The conservative Weekly Standard flags a pool report where Vice President Joe Biden is quoted saying “there should be two senators from the state of D.C.,” a possibility the conservative magazine likely finds very concerning because, as they point out, “[t]wo new U.S. senators from Washington, D.C. would almost surely be Democrats.”

DC is, indeed, likely to elect Democrats, just like the state of Wyoming tends to elect Republicans. Yet we do not deny representation to the 576,412 people who live in Wyoming for partisan reasons or for any other. Significantly more people live in DC (632,323), than live in Wyoming, and DC’s population also exceeds the 626,011 people who live in Vermont. As Biden suggests, it is difficult to justify treating Americans who live in Wyoming or Vermont as if they are more worthy of representation than Americans who live in the nation’s capitol.

Both houses of the Colorado legislature passed a major overhaul of state election law that would implement same-day registration and voting, automatically send mail-in ballots to every voter, and create a real-time statewide voter database to prevent fraud. Proponents view the bill, written by a bipartisan group of county clerks, as a national model for other states.

The same-day registration provision prompted most of the resistance from Republicans, who largely voted against the bill in both houses. The bill, however, did garner Republican support from county clerks, and former Republican Secretary of State Donetta Davidson. The Denver Post explained:

Those promoting the changes said the bill is uniquely Colorado, and the state could take the lead nationally on making elections more convenient to voters. They are confident other states will follow — because voters like mail voting (74 percent in Colorado last November), while preserving in-person voting at a few early voting centers, and, eventually, saving millions of dollars for counties. [...]

Other clerks, though, said switching to mail will mean buying less equipment to operate and maintain for a ever-shrinking number of people who still vote in person. That could save millions of dollars in some county over a longer period of time. Denver expects to save a total of about $730,000 in next year’s general election alone, director of elections Amber McReyholds said.

Before the bill goes before Gov. John Hickenlooper (D), the Senate must approve a slight amendment to the House bill. If signed into law, the bill is likely to give a significant boost to turnout. In Washington, Colorado and Oregon, the states that now have universal vote-by-mail, turnout rates exceed the national average by at least five percentage points. And studies have found that Election Day Registration laws boost turnout 7 to 14 percentage points.

Since the November election, 195 bills to expand the franchise have been introduced in 45 states, according to a recent Brennan Center for Justice study. Thirty-one states, however, also introduced 80 new bills to roll back the right to vote.

Maryland became the 18th state to abolish the death penalty Thursday, as Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) signed the bill he vied for into law. The law will not affect five prisoners currently on death row, but O’Malley will consider whether to commute their sentences, according to the Associated Press.

While Maryland is the sixth state to eliminate the penalty in as many years and the first to do so south of the Mason Dixon line, other southern states are headed in the opposite direction. Florida just passed a bill (not yet signed into law) to speed up the death penalty, with legislators saying, “this is not about guilt or innocence,” while Mississippi is slated to execute an inmate next week without having tested available DNA from the crime scene. Nonetheless, the general trend away from the death penalty may have constitutional implications.

At town halls across New Hampshire, gun safety advocates are confronting Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) for voting down bipartisan legislation expanding background checks for gun purchases. In April, Ayotte joined 45 senators to oppose the measure, which is supported by more than 90 percent of Americans, claiming that she was trying to protect gun shop owners from the burden of running additional background checks for sales conducted at gun shows or online.

But during a town hall in Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire Ayotte offered an additional reason for killing the popular measure and said, falsely, that it could lead to the creation of a national registry. The first-term senator was then “spirited away by her aides” before reporters could ask her about the claim:

When another man rose to ask Ayotte to explain why she voted against expanding background checks, several people in the audience of more than 250 people applauded.

“I know people have strong feelings about this issue,” Ayotte began. She said she voted against the bipartisan compromise on background checks last month because she believed gun owners would face an undue burden and she feared it could lead to a federal gun registry.

She did not tell the crowd here that the legislation called for a felony punishment for gun shop owners who tried to create a permanent registry.

“I thought the focus should be on fixing the current background check system and mental health,” Ayotte said. She declined interview requests, but when asked by ABC News whether she believed her vote was being mischaracterized, she paused and said, “Yes,” before being spirited away by aides.

Indeed, federally licensed gun dealers have conducted background checks for more than 40 years without ever creating a national gun registry, which federal law specifically prohibits. Under the bipartisan amendment offered by Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Pat Toomey (R-PA), federal dealers would conduct screenings for private sellers and keep the record; the federal government would not. Then, if a gun is recovered at a violent crime, law enforcement can use the records to track down the perpetrator. All information identifying the buyer generated by the background check would be destroyed by law enforcement within 24 hours.

The Manchin-Toomey amendment explicitly bans the federal government from creating a registry in three different places and treats the misuse of records for the pursue of building a registry as a felony punishable by 15 years in prison.

Since opposing the measure, Ayotte saw her approval ratings plummet by 15 points, leading the National Rifle Association, to start running radio ads in her defense.

