Earlier today, the Department of Justice filed a formal legal complaint against Sheriff Joe Arpaio and the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) alleging widespread constitutional violations and lawless mistreatment of Latinos. According to the complaint, Arpaio and his staff engaged in widespread, violent and demeaning mistreatment of Latino residents of Maricopa County, often targeting individuals solely because of their race:

1. Forcing Women To Sleep In Their Own Menstrual Blood: In Arpaio’s jails, “female Latina LEP prisoners have been denied basic sanitary items. In some instances, female Latina LEP prisoners have been forced to remain with sheets or pants soiled from menstruation because of MCSO’s failure to ensure that detention officers provide language assistance in such circumstances.”
2. Assaulting Pregnant Women: “[A]n MCSO officer stopped a Latina woman – a citizen of the United States and five months pregnant at the time – as she pulled into her driveway. After she exited her car, the officer then insisted that she sit on the hood of the car. When she refused, the officer grabbed her arms, pulled them behind her back, and slammed her, stomach first, into the vehicle three times. He then dragged her to the patrol car and shoved her into the backseat. He left her in the patrol car for approximately 30 minutes without air conditioning. The MCSO officer ultimately issued a citation for failure to provide identification.”
3. Stalking Latina Women: “In another instance, during a crime suppression operation, two MCSO officers followed a Latina woman, a citizen of the United States, for a quarter of a mile to her home. The officers did not turn on their emergency lights, but insisted that the woman remain in her car when she attempted to exit the car and enter her home. The officers’ stated reasons for approaching the woman was a non-functioning license plate light. When the woman attempted to enter her home, the officers used force to take her to the ground, kneed her in the back, and handcuffed her. The woman was then taken to an MCSO substation, cited for ‘disorderly conduct,’ and returned home. The disorderly conduct citation was subsequently dismissed.”
4. Criminalizing Being A Latino: “During raids, [Arpaio's Criminal Enforcement Squad] typically seizes all Latinos present, whether they are listed on the warrant or not. For example, in one raid CES had a search warrant for 67 people, yet 109 people were detained. Fifty-nine people were arrested and 50 held for several hours before they were released. Those detained, but not on the warrant, were seized because they were Latino and present at the time of the raid. No legal justification existed for their detention.”
5. Criminalizing Living Next To The Wrong People: “[D]uring a raid of a house suspected of containing human smugglers and their victims . . . officers went to an adjacent house, which was occupied by a Latino family. The officers entered the adjacent house and searched it, without a warrant and without the residents’ knowing consent. Although they found no evidence of criminal activity, after the search was over, the officers zip-tied the residents, a Latino man, a legal permanent resident of the United States, and his 12-year-old Latino son, a citizen of the United States, and required them to sit on the sidewalk for more than one hour, along with approximately 10 persons who had been seized from the target house, before being released.”
6. Ignoring Rape: Because of Arpaio’s obsessive focus on “low-level immigration offenses” his officers failed “to adequately respond to reports of sexual violence, including allegations of rape, sexual assault, and sexual abuse of girls.”
7. Widespread Use Of Racial Slurs: “MCSO personnel responsible for prisoners held in MCSO jails routinely direct racial slurs toward Latino prisoners, including calling Latino prisoners ‘paisas,’ ‘wetbacks,’ ‘Mexican bitches,’ ‘fucking Mexicans,’ and ‘stupid Mexicans.’”
8. Widespread Racial Profiling: “[I]n the southwest portion of the County, the study found that Latino drivers are almost four times more likely to be stopped by MCSO officers than non-Latino drivers engaged in similar conduct. . . . In the northwest portion of the County, the study found that Latino drivers are over seven times more likely to be stopped by MCSO officers than non-Latino drivers engaged in similar conduct. . . . Most strikingly, in the northeast portion of the County, the study found that Latino drivers are nearly nine times more likely to be stopped by MCSO officers than non-Latino drivers engaged in similar conduct.”
9. Random, Unlawful Detention Of Latinos: “MCSO officers stopped a car carrying four Latino men, although the car was not violating any traffic laws. The MCSO officers ordered the men out of the car, zip-tied them, and made them sit on the curb for an hour before releasing all of them. The only reason given for the stop was that the men’s car ‘was a little low,’ which is not a criminal or traffic violation.”
10. Group Punishments For Latinos: “In some instances, when a Latino [Low English Proficiency] prisoner has been unable to understand commands given in English, MCSO detention officers have put an entire area of the jail in lockdown—effectively preventing all the prisoners in that area from accessing a number of privileges because of the Latino LEP prisoner’s inability to understand English, inciting hostility toward the LEP prisoner, and potentially placing MCSO officers and other prisoners in harm’s way.”

