Obama administration will file brief in Prop 8 case

President Obama announcing support for marriage equality in an ABC News interview, May 2012. President Obama's Justice Department will file an amicus brief Thursday, urging the Supreme Court to allow same-sex marriage in California, overturning the state's Prop 8. The deadline for filing is today at midnight, with the case slated to be heard next month.

After first suggesting it would not get involved, the Obama administration will file a friend-of-the-court brief late today in support of the two gay couples who launched the fight over the issue four years ago, the officials said. Today is the last day for filing briefs in support of the couples' position.

The administration last year signaled it might stay on the sidelines. In May, when President Obama first said that "same-sex couples should be able to get married," he added that it was not a matter for the federal government.

In his inaugural address, however, Obama signalled this potential change, with this line: "Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law, for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well." Last week, the administration filed a brief on the Defense of Marriage Act, declaring it unconstitutional.

President Obama's evolution on marriage equality is now, very happily, complete.

Economics Daily Digest: The GOP's own goal

By Tim Price, originally published on Next New Deal

Click here to receive the Daily Digest via email.

Conservatives Hindered by Ownership-Society Ideal (Bloomberg)

Roosevelt Institute Fellow Mike Konczal argues that the GOP is still guided by its vision of an "ownership society" in which public risks are shifted onto private individuals. But having taken this model for a test drive, Americans can tell they're being sold a lemon.

Feminism's unfinished business (NY Daily News)

NND Editor Bryce Covert writes that Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique sparked a cultural transformation, but even with women making up half the workforce, our policies still assume they're literally cooking dinner rather than figuratively putting it on the table.

The Titanic Wealth Gap Between Blacks and Whites (Prospect)

Jamelle Bouie notes that a recent study shows the wealth gap between white and black families has tripled in the last 25 years and writes that the government must work to promote upward mobility, even if the Supreme Court rules that racism is officially over.

Senate, in a More Affable Mode, Backs Treasury Nominee (NYT)

Perhaps sensing it would be a stretch to tie him to Benghazi, the Senate confirmed Jack Lew as treasury secretary by a vote of 71 to 26, allowing Republicans to take the next step in the grieving process of admitting they didn't win the last presidential election.

Sequestration stupidity (WaPo)

Harold Meyerson notes that when the economy collapsed in the 1930s, FDR showed the world that public investment was the way out of the hole. But Europe's leaders and their GOP sympathizers must have skipped that history class, because they just keep digging.

6 Ways the Sequester Will Mess Up the Environment (MoJo)

Zaineb Mohammed looks at the environmental impact of looming budget cuts, from the inconvenient (delayed opening of national parks) to the truly unappetizing (cutbacks to food safety inspections). Maybe if we're lucky the job creators will start hiring food tasters.

Will the Sequester Start Another Recession? (TNR)

Perry Stein surveys a range of leading economists on the potential results of sequestration, and the general consensus is that it's a really dumb policy that will act as a drag on much needed growth. So it's pretty much meeting design specifications, then.

Economists think minimum wage is worth it (WaPo)

Ezra Klein highlights yet another survey of top economists that shows they don't really agree about the downsides of raising the minimum wage, but they do think the benefits outweigh the costs, whatever those may be. Thanks for clearing that up for us, guys.

Tim Price is Deputy Editor of Next New Deal. Follow him on Twitter @txprice.

Jobless benefit claims fall sharply. GDP growth for 4th quarter slightly better than first report

High volatility continued for another week in numbers of Americans seeking unemployment compensation, the Department of Labor reported Thursday.  For the week ending Feb. 23, seasonally adjusted first-time claims for compensation fell to 344,000, down 22,000 from the revised figure of 366,000 in the previous week, originally reported as 362,000. The claims were more than four percent below the median forecast by economic experts surveyed by Bloomberg earlier in the week.

Despite the roller-coaster look of week-to-week claims applications, the trend overall is down from a year ago.  For the comparable week a year ago, claims were 373,000. Analysts put more stock in the four-week running average that smooths out some of the volatility in the weekly numbers. That number decreased to 6,250, from 355,000 the previous week.

