As deficit reduction discussions continue this week to raise the debt ceiling, Congressman Jared Polis (D-CO) wrote to President Obama and Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) calling on them to consider immigration reform as a way of raising revenues without raising taxes. Polis wrote:

“Studies from groups across the political spectrum have proven the economic and fiscal benefits of comprehensive immigration reform. By requiring illegal immigrants to register with the government, pay fees and back taxes, and correct their status, we can drastically expand our tax base. A report by the Center for American Progress found that passing comprehensive immigration reform would generate $4.5 to $5.4 billion in additional net tax revenue over three years. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office scored the bi-partisan 2007 comprehensive immigration reform bill that was proposed in the Senate as increasing federal revenues by $15 billion over the 2008-2012 period and by $48 billion over the 2008-2017 period. [...]

Just like our budget deficit, immigration reform is an issue that we cannot afford to ignore. Bipartisan proposals that are tough, fair, and practical have garnered support from across the ideological spectrum in Congress, as well as from President Bush and the current administration. Comprehensive immigration reform would clearly help us reduce our deficit and debt, and would do so without raising tax rates. Therefore I strongly encourage you to include an immigration reform package as part of the larger compromise.”

While forwarding a comprehensive bipartisan immigration reform bill in time to raise the debt ceiling is not feasible, Polis highlighted an important issue. As Congress pursues austerity cuts despite a struggling economy, many immigration bills have been proposed that would lower the deficit and boost our GDP.

Alternatively, if no immigration reform bills pass and enforcement proposals are advanced, it could significantly impact our deficit and depress our economy. A Center for American Progress analysis found the average cost of deportation per person is $23,148, and tracking, detaining, and deporting every undocumented immigrant could total up to $285 billion. This figure does not take into account lost revenue and economic production, a cost of up to $2.5 trillion, while immigration reform could raise the GDP by an additional $1.6 trillion.

Under the status quo, Obama has deported nearly 1 million people since taking office.

–Sean Savett

Immigrants rights groups gathered at last night’s Major League Baseball All-Star Game in Phoenix to protest Senate Bill 1070, Arizona’s radical anti-immigrant law. Protesters marched to Chase Field carrying signs calling for boycotts of MLB and the host Arizona Diamondbacks. Proponents of the law, meanwhile, carried signs featuring the xenophobic description of immigrant children as “anchor babies.” Here are pictures from the protests, courtesy of Border Angels:

A hunger strike started by prisoners at Pelican Bay to protest appalling conditions has spread across California as inmates at 13 prisons joined in solidarity. The number of inmates refusing food hit a peak of 6,600, and is now estimated at 1,700. They are now in their 13th day of the hunger strike, and relatives are reporting that many are near death but still refusing medical attention.

Pelican Bay is a maximum security facility where inmates are held in windowless isolation cells for more than 22 hours a day, shower once every three days, and can have little or no contact with other prisoners for years and even decades at a time:

A core group of prisoners at Pelican Bay said they were willing to starve to death rather than continue to submit to prison conditions that they call a violation of basic civil and human rights.

“No one wants to die,” James Crawford, a prisoner serving a life sentence for murder and robbery, said in a statement provided by a coalition of prisoners’ rights groups. “Yet under this current system of what amounts to intense torture, what choice do we have?”

The hunger strike comes only weeks after the Supreme Court ordered California to dramatically lower its prisons population, because severe overcrowding was exposing inmates to high levels of violence and disease.

Hunger strike leaders are demanding an end to long-term confinement and collective punishment, access to food and programs, and “an end to the practice of ‘debriefing,’ or requiring prisoners to divulge information about themselves and other prisoners around gang affiliation in order to be released back into general population.”

They are supported by advocates and family members who are begging Gov. Jerry Brown (D) to swiftly improve prison conditions.

The Supreme Court ruled in May that California’s prisons violated minimum constitutional requirements by failing to meet prisoners’ basic health needs. “A prison that deprives prisoners of basic sustenance, including adequate medical care, is incompatible with the concept of human dignity and has no place in civilized society,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority, noting that as many as 200 prisoners had lived in a gym and as many as 54 prisoners had shared a single toilet.

Hundreds of hunger strikers are suffering from severe dehydration and official sources inside the prison say they are “progressing rapidly” toward organ damage and renal failure. The state corrections department continues to insist the situation is not a “crisis,” and say they will not meet the strikers’ requests.

“The department is not going to be manipulated or coerced into action,” said spokesman Terry Thornton, who said the hunger strike is not an appropriate way of registering their concern.

Speaking on the Senate floor this morning, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) offered what may be the most concise summary of conservative constitutionalism ever spoken — America must rewrite the Constitution to force conservative outcomes because we the people consistently elect lawmakers who disagree with McConnell:

The time has come for a balanced budget amendment that forces Washington to balance its books. If these debt negotiations have convinced us of anything, it’s that we can’t leave it to politicians in Washington to make the difficult decisions that they need to get our fiscal house in order. The balanced budget amendment will do that for them. Now is the moment. No more games. No more gimmicks. The Constitution must be amended to keep the government in check. We’ve tried persuasion. We’ve tried negotiations. We’re tried elections. Nothing has worked.

