Yesterday, New York Republicans voted to nominate Wendy Long as their candidate for the U.S. Senate seat held by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY). Long, a former law clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas, is best known for spearheading several inaccurate and race baiting attacks against Justice Sonia Sotomayor during Sotomayor’s confirmation process.

Despite an impressive legal resume, Long also appears unable to distinguish the United States Constitution from the Tea Party’s policy preferences. In 2008, Long penned a book review praising an opinion by Justice Thomas which would lead to everything from national child labor laws to the federal ban on whites-only lunch counters being declared unconstitutional. If elected, Long would join at least two other current senators, Sens. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Rand Paul (R-KY), who share Long’s misreading of our nation’s founding document.

Federal Judge Robert Hinkle rejected the Justice Department’s request for a temporary order suspending Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s (R) effort to purge tens of thousands of names from his state’s voter roles. According to the AP, Judge Hinkle relied on highly questionable reasoning in order to do so:

The U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit earlier this month to halt the purge, saying it was going on too close to a federal election. U.S. officials also said the list used by Florida had “critical imperfections, which lead to errors that harm and confuse voters.”

Hinkle in ruling from the bench said federal laws are designed to block states from removing eligible voters close to an election. He said they are not designed to block voters who should have never been allowed to cast ballots in the first place.

If this AP report is accurate, it then Judge Hinkle is simply wrong. Here is the text of the federal law at issue in this case:

A State shall complete, not later than 90 days prior to the date of a primary or general election for Federal office, any program the purpose of which is to systematically remove the names of ineligible voters from the official lists of eligible voters.

Although the law does include exceptions for voters who ask to be removed, felons, the mentally incapacitated and dead voters, none of those exceptions apply to this case. The law says that no state may engage in a Florida-style voter purge seeking to remove ineligible voters within 90 days of an election. Period.

Judge Hinkle’s apparent decision is not simply wrong as a matter of statutory text, it also defies common sense. No state should ever purge eligible voters from its voter rolls for reasons that should be obvious. The purpose of the federal law preventing purges of ineligible voters within 90 days of an election is to avoid a situation where a state wrongly flags an eligible voter as someone who cannot lawfully vote without providing that voter enough time to demonstrate that the state made a mistake. Hinkle’s apparently misreads this law to suggest that Florida is perfectly free to kick legal voters off its voter rolls so long as it does so more than three months before an election.

This week’s ruling on Arizona’s anti-immigrant law SB 1070 by the U.S. Supreme Court left the bill’s most controversial measure — the so-called papers please provision — untouched, and Representative Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) is not happy about it.

The Huffington Post picked up on remarks from the congressman on the House floor this morning:

“Arizona politicians will tell you with a straight face, no less, that they can apply this law without using racial profiling,” Gutierrez said, “without assuming that someone named Gutierrez isn’t less likely to be in this country legally than someone named Smith. That’s an amazing skill.”

And to prove the point, Gutierrez issued a challenge for C-SPAN viewers, which we’ve recreated below:

Medical marijuana is already legal in 17 states and the District of Columbia, and seven more states will decide whether to legalize it by the end of this year. As public support for medical marijuana grows, however, some misconceptions about marijuana remain — as illustrated in a recent exchange with a Drug Enforcement Agent official who refused to admit that marijuana is less harmful than crack cocaine.

A new UCLA study helps to ease some of the misguided fears about the danger of medical marijuana, pointing out that medical marijuana dispensaries don’t lead to any increase in crime rates in the areas where they’re located. Although other environmental factors like unemployment are clear contributors to rising crime rates, the study concludes that medical marijuana shops are not linked to violent or property crime:

Places such as medical marijuana dispensaries provide an opportunity where the conditions for crime outlined by routine activities theory can also converge. [...] Percentage of a census tract that was commercially zoned, percentage of housing units in a census tract that were one-person households, and unemployment rate were positively related to violent and property crime rates. However, no crosssectional associations were observed between the density of medical marijuana dispensaries and violent or property crime rates, controlling for ecological variables traditionally associated with routine activity theory.