For both state and federal emergency programs, the total number of Americans claiming benefits for the week ending Feb. 9 was 5,764,168. That was an increase of 183,841 over the previous week. Of that total, states reported that 2,005,991 people were receiving benefits as a result of emergency extensions first passed by Congress in 2009 and most recently renewed (at the last minute) in December. For the comparable week of 2012, there were 7,498,600 persons claiming benefits in all programs. That reflects both growth in jobs and the fact that many of those eligible for benefits have exhausted them. Three years ago, more than 70 percent of out-of-work Americans were receiving benefits; now less than 40 percent are.

Meanwhile, in the second of three monthly reports, the Bureau of Economic Analysis said Thursday that inflation-adjusted growth in gross domestic product in the fourth quarter of 2012 was 0.1 percent. That was a slight improvement over the minus 0.1 percent the BEA had calculated in last month's first report of the quarter's performance. The third and final GDP report for the fourth quarter comes in March, although additional adjustments in GDP calculations may be made in the coming year as better data become available.

The BEA said the drop in real GDP growth in the fourth quarter ' as compared to a 3.1 percent rise in the third quarter ' was primarily a reflection of downturns in private inventory investment, in federal government spending (particularly in defense), in exports, and in state and local government spending. These were "partly offset by an upturn in nonresidential fixed investment, a larger decrease in imports, and an acceleration in [personal consumption expenditures]."

As I always point out, GDP is the most complete measure of all goods and services. But its flaws have long been acknowledged. As Robert F. Kennedy said in 1968: GDP "measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile." GDP leaves out things such as income inequality, the intensity of poverty, economic security, crime costs, the economic value of civic and voluntary work, the economic value of unpaid housework and child care, educational attainment and life expectancy. It's a measure that assigns zero value to leisure time, to the depletion of mineral and other natural resources, to the benefits of saving, to trade imbalances, to deficits and debt.

These flaws have generated efforts to develop a better gauge or at least supplements to it. These include France's Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, Canada's Genuine Progress Index (a version of which has recently been tried out in Maryland), the Human Development Index and the  Gini coefficient.

Despite the looming sequester of federal spending, other economic data released this past week have been generally positive, particularly in the housing market where sales of new homes have risen considerably more than analysts had expected, although they are far below the pre-recession peak. That peak, however, was an unsustainable bubble. Consumer confidence for February, as measured by the Conference Board, rose by more than 10 points after the deep hit it took in January over the rise in payroll taxes.

Bob Woodward's story lets the media preen, and they love him for it

Taste the heroism. I think what we have here in this last too-maudlin Woodward story is a classic case of a media in love with reporting on themselves. Woodward himself has become an icon of that sort, someone whose stories are promoted not for what they contain, but who wrote them. Stories Bob Woodward writes are primarily access-based stories about Bob Woodward, and who's talking to him, and what they're saying to him, and if the details and external facts of the story don't actually match up with that then, well, that's too bad'but it's also not relevant.

In this case, Bob Woodward seems to have simply trolled himself and a lot of other people, and I'm not really sure what that's about. He claimed the White House threatened him, and this was breathlessly promoted throughout the land, but the actual "threat" in question was an email that, when released, you'd have to be a special kind of strange to perceive as "threatening" in any way. Really:

But I do truly believe you should rethink your comment about saying saying that Potus asking for revenues is moving the goal post. I know you may not believe this, but as a friend, I think you will regret staking out that claim.

So much for the myth of hard-nosed, sharp-edged journalists swashbuckling their way through Washington intrigue to bring us much-needed truths. Apparently even the behemoths of the profession are wilting flowers, and language as harsh as the above is enough to send them scurrying to the cameras to complain that somebody has been mean to them.

