I’ll be providing them here tonight, once the polls close, and results start coming in. I’ll also be doing updates via Twitter, @davekopel.

Besides the candidate races, there are five important ballot issues. Kansas will be voting on whether to restore the individual right to keep and bear arms to state constitution, undoing the judicial nullification in Salina v. Blaksley (1905). Arizona, Arkansas, South Carolina, and Tennessee will decide whether to give explicit constitutional protection to the right to hunt and fish.

The Washington Examiner has this useful guide to some of the key races, organized by when the polls close. Some early races to watch, all of them with poll closings at 7 pm. eastern time:

Peninsular Florida, eastern time zone: 22d district (incumb. Dem. Ron Klein) and 24th (incumbent Dem. Suzanne Kosmos), both terrible on gun rights, and both facing pro-gun opponents. 8th District, where incumb. Dem. Alan Grayson has a B rating from the NRA, but his opponent Daniel Webster has an A (and Grayson’s outrageous incivility provides a non-ideological reason to hope for his defeat).

Indiana, central time zone (polls close at 6 p.m. locally). Open seat, with Dem. Brad Ellsworth (perfect record on Second Amendment) vs. Repub. Dan Coats (uneven record). Either would be superior to retiring Evan Bayh, and Coats has a huge lead in the polls.

South Carolina. 5th District, House Budget Chairman John Spratt. By far the most senior and powerful anti-gun congressman who is at serious risk, among the early poll closings.

Virginia, 11th Dist. Incumbent Dem. Gerry Connolly appears to have a tighter race than expected. Michael Bloomberg has been spending heavily on Connolly’s behalf recently. Conventional wisdom says that Connolly survives a wave, but not a tsunami.

Further information on the gun issue in the 2010 election is available in my guides to the House races and the Senate races.

My comment on today’s decision, granting the motion to dismiss on some counts, and while allowing other counts to proceed. Like Randy’s comment, my comment is posted on the blog of the site Health Care Lawsuits, which is hosted by the Independent Women’s Forum.

The court entirely rejected the administration’s claim that the penalty for disobeying the mandate is justified under the federal tax power. As the court noted, Congress went out of its way to specify that the penalty is not a tax. Second, the court ruled that it is proper for the plaintiffs to be heard in their challenge to the mandate, which goes into effect in 2014. The court cited extensive precedent showing that when a future harm is certain, courts can act in the present to protect citizens from that harm. The court rejected the argument that the various employer mandates violate the constitutional sovereignty of states; as the court noted, the law simply treats states like other large employers, and so making states provide the same health benefits as other large employers must provide is no different from making states pay the same minimum wage as all other employers.

While federal spending programs may set conditions on grants to states, Supreme Court precedent states that the grants must not be coercive. Here, the court agreed that the states had raised a plausible legal argument which should be allowed to go forward:  the health control presents states with the unacceptable choice of massively increasing their own Medicaid spending on millions of more people, or of losing all funding for the traditional Medicaid program. Finally, the court agreed that the challenge to the individual mandate could go forward, because the mandate was “unprecedented.” Never before has Congress attempted to use its power of regulating interstate commerce to force people to buy a particular product. Because there is no judicial precedent in support of such a mandate, the plaintiffs had raised a plausible constitutional challenge which should be allowed to go forward.

The court’s ruling is not a final decision on the constitutional merits, but it is a solid, meticulously researched, and carefully-reasoned decision declaring that the opponents of the health control law have raised legitimate constitutional objections.

Earlier this week, I wrote that NRA would be foolish obey the wishes of Republican activists who want the NRA to endorse only Republicans, and especially to not endorse endangered House Democrats. Here are some data on NRA endorsements, and some of the actions that dozens of House Democrats have taken to merit their endorsements:

NRA Senate endorsements in 2010: 23 Republicans, 2 Democrats.

NRA House endorsements in 2010: 197 Republicans and 61 Democrats.

There were 251 Congresspersons who signed the pro-Second Amendment incorporation congressional amicus brief in McDonald v. Chicago. Of the signers, 81 were House Democrats, and 19 were Senate Democrats, including Majority Leader Harry Reid.

A top NRA priority in Congress is H.R. 2296, to reform the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives.  Of the 243 cosponsors, 76 are House Democrats.

Another NRA-favored bill is H.R. 442, the “Veterans’ Heritage Firearms Act,” would create an amnesty period to allow the registration of war trophies (e.g., an automatic rifle captured from the North Vietnamese Army) that were brought into the United States between 1934 and 1968. There are 211 cosponsors, 66 of whom are House Democrats.

The bill that would have the most significant practical effect for most gun owners is H.R. 197, the “National Right-to-Carry Reciprocity Act .” Sixty-five House Democrats are among the 209 cosponsors.

