Testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee this morning, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder commented on the prosecution of activist, programmer, and internet culture figure Aaron Swartz which ended with his suicide in January:

The Justice Department never intended for Internet activist Aaron Swartz to go to jail “for longer than a three, four, potentially five-month range,” Attorney General Eric Holder told the Senate Judiciary Committee during an oversight hearing on Wednesday.

Calling Swartz’s January suicide “a tragedy,” Holder defended the Justice Department’s handling of the case, stating that looking at Swartz’s conduct and fashioning a potential sentence based on that conduct was “a good use of prosecutorial discretion.”

At the time of his death, Swartz was under indictment for a scheme to rapidly download documents from a database of scholarly articles with the intent to make those articles public. He faced a potential maximum sentence of several decades, but under sentencing guidelines would have likely only received “a few years” in prison if found guilty at trial.

As ThinkProgress previously noted, Swartz’ case is far from unusual — although it has received a great deal more attention than many similar cases due to Swartz Internet celebrity. Holder is no doubt telling the truth when he says the Justice Department did not intend for Swartz to spend more than a few months in jail, but it is difficult to imagine that Swartz was able to think rationally about whether or not to accept a plea bargain after reading a DOJ press release that used his named followed by the words “faces up to 35 years in prison.”

Guilty pleas resolved 97 percent of all federal cases the Justice Department prosecuted to a conclusion in 2011 — up from 84 percent in 1990.

Cockfighting is a barbaric activity where roosters specifically bred for aggression are placed in a ring and often forced to fight to the death. In many cases, the birds are loaded up with steroids, and sharp knives or other weapons are strapped to their legs in order to make them more deadly to their opponent. And yet, this brutal bloodsport cannot be a felony, according to one Utah lawmaker, because abortion:

“In a state where we can still allow people to kill their babies, we want to make it a felony to let chickens fight for the purpose of which they were raised,” said Sen. Allen Christensen, R-North Ogden.

Christensen said cockfighting is not “beautiful” or “wonderful.” But the birds “naturally want to do this thing in their lives and we’re going to send their owners to prison for this, yet we allow people to go ahead and murder their unborn babies.”

Despite Christensen’s odd objection, the bill was preliminarily approved by a 17-11 vote. It will receive a final vote in the state senate later this week.

The justices are still considering a case that could potentially invalidate a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, but Arizona Republicans are already pushing legislation that’s unlikely to survive contact with the landmark voting rights law if it is not struck down by the Court.

The Arizona Senate recently passed a bill which makes it a felony for anyone working or volunteering on behalf of a political committee or other organization to deliver mailed ballots to a polling place — a bill which could significantly undermine voter turnout efforts in Latino communities. Arizona is one of nine states that must, because of the Voting Rights Act, submit any new voting law to the Justice Department or a federal court to ensure that the law “neither has the purpose nor will have the effect of denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race or color.”

In 2011, Latino voter turnout jumped nearly 500 percent in one district in Phoenix, Arizona. That same year, Russell Pearce, the former state senate president behind Arizona’s anti-immigrant SB 1070, was recalled from office. In both cases, a major driving force was grassroots volunteers — often high school students — who provided full-service voter turnout operations in Latino communities. These grassroots campaigns would identify voters who received mail in ballots but had not yet returned them, encourage the voter to fill out the ballot, and offer to return it to the polling place in order to make it as easy as possible for the voter to vote. Last year, the Campaign for Arizona’s Future, used this technique to turnout voters opposed to anti-immigrant Sheriff Joe Arpaio last year. They claim to have turned in nearly 1400 votes using the method that Arizona Republicans now want to criminalize.

So, while there’s nothing inherently racist about regulating how ballots are cast, the bill that recently passed the Arizona senate targets a method of voting that is likely to be unusually common among Latino voters. In other words, the law likely has the “effect of denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race or color,” and thus is unlikely to survive review under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act — unless, of course, the Supreme Court strikes down Section 5.

Seemingly-neutral laws that have a disproportionate impact on minority voters are a common tactic by Republican lawmakers. Voter ID laws, restrictions on registration drives and attacks on early voting all have the effect of making minority voters less likely to vote. As President Lyndon Johnson explained when he originally proposed the Voting Rights Act, “every device of which human ingenuity is capable” will be used by politicians eager to keep certain voters from casting a ballot.

