Later today, the Senate will hold a confirmation vote on Paul Oetken’s nomination to a federal judgeship in New York City. If confirmed, Oetken will be the first of President Obama’s three openly-gay nominees to join the bench — but he will also be only the fourth new federal judge in two months.

Because approximately one federal judge retires every week, this means that the federal bench is currently losing judges twice as fast as new ones are being confirmed. And this near-shutdown in judicial confirmations is nothing new. The moment President Obama took office, Senate Republicans launched an unprecedented game of obstruction against his judicial nominees, slowing the judicial confirmation to just over half what it was during at this point in the last two presidencies:

And, of course, this practice is hardly limited to federal judgeships. Republicans promised to filibuster Consumer Financial Protection Bureau nominee Richard Cordray — or anyone else nominated to head that agency — before President Obama even named Cordray. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) even threatened to block every single item of business that comes before the Senate unless Congress slashes federal spending by a massive 37 percent.

So we’re witnessing a massive, multi-pronged effort to dismantle the federal government’s ability to function at all, and the blockade on new judges is a very significant part of that effort.

Last week, New Hampshire joined the handful of states that have enacted wildly unconstitutional laws claiming to nullify part of the Affordable Care Act. Perhaps most distressingly of all, however, the state’s Democratic Gov. John Lynch refused to exercise his authority to veto the bill:

I today allowed SB 148, to become law without my signature.

SB 148 purports to block the individual coverage provisions included in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act from going forward in New Hampshire. [...]

On a practical level, there is no mechanism for the State of New Hampshire to enforce SB 148. Under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the assessments for not obtaining health insurance will not be administered through the state but through the Internal Revenue Service. Legislators and the public should understand that this legislation would have no impact on the capacity of the State of New Hampshire to block the individual health insurance mandate or the federal assessments for not obtaining insurance.

Lynch is, of course, correct that this law has no legal impact whatsoever. The U.S. Constitution provides that Acts of Congress “shall be the supreme law of the land…anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding,” thus expressly establishing that states do not have a veto power over federal laws. So the bill Lynch just allowed to become law is nothing more than an impotent middle finger to the express language of the Constitution.

But while this unambiguously unconstitutional law has no legal effect, Lynch is simply wrong that it has no practical effect. A recent poll found that 22 percent of the country falsely thinks the Affordable Care Act has been repealed, and another 26 percent were not sure. When states are allowed to engage in unconstitutional stunts such as this one, they only add to the confusion.

Of course, Lynch is hardly the worst culprit here — that honor goes to the right-wing lawmakers who pushed this direct attack on the Constitution in the first place. But Lynch swore an oath to support the Constitution when he became governor, and he should have used all the tools available to him to push back against the far right’s belief that the words of the Constitution mean whatever they want them to mean.

On Friday, the House passed an anti-transparency amendment, which would “prohibit the use of funds to implement any rule, regulation, or executive order regarding the disclosure of political contributions.” This amendment would strip away the Obama Administration’s ability to mitigate the flood of corporate money that started buying American elections after the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC by requiring corporate donors to disclose their contributions.

Bizarrely, 18 Democrats joined nearly every Republican to pass this amendment 259 to 169. The 18 Democrats who voted to protect corporate America’s power to secretly spend unlimited amounts of money influencing elections are:

Jason Altmire (PA-4); John Barrow (GA-12); Dan Boren (OK-2); Ben Chandler (KY-6); Gerald Connolly (VA-11); Jim Cooper (TN-5); Jerry Costello (IL-12); Mark Critz (PA-12); Henry Cuellar (TX-28); Peter DeFazio (OR-4); Michael Honda (CA-15); Jim Matheson (UT-2); William Owens (NY-23); Edward Pastor (AZ-4); Colin Peterson (MN-7); Nick Rahall (WV-3); Mike Ross (AR-4); and Heath Shuler (NC-11)

It’s anyone’s guess why these members of Congress choose to place corporate interest groups ahead of the integrity of American elections, but it is possible that they were influenced by a massive corporate PR and lobbying campaign against transparency in campaign finance. After news broke that the Obama Administration is considering issuing an executive order requiring government contractors to disclose their campaign donations, industry groups responded by ginning up paranoid fantasies claiming that the administration would use these disclosures to create a “pay to play” scenario where only contractors who donate to Democratic causes could receive contracts.

But, of course, this scenario is actually the opposite of what would actually happen if disclosure were mandated. During the Bush Administration, former Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Alphonso Jackson resigned in disgrace after he was implicated in widespread scandals involving cutting President Bush’s opponents out of the contracting process and awarding contracts to his personal cronies. Had a disclosure rule been in effect, however, it would have been possible to compare the donation patterns of all government contractors against who was awarding them contracts, and systematically uncover examples of political corruption.

Transparency is the enemy of corruption — not the means to implement it. It is very sad that a majority of the House chose to ignore this simple and obvious fact.