Rep. Austin Scott (R-GA)

Yet, while Scott’s one-sentence bill would end the government practice, “dating to the Nixon administration, of providing legal assistance to low-income people pursuing equal justice under the law,” there does appear to be one group that will benefit from it:

This one sentence says a great deal about Scott, because it is a transparent attempt by the young lawmaker to defend a company in his district that discriminates against U.S. citizens in favor of Mexican migrant workers.

Scott introduced the bill abolishing Legal Services exactly three days after it became public that Legal Services had won a U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission determination that Georgia’s Hamilton Growers “engages in a pattern or practice of regularly denying work hours and assigning less favorable assignments to U.S. workers, in favor of H2-A guestworkers.” Hamilton also “engages in a pattern or practice of discharging U.S. workers and replacing them with H-2A guestworkers,” the EEOC determined.

Ironically (or rather, hypocritically), Scott defeated a moderate Democratic incumbent in 2010 by running a tough-on-immigration message. According to his hometown paper, “He said that jobs here was the biggest draw for illegal aliens coming into the country and that making it more difficult to obtain them would curb the influx of illegal aliens.”

The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank observes that given his past anti-immigrant stance, “you’d think Scott would have sided with the 17 U.S. citizens in Georgia who claimed Hamilton Growers illegally dumped them in favor of Mexican workers on H-2A visas.”

For decades, low-income Americans use government legal services for a range of important actions, like women seeking restraining orders against abusive partners, and homeowners fighting foreclosure or predatory lending. Yet the congressman questioned whether these services were “absolutely necessary” and suggested poor Americans simply rely on private charity programs so we can get this “duplicative and unnecessary program off the federal taxpayers’ dole.”

Ultimately, Scott’s bill amounts to siding with “a large employer of foreign migrants in his district — against his out-of-work constituents.”

Fifth Circuit Judge Catharina Haynes

The feds, however, did not keep them safe. When the mobster fled the country, Demiraj’s husband was deported — where he was kidnapped, beaten, and shot by the mobster he was once slated to testify against (he survived, and was eventually allowed back in the United States). The mobster also kidnapped Demiraj’s two nieces and forced them into prostitution.

Flash forward several years, and Rudina Demiraj herself is in court facing deportation. Federal law grants asylum to non-citizens whose “life or freedom would be threatened” because they belong to a particular family, and no one in this case questions that the mobster would seek revenge against Demiraj’s husband by going after her if she is returned to Albania. Nevertheless, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit voted 2-1 along party lines to deny asylum to Demiraj by twisting the asylum law in a way that deprives it of any real meaning:

The crucial finding here is that the record discloses no evidence that Mrs. Demiraj would be targeted for her membership in the Demiraj family as such. Rather, the evidence strongly suggests that Mrs. Demiraj, her son, and Mr. Demiraj’s nieces were targeted because they are people who are important to Mr. Demiraj—that is, because hurting them would hurt Mr. Demiraj. No one suggests that distant members of the Demiraj family have been systematically targeted as would be the case if, for example, a persecutor sought to terminate a line of dynastic succession. Nor does the record suggest that the fact of Mr. and Mrs. Demiraj’s marriage and formal inclusion in the Demiraj family matters to Bedini; that is, Mrs. Demiraj would not be any safer in Albania if she divorced Mr. Demiraj and renounced membership in the family, nor would she be any safer if she were Mr. Demiraj’s girlfriend of many years rather than his wife.

This reasoning is absurd on its face, and, fortunately, it also places the Fifth Circuit directly at odds with a decision by another court of appeals — so there is actually a meaningful chance that this decision will be reversed by the Supreme Court. Sadly, however, this kind of heartless reasoning is all too common in the nation’s cruelest court of appeals.

The Fifth Circuit infamously ordered a cheerleader to pay sanctions after she sued the school district that required her to cheer for her alleged rapist. And several of the Fifth Circuit’s judges once wrote that a death row defendant whose lawyer slept through much of his trial was not denied his constitutional right to counsel.

Yet, there is one group that the Fifth Circuit shows tremendous empathy for: wealthy corporations. Two Fifth Circuit judges, Jerry Smith and Eugene Davis, ruled in favor of the oil industry in a major drilling moratorium case despite the fact that they both attended expense-paid “junkets for judges” sponsored by an oil-industry funded organization. A third Fifth Circuit judge, Edith Clement, serves on the board of this organization, despite an opinion from the federal judiciary’s ethics committee saying that Clement violates her ethical obligations by remaining on this board. Indeed, the Fifth Circuit is so widely viewed as a safe haven for the oil industry that the House GOP attempted to shift several key oil drilling cases to this court because they knew its judges would treat the industry kindly.

So the Fifth Circuit is a great place to seek justice — just so long as you are rich, well-connected and loaded with oil interests.

From the moment he took office, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) seized every opportunity to reshape his state’s law to improve the GOP’s chances on election day. Walker stripped state workers of their right to organize in order to weaken a traditionally progressive constituency. He gutted the state’s public financing system, which allows candidates to run effective campaigns without pleading for money from big dollar donors, and used this money to pay for a voter ID law that that disenfranchises numerous elderly voters, young voters, students, minorities and low-income voters.

Yet it was not these attempts to un-level the playing field that saved Walker’s Senate majority in last night’s recall elections — where Democrats took two of the three seats they needed to flip control of the state senate. Rather, it was a longstanding quirk in Wisconsin law which protects elected officials from recalls during the first year of their term in office:

(s) No petition for recall of an officer may be offered for filing prior to the expiration of one year after commencement of the term of office for which the officer is elected.

In 2008, Barack Obama won a landslide victory for Wisconsin’s electoral votes, and Democrats rode a wave that allowed them to capture many elected offices that are typically out of their reach. In 2010, by contrast, economic discontent fueled a backlash against the incumbent party, and Republicans rode their own wave into various elected positions.

For this reason, all of the Republican state senators who were eligible for recall in yesterday’s elections were Republicans who held on in 2008 despite the fact that they had to stand for election during a Democratic wave. Likewise, all of the Republicans who were elected in 2010 only because they were fortunate enough to run during a Republican wave were immune from recall. Come 2012, however, all of this changes.