Traditionally, a president will not nominate district court judges without consulting with a potential nominee’s home-state senators. Yet Arizona Senators John McCain (R) and John Kyl (R) appear to be absent from this process — despite a GOP-appointed chief judge literally begging them to step up:

The Arizona Republic reported that at the time of [Chief Judge] Roll’s death, Sens. Jon Kyl and John McCain, both Republicans, had yet to submit any names to the White House. Four months later, there are few public signs of progress.

“The latest I know is there has been no nomination,” said [Ninth Circuit Chief Judge Alex] Kozinski, a Reagan appointee. “This is very disconcerting. I have the impression it took a very long time to get names to the White House. […] We’ve pleaded with senators to hurry up the process, and I’m sure they’re doing [the] best they can.”

McCain and Kyl’s failure to engage leaves thousands of their constituents without meaningful access to justice. The U.S. district court in Arizona is among the most overburdened in the country. Felony filings doubled in just two years, and the court is currently operating eight judges short of what it needs to adequately handle its caseload — a vacancy crisis that was exacerbated after its chief judge was murdered while waiting to speak to Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) about how to solve this problem.

Moreover, Kyl and McCain’s foot-dragging is just one part of the Senate GOP’s widespread obstruction of Obama’s judicial nominees. As ThinkProgress reported yesterday, GOP obstruction of Obama’s judges was so widespread during the president’s first two years in office that the Senate confirmed a smaller percentage of Obama’s judges than it did during the first two years of any previous presidency.

Indeed, this obstructionism has produced such a severe vacancy crisis that Kozinski is just one of many GOP judges begging Senate Republicans to stop playing partisan games. Eleventh Circuit Chief Judge Joel Dubina recently complained that “I don’t know what it’s going to take to break this logjam. But something needs to be done.” Republican former appeals court Judge Timothy Lewis described Senate obstructionism as “outrageous” and “shameful.” Even George W. Bush-appointed Chief Justice John Roberts used his annual report last January to speak out against the vacancy crisis.

Sadly, at least in Arizona, their pleas appear to be falling on deaf ears.

A fringe anti-abortion group, Personhood USA, has been startlingly successful at pushing forward legislation across the country that would redefine life as beginning at the moment of fertilization, effectively outlawing contraceptives like birth control pills. Although the medical community has long been in agreement that fertilization does not mark the beginning of a pregnancy — fertilized eggs must first be implanted, and only about half of fertilized eggs actually result in a pregnancy — a growing number of lawmakers are supporting Personhood USA’s efforts to buck medical expertise and legally define life as the moment a sperm meets an egg.

If they succeed in passing such a law — and if such a law survives judicial scrutiny — it could turn common forms of birth control into the legal equivalent of a homicide. While “personhood” laws have always been a transparent attempt to outlaw abortion, the legislation supported by groups like Personhood USA goes much further in trying to assert government control over women’s bodies. These laws would recognize every fertilized egg as an individual and complete human being with full rights, and place millions of women in legal jeopardy. According to 2008 numbers, around 11 million American women use birth control pills and another 2 million use intrauterine devices (IUDs).

Contraceptives like the pill and IUDs not only act to prevent fertilization, but, if fertilization does occur, may prevent that fertilized egg from implanting in a woman’s uterus. Personhood USA considers this tantamount to abortion, and wants to make it a punishable offense for women to control their own fertility. Worse, because the proposed legislation could make any effort to terminate a pregnancy a criminal act, it could also bar doctors from saving the lives of women with ectopic pregnancies, which are never viable and need to be terminated as soon as possible.

Also at risk of prosecution would be the millions of women whose fertilized eggs never begin dividing, never implant, or implant but spontaneously abort. This often happens so early on that the woman never even knows she might have been pregnant.

Keith Mason, the president of Personhood USA, is transparent about his motives, telling NPR, “Certainly women, my wife included, would want to know if the pills they’re taking would kill a unique human individual. And I think there’s a lot of misinformation about that, or lack of information.” Sadly, Mason is not alone. Rachel Maddow reports that this Saturday is the fourth annual Protest the Pill event. Each year the event, put on by another fringe group called American Life League, features slogans like “The pill kills babies,” “The pill kills women,” and “The pill kills marriage.”

The very real risk to women posed by the “redefining life” agenda led Colorado to defeat personhood amendments in 2008 and 2010. But Alabama is one step away from passing this legislation, and voters in Mississippi could vote on a personhood amendment to their state Constitution this November. Personhood USA hopes to get proposals on the ballot in nearly half the states by 2012.

In the landmark privacy case Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court struck down a Connecticut law that made it illegal for married couples to use contraception. It’s difficult to imagine that the justices would overrule Griswold, but not as difficult as it once was. Justice Thomas’ dissent in Lawrence v. Texas leaves little doubt that he would overrule Griswold if given the chance, and Chief Justice Roberts disparaged Griswold in an article he drafted in 1981, although he claimed to have backed away from that view in his confirmation hearing.