The study, which examined 95 different areas around Sacramento, builds upon similar findings from another California-area study. Although the study’s author points out that the research will paint a broader picture once extrapolated to different areas of the country, it is yet another sign that fears about marijuana leading to increased violence, crime, and drug use are overblown. In fact, there is evidence to suggest that legalizing marijuana actually leads to positive effects, including the potential to decrease teens’ use of drugs like cocaine.

Our guest blogger is Anh Phan, Manager of the Anti-Hate Table at the Center For American Progress Action Fund

It’s time to get to know Kris Kobach, the author of Arizona’s SB1070 law and Romney immigration advisor, whose work was largely gutted by the Supreme Court on Monday. Unfortunately the one portion upheld by the Court may still encourage racial profiling by Arizona police during traffic stops and other minor infractions. Codifying racial profiling is essential to Kobach’s long-term strategy of “attrition through enforcement”. But just who is Kris Kobach and what does he really believe?

Here are the top five things you should really know about Kobach,

1.       He works for an arm of a racist hate group whose stated purpose is to reduce the number of people of color in the United States. Kris Kobach is of counsel for the Immigration Reform Law Institute, which is the legal arm of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which the Southern Poverty Law Center labels a hate group. Kobach’s boss at the Immigration Reform Law Institute, Michael Hethmon, openly argues that the United States’s transition to a country where the majority of its citizens are people of color will lead to violence. And the founder of Federation for American Immigration Reform, John Tanton wrote, “I‘ve come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority and a clear one at that.”

2.       He is virulently anti-gay. Kobach uses divisive politics and has grouped gays and lesbians together with pedophiles. During his 2004 run for Congress, Kobach accused the a leading gay rights group, the Human Rights Campaign, of promoting “homosexual pedophilia” in an attempt to smear his opponent.

3.       He’s birther-curious. In his run for Kansas Secretary of State, Kobach raised the question of whether President Barack Obama’s “short-form” birth certificate was sufficient to prove his citizenship. Later, when called on it, Kobach backtracked and said that he believed in the president’s citizenship but still maintained that questioning his birth certificate was valid.

4.       He’s cashing in. When Kobach takes his anti-immigrant show on the road, he makes a pile of money representing local communities, often running up huge bills. Kobach co-wrote anti-immigrant laws across the country from Farmer’s Branch, Texas to Fremont, Nebraska to Prince William County, Virginia to Hazelton, Pennsylvania to Valley Park, Missouri to Arizona and Alabama. Kobach’s efforts have netted him more than $6.6 million in legal fees. And while serving as Kansas Secretary of State, Kobach appeared on out-of-state media at least 101 times in just one year, with an astonishing 31 appearances just on Lou Dobbs’ shows.

5.       He’s anti-democracy. Kobach ran for Kansas chief elections officer on a flimsy voter fraud platform. Using non-existent cases of alleged voter fraud as an excuse, Kobach pushed a law that will disenfranchise thousands of Kansans. He claimed that his voter ID law does not suppress the vote of citizens and especially minority citizens when in reality the opposite is true. After getting this law passed, Kobach resisted efforts necessary to make it possible for citizens who lacked an ID to get one for free, as the law required.

For two years, House Oversight Chair Darrell Issa (R-CA) has persued a quixotic witchhunt against Attorney General Eric Holder, claiming that a series of botched gun stings that began during the Bush Administration somehow are now the subject of a giant cover up by Holder. Issa’s witchhunt, however, has not been well received by the House Republican leadership, some of whom have even called for Issa to abandon his baseless case against the Attorney General. Nevertheless, Issa enjoys the support of House Republican freshman and other members of his caucus’ right flank, and he’s wielded this support to ignore his leadership’s wishes. Last week, Issa even held a committee vote to hold Holder in contempt of Congress for failing to turn over various documents that are shielded either by executive privilege or longstanding Justice Department polices.

In a sign that the Republican leadership still believes Issa’s witchhunt is not a winner for the GOP, however, they scheduled the full House vote on this contempt resolution for Thursday. Thursday is also the day the Supreme Court will hand down its decision in the Affordable Care Act case, almost certainly displacing all other stories from the news cycle.