Watch it:

It’s worth noting just what McConnell is asking the American people to choke down. Senate Republicans’ so-called “balanced budget amendment” does far more than simply requiring federal spending to equal federal revenues. It makes it functionally impossible to raise taxes by imposing a two-thirds supermajority requirement — a provision closely modeled after the California anti-tax amendment that blew up that state’s finances. It would also require spending cuts so steep that it would have made Ronald Reagan’s fiscal policy unconstitutional. Ezra Klein rightfully labeled this plan the “worst idea in Washington.”

So there really isn’t any question why the American people refuse to elect a Congress that will force this agenda upon the nation, but McConnell simply doesn’t care. If the American people won’t vote for the kind of government he wants, then we must strip away the people’s ability to choose their own government. Elections haven’t worked.

Sadly, McConnell’s deeply authoritarian plan to take away our ability to choose how we will be governed is part of a much larger conservative agenda to strip American democracy of any meaning and force conservative governance upon the American people:

• Affordable Care Act Litigation: In 2008, elections didn’t work because we the people elected Barack Obama and gave him the majorities he needed to comprehensively reform the health care system. Conservatives immediately responded with an entirely fabricated constitutional argument against this law that relied on a constitutional theory that no one had ever even heard of before 2009. Even Judge Jeffrey Sutton, a former Scalia clerk and a leader of the conservative states rights movement, rejected this meritless attack on the Affordable Care Act.
• Killing Medicare and Medicaid: In 1964, elections didn’t work, and the American people gave President Lyndon Johnson the congressional support he needed to enact Medicare and Medicaid. Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) would take away the American people’s ability to benefit from this law as well. He claims that the Constitution must be reinterpreted so that the federal government can’t do anything at all about “health care.”
• Bringing Back Whites-Only Lunch Counters: In 1962, elections didn’t work, and the American people gave Johnson enough votes to pass a ban on whites-only lunch counters. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) disagrees with this outcome, so he would reinterpret the Constitution to make the Civil Rights Act of 1964 unconstitutional.
• Putting Children To Work: In 1936, elections didn’t work, and the American people reelected President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and gave him an enormous supermajority in Congress. Roosevelt used this mandate to eliminate the exploitation of child labor. Sen. Lee also disagrees with this outcome, and would rethink the Constitution to make child labor laws unconstitutional.
• Cutting Students Loose: Time and time again, elections haven’t worked because the American people elected a Congress that supports education programs. Numerous members of Congress believe that all federal education programs — from Pell Grants to federal student loans to public school funding — must be eliminated entirely because, in Sen. Tom Coburn’s (R-OK) words, “I don’t even think [education] is a role for the federal government, if you read the Constitution.”

In other words, McConnell’s plan to strip we the people of our ability to govern ourselves is only the beginning. The right has a clear and comprehensive agenda to rethink the entire Constitution — and democracy has no part in their vision.

Doe v. Exxon Mobil is one of those cases that makes your skin crawl. A law known as the Alien Tort Statute allows private parties to be sued for some of the most atrocious violations of international law, and Exxon’s alleged actions clearly qualify. The oil giant allegedly hired members of the Indonesian military to guard one of its natural gas facilities in that country, despite that military’s long history of genocide, sexual violence and other crimes against humanity. These soldiers then allegedly acted exactly as you would expect while working on Exxon’s behalf:

In addition to extrajudicial killings of some of the plaintiffs-appellants’ husbands as part of a “systematic campaign of extermination of the people of Aceh by [d]efendants’ [Indonesian] security forces,” the plaintiffs-appellants were “beaten, burned, shocked with cattle prods, kicked and subjected to other forms of brutality and cruelty” amounting to torture, as well as forcibly removed and detained for lengthy periods of time.

Despite a lower court decision tossing out these plaintiffs’ suit against Exxon, two of the three judges on a D.C. Circuit panel voted to reinstate the case. The third judge, Bush-appointee Brett Kavanaugh, offered a reason to toss out the case against Exxon that borders of self-parody:

To support an ATS claim against a corporation, it would not be sufficient to show that customary international law prohibits torture, extrajudicial killing, and prolonged detention when committed by state actors. It likewise would not be sufficient to show that customary international law recognizes corporate liability for some violations, but not for aiding and abetting torture, extrajudicial killing, and prolonged detention. Rather, for plaintiffs to maintain their claims, customary international law must impose liability against corporations for aiding and abetting torture, extrajudicial killing, or prolonged detention. It does not. In fact, customary international law does not impose liability against corporations at all.

In essence, Kavanaugh argues that Exxon is free to engage in as much torture, murder and lawless detention abroad as it desires because Exxon is a corporation, and corporations enjoy complete immunity from the international legal norms forbidding such barbaric behavior.

As the majority opinion explains, Kavanaugh is simply wrong about Exxon’s so-called legal immunity. Indeed, there is a line of precedents going back at least as far as 1774 holding corporations accountable for causing harms to others. Unfortunately, however, there is a very real risk that Exxon will ultimately succeed in its quest for unchecked freedom to hire it’s own private army to torture and kill. Two conservative judges on the Second Circuit recently held that corporations do indeed enjoy the kind of immunity Exxon sought here — and the Supreme Court typically likes to review cases where two courts of appeals have split on the same legal issue.

In other words, the fate of people allegedly tortured or killed by Exxon’s soldiers for hire could rest on whether the same five justices who brought us unlimited corporate money in elections, forced arbitration and the near death of the class action see fit to hold a corporation accountable for its actions.