There’s nothing unusual about Republicans denouncing illegal immigration. But a GOP senator attacking immigrants who come to this country legally to work and study is something new. According to the New York Times, that’s exactly what Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) did today during a Homeland Security Committee hearing. Sen. Paul specifically went after immigrant students, who he called our “would-be attackers”:

“We have 40,000 students coming to this country from all over the world,” he said. “Are they would-be attackers?”

Speaking at a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing on border patrol corruption, Mr. Paul on Thursday questioned whether the government was adequately screening and then keeping tabs on those who enter the country with student visas or as refugees.[...]

But while Mr. Paul said he worried about legal immigrants, he was not concerned about the potential threat from American citizens.

“We’ve done so many things to think that we’re all terrorists, that universally we have to scrutinize everybody to the Nth degree instead of doing what I just think would be good police work,” Mr. Paul said, adding that it would be less expensive and less intrusive to privacy if the country looked at “the people who did attack us and who continue to attack us, and not really U.S. citizens.”

Paul’s latest attack on immigrants is only the latest example of the so-called libertarian’s disdain for civil liberties. Paul has advocated stripping many Americans of their constitutional right to citizenship, and he once suggested that the U.S. wouldn’t even need laws if all citizens were Christians. As ThinkProgress reported, he recently called for jailing people who attend “radical political speeches.”

The senator’s selective focus on immigrants also betrays his own ignorance about the threats facing this country. At today’s hearing, Commissioner of Customs and Border Protection Alan D. Bersin cautioned Paul against dismissing the threat posed by homegrown terrorists. After all, Bersin pointed out, the man accused of trying to detonate a car bomb in Times Square last year was a U.S. citizen. Additionally, attacking refugees who flee persecution in their own countries and jump through countless legal hoops to receive asylum in the United States is a particularly baseless (not to mention heartless) concern.

Arizona’s immigration law — SB-1070 — is no longer the toughest immigration law in America. Today, Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley (R) signed a bill into law that goes several steps farther. “I campaigned for the toughest immigration laws and I’m proud of the Legislature for working tirelessly to create the strongest immigration bill in the country,” boasted Bentley.

Like the bill that Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) signed into law last year, Alabama’s immigration measure requires local law enforcement to ask about immigration status when police have “reasonable suspicion” that the person they have stopped for some other violation is also an undocumented immigrant. Similarly, the law allows police to detain suspected undocumented immigrants and makes it a crime to employ or transport them. In its lawsuit against the state of Arizona, the Department of Justice claims that these provisions are preempted and conflict with federal priorities. These parts of SB-1070 have been enjoined by two separate courts on the basis that they are unconstitutional.

The courts will likely find even more issues with the law Alabama just passed. Under this law, Alabama schools will now have to collect student citizenship information. The lawyers behind this type of legislation have already made clear that their goal is to “take on” Plyler v. Doe, a Supreme Court decision which struck down a state statute denying education funding to undocumented children.

In the majority opinion, Justice William Brennan wrote that the “denial of education to some isolated group of children poses an affront to one of the goals of the Equal Protection Clause: the abolition of governmental barriers presenting unreasonable obstacles to advancement on the basis of individual merit.” The DOJ’s Civil Rights Division has already made clear that “student enrollment practices that may chill or discourage” school enrollment based on immigration status is a violation of federal law.

Many Alabama school officials are worried that the new law will do just that. “Once you start asking that question, you get to the point where you’re tacitly trying to deny access to school,” explained an attendance coordinator for Elmore County Public Schools. Even in Arizona, an attempt to institute this policy failed miserably.

Alabama’s law also requires state employers to use the controversial electronic employment verification system, E-Verify, and will revoke the businesses licenses of those who fail to comply. This is probably one of the only parts of Alabama’s measure that will remain intact. That is because Arizona passed a separate piece of legislation with a similar mandate a couple of years ago, and last week the Supreme Court ruled in its favor, upholding a decision made by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Yet people shouldn’t read too much into that. The same appeals court also imposed a preliminary injunction on parts of SB-1070 on the basis that it “interferes with the federal government’s authority to implement its priorities and strategies in law enforcement” is likely preempted by federal law and foreign policy.

In addition, Alabama has made it illegal for landlords to “knowingly” rent housing to undocumented immigrants. The Third US Circuit Court of Appeals blocked a similar law from going into effect in Hazleton, Pennsylvania on the basis of federal preemption. The Supreme Court recently vacated the decision, but that likely has more to do with the Hazleton law’s E-Verify provisions which mirror the Arizona law that the Court recently reviewed.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) requires most Americans to either carry insurance or pay slighty more income taxes for a simple reason. The act also forbids insurance companies from denying coverage to patients with preexisting conditions, and this ban cannot function if patients are free to enter and exit the insurance market at will. If patients can wait until they get sick to buy insurance, they will drain all the money out of an insurance plan that they have not previously paid into, leaving nothing left for the rest of the plan’s consumers.