The Department of Homeland Security’s Secure Communities program is supposed to help prioritize the deportation of undocumented immigrants who commit serious crimes. It formed agreements with state and local police departments to check the fingerprints of every person booked at jails against an immigration database to identify who is undocumented. But the program failed to focus on serious criminals — most people identified through the program were charged with traffic-related offenses in some jurisdiction — and thousands of U.S. citizens have been detained through the program.

Following Monday’s Supreme Court ruling that invalidated three sections of Arizona’s immigration law, the Department of Homeland Security rescinded Secure Communities agreements with seven Arizona law enforcement agencies. They were the last agencies in Arizona with street-level task force agreements under the controversial program to check the immigration status of suspected undocumented immigrants. After the ruling let the “show me your papers” provision stand in SB 1070, a DHS official said the Obama administration determined that the agreements are “not useful” now in states that have Arizona-style laws.

Along with ending the partnerships, DHS officials said officials would not respond to calls from Arizona officials who want immigration agents to take undocumented immigrants into custody unless the suspects meet the criteria for enforcement priorities, such as convicted criminals or deportees who have returned to the U.S. While the task forces have been suspended, several Arizona departments still check immigration status in jails.

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) accused President Obama of not thinking that Arizona is “part of the country anymore” if officials are pulling back on Secure Communities in the state. But a task force advising the president last year found that Secure Communities had a “negative impact” on public safety. It had “eroded the public trust” because even immigrants who had not committed serious crimes were being detained.

A Minnesota mother is suing the correctional facility where her son, Xavier Scullark-Johnson, died after being denied emergency care by his prison nurses. The 27-year-old St. Paul native was less than three months away from his prison release when he passed away in June 2010.

According to new documents obtained by the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Scullark-Johnson had already suffered numerous seizures the night that prison nurse Denise L. Garin turned away an ambulance team that a doctor had ordered to be sent for the inmate.

Garin overrode the on-call doctor and demanded that Scullark-Johnson not be transported to the hospital because “protocol” stated that ambulance transports were to be “strictly monitored” in an effort to “cut costs.” The nurse likely was worried about the cost incurred from the prison’s for-profit medical contractor, Corizon. She described the man as “alert, his vital signs were stable, and he responded appropriately,” but the ambulance crew’s report indicated otherwise:

“They say the patient has had three seizures through the night,” a crew member wrote in her June 29, 2010, report. “They believe that he has a seizure [history] but do not know because health services is closed at night. They did not want patient transported.

“They have protocols to deal with the patient,” her notes continue, “and say this is because patient has recently gotten his Dilantin cut in half.”

Dilantin is a drug used to control seizures. An autopsy later showed that Johnson’s Dilantin was “below therapeutic level,” but there is no mention in Garin’s charting why she refused to let the ambulance crew take him to the hospital to have his Dilantin level checked immediately.

Garin’s own report makes no mention of protocols or drug dosages.

Johnson was pronounced dead less than two hours after the ambulance was ordered to leave without him. All accounts indicated that he was found soaked in urine on the floor of his cell, coiled in a fetal position after seizures had caused irreversible brain damage. Garin continues to work for the Rush City prison.

This tragedy marks the glaring problem of using for-profit contractors for medical care in government-run prisons: Private contractors put money before the care of their patients. Other cost-cutting measures have included eliminating doctors from Minnesota prisons after 4 p.m. and on weekends. Nurses continue to remain on staff, but end their shifts at 10:30 p.m., leaving inmates with no immediate access to medical care after hours.

–Angela Guo

In 2003, Texas voters approved Proposition 12, tort reform which capped medical malpractice payouts and made it more difficult for patients to sue hospitals. Republican politicians, led by Gov. Rick Perry (R), claimed that doctors were providing less services to patients because they feared getting sued. Republicans, joined by a “Yes on 12” campaign funded by the health insurance industry, promised that the amendment would lower health care costs and bring an influx of doctors to the state. Since 2003, Republicans nationwide have touted Texas as a model for tort reform.

Now, a group of researchers studying Texas Medicare spending have found no decrease in doctors’ fees for senior citizens between 2002 and 2009. Medicare payments to doctors rose 1 to 2 percent faster than the rest of the country, Northwestern professor Bernard Black, a researcher on the study, said.