The Woodward claim (one that he's being disingenuous about, or rather is finessing a bit more than can be reasonably finessed) is that the White House never expected raised revenues as part of the threatened sequester, and apparently the White House vigorously disputing his version of events is supposed to be evidence of just how right he is. By that token, every conspiracy crackpot in America has been vindicated ten times over'but now it's Bob Woodward saying it, so that gets more notice? Is that how we do things?

The entire media establishment seemed to bellow forth as one: Yes, that is how we do things. Woodward made too much of it in a CNN interview devoted to the White House being "not happy" with Woodward's article, an access-based, personality-fueled metastory of the sort that seems to make up what CNN and Wolf Blitzer in particular seem to think is a good enough substitute for actual journalism. Politico's Mike Allen and Jim Vandehei ran with it, and seem to have embellished it themselves, declaring it "Woodward at war". We were off and running: The premise was going to be that the mean, mean White House had "threatened" Bob Woodward in an email clearly threatening Woodward with, at most, future embarrassment about the story.

Why? Because at heart, this is a story about access journalism, and there is nothing so dear to access journalism as hearing the brave war tales of those that engage entirely in access journalism. Oh'and because for those on the conservative side of things, the silly non-event was evidence once again of a "Chicago-style" aggression and oppression of the media. Because of that email, up there. Yes, that one.

Let's look at just some of the brave souls who latched on eagerly to the notion of an embattled Bob Woodward facing cruel, vicious treatment at the hands of the White House, apparently not one of them actually having read the email exchange in question (below the fold):

Senate Republicans filibuster Democratic sequester replacement

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell: "We believe we have this much responsibility to get anything done." A majority of United States senators voted this afternoon to replace the sequester with a combination of revenue increases and spending cuts, but thanks to a Republican filibuster, the legislation was blocked. Fifty-one votes were cast in favor of the measure. (Among the 49 no votes was Harry Reid, who voted no for procedural reasons.)

A Republican proposal also failed, but that gained just 38 votes. Meanwhile, House Republicans have failed to pass anything during the current Congress to address the sequester.

So, to wrap up, a majority of senators voted to avoid the sequester, but Republicans (joined by 3 Democrats who opposed the measure'Sens. Kay Hagan (D-NC), Mary Landrieu (D-LA) and Mark Pryor (D-AR)) blocked them from taking action. Republicans did this despite failing to offer a plan of their own that could pass the Senate or the House. Their Senate plan got just 38 votes and the House Republicans did nothing.

Or, as Bob Woodward would say, it's all Obama's fault.

Please ask Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to reopen filibuster reform.

Senate GOP expected to filibuster Democratic plan to avoid sequester as House GOP twiddles thumbs

GOP preparing to do what they do best: Nothing With automatic budget cuts set to kick in tomorrow, here's a really short version of today's episode of Sequester Theater: In the Senate, Democrats and Republicans will hold dueling votes on plans to avert the sequester. The Democratic plan will likely get more than 50 votes, and the Republican plan certainly won't. Despite getting a majority, the Democratic plan will likely fail, however'unless Republicans decide not to filibuster it. In the House, nothing will happen.

Here's an even shorter version: Congress is completely dysfunctional. The only people who are doing anything remotely serious to stop the sequester are Senate Democrats, but they can't even put pressure on House Republicans because a handful of old-timers blocked filibuster reform, giving Senate Republicans veto power.

(Yes, this is yet another reason to ask Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to reopen filibuster reform.)

As for the policy substance of the proposals on the table, none of the plans being talked about would actually completely replace the sequester. The Democratic plan would replace one year of it by reducing long-term spending and closing loopholes for high income taxpayers.

The main Senate Republican plan would replace the sequester with the exact same level of spending cuts over the exact same period of time, except it would require President Obama to decide where to make the cuts instead of the 2011 Budget Control Act. That's really just an effort to gloss over the impact of the sequester, however, and shift the blame to Obama. It faces Democratic opposition as well as GOP opposition.