There is also a ton of evidence proving this point. Seven states attempted to protect people with preexisting conditions without also enacting an insurance requirement, and it ended in disaster. Kentucky, Maine, New Hampshire, and Washington each lost most or all of their individual market insurers, and the cost of some New Jersey health plans more than tripled after that state enacted a similar law. A couple of states had slightly less awful results, but they still saw premiums shoot up between 15 and 20 percent immediately after their laws went into effect. Massachusetts, by contrast, enacted a law much like the ACA, and its premiums declined by 40 percent.

Moreover, this essential link between the two provisions is more than enough to justify the insurance coverage requirement under the Constitution. As conservative Justice Antonin Scalia explains, “where Congress has the authority to enact a regulation of interstate commerce,” such as a law protecting people with preexisting conditions, “it possesses every power needed to make that regulation effective.”

Which is why one of the most bizarre aspects of an incredibly bizarre Eleventh Circuit argument yesterday was the fact that the acting solicitor general faced a bevy of questions forcing him to cite more and more specific studies proving that the insurance coverage requirement actually is necessary to thwart disaster. Consider this exchange between Katyal and Judge Frank Hull:

KATYAL: What Congress found was that you couldn’t ban preexisting condition discrimination…without a minimum coverage provision. They had eight states that tried to do this, and ban these forms of discrimination.

HULL: And that’s because the insurers left that state and left that market? [...] I tried to find a study in the record by an economist — anybody — that tries to analyze the national market based on whether insurers will or will not leave the market. There did not seem to be a study in the record on that point, is that correct?

KATYAL: Well, I think that there are several studies. The American [Association of People] with Disabilities brief shows that, for example, that when the seven states reformed the insurance markets without a minimum coverage provision the insurers did leave the states. And Congress made a specific finding saying that the Massachusetts experience worked precisely because it coupled the insurance reforms to the minimum coverage provision.

Watch it:

It’s not entirely clear what Judge Hull is getting at here, but if she is suggesting that the many studies showing that state insurance markets strain until they break without an insurance coverage requirement aren’t enough for her court to simply accept that fact and move on, than she is departing wildly from decades of settled law. As the Supreme Court has said time and time again, Congress does not have to prove by utterly incontestable evidence that its economic regulations are justified; it only has to prove that its economic assumptions aren’t completely irrational. A pile of studies showing the impact of health care regulations in the states are more than sufficient to clear this very low bar, as should be a CBO study finding that premiums would spike substantially if the court sides with the plaintiffs.

Moreover, there are is a very good reason why courts are not supposed to second-guess Congress’ economic policy assumptions except in the most extreme and absurd cases. Members of Congress are elected; judges are not. Both supporters and opponents of the ACA were able to muster an army of economists supporting their position on this law. Someone has to make the call as to which side is right, and that someone will either be an elected official accountable to the public, or it will be an appointed judge with lifetime tenure.

If the Eleventh Circuit decides that Congress’ judgment wasn’t good enough, it will not only be a massive departure from settled law, it will be a minor coup wrestling power away from the voters and giving it to three officials in black robes.

In a must-read article about the broken confirmations process in the Senate, Dave Weigel quotes former Office of Legal Counsel nominee Dawn Johnsen explaining that conservative objections to her failed nomination had nothing to do with actual disagreements with her views:

“I’m not going to talk about any individual meetings with senators,” [Johnsen] says, “but the impression that I got was it wasn’t about me, that it wasn’t personal. It was political. And there were some senators who were very open about that. It wasn’t a difference in substantive views. The things I was attacked for saying about torture, for example—Lindsey Graham and John McCain have talked about that the same way.” (Neither publicly supported her nomination.) “You definitely need to look at how all the terrorism issues and nominees who dealt with terrorism issues were treated. The attempt was to describe President Obama’s approach as not sufficiently tough on terrorism, and make that a political issue.“

And Johnsen is hardly the only Obama nominee that became the focus of a smear campaign despite no legitimate objections to her fitness for public service. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) accused failed judicial nominee Goodwin Liu of wanting to use the courts to turn America into “communist-run China,” and a law review article that became the centerpiece of the conservative claim that Liu was a judicial activist was in many ways a call for judicial restraint. Similarly, while no one on the right has provided a plausible explanation for why Peter Diamond’s nomination to the Fed board needed to be blocked, Sen. Richard Shelby’s (R-AL) claim that the Nobel Prize-winning economist was unqualified is obviously absurd.

Johnsen, Liu, and Diamond can at least say that their nominations were high-profile enough that people noticed the campaign of obstruction against them. The sad truth is that many nominees simply die a quiet death as senators delay their confirmation votes into oblivion. Indeed, this silent obstructionism caused Obama to have a lower percentage of his judicial nominees confirmed during his first two years in office than any other president in American history.

Weigel’s piece concludes with an uncharacteristically smart idea by Manuel Miranda, the disgraced former Senate staffer best known for hacking Democrats’ computer servers and stealing confidential documents. Miranda proposes allowing nominees at the rank of assistant secretary or lower to begin doing their job before they are confirmed by the Senate. Doing so would be a real step towards preventing the hollowing out of government we are currently witnessing.