In urban and high population counties, the study’s authors expected to see lower health care costs stemming from a reduction in medical tests doctors previously used to protect themselves from lawsuits. However, the researchers found no decrease in costs and a slight increase in medical tests performed. “This is not a result we expected,” said Bernard Black, a co-author and a professor at Northwestern University’s Law School and Kellogg School of Management.

During his short-lived presidential run, Rick Perry claimed that Prop 12 brought 21,000 doctors to Texas; that claim was ranked “False” by PolitiFact. Other advocates, like the industry-funded Texas Alliance for Patient Access behind the “Yes on 12” campaign, have claimed that tort reform brought 5,000 doctors to Texas. An unpublished study by the same group of researchers rejects that claim, which they say ignores “doctors who left the state or retired, creating vacancies for their jobs; physicians who don’t treat patients but do research or administrative work; and physician growth compared with other states.” When these factors are taken into account, the study found, doctor growth has actually declined slightly since 2003.

– Ben Sherman

Our Guest Blogger is Billy Corriher, Associate Director of Research for Legal Progress

In 2004, West Virginia coal mogul Don Blankenship spend $3 million to elect a West Virginia supreme court justice — more money that all the candidates combined. The newly elected justice then cast the deciding vote to overturn a $50 million verdict against his Blankenship’s company, although a 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court later required the state justices to rehear the case with Blankenship’s bought judge recused.

In response to this judge-for-sale incident, West Virginia enacted a pilot program to publicly finance judicial elections. Thanks to a a U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down a similar program in Arizona, however, West Virginia’s effort to fight corruption in judicial elections may never get off the ground:

West Virginia Supreme Court candidate Allen Loughry accused Secretary of State Natalie Tennant of not following the law when it comes to the state’s election public financing pilot project. . . .

Loughry is the only candidate who is part of the funding option. Part of the state law would allow him to receive several hundred thousand dollars for his campaign if other candidates in the race for state Supreme Court spend a certain amount.

But the provision has been called into question by the state Attorney General after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a similar provision in an Arizona public financing law. A previous report said Tennant planned to follow the state Attorney General’s advice.

In enacting this law, West Virginia followed the lead of North Carolina, the only state that offers public financing specifically for judicial candidates. Yet, one month ago, a federal judge ruled North Carolina’s matching funds provision unconstitutional, citing the Supreme Court’s decision in the Arizona case.

As Justice Stevens warned in his Citizens United dissent, the conservative justices “unleashe[d] the floodgates” of unlimited corporate spend at exactly the same time that “concerns about the conduct of judicial elections have reached a fever pitch.” Yet Citizens United is hardly these conservatives only effort to give an upper hand to the wealthy in American elections. The Arizona case, and its likely impact on public financing in states like West Virginia and North Carolina, are a direct assault on America’s ability to fight public corruption.

As ThinkProgress reported yesterday, conservative Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissenting opinion claiming that Arizona’s entire harsh immigration law should be upheld sacrifices both factual and mathematical accuracy in order to attack one of the Obama Administrations recently announced policies. Perhaps the oddest part of Scalia’s dissent, however, is the fact that he actually relied on pro-slavery laws excluding free persons of African descent from much of the south to justify allowing Arizona to target undocumented immigrants:

Notwithstanding “[t]he myth of an era of unrestricted immigration” in the first 100 years of the Republic, the States enacted numerous laws restricting the immigration of certain classes of aliens, including convicted crimi­nals, indigents, persons with contagious diseases, and (in Southern States) freed blacks. State laws not only provided for the removal of unwanted immigrants but also imposed penalties on unlawfully present aliens and those who aided their immigration

This kind of thing is, sadly, common in Scalia’s opinions. He’s defended torture and finds little wrong with executing the innocent.  When a majority of his colleagues reached the radical conclusion that people have a right to choose their own sex partners, Scalia railed against them for embracing the “homosexual agenda.” During oral arguments over the Affordable Care Act, Scalia seemed unable to distinguish legal arguments from partisan talking points.

Nevertheless, looking to slaveholding states for guidance is beyond the pale, even for Scalia.

[HT: Matt Yglesias]

It took almost three quarters of a century, but one Sheriff in Alabama is finally speaking out against a 1939 law that allows for the state’s 67 sheriffs to keep leftover money the state provides to each municipality for feeding inmates in local prisons.