House Republicans haven't proposed any plan for replacing the sequester during the current Congress. They did pass a plan last year to replace $315 billion of it with cuts to social insurance programs like food stamps, but that left in place nearly $1 trillion in future sequester cuts, largely to domestic priorities. It barely passed the House in 2012, and with the smaller GOP majority in 2013, it probably couldn't pass today.

Tomorrow's episode of Sequester Theater will feature a meeting at the White House with Congressional leaders and President Obama. There's no word yet on whether whatever remains of Bob Woodward's dignity will make an appearance.

Bad Fetus, in "Fetal Firepower!!"

Tom the Dancing Bug.

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Dear Businessweek: What. The. Hell.

The Bloomberg Businessweek cover for this week, via Matt Yglesias:

What. The. Hell? What were you going for on this one, sports?

Update: And Businessweek is apologizing, sort of:

"Our cover illustration last week got strong reactions, which we regret," Josh Tyrangiel, the magazine's editor, wrote in a statement sent to POLITICO. "Our intention was not to incite or offend. If we had to do it over again we'd do it differently."

Meet the two weenie Democrats who are cool with violence against not-straight, not-white women

Reps. Lipinski and McIntyre First, the good news. The House finally'finally'reauthorized the Violence Against Women Act. Hooray! And it's the bipartisan version from the Senate, the one the president has promised to sign, the one that includes protection for all women, not just straight white ladies. Hooray some more!

Now here's the bad news: We have a turncoat in our midst. Two of them, in fact: Reps. Mike McIntyre and Dan Lipinski. Now, McIntyre hails from the very red 7th district in North Carolina, where President Obama won a whopping 39.9 percent of the vote. He's a bad guy, to be sure, but you can't expect much from a Democrat in a district that red. Heck, you have to wonder how he managed to win the seat at all.

But Lipinski? Lipinski cast his Republicanesque vote from the comfort of his nice, safe blue 3rd Congressional District in Illinois, where the president won 55.9 percent of the vote in 2012, and where Lipinski has no excuse for voting with Republicans except that he's a son of a bitch who likes voting with Republicans. Especially when it comes to their War on Women. He's had a zero percent rating from NARAL for most of his career in Congress, though he somehow managed to improve that by a whole 10 points in 2011. He voted against the Affordable Care Act. He's voted repeatedly to defund Planned Parenthood. Basically, he's not a fan of women, their health care, or the programs that help combat violence against them. So he's a great soldier in the War on Women'for the Republicans.

These two turncoats did ultimately vote for the final version of the bill, so they each get an eighth of a point for that (to be shared between them). But then, 87 Republicans managed to suck it up and vote for the final version too, which makes Lipinski and McIntyre as good as, well, those Republicans.

McIntyre may be untouchable in his district, but Lipinski? He has no excuse. If he's so devoted to helping Republicans fight their War on Women, he has no business holding that seat. It's time to kick him to the curb and make sure this session of Congress is his last.

For third time this year, Boehner relies primarily on Democratic votes

Without Democrats to bail him out, Boehner would be up a creek. And without Republicans in charge, the country would be better off. So after way, way too much delay, the House finally reauthorized the Violence Against Women Act on Thursday morning. That's a story in itself, but there's an important detail about how it got passed worth highlighting. That detail is this: For the third time this year, House Speaker John Boehner relied primarily on Democrats to pass a piece of legislation because a majority of House Republicans opposed it. (Update: The final vote was 286 to 138, with 87 Republicans voting yes. All no votes came from the GOP.)

From the 1999 through 2013, Republicans rarely broke the so-called Hastert Rule: the unofficial rule that no Republican Speaker of the House would let let legislation move to a full vote unless a majority of the Republican Conference supported that legislation. But now it's happened three times in the first two months of 2013'first on the tax cliff, then on the Hurricane Sandy relief bill, and now on the Violence Against Women Act.

