Correction Appended

When Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) signed the law requiring welfare recipients to pass annual drug tests to collect benefits, he justified the likely unconstitutional law by saying it would save the state money by keeping drug users from using public money to subsidize their drug habits. Drug use, Scott claimed, was higher among welfare recipients than among the rest of the population.

Preliminary results from the state’s first round of testing, however, has seemingly proven both of those claims false. Only 2 percent of welfare recipients failed drug tests, meaning the state must reimburse the cost of the $30 drug tests to the 96 percent of recipients who passed drug tests (two percent did not take the tests). After reimbursements, the state’s savings will be almost negligible, the Tampa Tribune reports:

Cost of the tests averages about $30. Assuming that 1,000 to 1,500 applicants take the test every month, the state will owe about $28,800-$43,200 monthly in reimbursements to those who test drug-free.

That compares with roughly $32,200-$48,200 the state may save on one month’s worth of rejected applicants.

Net savings to the state: $3,400 to $5,000 annually on one month’s worth of rejected applicants. Over 12 months, the money saved on all rejected applicants would add up to $40,800 to $60,000 for a program that state analysts have predicted will cost $178 million this fiscal year.

While the state will save little, if any, money on the drug testing racket, Scott’s family could stand to gain financially. A former health care executive, Scott founded Solantic Corp., a chain of walk-in health care clinics that provides, among other services, drug tests. Scott maintains that he has no involvement in the company, but he does have $62 million worth of the company’s shares contained in a blind trust under his wife’s name. Though there is no conflict under Florida law unless the company deals with the governor’s office directly, the company, and thus Scott’s investment, could benefit from the increased traffic from drug tests.

Meanwhile, the state’s already-small annual savings could be wiped out entirely by the cost of implementing the program and issuing the reimbursements. And as Derek Newton, the spokesman for the Florida chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, told the Tribune, the cost of the program could skyrocket if the state has to defend it in court. The ACLU is still considering a lawsuit challenging the law’s constitutionality, Newton said.

If the ACLU or anyone else were to challenge the law, the lawsuit would likely succeed. As UCLA law professor Adam Winkler wrote after Scott signed the law, “Random drug-testing is what is known as a ‘suspicion-less search,’” and outside of a few limited instances, courts have “generally frowned upon” drug testing that occurs at random and without probable cause. “Indeed, courts have stuck down policies just like the ones put in place by Florida,” Winkler wrote, citing two cases to back up the claim.

As for Scott’s second claim, that drug use is higher among welfare recipients, the test results also show that to be false. While only 2 percent of welfare recipients failed drug tests, a 2008 study by the Office of National Drug Control Policy found that approximately 8 percent of Floridians age 12 and up had used illegal drugs in the last month, and 9.69 percent had smoked marijuana in the last year.

The nation’s most radical immigration law will go before a federal judge in Birmingham, Alabama today as the U.S. Justice Department, civil rights groups, and churches try to block Alabama from instituting its highly discriminatory, “merciless” Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act on Sept. 1. While Republican proponents insist the law will “drive illegal workers out of the state” and open jobs to unemployed Alabamians, another group is joining the chorus of antipathy: actual employers. As undocumented workers follow Georgia’s example and flee the state, employers in Alabama’s largest industries worry that they may “go under”:

Representatives of agribusiness, the state’s biggest industry, and sectors such as construction, which is charged with rebuilding the tornado-hit city of Tuscaloosa, are reporting worker shortages because of immigrants already fleeing the state. The state agriculture commission says squash, tomatoes and other produce are rotting in the fields.

“We have a big problem on our hands,” said Brett Hall, the state’s deputy commissioner for agriculture and industry. “Farmers and business people could go under.” [...]

James Latham, chief executive of WAR Construction Inc. in Tuscaloosa, expressed concern about the impact of the exodus on reconstructing the tornado-ravaged region.

“We are seeing smaller crews, and work taking longer to get accomplished, due to less available workers,” said Mr. Latham, who is also president of Alabama Associated General Contractors.

GOP state Rep. Micky Hammon, however, insists that by preventing illegal immigrants “from putting down roots,” the law “will help the economy.” But as the Wall Street Journal notes, Agribusiness contributes $5 billion annually to the state’s economy and the industry is “already hurting” under the new law.

Business owners filled a Montgomery, Alabama auditorium to hear how the extreme regulations will hinder their business. “Unfortunately, it is a HR nightmare,” said a business coalition co-chairman Jay Reed. He said if members aren’t up on the new requirements, it could cost thousands of dollars in fines. “It is the most comprehensive and strict piece of immigration legislation that’s been passed anywhere in the U.S., and it’s right here in Alabama,” he said.