Early in the Obama adminisration, Attorney General Eric Holder said that the 1994 ban on so-called “assault weapons” and magazines holding more than 10 rounds, which sunset in 2004, should be re-enacted. Sixty-five Democratic Congressmen signed a letter to the Attorney General, opposing a new ban. In addition, Ike Skelton, the Missouri Democrat who chairs the Armed Services Committee, sent a separate letter to Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Hoyer expressing his opposition to the Attorney General’s remarks. The show of Democratic opposition demonstrated that there was no chance that a ban could pass Congress.  Since then, Attorney General Holder has not made any public statements in favor of gun bans. 

As the numbers above illustrate, Democrats constitute an indispensible part of the pro-Second Amendment majority of the current Congress. Without the NRA’s strong working relationship with so many Democrats, 2009-10 would have seen the enactment of destructive legislation for gun rights, rather than the constructive legislation which has become law.

That’s the topic of my article in yesterday’s edition of The New Ledger. Bottom line: in the Venn diagram, Republican gains and pro-Second Amendment gains sometimes overlap, but not always.

New Hampshire, West Virginia, Indiana, North Dakota are guaranteed gains for Second Amendment supporters, regardless of which party wins.

The most important races, from a right to arms viewpoint, are Connecticut, New York (Gillibrand), Pennsylvania, Ohio, Missouri, Colorado, Washington, and California.

A Democratic-controlled Senate in 2011 with a Majority Leader other than Harry Reid could well be more problematic for Second Amendment rights, even though the total number of pro-rights Senators would have increased.

My DU colleague Thomas Russell, who used to teach at the University of Texas Law school, has a written a paper, available on SSRN, which urges the University of Texas Law School to rename Simkins Hall, a law and graduate male student dormitory named for William Stewart Simkins. Simkins taught equity, contracts, procedure, and related topics at UT for three decades in the early 20th century. He was also a founder of the Ku Klux Klan in Florida, and every year at UT he gave a formal speech extolling the Klan.

Most of Russell’s paper concentrates on Simkins’ career at UT, as well as the 1954 decision (five weeks after Brown v. Board was announced) to name the dormitory after him. I was curious to learn more about Simkins had actually done with the Florida Klan, so I read Michael Newtown’s book The Invisible Empire: The Ku Klux Klan in Florida.

The Florida KKK organized in 1867–68. Simkins later described himself at the Klan leader in Taylor, Madison, and Jefferson counties. These three contiguous counties are part of the eastern panhandle, east of Tallahassee. As far as the record shows, Simkins never claimed that any Klan actions in those counties had been carried out contrary to his orders, or that he regretted anything the Klan did in those counties. Accordingly, it is plausible to hold Simkins personally responsible Klan activity there.

Federal troops were withdrawn from Florida in July 4, 1868. From July 8 through 14, five blacks were murdered by “white regulators.” In mid-July through October 1868, the Madison County KKK murdered seven more blacks, including Randall Coleman, a leading Republican.

In Taylor County, “masked night riders paraded with KKK flags and threatened farmers who refused to join the Klan.”

Florida’s Governor Reed had purchased two thousand muskets for the state militia. On the night of November 5, 1868, while the train carrying the muskets had stopped at the Greenville station in Madison County, Klan raiders removed all two thousand muskets–destroying some, and keeping the rest. Simkins later bragged that “Every telegraph operator, brakeman, engineer and conductor on the road was a Ku Klux.”

The Jefferson County Klan coerced white farmers into refusing to sell land to freedmen, or to taking the money, and then having the Klan drive the freedmen off his new freehold.

According to Newton, Madison County was the second-worst county in Florida for Klan violence, with 25 murders from 1868–71. The victims were always members of the Republican party.

On the night before the November 7, 1870, election, “armed riders invaded” the town of Madison, “harassing black voters.” On election day in Monticello, Jefferson County, “Georgia Klansmen joined the local mob and hundreds of shots were fired in a rioutous demonstration of white solidarity,” intended to frighten blacks against voting.

The election results left the state government weakly in reconstructionist hands. The store belonging to Madison County Sheriff Montgomery was burned on December 17.

Congress passed a new, stronger Enforcement Act in April 1871, and in November, a congressional subcommittee held four days of hearings in Tallahassee about Klan crimes. Even so, another Republican’s store was torched on November 6, 1871. However, President Grant’s October declaration of martial law in nine South Carolina counties had a chilling effect on the Klan, and by 1873, Florida Klan supporters were denying that there have had been a Klan in Florida, or were claiming that if there had been one, it was no longer active.

Simkins himself happened to leave Florida for Texas in either 1871 or 1873. (Sources conflict.) He particpated in two 1894 U.S. Supreme Court cases, Reagan v. Farmers’ Loan & Trust Co. and Reagan v. Mercantile Trust Co. He supported the Texas Attorney General’s argument that the judiciary had no power to review the reasonableness of railroad rates which had been established by the Texas Railroad Commission. The Supreme Court, in an unanimous opinion by Justice Brewer, disagreed.