Mississippi has set an execution date for Willie Jerome Manning next week, without ever having tested readily available DNA from the scene of the abduction and murder in which Manning was convicted. In a 5-4 decision Thursday, the Mississippi Supreme Court said DNA testing was not necessary due to the “overwhelming evidence in his case.”  The Innocence Project provides background about the nature of that evidence:

Manning was convicted of the abduction and murder of Jon Steckler and Tiffany Miller in 1992 on mostly circumstantial evidence, including the testimony of a jailhouse informant who had previously given a statement implicating another person. No physical evidence has ever linked him to the crime, and he has consistently maintained his innocence. He has been seeking post-conviction DNA testing for years, insisting that technological strides made in the past 20 years could prove him innocent of the crime.

During trial, the prosecutor reasoned that a hair sample found in the victim’s car belonged to Manning because both Manning and the hair sample were African American. Dissenting Justice Leslie King pointed out, ”Should a DNA test demonstrate that the African-American hairs found in Miller’s cart did not belong to Manning, then the infirmity in the prosecution’s emphasis on the importance of the evidence would be exposed. And it would certainly raise reasonable questions regarding Manning’s guilt.” But the majority nonetheless held such testing would not change the outcome of the case, disregarding the substantial evidence that informant testing is susceptible to bias and manipulation, and that the death penalty system is fraught with racial bias.

Even though DNA would supplant the prosecutor’s speculation about the hair sample with definitive scientific evidence, both the majority in Thursday’s ruling and the U.S. Supreme Court have refused to stand up for defendants’ right to raise the most robust defense possible. In a 2009 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that a defendant who was willing to pay for a DNA test at his own expense was not entitled to the test, because allowing William Osburne to prove his potential innocence risks “unnecessarily overthrowing the established system of criminal justice.”

Manning’s inability to access evidence in his own case is alarmingly common. Because it is law enforcement officers who investigate crimes, prosecutors are the gatekeepers to evidence that should be equally available to both parties, and they are institutionally positioned to block evidence that might threaten the convictions they’ve secured. Nonetheless, some states and law enforcers recognize that it is in everybody’s best interests to have all available evidence. Nine states have laws granting defense lawyers access to a national DNA database. And even Texas’ conservative attorney general recently came out in support of mandatory DNA testing. Manning’s execution is now scheduled for May 7, but his attorney has filed another motion asking the Supreme Court to reconsider its decision.

WARREN, NH — Women in full-time year-round jobs earned 77 cents for every dollar earned by a man. Yet, at a town hall earlier this week, Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) claimed that Congress has done enough to ensure that women receive equal pay for equal work. Indeed, she justified her vote against legislation intended to prevent employers from dodging federal equal pay law with an excuse similar to the National Rifle Association’s explanation for why we do not need any more gun laws — we just need to enforce the ones we have:

QUESTION: My grandmother, who was an extremely intelligent woman, trained many, many men who then became her boss, and so on and so forth. [She] never received a pension, never, um, was really paid what she was worth. And I was disappointed that you voted against the Equal Pay Act, but maybe there was something in the bill that you thought would be detrimental to the economy or whatever. But I was curious if you could explain your philosophy about equal pay and how, maybe, you could suggest something that we could all agree upon so that women would stop making 75 cents for every dollar a man makes . . . .

AYOTTE: We have existing laws — Title VII, um, Lilly Ledbetter, all those existing protections in place — that, I believe, enforce and provide that people doing equal jobs are, certainly in this country, should receive equal pay. So, uh, that bill, in my view, didn’t add — in fact I think it created a lot of additional burdens that would have been hard, um, to make it more difficult for job creators to create jobs. . . . The reason that I voted against that specific bill is that, I looked at it, and there were already existing laws that need to be enforced and can be enforced and I didn’t feel like adding that layer was going to help us better get at the equal pay issue.

Watch it:

 

 

It should go without saying that, if similarly situated women are not making the same amount as their male colleagues, then we aren’t doing enough to close this pay gap. So Ayotte’s suggestion that our current laws are sufficient cannot be squared with the reality facing women in the workplace. The backbone of modern workplace discrimination law was formed by the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and it is indeed true that the pay gap narrowed significantly in the quarter-century after these workplace protections became law. According to data from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, however, progress on the pay gap stalled in the 1990s, and has been only slightly more than flat ever since:

The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which Ayotte refers to in her remarks, overruled an erroneous Supreme Court decision that reduced existing protections for women. It did not expand workers’ rights beyond what they already enjoyed prior to the Supreme Court’s decision to roll back civil rights law.

The bill that Ayotte opposed was the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would hardly “make it more difficult for job creators to create jobs,” as Ayotte suggests. Currently, employers can escape liability under the Equal Pay Act even if they engaged in completely irrational discrimination that impacts a female worker. The Paycheck Fairness Act would change this to ensure that employer’s pay decisions are rooted in legitimate business reasons to pay one employee more than another — reasons like “education, training, or experience” — and not something completely arbitrary. It also provides a few additional protections to women, such as forbidding employers from retaliating against employees who try to discover how their pay compares to that of their colleagues.