The California Assembly Chamber

California isn’t exactly known for its sensible budget policy. The state’s long history of requiring supermajorities in order to raise taxes has turned it’s broken budget process into an international laughing stock. Nevertheless, California’s constitution does contain one very sensible provision — under a ballot initiative which was enacted last November, if lawmakers do not pass a budget by June 15, their salaries will be permanently docked:

[I]n any year in which the budget bill is not passed by the Legislature by midnight on June 15, there shall be no appropriation from the current budget or future budget to pay any salary or reimbursement for travel or living expenses for Members of the Legislature during any regular or special session for the period from midnight on June 15 until the day that the budget bill is presented to the Governor. No salary or reimbursement for travel or living expenses forfeited pursuant to this subdivision shall be paid retroactively.

California Comptroller John Chiang announced yesterday that the legislature has not yet complied with this provision, thus its members will lose their pay in two weeks if a new budget is not enacted. And, frankly, the federal government would be much improved if it took a page out of California’s book.

Earlier this year, the federal government came within inches of an economically catastrophic shutdown because right-wing lawmakers refused to fund the government unless they could exact some concessions from President Obama. This summer, the GOP could blow up the entire U.S. economy by forcing us to default on our debt unless Obama signs economically crippling spending cuts into law. Meanwhile, there is nothing in the U.S. Constitution or anywhere else in federal law that penalizes lawmakers who fail to complete must-do tasks like funding the government or raising the debt ceiling.

California’s pay-docking provision is a good idea, but it probably doesn’t go far enough. Many modern constitutions are designed to make it next to impossible for a government to cripple itself via inaction. Canada, for example, recently had to dissolve its entire government and hold a new election because it’s previous legislature failed to pass a budget.

But, in the United States, Speaker John Boehner, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), and their follow extortionists will suffer few personal consequences if they force us into the impossible choice of either killing Medicare or defaulting on our debts. Their jobs are guaranteed for two full years, and they can always retroactively pay their own salaries in the event of a shutdown. Worse, if Tea-drunk members of Congress bring us within inches of blowing up the nation’s economy, our Constitution contains no fail-safe to prevent catastrophe.

House Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) scheduled a markup on the “Keep Our Communities Safe Act,” a bill that Smith claims will “stop the release of dangerous criminal immigrants into American communities.” The reality, however, is much darker:

To understand the scope of Chairman Smith’s bill, take the example of someone who commits a crime and serves a five-year term. If he’s a U.S. citizen, after his prison sentence, he is released into society. If he’s an immigrant, lawfully in the country or not, the U.S. can move to deport him after his five years in prison.

However, if he is a legal immigrant but from a country such as Cuba, with which the U.S. does not have diplomatic relations, he probably cannot be deported. There are a handful of countries around the world with which the U.S. has such constrained diplomatic relations that deportation is very difficult.

What this bill would do is allow the government to lock that person up indefinitely. All it would take is a written certification every six months from the Homeland Security secretary that the detainee is a risk to the community.

The bill’s critics argue that it is an unconstitutional bill that will lead to foreign nationals who pose no threat to society being detained indefinitely — and there are two Supreme Court decisions that strongly suggest they are right about the bill’s unconstitutionality. According to Antonio Ginatta of Human Rights Watch:

[A] person who completes his sentence is suddenly subject to a lifetime in detention based purely on the unilateral and unappealable decision of an administration appointee. It gives that official full authority to subject someone to incarceration well beyond the criminal sentence imposed by the judge or jury. [...] This bill gives the president imperial power over the judiciary and the legislature when it comes to locking up immigrants.

Human Rights First also notes that the bill “contains several provisions that have nothing to do with dangerousness or safety assessments or even flight risk.” In fact, it will likely lead to the indefinite incarceration of “asylum seekers fleeing religious, political and other forms of persecution and seeking protection in the United States – who do not warrant that description and whose detention is unconnected to community safety.” The organizations also claims that since 2003, “immigration authorities have spent more than $300 million of taxpayer dollars detaining thousands of asylum seekers in jails and jail-like facilities under a system that lacks basic due process safeguards.”

The prolonged detention of refugees and asylum seekers hasn’t worked out so well for Australia. Suicide is common among detained refugees in Australia, and riots erupted in April in the country’s detention centers over Australia’s prolonged mandatory detention policy.

Salvatore Colleluori over at Political Correction further argues that Smith’s bill is “an attempt to correct a statistically small problem.” In his testimony on the bill, Immigration and Customs Enforcement official Gary Mead pointed out, “Since the beginning of FY 2009, ICE has released 12,567 individual aliens. … Of this amount, 868 were re-booked into ICE custody, which is a relatively low re-detention rate of 7 percent.”