The U.S. Department of Justice blocked Texas’ new voter ID law Monday, noting that the measure would unduly disenfranchise Hispanic voters.

Texas passed an election law overhaul last May which included a requirement that voters present a certain form of government-issued photo ID or be turned away from the polls. Neither Student IDs nor Social Security or Medicaid cards, and no exceptions are allowed for the poor or elderly. Unlike some states which ask for photo ID but have recourse such as a provisional ballot for voters who lack an acceptable ID, the Texas law simply turned away these folks. As a result, thousands of Texans stood to be disenfranchised, including a longtime Texas voter ThinkProgress interviewed named Jessica Cohen who had her personal papers stolen and could not afford the fee to pay Missouri officials for a replacement, all in order to get an acceptable voter ID.

Fortunately, Texas is one of nine states with a history of discrimination that must get any changes to their election law cleared by the Department of Justice under the Voting Rights Act before they can take effect. The burden of proof is one these states to show that any new laws will not have an adverse impact on minorities.

That preclearance was denied today in a letter from Assistant U.S. Attorney General Thomas E. Perez because the law would have unduly discriminated against Hispanic voters. For instance, nearly one-third of counties in Texas lack driver’s license offices, and in these counties, 10 percent of Hispanics lack a license, double the rate of non-Hispanics. Across the state, Perez notes, “Hispanic voters represent only 21.8 percent of the registered voters in the state, Hispanic voters represent fully 29.0 percent of the registered voters without such identification.”

He sums up:

Thus, we conclude that the total number of registered voters who lack a driver’s license or personal identification card issued by DPS could range from 603,892 to 795,955. The disparity between the percentages of Hispanics and non-Hispanics who lack these forms of identification ranges from 46.5 to 120.0 percent. That is, according to the state’s own data, a Hispanic registered voter is at least 46.5 percent, and potentially 120.0 percent, more likely than a non-Hispanic registered voter to lack this identification. Even using the data most favorable to the state, Hispanics disproportionately lack either a driver’s license or a personal identification card issued by DPS, and that disparity is statistically significant.

The Department of Justice has shown an admirable amount of courage in protecting the voting rights of minorities against the recent onslaught of regressive state voting laws. Last year, they denied preclearance to South Carolina for a similar voter ID law that would have had a discriminatory effect on black voters.

Yesterday, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) named the first victim in his plan to retaliate against President Obama for naming recess appointees by seeking revenge against Obama’s nominees. Because DOJ Office of Legal Counsel head Virginia Seitz wrote an opinion that correctly reasoned that the president has the power to make recess appointments when the Senate is not available to confirm nominees, Grassley claimed that Seitz’s confirmation to this role is “likely to be the last confirmation that she’ll ever experience.”

To their credit, two former Bush Administration attorneys quickly denounced Grassley’s misguided campaign of vengeance:

“The Senator’s name-calling is misplaced,” said Jack Goldsmith, who served as head of the Office of Legal Counsel during President George W. Bush’s administration. “The legality of the Obama recess appointments is, as the Seitz opinion acknowledged, a close question. But much of Seitz’s opinion followed long-settled executive branch legal precedent, and when she encountered novel issues, she addressed them honestly in a reasoned analysis that she published for the world to see and criticize.”

