentals after the AirBnB model, and Wilson claims his designs have been downloaded 10,000 times, not counting downloads via BitTorrent.

(HT: Ars Technica )

The case for marriage equality does not have a legal problem. Indeed, the sheer absurdity of the arguments advanced against it prove this point. It does however, have an Alabama problem. That is, while there are five justices on this Supreme Court who mostly supported gay rights in the past, it is less clear that there are five votes prepared to tell the old Confederacy to stop hating on gay couples. On the lower courts, both liberal and conservative judges twisted themselves into pretzels to craft legal rules that guarantee equality in California and Massachusetts without extending the blessings of liberty to Alabama.

Yesterday, the Obama Administration offered the Supreme Court its proposal for how the justices should navigate this Alabama problem. The Department of Justice’s brief calling for California’s anti-gay Proposition 8 to be struck down is deliberately coy about whether the Constitution’s promise of equality applies in the state of Alabama. When it does hint at what is almost certainly the administration’s true answer to this question — YES! — that answer is always caveated with language suggesting that the Court could put off the Alabama question until another day. In the end, the brief never actually calls for nationwide marriage equality, instead proposing a middle ground where civil unions and similar arrangements are converted into full marriages:

Proposition 8 nevertheless forbids committed same-sex couples from solemnizing their union in marriage, and instead relegates them to a legal status—domestic partnership—distinct from marriage but identical to it in terms of the substantive rights and obligations understate law. . . . Seven other states provide, through comprehensive domestic partnership or civil union laws, same-sex couples rights substantially similar to those available to married couples, yet still restrict marriage to opposite-sex couples: Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Nevada, New Jersey, Oregon, and Rhode Island. The designation of marriage, however, confers a special validation of the relationship between two individuals and conveys a message to society that domestic partner-ships or civil unions cannot match.

Proposition 8’s denial of marriage to same-sex couples, particularly where California at the same time grants same-sex partners all the substantive rights of marriage, violates equal protection. The Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection embodies a defining constitutional ideal that “all persons similarly situated should be treated alike.”

So, on its face, the Obama Administration’s proposal would merely upgrade these eight civil union states into full marriage equality states, resulting in just 17 states and the District of Columbia providing full rights to gay Americans. At first glance, the brief appears to say that following the Constitution should remain optional in the rest of the nation.
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Only 30 percent of federal judges for the U.S. District Courts are women. And a mere 22 percent are people of color. If those numbers sound suspiciously low, that’s because, a new report suggests, they are.

The American Bar Association has been assigning lesser judicial qualification ratings to candidates for federal judgeships who are not white men, according to the research of University of Rochester professor Maya Sen. These ratings are used by both the White House and Congress in determining how to proceed with a candidate. And the evidence points to the fact that this bias has been systematic, not incidental — meaning that it has nothing to do with the judge’s qualifications. However it does, as The Monkey Cage points out, affect a potential judge’s political future:

This finding holds after controlling for observable characteristics (via matching) that may be associated with qualification; such as the quality of the law school where a nominee got her law degree, how much experience she has practicing law, and whether this experience was attained as a law clerk, a public defender, a judge (of several varieties), or in some other role. Partisanship plays little role in the qualification ratings for these lower Court judges (in contrast to appointments to Federal Courts of Appeals).

Sen also shows that getting a lower qualification rating is correlated with a reduced confirmation probability. On the other hand, qualification ratings are not correlated with an indicator for judicial quality (high reversal rates). This suggests that the ABA does not have some sort of private information about the true quality of judges that is not captured by observable characteristics of judges.

A 2011 New York Times report also found that women and minorities fared poorly in the ABA’s review process. While the ratings are generally just advisory, the White House’s policy at the time was not to nominate anyone who received a rating of “not qualified,” and almost all of the Obama candidates deemed “not qualified” were women or minorities. To Obama’s credit, he has had the most diverse set of judicial appointments of any president, in spite of the ABA process.

ThinkProgress has previously covered the problems with diversity originating in federal clerkships. But it’s clear that lack of diversity extends up the judicial hierarchy.

Reversing a longtime trend, the incarceration rate for African Americans declined significantly over the last ten years, particularly among women. As the New York Times highlights, the drop is a noteworthy shift in the stark racial disparities that “have long characterized” both the prison and incarceration systems. Overall, however, U.S. incarceration rates remain the highest rate in the world, and the proportion of African Americans who are locked up — particularly men from certain demographics – remains shockingly high. In a new study by The Sentencing Project, Mark Mauer provides the take-aways:

• Racial/ethnic disparities in U.S. incarceration remain substantial – In 2009, African Americans and Latinos constituted more than 60% of imprisoned offenders. African American males were incarcerated in state and federal prisons at 6.4 times the rate of non-Hispanic white males, and Hispanic males at 2.4 times the rate of non-Hispanic whites.
• Declining rate of incarceration for African Americans – From 2000 to 2009 the rate of incarceration in state and federal prisons declined 9.8% for black men and 30.7% for black women.
• Rates of incarceration for whites and Latinos generally rising – Incarceration rates for white men and women rose 8.5% and 47.1%, respectively from 2000 to 2009. For Hispanics the men’s rate declined by 2.2% while the women’s rate rose by 23.3%.
• Dramatic shift in racial disparities among women – In 2000 black women were incarcerated in state and federal prisons at six times the rate of white women. By 2009 that ratio had declined by 53%, to 2.8:1. This shift was a result of both declining incarceration of African American women and rising incarceration of white women. The disparity between Hispanic and non-Hispanic white women declined by 16.7% during this period.

It is noteworthy that even beyond these general trends, particular populations of African Americans suffer dramatically in our current criminal justice system. Black men between age 20 and 34 with no high school diploma, for example, are more likely to end up in jail than to have a job, according to a 2010 Pew Charitable Trust study. A new study just out shows that blacks receive sentences that are 20 percent longer than whites. Studies have long shown that the death penalty is imposed in a discriminatory manner. And police stops and arrests of questionable constitutionality are imposed disproportionately on minorities.

And even with slightly less disparate imprisonment in a mass incarceration system that Michelle Alexander dubbed the New Jim Crow, there’s not much about the world’s highest incarceration rate to celebrate. These statistics do accompany another bit of good news, though. Just Thursday, The Root reported that there are no longer more black men in jail than in college.