I'm sure there are some folks who think Boehner deserves credit for being willing to let legislation move forward despite opposition from his own conference, but while they've at least got a superficially decent point, this trend says less about Boehner's flexibility than it does about the dysfunctional nature of House Republicans. Clearly, many House Republicans are voting no on legislation that they secretly hope passes. Indeed, as Ashley Parker of the New York Times reported, some House Republicans are even saying this on the record.

The thing that isn't entirely clear is this: Why are Republicans voting no and hoping yes? Is it because they secretly disagree with their political base, but are too afraid to cast votes that might cost them a primary? Or do they agree with their base, but are too afraid to block legislation that they fear could cost them a majority? Or is it both?

Whatever the case, House Republicans aren't being honest about what they stand for. They're lying to somebody'or everybody. And when it comes to actually enacting must-pass legislation, the party that has reliably been willing to stand up and move the country forward is the Democratic Party. That's why Boehner has had to turn to Democrats three times in two months to get critical legislation passed.

I suppose that's better than nothing at all, but one of the key messages in 2014 should be that keeping Republicans in control of the House is recipe for more of this kind of dysfunction. The country would be much better off with Democrats in control of the House. After all, they're already doing much of the work.

House finally votes on Violence Against Women Act to protect ALL women

After the last Congress allowed the Violence Against Women Act to expire because Republicans believe only straight, white women deserve protection from rape and abuse, the House is finally doing the right thing by voting on the Senate's version of the act. Of course Republicans will first play some kabuki theater by voting on the straight-white-women only amendment, but once that goes down in defeat, Republicans are expected to oh-so-graciously hold a vote on the actual, all-inclusive bill.

It's a sign of just how extreme the Republican Party has become that it took two sessions of Congress to renew this previously uncontroversial bill. For nearly 20 years, VAWA has funded investigations and prosecutions of violent crimes, prevention and education programs, and shelters and other resources for victims. It's something that even Republicans used to recognize as important and valuable'until the party handed itself over to its wingnuttiest members, who were determined to, as Melissa McEwan brilliantly described it, "Protect the sanctity of traditional domestic violence!"

After receiving several sternly worded letters from their own party, House leaders finally caved and agreed that yes, maybe they ought to vote on the real bill that has the support of the Senate, the White House, and, oh yeah, America. Big of them, isn't it?

8:04 AM PT: You can watch the livestream of the debate before the vote here.

8:15 AM PT: And now they're finally voting on Cathy McMorris Rodgers's amendment to only protect straight white women.

8:40 AM PT: And the Republicans' version goes down in defeat, 166 to 257, as expected'and to the sound of enthusiastic cheers.

8:59 AM PT: And the bill'the right, all-inclusive bill'passes, 286 to 138. Now on to the president's desk for his signature.

9:03 AM PT: Eighty-seven Republicans voted for the bill, and despite those two weenie Democratic votes for the Republicans' amendment, no Democrats voted against the final bill.

10:50 AM PT: The roll call for the Republicans' pathetic amendment is here. The roll call for final passage of the real bill is here.

GOP rebranding effort hitting a few snags

Republicans know they need to better appeal to voters who aren't white Southern males, lest they end up consigned to permanent minority status. So they had a bunch of pow-pows where they decided that, well, the problem wasn't in their policies, but in how they marketed those policies.

Or something silly like that.

But let's see how their marketing efforts are coming along. Remember, Republicans lost the woman vote 55-44 in 2012. And to make matters worse, women made up 53 percent of all voters, far outperforming their male counterparts. So if you've got a double-digit deficit against the largest single voting group, you should do something about it, right?

Well, protecting abusers and rapists wasn't the answer, but that's what the majority of the GOP caucus tried to do today when voting on the Violence Against Women Act.

As Rep. Lynn Jenkins, a rare Republican woman, said in a statement after the vote:

Democrats wanted a hammer to beat over the heads of Republicans and far too many misguided Republicans provided them with that hammer. This is exactly why hardworking Americans are fed up with Congress.

Actually, Democrats wanted a sensible and once-uncontroversial piece of legislation to pass. It was Republicans who took that hammer and beat themselves in the face with it.