So when Ayotte voted against this bill, she stood up for employer’s rights to make completely irrational judgments about how much a female worker should be paid, and their right to retaliate against employees who are trying to figure out if they are being treated fairly.

Several days after suggesting the Boston Bombing was perpetrated by the U.S. government, New Hampshire State Rep. Stella Tremblay (R-NH) doubled down on the claim Tuesday. In an interview on the radio show of anti-government conspiracy theorist Pete Santilli, Tremblay opined that since photos of a victim who lost his legs did not appear to show him “in shock” or “screaming in agony,” the attack must have been staged.

Citing Alex Jones and his conspiracy theory site Infowars, Tremblay notes that while she once believed 9/11 was a real attack by terrorists, 9/11 “truthers” have opened her eyes. This attack too, she argues, was a “Black Ops” attack staged — apparently unconvincingly — by the federal government:

TREMBLY: And the more I looked at this, in my heart, something told me there’s something wrong here. You just have to look at that backpack and you can see. If there’s an explosion, the backpack is blown to smithereens. There’s nothing left. What was it doing just laying there? Then, my first gut reaction seeing the horror of that person that had their legs blown off… you know, with the bone sticking out? And he was not in shock. I looked and I thought there’s something… I don’t know what’s wrong, but it seems surreal to me. I talked to my sister, who’s not into politics at all, and she said, “Yea, I saw the same thing.” He was not in shock. He was not in pain. If I had had those type of injuries, I’d be screaming in agony.

Listen to the interview (HT: Miscellany Blue):

A two-term member of the New Hampshire House of Representatives, Tremblay has sponsored unsuccessful legislation to require state candidates to disclose whether they support their party’s official platform and all personal affiliations and to make New Hampshire recognize a never ratified constitutional amendment that would have stripped citizenship from any American who accepts, claims, receives, or retains any title of nobility or honor or any present, pension, office or emolument, without Congressional permission, “from any Emperor, King, Prince or foreign power.”

According to the Huffington Post, Tremblay also previously sent an email to House colleagues with a doctored video purporting to show President Obama admitting he was not born in the United States (she herself was born in Italy) and once falsely told a legislative committee that President Woodrow Wilson (who died in 1924) had been a supporter of Adolf Hitler.

A federal jury ruled Wednesday afternoon that Henry’s Turkey Service of Goldwaithe, Texas, must pay 32 mentally disabled workers $240 million for years of abuse and neglect. The now-shuttered company’s violations of the American Disabilities Act range from physically abusing the men to packing them in unsanitary bunkhouses at night.

Over 40 years, hundreds of men were shipped from Texas to work in Henry’s Iowa plant for 41 cents an hour. They were housed in a century-old, cockroach-infested school building with a broken boiler, denied access to disability services, and battered with constant physical and verbal abuse by their so-called caretakers. The complaint details how injuries and requests for medical aid were ignored, restroom breaks were prohibited, while caretakers mocked the men as “retarded” “dumbass” and “stupid.”

Meanwhile, the state of Iowa and the U.S. Labor Department turned a blind eye to the labor camp’s myriad violations, as the Des Moines Register explains:

Evidence produced during the trial indicates bunkhouse supervisor Randy Neubauer had one of the bunkhouse residents handcuffed to his bed at night — an allegation Neubauer denied when testifying.

Also, an Iowa Department of Human Services social worker testified that evidence showed some of the men were punished for violating company rules by being taken to a garage next to the bunkhouse, where they were forced to walk around a pole while they were hit, kicked and screamed at by their caretakers.

Although federal officials have said Henry’s violated the state fire code, committed abuse and ran the bunkhouse as an unlicensed care facility, the state of Iowa never filed criminal charges in the case.
[...]
Henry’s decades-long practice of paying the men less than the minimum wage was well-known to the U.S. Department of Labor, which over 15 years repeatedly cited the company for wage violations but imposed no penalties.

Even Kenneth Henry, the owner of Henry’s Turkey Service, struck an employee, or one of the “boys,” as Henry called the mostly middle-aged men. Henry denied it in court, also claiming he had no knowledge of the appalling conditions in his labor camp.

After a Des Moines Register investigation helped shut down the plant in 2009, the company was ordered to pay millions in penalties to the workers, the U.S. Labor Department, and Iowa Workforce Development for wage violations. However, months later, Henry’s has not yet paid up. On top of these outstanding penalties, Henry’s will now have to pay for the abuses and neglect suffered by the workers.

The $240 million penalty was welcomed as a “powerful statement” by advocates and family members of the abused workers. Still, one expert witness wondered, “How do you put a value on decades of lost opportunity? You can’t recapture those years…These men were hidden away for decades, and for others’ personal gain.”