“These OLC opinions involve very difficult constitutional issues as well as separation of powers,” said Richard Painter, a White House ethics lawyer during the Bush administration. “OLC lawyers should be free to render their honest opinion and not be threatened with adverse career consquences by either the White House or Congress.”

Seitz’s opinion did indeed confront a very difficult legal question, and she did indeed rely heavily on well-settled precedents. Ultimately, however, she forgot the first rule of keeping right-wing senators mollified — the Constitution only says what conservatives wish it said.

Earlier this month, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) threatened to exact revenge for President Obama’s decision to recess appoint four critical consumer and worker protection officials by escalating the Senate GOP’s campaign of obstruction against the president’s nominees. In a speech on the Senate floor last night, Grassley named the first victim of his campaign of retribution — DOJ Office of Legal Counsel head Virginia Seitz — flagging OLC’s opinion saying that Obama has the constitutional authority to make the recess appointments as justification:

[Seitz] stated [in her confirmation hearing] that if the Administration contemplated taking action that she believed was unconstitutional, she would not stand idly by. [...] Ms. Seitz is the author of this wholly erroneous opinion that takes an unprecedented view of recess appointments clause [sic]. And I suppose that it is literally true that Ms. Seitz did not stand idly by when the administration took unconstitutional action. Rather, she actively became a lackey for the administration. She wrote a poorly reasoned opinion that placed loyalty to the president over loyalty to the rule of law. [...] After reading this misguided and very dangerous legal opinion, I’m sorry the Senate confirmed her. It’s likely to be the last confirmation that she’ll ever experience.

Watch it:

Grassley’s attack on Seitz is troubling on many levels — not the least of which is the fact that her opinion reached the correct interpretation of the Constitution. As Seitz’s predecessor from the Bush Administration explained in a 2010 op-ed, the Senate is in recess when it is “not capable of acting on the president’s nominations.” When the president announced his recess appointments, the Senate was adjourned under an order stating that there will be “no business conducted” for weeks. So the Senate was in no shape to confirm a nominee until it returned to Washington, and the president acted entirely within his legal rights in making recess appointments.

Moreover, the attack on Seitz is particularly troubling in light of the unique nature of Seitz’s job. Unlike most lawyers in the Department of Justice, OLC’s attorneys are not advocates. Their job is to provide neutral, objective and correct legal advice to the executive branch, regardless of whether their advice agrees with the view held by powerful politicians. That is exactly what Seitz did here when she correctly reasoned that the Constitution means exactly what her Bush era predecessor said that it means — the Senate must be engaged in actual work to defeat the recess appointment power.

By punishing Seitz for issuing a legally correct opinion that he disagrees with, Grassley places dangerous pressure on Seitz and on all future OLC heads. OLC is an important office in its own right, but it is also frequently led by ambitious attorneys who go on to do greater things — both Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justice Scalia once held Seitz’s current job. Grassley’s thinly veiled threat sends a clear message to future OLC heads: hand down a decision that I disagree with and I will destroy your career.

Needless to say, this kind of incentive is neither conducive to honest reasoning by OLC heads nor likely to attract the best applicants to lead this office. If the executive branch is to receive accurate and unbiased legal advice, it must come from attorneys who are focused solely on the law — not on trying to anticipate what Chuck Grassley thinks the law should be.

The Affordable Care Act has done very well in court so far; three of the four courts of appeals to consider it have upheld the law. Moreover, there is every reason why it should be doing well. As conservative Judge Laurence Siliberman recently explained, the legal case against health reform “cannot find real support for their proposed rule in either the text of the Constitution or Supreme Court precedent.”

Nevertheless, a handful of judges have ignored the clear and unambiguous command of the Constitution and struck the law down. This minority view among judges is largely rooted in a misguided concern that, should the Affordable Care Act be upheld, it would somehow mean that there would be nothing else left that Congress cannot do. If Congress can require you to carry health insurance, the argument goes, why can’t they force you to eat broccoli?