Then there's brown Americans, many of whom continue fighting for the same access to the voting booth enjoyed by their whiter counterparts. Yet just months removed from an election in which non-white voters had to wait hours to vote, fight efforts to purge them from voter rolls, and fight efforts to require overly restrictive voter ID laws specifically designed to disenfranchise them, you had a conservative SUPREME COURT JUSTICE (Scalia) say that Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires federal pre-clearance of changes in voting laws in parts of the country with a history of racial disenfranchisement, enables the

perpetuation of racial entitlement.

The old coot doesn't even bother hiding his bigotry. Yet despite howls of protest from the Left, there was only crickets from the Right (and the occasional defense here and there). Given the GOP's inability to win any meaningful level of support from African American, Latinos, and Asians, you'd think they'd begin trying to address those deficiencies. But nope. Not interested.

And so concludes another day in the GOP's ongoing campaign to rebrand itself, which looks no different from the version of the GOP already relegated to the fringe of mainstream American opinion.

Even the Wall Street Journal says it: 'Government spending cuts are slowing the recovery's momentum'

They are fighting for all the wrong things Meteor Blades wrote about the latest economic news'including the limitations of Gross Domestic Product as an economic yardstick'but from a political perspective it's worth taking a look at the how the Wall Street Journal reported the news (my emphasis):

The U.S. economy grew slightly in the fourth quarter of 2012'a reversal from an initial report of contraction'but the meager showing underscored that government spending cuts are slowing the recovery's momentum.

That's hardly an original observation by the WSJ, and clearly it's coming from the reporting side of their operation, not the editorial. But I think it's notable that even in a flagship newspaper of Rupert Murdoch's American media empire, it's impossible to avoid the reality that anemic spending is a major economic problem. No matter what Joe Scarborough or Alan Simpson or Erskine Bowles say, among people who actually understand economics, this is not a controversial proposition. It's a fact.

There are reasonable disagreements to be had about where money should be spent, or what our long-term fiscal policy priorities should be. But on the narrow question of whether current levels of spending are a boost or a drain to the economy, there's really nothing to debate. And that's precisely why the sequester is such a stupid policy instrument.

Committee mark-up of Senate gun legislation postponed. Background check hang-ups irk Biden

Patrick Leahy The Senate Judiciary Committee was scheduled to begin the "mark-up" of four pieces of proposed firearms legislation Thursday, but Chairman Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat, announced a one-week delay when the committee got together this morning. That will give the four members of an ad hoc bipartisan committee time to hammer out  their differences on a fifth piece of legislation'universal background checks for all gun buyers. Expanding background checks is by far the most popular newly proposed gun legislation in the wake of the 12/14 elementary school slaughter in Newtown, Connecticut. Poll after poll has shown 90 percent of Americans favor the idea.

The ad hoc committee drafting the background check legislation has been stymied by Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma over the matter of record-keeping. The National Rifle Association, the gun industry's well-funded mouthpiece, and others have claimed that another member of the committee, Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, wants to set up a national gun registry. Schumer's office denies this.

Record-keeping of background checks has long been anathema for many gun-rights advocates and other gun owners who see it as a prelude to gun confiscation. Under current federal law, records of people who pass a check by the FBI's National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) that is required for any gun purchases from licensed dealers must be destroyed within 24 hours. Previously, it was 90 days.

Unlike the government, gun dealers are required to keep a record of all their firearms transactions for 20 years. But these are in no way centralized. Federal law already prohibits centralization or any effort to build a federal gun registry. Despite NRA paranoia, any registry is off the table in negotiations.

But for two weeks committee negotiations have been stalled because Coburn says there should be no record of any kind kept of private sales. This sticking point is said to have sent gun-friendly Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia looking for other Republican NRA members in the Senate who might be more flexible in crafting the universal background check legislation. The pace of negotiations has also apparently irked the White House and elicited criticism from Vice President Joe Biden, who has been President Barack Obama's point man on guns since the Newtown massacre. To a meeting of the National Association of Attorneys General on Wednesday, Biden said:

'The proposals they're arguing as they mark up the legislation in the United States Senate are so porous that they are going to allow a truck to be driven through the holes in the legislation they are proposing, loaded with tens of thousands of weapons,' Biden said. [...]