After the Senate Republican minority blocked allowing an up-or-down vote on a completely qualified judicial nominee Wednesday, Senate Assistant Majority Leader Dick Durbin (D-IL) suggested it may be time to re-open the conversation on filibuster reform. A proposal to doing so — dubbed the “constitutional option” by then-Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) — was suggested by Senate Republicans as recently as 2005.

Durbin said in a floor speech:

We have tried at the beginning of this Senate session to avoid this kind of filibuster confrontation. The last several years we have had over 400 filibusters — a record number of filibusters in the Senate. I hate to suggest this, but if this is an indication of where we’re headed, we need to revisit the rules again. We need to go back to it again. I’m sorry to say it because I — was hopeful that a bipartisan approach to dealing with these issues would work. It’s the best thing for this chamber, for the people serving here and the history of this institution. But if this Caitlin Halligan nomination is an indication of things to come, we’ve got to revisit the rules.

In 2005, Senate Republicans slammed what they called the “unconstitutional” filibuster of President Bush’s nominees. They proposed a mid-session rules change to eliminate the power of the minority to block nominees with majority support. This “constitutional option” was only dropped when a bipartisan group agreed to only filibuster nominees in the most extreme circumstances.

Earlier this year, several Democratic Senators proposed significant changes to the Senate rules permitting minority obstruction of legislation and confirmation votes. Rather than pushing major changes, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) reached an agreement with Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) for a very modest set of reforms.

Already this year, Senate Republicans have filibustered a bill to limit the harms of the sequester, the confirmation of a former Republican colleague to be Secretary of Defense, and — as of Wednesday — the confirmation of John Brennan to be CIA director.

Wednesday marked the second time, Senate Republicans have blocked a confirmation vote for Caitlin Halligan, an Obama nominee for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, dating back to 2011. As 41 Senate Republicans voted to filibuster her, only Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) voted to give her an up-or-down vote.

A city in Georgia is considering a proposal as soon as next month that requires every homeowner to own a gun. Citing limited police resources and slow response time, Nelson City Councilman Duane Cronic said armed residents would deter crime instead:

“When he’s not here we rely on county sheriffs–however it takes a while for them to get here,” said Nelson City Councilman Duane Cronic. [..]

“It’s a deterrent ordinance,” Cronic said. “It tells the potential intruder you better think twice.”

Another city, Kennesaw, Georgia, already has a mandatory gun ownership law, although it is not enforced. And outside of Georgia, a Milwaukee, Wisconsin sheriff recently urged residents to “get in the game” with a gun for emergencies, rather than call 911.

Cronic and others tend to argue that more guns mean less crime, based on scant evidence from two methodologicaly flawed studies. But academic consensus finds the opposite to be true: A survey by researchers at the Harvard University School of Public Health makes a strong case for the idea that more people die from gun homicides in areas with higher rates of gun ownership.

(HT: Buzzfeed)

Ninety-one percent of the country believes that there should be universal background checks for all gun sales. Indeed, there are more Americans who believe they have personally seen a UFO than agree with the National Rifle Association’s opposition to universal background checks. Even the nation’s top trade group for gun makers does not agree with the NRA:

The trade group for the nation’s leading firearm manufacturers said it will not actively oppose the expansion of background checks, which are designed to prevent guns from reaching criminals or the seriously mentally ill.

“That’s more the NRA’s issue,” Steve Sanetti, president of the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), said in an interview. “From the commercial side, we’re already there, and we’ve been there, and we were the ones that have been the strongest proponents of an effective, complete background check.”

It is not surprising that other firearms-related groups are uncomfortable with the NRA’s positions. Indeed, the NRA’s stance on background checks is so far on the fringe that more Americans support communism and the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez:

NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre recently published an apocalyptic op-ed claiming that we all need to arm ourselves because civilization is on the verge of collapse and also we are endangered by violent Latino gangs, so the gun group’s fringe beliefs is hardly limited to opposing universal background checks.

Earlier today, the Maryland senate voted 27-20 to repeal the death penalty in that state. The repeal bill, which is a top priority for Gov. Martin O’Malley (D), will now move on to the state house, where it appears likely to pass. The bill has 67 co-sponsors in the house, and only 71 are needed for it to pass.

This bill reflects a growing national trend away from the death penalty in states that are not Texas or a handful of other, mostly Southern states. As the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution forbids “cruel and unusual punishments,” Maryland’s bill also brings the death penalty one step closer to being declared unconstitutional, as the Constitution explicitly states that punishments that are increasingly “unusual” stand on increasingly weaker constitutional footing.