Sheriff Mike Rainey reportedly received $295,294 from the local, state and federal governments to spend on food for the county’s inmate population. But thanks to the old law, Rainey is entitled to pocket any money left over after he fulfills his responsibility of feeding his inmates.

It’s not hard to imagine how such a system could lead to massive corruption. In 2009, former Morgan County Sheriff Greg Bartlett was himself put behind bars after he admitted to keeping more than $200,000 from the prison’s food budget while the inmates he oversaw were provided with inadequate food.

Remarkably, Bartlett may not have actually broken any laws, a point the Alabama Sheriffs Association made to defend Bartlett during his trial.

Sheriff Rainey, who is calling on the legislature to end the current system in favor of allowing county commissions to oversee the funding, says he has donated most of his potential earnings to charity, upwards of $10,000 so far. He also wants to ensure that inmates are served fresh, healthy food, he told the Montgomery Advertiser:

“Incarceration is punishment. I know some people think you shouldn’t worry about what an inmate eats, but I think it’s a moral issue,” Rainey said. “They’re not getting filet mignon, but they’re certainly not being served green bologna, nor will they be served something like that.”

The Alabama legislature has tried to pass bills before repealing the 1939 law, most recently in 2009, but those bills have failed to advance to the Governor’s desk.

As ThinkProgress previously explained, today’s majority opinion striking down much of Arizona’s harsh immigration law SB 1070 includes several passages suggesting that an Obama Administration initiative allowing undocumented college students and veterans to remain in the country is lawful. In a dissenting opinion joined by no other justice, however, conservative Justice Antonin Scalia takes a swipe at President Obama’s immigration policy:

After this case was argued and while it was under consideration, the Secretary of Homeland Security announced a program exempting from immigration enforcement some 1.4 million illegal immigrants under the age of 30. If an individual unlawfully present in the United States

“• came to the United States under the age of sixteen;

“• has continuously resided in the United States for at least five years . . . ,

“• is currently in school, has graduated from high school, has obtained a general education develop­ment certificate, or is an honorably discharged veteran . . . ,

“• has not been convicted of a [serious crime]; and

“• is not above the age of thirty,” . . . .

The husbanding of scarce enforcement resources can hardly be the justification for this, since the considerable administrative cost of conduct­ing as many as 1.4 million background checks, and ruling on the biennial requests for dispensation that the nonen­forcement program envisions, will necessarily be deducted from immigration enforcement.

The Obama Administration justifies its new policy under a doctrine known as “prosecutorial discretion.” Because Congress has not appropriated enough money to deport every undocumented immigrant in the country — the $285 billion cost of doing so adds up to more than six times to Department of Homeland Security’s entire annual budget — the executive branch has the authority to decide how to use its limited enforcement resources by focusing on undocumented immigrants who commit serious offenses and shifting resources away from college students and veterans.

Scalia’s dissent essentially claims that the Obama Administration’s invocation of prosecutorial discretion is a sham because their new immigration directive would also cost money to implement. Scalia would have done well, however, to actually crunch some numbers before making this claim.

Although it is true that the administration’s directive requires immigrants to “pass a background check” and undergo a “case by case” examination of their circumstances before they can take advantage of the new policy, such review will cost only a fraction of how much it would cost to round up, detain, process and deport each of these immigrants. As a Center for American Progress report explains, it costs an average of $18,310 to apprehend a single undocumented immigrant, $3,355 to detain the immigrant while they are facing removal proceedings, $817 to conduct the proceeding itself and another $1,000 to actually deport the immigrant to their country of origin — for a total cost of more than $23,000 for each college student or U.S. military veteran removed from the country.

Private companies, by contrast, offer criminal background checks for as low as $34.95. Federal employees undergo somewhat more expensive screening — those background checks start out at $125 — but even top secret clearances only require $4,000 to conduct. In other words, even if every single person eligible for relief under the Obama Administration’s directive were subjected to the same rigorous screening process required of top security officials who handle information that would cause “exceptionally grave damage” to national security if it became public, that would still cost about $19,000 less per immigrant than the cost of rounding up and deporting undocumented students and veterans.