'For example, they come up with a system where there's a new version of an instant-check system where you go online and check if you're qualified and then you go to the buyer in a private sale,' Biden said. 'But guess what? They want the law to say no record would be kept. How in the hell would you know if that transaction would be real if no record can be kept?'

Right now, background checks are only required of buyers who get their firearms from a federally licensed dealer. If you buy a gun from a friend or neighbor or an unlicensed seller at a gun show, no check is required. A universal background check would change that, covering all private sales as well. To see more about the proposed law and the other legislation that will marked up next Thursday, please continue reading below the fold.

Another Creature of Washington...

(Click for larger image)

John Roberts has always had it in for the Voting Rights Act

Chief Justice John Roberts
caricature by DonkeyHotey. Three decades ago, when John Roberts, now chief justice of the Supreme Court, was just a Reagan-hired grunt in the conservative movement's efforts to roll back the clock on progressive achievements, he became the point man for defeating the 1982 renewal of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Which has led close observers to expect that he will be part of a majority of five that will all but demolish the act based on the case the court heard oral arguments on Wednesday.

In his Mother Jones exploration of Roberts's work to wreck the VRA in the 1980s, Adam Serwer leaves the door open half a smidgen for the possibility the chief justice might change his mind when making his decision on Shelby County (Alabama) v. Holder.

To reiterate what's at issue: Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act requires that all or parts of 16 states, most of them in the South, must pre-clear any changes in their voting laws to ensure they do not discriminate against minorities. Those jurisdictions were chosen in the original act or added in amendments because they had long histories of such discrimination against African Americans and, in some regions, against American Indians and Latinos. Civil rights activists and an overwhelming majority of Congress as of 2006 (when the act was renewed) believed the provisions of Section 5 were still needed then. Foes argue that it's obsolete or, at the very least, should be expanded to cover all the states. Universal coverage is something critics say could kill the effectiveness of the act by stretching the resources of the Department of Justice and federal courts too thin.

In 1981, President Ronald Reagan took the stance that the provisions of Section 5 "impose[d] burdens unequally upon different parts of the nation." Activists, Serwer writes, didn't want merely to renew the law, they wanted to strengthen it with a rewrite in light of a 1980 Supreme Court decision that had diluted it by requiring prosecutors to prove intentional discrimination. Intentional or not, all discrimination in voting practices should be forbidden, the activists said:

Roberts wasn't having it. Voting rights violations, according to one memo he helped draft in 1981, "should not be too easy to prove since they provide a basis for the most intrusive interference imaginable." If Roberts and the Reagan administration had gotten their way, discriminatory voting systems in most of the country could only be barred when discrimination could be shown to be intentional. That would make it much tougher for the feds to intervene in states and localities and guarantee equal voting rights. The Reagan administration argued that they were just trying to preserve the Voting Rights Act, but it was really attempting to preserve a Supreme Court ruling neutering the law.

Roberts helped the administration hone its argument. He wrote that it made sense for parts of the VRA to require proof that discrimination was intentional.

The Reagan administration lost that fight. Now, with Shelby in the dock, the hope of activists is that perhaps Roberts has moderated his stance. But in a ruling in 2009, he seemed to echo Reagan's view that there could not forever be "punishment" of the South for past behavior. One modification of the law that leaned in the critics' direction in the 1982 renewal gave jurisdictions the option of bailing out of Section 5 if they could prove they no longer needed to be under federal supervision. Roberts stated in that 2009 case that the Justice Department had made the bailout provision "all but a nullity." But in the years since that decision, more than a hundred jurisdictions have bailed out. Shelby County hasn't been able to argue it deserves a bailout because in 2006, it gerrymandered away the district of the only black city council member in one county town.

