Today was the deadline for the Obama Administration to seek something known as en banc review — a procedure allowing an entire court of appeals to review a three-judge panel’s decision — of the Eleventh Circuit’s erroneous decision striking down part of the Affordable Care Act. The Administration has decided not to seek this review.

This is significant not because the full court is likely to reverse the panel’s error — the Eleventh Circuit is a notorious hotbed of far right conservatives — but because it reflects the Administration’s understanding that it has little to gain from delaying this case’s ascent to the Supreme Court. One effect of an en banc petition is that it significantly extends the amount of time DOJ can wait before it has to seek review of the court of appeals’ decision in the Supreme Court. Because DOJ did not ask the full court of appeals to weigh in, it is now exceedingly likely that the Supreme Court will consider this case during its 2011-2012 term.

It is not the least bit surprising that the Obama Administration passed up this potential opportunity to delay the case until after the next Supreme Court term. For one thing, the Administration has consistently chosen not to engage in delay tactics throughout this litigation. Most recently, DOJ refused to argue that the courts lack jurisdiction to hear the case until 2015 despite the fact that one court of appeal concluded that they do lack jurisdiction and another expressed sympathy with that view. More importantly, the Administration should be eager to get this case in front of the justices since they are overwhelmingly likely to win once the case gets there.

The biggest loser in the Administration’s decision not to file are the handful of right-wing commentators who have claimed — despite no evidence to that effect — that DOJ would seek en banc review as part of some nefarious plot to delay the litigation. The most prominent of these commentators was former DC Circuit nominee Miguel Estrada, who touted this theory at a recent panel hosted by the American Constitution Society:

The strategy of the Administration is to do cartwheels to keep the case out of the Supreme Court so as not to have a ruling before the 2012 election. I mean, they take every extension. They do everything they can to stretch it out . . . . I will bet you any amount of money that the Administration is going to seek en banc in the Eleventh Circuit.

Watch it:

Estrada is one of the nation’s top appellate litigators, so he knows better than to make this kind of claim despite the vast wealth of evidence to the contrary. In 2003, Senate Democrats blocked Estrada’s nomination to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit because they were concerned that, despite Estrada’s significant legal talent, he would be unable to ensure that his legal analysis on the bench is untainted by his own desire to see the law through a conservative lens. That decision is looking pretty good today.

In a speech at the historically Catholic Duquesne University School of Law, conservative Justice Antonin Scalia urged the university not to stray from a religious identity hostile to gay and lesbian students:

“Our educational establishment these days, while so tolerant of and even insistent upon diversity in all other aspects of life seems bent on eliminating diversity of moral judgment — particularly moral judgment based on religious views,” Scalia said.

As examples, he cited attempts to sue a religious university in Washington, D.C., for offering only same-sex dorms and other attempts by a law school association to bar schools that discriminate against homosexuals.

“I hope this place will not yield — as some Catholic institutions have — to this politically correct insistence upon suppression of moral judgment, to this distorted view of what diversity in America means,” Scalia said.

Scalia’s suggestion that there is something quintessentially Catholic about being anti-gay — a view that millions of American Catholics would no doubt find deeply offensive — is more than a little bizarre. The reality is that Catholics tend to be more supportive of gay rights than other Christian sects.

Moreover, his insistence that religious institutions enjoy a special right to discriminate against gay people is particularly troubling, and it has worked its way into his decisions on the Supreme Court. In Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, a conservative Christian student group claimed the special right to have a state university subsidize their organization even though it refused to comply with the university’s anti-discrimination policy. Scalia joined a four justice dissent that would have given anti-gay groups exactly this right.

Now, let’s be clear. All groups have a First Amendment protected right to build institutions and use those institutions to spread their viewpoint. Indeed, if an institution — whether religious or otherwise — wants to outright engage in hate speech, than that is their right under the First Amendment. But Scalia is advocating something entirely different here. He believes that anti-gay groups can demand that society as a whole support their alternative lifestyle, and he also seems to believe that religious schools have a special right to force their way into organizations that find anti-gay discrimination repugnant.

In other words, Scalia needs to understand that the First Amendment is fine with anti-gay speech — anti-gay groups just have no right to flamboyantly demand that the rest of us subsidize their behavior.