That Simkins was an advocate of the unreviewable power of unreasonable government economic regulation should be no surprise. As David Bernstein explains in his book Only One Place of Redress: African-Americans, Labor Regulations, and the Courts from Reconstruction to the New Deal, the caste system of Jim Crow was founded on government power to prevent black and white people from freely choosing to engage in economic relations.

Last Friday, the University of Texas announced the formation of a special working group which will issue a report on the Simkins naming controversy by the end of June.

Simkins should have been denied admission to the Florida bar in 1870, based on his admitted role in the theft of firearms from the militia of the state of Florida, and his role in organizing and leading a terrorist organization which appears responsible for numerous homicides and many other violent felonies. In 1870, the Florida Supreme Court did not know of the evidence regarding Simkins’ terrorist crime spree in 1868–70,  but the 2010 working group will have more information.

Of course the fact that a person is an unrepentant, retired, terrorist is not necessarily a bar to being a professor at a prestigious law school–not for William Stewart Simkins at Texas in the early 20th century, or for Bernardine Rae Dohrn at Northwestern in the early 21st century.

Readers who are interested in more on the Simkins controversy may enjoy the blogging thereon at The Faculty Lounge, which has been covering the story since Russell released his paper.

Held on April 28 at the University of Colorado law school, under the sponsorship of the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado. Arguing in favor of constitutionality was Jean Dubofsky, former Justice of the Colorado Supreme Court. Arguing the other side was me. The video is here. (Video and audio are often out of sync by several seconds.) The format was Kopel presentation, Dubofsky presentation, Kopel rebuttal, Dubofsky rebuttal, and then questions from the audience. Pursuant to the framing of the question, both of us devoted substantial attention to whether Colorado Attorney General John Suthers made the right decision in joining the 20-state coalition lawsuit against the new law. The pro/con presentations take about an hour, and the full program is 1 hour and 36 minutes.

This week’s National Journal poll of political bloggers asked about the impact of the Wall Street reform issue on the midterm elections. Ninety-four percent of the Left bloggers thought that it would help Democrats a lot or a little. The Left was evenly divided between expecting the issue to hurt Republicans a little, or to have no impact. My guess was that it would hurt Republicans a little, although the result might depend on the substance of what the Republicans do: “Republicans would be wrong, as a matter of policy and of politics, to oppose reforms which would reduce the ability of Wall Street to make the public pay for losing bets on complex financial instruments. It would be politically self-destructive for anyone to vote for a bill which provides congressional pre-authorization for more bailouts, including bailouts of the creditors of an insolvent Wall Street firm.” And yes, I’m aware the the bailout fund is now gone from the bill; but the bill still has authority for the executive branch to take money from prudent banks and give it to the reckless creditors of imprudent banks. In general, the bankruptcy laws provide a fair and orderly process to terminate the operations of a bankrupt financial services company; the Dodd bill, in contrast, provides nearly limitless executive power, almost no due process protections, and tremendous opportunity for abusing the system to help politically-favored creditors, or to threaten political opponents with federal destruction of their company.

Asked about what areas the President’s deficit reduction commission should focus on, the bloggers split. A hundred percent of the Left, and 50% of the Right (including me) wanted the commission to consider defense budget cuts. Huge majorities of the Right, and 36–46% of the Left wanted consideration of cuts in domestic discretionary spending, social security, and medicare. (I was for considering cuts in all these.) Eighty-seven percent of the Left, but only 37% of the Right, wanted consideration of tax increases. I favored an alternative approach: “Instead of tax increases, elimination of corporate welfare could raise a great deal of new revenue.”

p.s. Readers looking for good ideas on corporate welfare cuts could start with this collection of materials, from my colleagues at the Cato Institute.

“Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says ‘we’re going to have comprehensive immigration reform now.’ Top political bloggers don’t see it.” So begins the National Journal’s write-up of this week’s blogger poll. Seventy percent of the Left and 78% of the Right called enactment of a comprehensive bill either “very” or “somewhat” unlikely. I was in the “very” group: “As the passage of ObamaCare showed, the Reid-Pelosi team has extraordinary talent at pushing unpopular legislation through Congress. But it seems unlikely that there will be enough swing-seat Democrats, who are already in enough trouble, willing to change their own chances of re-election from ‘difficult’ to ‘nearly impossible.’”

The second question asked the bloggers if they were open to supporting some form of a VAT. Only 1/3 of the Left and 1/6 of the Right expressed openness. I was part of that small minority: “If and only if accompanied by substantial, immediate fiscal reform, such as a balanced budget amendment, major entitlement reform, a large reduction in the percentage of the population who are consumers rather than payers of income tax revenues, and an iron-clad program to pay down the federal debt.”