Roberts, Serwer concludes, argued in 1982 that elected officials, not judges, should decide the rules governing when a jurisdiction had proved it was deserving of a bailout. If he stuck to that view, Section 5 would survive. It would be naive to imagine that he will not modify the argument he made when he was 27 in order to extend the bailout to all the covered jurisdictions.

Abbreviated Pundit Round-up: Gun violence, the voting rights act and more

Maggie Fox, NBC News:

Let us study gun violence, physicians beg Congress

'Allow me as a medical doctor, when I see a patient and I talk to them about the risks of excess alcohol, or tobacco use, or safe sex, morbid obesity, seat belts, texting and driving, can I talk to them about the risk of gun violence, please?' Begg asked.
Begg asked Congress to ban assault weapons, high capacity ammunition magazines and semi-automatic rifles. 'People say the overall number of assault weapons deaths is small. Please don't say that to the people of Tucson or Columbine or Aurora or Virginia Tech and don't tell that to the people of Newtown,' he said to applause from the audience in the hearing room.

'This is a tipping point. And this is a public health issue.'

Indeed it is. They interviewed me as well in the story. It really is a public health issue. And this weekend, I hope to interview one of the founders of the United Physicians of Newtown group to talk more about what the Newtown docs think.

Greg Sargent:

Bloomberg's PAC wasn't the only group that sought to swing the race. A number of liberal organizations and online groups also got involved: CREDO Super PAC did on the ground organizing against Halvorson; DailyKos raised money for her; Democracy for America also raised money and contributed phone banking; and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee did some last minute organizing. The success of this effort is likely to encourage such groups to look for other 'gun rights' Dems to target.

'As long as Democrats and Republicans keep voting with the NRA instead of their constituents, you will see progressive groups like CREDO, DFA and the Daily Kos community continue to make the NRA a major factor in our election organizing ' including in Democratic primaries ' going forward,' Becky Bond, the president of the CREDO Super PAC, tells me.

Molly Ball:

5 False Assumptions Political Pundits Make All the Time

A really good read. And more good reads below the fold, but first, our own David Waldman on Australian tv at 18:30.

Michele Bachmann: Other than losing, I did everything right when I ran for president

Don't look at the investigations of my campaign. Instead, remember how awesome I was! Oh, Michele. Oh, you poor, dumb bastard.

While Bachmann's long-ago abandoned quest for the White House continues to face investigations for criminal and ethical violations, she would like to take this opportunity to remind us'again!'that she was super awesome at running for president:

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) gave an interview this week at Patrick Henry College, an Evangelical Christian institution in Virginia, in which she proudly claimed that she'd had a flawless record of accuracy throughout the 2012 GOP presidential debate cycle.

'I was very proud of the fact that I didn't get anything wrong that I said during the course of the debates," she said, according to Salon. "I didn't get anything wrong, and that's a huge arena."

Bachmann went on to explain the difficulty of achieving such perceived perfection.

'You have to be a virtual Wikipedia,' she said. 'You can be asked anything. You could be asked, 'who's your favorite contemporary singer?''

Well, Lord knows whenever people hear the name "Michele Bachmann," they immediately think "virtual Wikipedia." Which is funny because if you go way back to May 2012, you may recall when Bachmann claimed her campaign was almost, but not quite, flawless:

It really was, we were extremely careful, and we were almost mistake free, but for those two points, Elvis Presley's birthday and John Wayne's birthplace. I've apologized, and we moved beyond.

Of course, that "almost mistake free" claim came a few short months she insisted, "I haven't had a gaffe or something that I've done that has caused me to fall in the polls." That's why she continued to soar in the polls, seal the Republican nomination, and kick President Barack Obama out of the White House. Oh, except not.

Michele can pat herself on the back for her stellar presidential run all she wants, but let's not get distracted from what really matters: that her campaign just may have broken the law.

Please sign our petition urging the Federal Election Commission to engage in a speedy and transparent investigation into these allegations.