Today, the Michigan Messenger reports about how the private prisons behemoth Corrections Corporations of America grew over the last decade, expanding both its prisoner population and its political clout. The Messenger cites data from the U.S. Department of Justice showing that the private prison population grew from 87,369 to 129,336 from 2000 to 2009:

Then, citing figures from the Justice Policy Institute, the Messenger notes that lobbying dollars from the major private prison operators grew from $840,885 to $1,391,056 from 2002 to 2009:

This means that as industry lobbying dollars increased 165 percent between 2002 and 2009, the U.S. private prison population grew 37 percent. As ThinkProgress has previously reported, the private prisons haven’t just expanded their political influence by expending lobbying dollars. They’ve also been remarkably apt at placing friendly lawyers and lobbyists in the offices of major decision-makers like Gov. Jan Brewer (R-AZ), who last year signed a harsh anti-immigrant law that many expect to increase prison populations.

Paranoid and baseless accusations that Democrats are trying to destroy the Second Amendment is nothing new for Wayne LaPierre, the executive vice president of the National Rifle Association. This is the man who, after the January Tuscon shooting claimed six lives, rejected President Obama’s offer to come to the White House for a closed door meeting to discuss solutions to gun violence in America.

“Why should I or the N.R.A. go sit down with a group of people that have spent a lifetime trying to destroy the Second Amendment in the United States?” he asked. LaPierre conveniently ignores the fact Obama is a supporter of the Second Amendment who, much to the chagrin of his liberal base, has actually expanded gun rights.

But as Crooks and Liars points out, you just can’t please some people. Last week at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Florida, LaPierre took his paranoia about the president to new heights, claiming that the fact that Obama has not pursued gun control actually proves he’s orchestrated a “massive conspiracy” to take away guns:

LAPIERRE: They’ll say gun owners — they’ll say they left them alone…In public, the president will remind us that he’s put off calls from his party to renew the old Clinton ban, that he hasn’t pushed for new gun control laws…The president will offer the Second Amendment lip service and hit the campaign trail saying he’s actually been good for the Second Amendment. But it’s a big fat stinking lie!…It’s all part of a massive Obama conspiracy to deceive voters and hide his true intentions to destroy the Second Amendment in our country…Before the president was even sworn into office, they met and they hatched a conspiracy of public deception to try to guarantee his re-election in 2012.

Watch it:

LaPierre’s iron-clad logic is that Obama’s failure to take any action against gun owners in his first term means he is conspiring to launch an all-out assault on their rights in his second term. Equally ridiculous is LaPierre’s suggestion that he somehow has secret knowledge that the president “makes fun of gun-owners” when he’s in private or had a conspiratorial meeting with advisers before he took office where he plotted the Second Amendment’s downfall.

“Our freedom is at risk at this election like never before,” LaPierre claimed at the beginning of his speech, using the same fear-mongering the NRA has depended on since Obama took office to enhance their own membership and financial contributions.

It’s unclear, however, why anyone should believe the NRA’s paranoia. By LaPierre’s logic, Obama also has a secret plan to launch a manned mission to Uranus, convert the nation to Pastafarianism, and wipe out the pink flamingo. After all, Obama has done exactly as much to accomplish these three goals as he has done to undermine gun owners’ rights.

This week, the Alabama town of Bay Minette will implement a bizarre and unconstitutional way of keeping minor offenders in check — go to church or go to jail:

Operation Restore Our Community or “ROC”…begins next week. The city judge will either let misdemenor [sic] offenders work off their sentences in jail and pay a fine or go to church every Sunday for a year.

If offenders elect church, they’re allowed to pick the place of worship, but must check in weekly with the pastor and the police department. If the one-year church attendance program is completed successfully, the offender’s case will be dismissed.

This program isn’t just unconstitutional, it is unconstitutional even under conservative Justice Antonin Scalia’s vision of the Constitution’s Establishment Clause. In his dissenting opinion in Lee v. Weisman, Scalia wrote that the state may not us the “threat of penalty” to “coerce anyone to support or participate in religion or its exercise.” Telling someone — even someone convicted of a crime — that they must participate in a religious service or go to jail clearly fails Justice Scalia’s test.

Indeed, as conservative law Professor Eugene Volokh points out, religiously compelled church attendance is so clearly and obviously unconstitutional, that the Mississippi Supreme Court held that a “judge’s decision to order people to attend church as a condition of bail is not just unconstitutional, but merits a 30-day suspension from the bench.” Again, this was in Mississippi.

Just across the border in Alabama, however, one town apparently thinks that the Constitution no longer applies.