Alabama timber worker Glen Leuenberger said, “I think in a down economy, this is really bad timing, because the last thing we need to do is put more burden on businesses.”

Last week, a federal judge in Rhode Island issued an order that temporarily halts all foreclosures in that state’s federal court district — and order that will give the court time to sort through the chaos created by a privatized real estate registry known as the Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems:

At issue in many cases in Rhode Island and elsewhere is the privately held MERS’ right to foreclose on property owners or assign the mortgage to another company so it can, in turn, foreclose. Shoddy paperwork in which the transfer of mortgage ownership from one holder to the next is a central issue. In many cases, the property owner admittedly is in default but is challenging the paper trail. [...]

[L]awyers Todd S. Dion and Babcock argue that cities and towns are losing millions in recording fees as a result of the process, and that MERS is allowing mortgages to be sold without complying with state law.

The backbone of American real estate law is a network of state-run registries, which track who owns what properties and whether the property is subject to any encumberances such as a mortgage. In the 1990s, however, the banking industry created MERS as an alternative, privatized registry that would allow banks to transfer mortgages more quickly in order to facilitate the creation of the kind of mortgage-backed securities that were a centerpiece of the recent economic crisis.

The result has been a disaster. One study found that “[f]ewer than 30 percent of the mortgages had an accurate record in MERS.” To make matters even worse, MERS functions based on a legal slight of hand that treats it as the technical owner of roughly half of all home mortgages in the country. As a result, approximately one-third of all home mortgages are caught in a vortex of uncertainty. The homeowner doesn’t know who owns their debt obligation, and the courts have no idea who actually has the legal right to foreclose.

MERS’ attorneys essentially argue that it should be above legal scrutiny because it is too big to enjoin. Shutting down MERS’ ability to foreclose on properties could throw half of the nation’s foreclosures into legal limbo, and there’s no telling what impact this could have on the nation’s housing market. Several judges, however, have ignored MERS’ scare tactics. The Arkansas Supreme Court held last year that MERS can no longer bring foreclosure proceedings in that state. A federal bankruptcy judge in New York held that “This court does not accept the argument that because MERS may be involved with 50 percent of all residential mortgages in the country, that is reason enough for this court to turn a blind eye to the fact that this process does not comply with the law.” Last week’s Rhode Island decision is only the latest warning shot over the banking industry’s bow.

As a final note, it will be interesting to see whether the banking industry attempts to discredit last week’s decision by noting that it was handed down by newly-confirmed Judge John McConnell. The Chamber of Commerce led a blistering campaign of obstruction against McConnell’s nomination because he committed the unforgivable sin of trying to hold lead paint companies and the tobacco industry accountable to their consumers. McConnell’s assignment to a high-profile foreclosure case is no doubt exciting the banking industry’s PR department, even if they have no one to blame for MERS’ problems but themselves.

In an interview with conservative CNSNews, Rep. Steve King (R-IA) made a revealing claim. He opposes a balanced budget amendment that doesn’t also include draconian spending caps and a provision making it nearly impossible to raise taxes:

One of the reasons I voted “no” on the debt ceiling deal is because it was supposed to be an important lever for us to get a vote on a balanced budget amendment, but they did not have first a definition for a balanced budget amendment…[that] has a supermajority [to raise taxes] and an 18 percent GDP cap in it. [...] If we pass something out of the House that’s meant as a constitutional amendment that has no heat then we have no results then it will look like we are just posturing ourselves rather than actually fixing the problem.

Listen:

It’s hard to read King’s statement as anything less than an admission that he doesn’t really care whether the budget is balanced. In 1995, the House passed a true balanced budget amendment, which would have made it very difficult to enact an unbalanced budget. Had this actual balanced budget amendment been in effect in 2001, for example, the single largest driver of our present deficits — the Bush tax cuts — would have been unconstitutional. Likewise, the House GOP’s Medicare-killing budget that passed the House earlier this year also would fail under a clean balanced budget amendment because it fails to raise enough taxes to cover its costs.

Needless to say, congressional Republicans don’t like this outcome, which is why they are currently dressing up a Tea Party fantasy amendment in balanced budget amendment clothing. The so-called “balanced budget amendment” that King supports 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.

Last month, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell explained that he supports this Tea Party amendment because it eliminates the ability of something as silly as the American people voting for candidates who don’t want Tea Party fiscal policy from actually having an impact on national policy. Rep. King’s opposition to a clean balanced budget amendment is just one more admission that Congressional Republicans don’t actually care a bit about balancing the budget — they just want to use the American people’s legitimate anxiety over our long term deficits to permanently enshrine a comprehensive Tea Party agenda in the Constitution.