The Senate just voted 51-41 to end the Senate Republicans’ filibuster of Caitlin Halligan to the second highest court in the country, the United States Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit — which in the bizarro world that is the Senate means that Halligan’s nomination will not move forward. Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) switched his vote to “no” for procedural reasons, but he supports the nomination.

There are many reasons why Halligan should be a judge. She is among the best attorneys in the country. The court she was nominated to now has four vacancies, and thus will experience an increasingly crushing workload without new judges. Additionally, the DC Circuit’s current conservative majority includes some of the worst judges in the country. Two DC Circuit judges recently joined an opinion claiming that all business, labor or Wall Street regulation is constitutional suspect. Halligan’s confirmation would have diluted those judges’ votes, which is an important goal in and of itself.

There is, however, also a very bad reason to keep Halligan off the bench. As Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), the highest ranking minority member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, recently claimed, Halligan’s “got gun problems.”

Of course, her so-called “gun problem” is that she once argued a position that the NRA disagrees with when she was Solicitor General of the state of New York. And the idea that she should be blocked for the positions she argued as a government attorney is completely absurd. By that logic, Republicans should also block Republican superlawyer Paul Clement because he is too friendly to Obamacare.

But the NRA is not a logical organization — their CEO recently claimed that we all need to arm ourselves to defend against violent Latinos and the collapse of civilization. So it’s not surprising that they would take an unreasonable position on Halligan. Nevertheless, it is deeply unfortunate that 40 senators are still following the lead of this fringe organization.

On Monday, one air force general overturned a jury’s rape conviction of Lieutenant Colonel James Wilkerson. Wilkerson was originally dismissed from the Air Force and sentenced to one year in jail for aggravated sexual assault of a woman who was staying the night as a guest in his house.

A jury of four servicemembers found him guilty of having sneaked into the woman’s room while she was sleeping, fondled her breasts, and penetrated her with his fingers. He reportedly stopped when his wife entered the room and turned on the lights.

But Lieutenant General Craig Franklin overturned the case single-handedly, citing his “convening authority” — the absolute ability of one member of the military to overturn a jury. Franklin’s reasoning for overturning the conviction was vague: A spokesperson said he “declined to approve the conviction because he did not think that there was enough evidence to say that he was guilty.”

A group of U.S. Senators on Monday blasted Franklin’s decision, saying that he had, “not adequately explained why he chose to overturn a guilty verdict.” Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) added that the case was an opportunity for the military to show whether it took sexual assault accusations seriously, and that Franklin had failed them:

“The military needs to understand that this could be a tipping point,” said McCaskill, a former Jackson County prosecutor and a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “I question whether, after this incident, there’s any chance a woman assaulted in that unit would ever say a word. There’s a culture issue that’s going to have to be addressed here. And what this decision did — all it did was underline and put an exclamation point behind the notion that if you are sexually assaulted in the military — good luck.” [...]

“I think there is a culture issue,” McCaskill said. “I don’t think one general should be able to overturn a jury. … I have a high degree of frustration.”

Sexual assault is a rampant and under-reported problem in the military. While the actual data is sparse, it was predicted that 19,000 instances (PDF) of Military Sexual Trauma (MST, as it’s called within the armed forces) occurred in the year 2011 alone. Reports of such incidents have been on the rise, to the point that former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta pledged to make it an ongoing goal of the Department of Defense to put a stop to the assaults and the cover-ups of such behavior.

While the National Rifle Association claims millions of members, polls show the vast majority of the group’s members disagree with the national leadership’s hard-line opposition to gun violence prevention efforts. But despite the out-of-touch NRA executives, Americans might well join for another reason: massive financial incentives.

A recent NRA promotion invited people to join at a discounted $25 rate. In addition to receiving an official membership card, a subscription to an association magazine, and free gun insurance, new members received a $25 gift card for Bass Pro Shops, making the membership essentially free.

In addition to those incentives, members of the NRA and its business alliance receive a bevy of other discounts courtesy of the Association’s corporate affiliates. National and local companies provide discounts on everything from car rentals to identity theft protection. The companies get listed on the NRA’s site as corporate partners and can promote themselves as “NRA endorsed.” And, in some cases, the NRA gets a percentage of the profits.

Among the companies are:
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