New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) is firing back at critics in his own party who have questioned his decision to appoint a Muslim judge, Sohail Mohammed, to a state bench. Mohammed defended Muslims who were wrongly accused in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, which some conservatives have suggested makes him an unqualified candidate.

While defending his choice at a press conference, Christie made it clear he is “disgusted” by the “ignorance behind the criticism of Sohail Mohammed.” Paranoid fear of Sharia law has become a growing theme in Republican rhetoric, and Christie lashed out at those who would use Islamophobia to attack an exceptional judge:

CHRISTIE: They are criticizing him because he is a Muslim American…I was disgusted, candidly, by some of the questions he was asked by both parties at the Senate judiciary committee…Sharia Law has nothing to do with this at all — it’s crazy! It’s crazy. The guy’s an American citizen…This Sharia Law business is crap. It’s just crazy, and I’m tired of dealing with the crazies. It’s just unnecessary to be accusing this guy of things just because of his religious background.

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Mohammed is only the second Muslim American to be appointed to a New Jersey bench. Christie praised him as “an extraordinary American” and an “outstanding lawyer” who “played an integral role in the post-September 11 period in building bridges between the Muslim American population and law enforcement in this state.”

Christie also expressed his appreciation that Mohammed is still “willing to serve after all this baloney.”

A SuperPAC is a group that allows wealthy people and corporations to pool their money together in order to try to change the result of an election. The seven major SuperPACs have taken in a total of $23.7 million in just the first half of this year — a number that is certain to grow much larger as election day approaches. Yet, as USA Today reports, more than half of this money comes from just twelve rich people or corporations:

A dozen wealthy individuals and corporations — ranging from a Hollywood mogul to Texas billionaires — gave more than half the money flowing to the biggest outside groups raising unlimited amounts to influence next year’s presidential and congressional races, a USA TODAY analysis shows.

Republican-affiliated groups outraised Democratic groups by more than 2-to-1, the review found, demonstrating the willingness of Republican donors to write big checks to deny President Obama a second term. . . . Million-dollar donors to PACs include New York hedge-fund manager John Paulson, who gave to Restore Our Future. Eli Publishing and F8 LLC, two companies that share an address in Provo, Utah, donated $1 million each to the group backing Romney, who has extensive ties to the state. . . .

Supporters of Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who is weighing entering the Republican race, collected $193,000 through a group named Americans for Rick Perry. The top donor: Texas billionaire Harold Simmons, who gave $100,000 on June 27, 10 days after Perry signed legislation allowing Simmons’ company to accept low-level radioactive waste from other states at its West Texas facility.

It’s tough to imagine a surer recipe for corruption. Although SuperPAC’s are prohibited from giving money directly to candidates — one of the few remaining campaign finance laws that wasn’t eviscerated by Citizens United and similar cases — it’s not like a presidential candidate isn’t perfectly capable of finding out which billionaires funded the shadowy groups that supported their campaign. Moreover, if just a handful of people are responsible for the bulk of these donations, a newly elected president will have no problem figuring out who to lavish favors on once they enter the White House.

Earlier this year, Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) signed a voter suppression law that, among other things, cuts the number of early voting days nearly in half and imposes crippling administrative burdens on voter registration drives. The Democratic Senate Campaign Committee is now asking DOJ to suspend the law because it violates the federal Voting Rights Act, which strikes down state laws that have a greater impact on minority voters than on others:

There is no doubt that the effect of the new law will be to intimidate volunteers from participating in voter registration efforts . . . . [M]inority voters are more than twice as likely to register in these drives than white Americans. Voter registration drives go a long way toward decreasing the registration rate gap between eligible minority and white voters. Thus, the chilling effect [Florida's law] will have on voter registration efforts will result in fewer minority voters at the polls. . . .

Florida saw record turnout among African-American voters in the 2008 general election in which voters had the opportunity to elect the country’s first African-American president. More than half of the African-American Voters in Florida that year cast ballots before Election Day in early voting sites. The DSCC sees it as no coincidence that the Republican-dominated Florida Legislature would institute voting changes that will disparately affect minority voters in an election year when suppressing the minority vote likely will help Republican candidates. But under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, minority voting rights cannot be bartered in the course of political gamesmanship.

Of course, Rick Scott’s voter suppression law is just one small part of a widespread GOP war on voting. Several Republican-controlled states recently enacted so-called “voter ID” laws which effectively disenfranchise tens of thousands of elderly voters, young voters, students, minorities and low-income voters. Because of their disproportionate impact on racial minorities, these laws also violate the federal Voting Rights Act.

Likewise, Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) signed his very own law limiting early voting. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) declared war on the state’s unions and cut the state’s public financing scheme — both of which are attempts to reduce the viability of pro-worker candidates while enhancing corporate control of elections. The Maine Republican Party chair even made the paranoid claim that his state must make it harder to vote because “Democrats intentionally steal elections.”

And, sadly, these voter suppression efforts are just one display of the GOP’s utter contempt for democracy. If Republicans can win a fair election, than they have every right to govern. But disenfranchising voters for electoral gain is not simply despicable — it undermines the legitimacy of any government elected by taking advantage of these tactics.

From the moment President Obama took office, Senate Republicans waged an unprecedented campaign of obstruction against his judicial nominees. During the 111th Congress, when Democrats actually controlled enough seats to break a filibuster, the GOP exploited the Senate’s many opportunities for delay to literally run out the clock before more than a trickle of judges could be confirmed. Now that Democrats control a mere 53 percent of the Senate, the body’s broken rules enable the Republican minority to block any judge they want through a filibuster.

As a result, judicial confirmations have fallen off a cliff. President Obama’s nominees have been confirmed at only slightly more than half the rate of his two predecessors’ nominees, and Obama is now the only recent president to see the number of judicial vacancies actually go up during his first 30 months in office.

Yet, even if every single judicial vacancy were filled tomorrow, that would only solve part of the problem. As a new report by the Constitutional Accountability Center explains, the number of congressionally authorized federal judgeships has barely changed at all since the first President Bush left the White House, while the federal judiciary’s caseload has skyrocketed:

In some parts of the country, this increased caseload has become completely unmanageable. As Texas federal Judge W. Royal Furgeson recently explained:

[A] normal federal court will handle during this period of time something like 75 to 85 to 90 criminal cases and I was handling 450. . . . I would sometimes look out in the evening at the mass of people assembled in my courtroom and it would take me back to the days when I was a very young lawyer and my firm was assigning me to handle clients in night traffic court. And I felt like I was in night traffic court.

The problem, of course, in night traffic court if my client got fined it was going to be a couple of hundred bucks at the most, and the problem that I had with the defendants before me, they were looking at years — potentially years and years in a federal prison. And I was able to give them about as much attention as I could see those traffic judges giving their — the defendants before them attention when the fines were about $100 or $200. It was not a good feeling and federal judges all across the border continue to deal with this problem of not having the time it takes to really consider what they’re doing, especially in sentencing. And I don’t think there’s a federal judge in American that will tell you — that will disagree with this statement. The hardest job we have is to sentence human beings. You know, it’s something to judge another human being. And it’s a very hard job. And to feel like you’re not being able to give it near the attention it deserves creates a desperate sense of failure on your part.

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This dysfunction is Texas’ present, and if Congress does not act soon it will be America’s future. A responsible Senate would return to Washington today to confirm the twenty judges currently awaiting a floor vote — rather than spend the next five weeks on vacation. A responsible Senate minority would end its two year campaign of obstruction against President Obama’s nominees. And a responsible Congress would authorize enough new judgeships to accommodate the increase in caseloads since the early 1990s.