This is not a very good argument. As ThinkProgress has explained, Congress cannot do lots of things. Broadly speaking, the Constitution gives the federal government sweeping authority to regulate economic matters — like the national health care market — but Congress has far less authority over non-economic matters. For this reason, federal murder laws, assault laws, laws regulating sexual morality or many laws regulating the family are all unconstitutional, but the Affordable Care Act fits clearly within Congress’ constitutional authority.

Nevertheless, to the extent that judges have fallen for the “if Congress can do this, they can do anything” argument, part of that is because the Justice Department has at times been reluctant to state clearly and explicitly what the limits of federal power are. There’s a good reason for this — if DOJ concedes that a hypothetical law is unconstitutional today, Congress could pass that law tomorrow, and then DOJ will be stuck defending a law they’ve already conceded to be unconstitutional. Nevertheless, a few judges have misread DOJ’s reluctance as a concession that there are not meaningful limits on Congress’ power if the ACA is upheld.

Today, however, DOJ filed its brief defending the Affordable Care Act’s insurance coverage requirement, and with one sentence the Justice Department takes the plaintiff’s silliest and most successful argument off the table:

[T]he minimum coverage provision is justified on the basis of a constitutional analysis that poses no risk of “convert[ing] congressional authority under the Commerce Clause to a general police power of the sort retained by the States.” Respondents “have not argued that health care and health insurance are uniquely state concerns, and decades of established federal legislation in these areas suggest the contrary.” Indeed, respondents do not contest that Congress has the authority to enact the Act’s comprehensive regulatory scheme; nor do they question the undeniably pervasive federal role in providing and regulating the methods of health care financing. They have also conceded that Congress could constitutionally achieve the end that the minimum coverage provision seeks to achieve through the (more coercive) means of prohibiting individuals without insurance from obtaining health care. Given those concessions, respondents cannot plausibly contend that the minimum coverage provision “upsets the federal balance to a degree that renders it an unconstitutional assertion of the commerce power,” or that it trenches upon areas such as family law, general criminal law, or education, “where States historically have been sovereign.”

This statement, that federal efforts to directly regulate the family, general crimes or education stand on much weaker constitutional footing than the ACA, is a very big deal. It shows that DOJ recognizes the only thing that even vaguely resembles a hole in their previous legal arguments, and that they have now sewn that hole up. When one of the justices asks them “if Congress can do this, what can it not do?” they will now have a clear and well-articulated answer.

With just one sentence in its brief, DOJ took away the last few straws the ACA’s opponents were desperately grasping at.

Last week the Justice Department announced the findings of its three year investigation into notorious Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, concluding that he was guilty of systematic civil rights violations against Latinos. In a searing rebuke, DOJ said Arpaio had relied upon racial profiling and discrimination in his obsessive campaign against undocumented immigrants.

Arpaio was quick to respond that the DOJ probe (which began under the Bush administration) was politically motivated. The man who made his name parading prisoners around in pink underwear and cramming them into inhumane outdoor “tent cities” complained that his own civil rights had been violated because DOJ called him names:

At the same time, the sheriff rejected as false all of the allegations concerning systemic civil-rights violations. He acknowledged isolated incidents of misconduct by deputies or detention officers, but he said those occurred during arrests of 7,000 suspected illegal immigrants and jail contact with 40,000 others.

“You’re bound, with 50,000, to get a few complaints,” Arpaio said.

Likewise, the sheriff denied unlawfully targeting critics for arrest during political protests. “We don’t go after anybody,” he said. “Actually, they go after me. They’re demonstrating in front of my building, calling me every kind of name. If you want to talk about civil-rights violations, what about that?“

Arpaio stalled the investigation for 17 months by refusing to turn over records to federal investigators, forcing officials to file an unprecedented lawsuit against him for breaking the law by not cooperating. And the man who relishes brutally enforcing the law is still acting as if it does not apply to him.

Defiant as ever, Arpaio is pledging to resist the Justice Department’s order that he reach an agreement to reform internal affairs and training and submit to independent monitoring. He said Friday that he will not agree to be “controlled by some federal monitor or something.”

(HT: Adam Serwer at Mother Jones)