Welcome to Justiceline, ThinkProgress Justice’s morning round-up of the latest legal news and developments. Remember to follow us on Twitter at @TPJustice.
- And, we’re back. Thanks to all of our loyal readers for bearing with us as we relaxed over the holidays.
- Remember that time when Rick Perry was a hardcore tenther who believes that Medicare and Social Security are unconstitutional? Apparently his support for states rights ends the minute a state election law creates a roadblock for his campaign.
- Meanwhile, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has now held two entirely different positions on whether Virginia should enact emergency legislation to let Perry and several other Republicans onto his states’ primary ballot. Currently he’s against it.
- Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell gives his official approval to onerous abortion clinic regulations that will likely shut down most of the clinics in his state.
- Tennessee lawmakers are working to overrule two state supreme court decisions because they deem them insufficiently favorable to corporate interest groups and other repeat civil defendants.
- Former U.S. Rep. Artur Davis, who has remade himself as a supporter of GOP-sponsored voter disenfranchisement laws after a disastrous bid to run for Alabama governor as a Democrat, is flirting with running for office again as a Republican.
- Viveca Novak profiles James Bopp, the right-wing lawyer who has waged a mostly successful war on campaign finance regulation in the Supreme Court.
- And, finally, the award for the strangest line in a correctly-decided federal court of appeals opinion goes to: “We conclude that [the officer’s] use of a knife in cutting the sandwich baggie off Edwards’ penis posed a significant and an unnecessary risk of injury to Edwards, transgressing well settled standards of reasonableness.”
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