Faced with their worst budget crises since the Great Depression, states and cities have resorted to increasingly desperate measures to cut costs. State and local governments have laid off teachers, slashed Medicaid funding, and even started unpaving roads and turning off streetlights.

But perhaps the most shocking idea to save money is being debated right now by the City Council of Topeka, Kansas. The city could repeal an ordinance banning domestic violence because some say the cost of prosecuting those cases is just too high:

Last night, in between approving city expenditures and other routine agenda items, the Topeka, Kansas City Council debated one rather controversial one: decriminalizing domestic violence.

Here’s what happened: Last month, the Shawnee County District Attorney’s office, facing a 10% budget cut, announced that the county would no longer be prosecuting misdemeanors, including domestic violence cases, at the county level. Finding those cases suddenly dumped on the city and lacking resources of their own, the Topeka City Council is now considering repealing the part of the city code that bans domestic battery. [...]

Since the county stopped prosecuting the crimes on September 8th, it has turned back 30 domestic violence cases. Sixteen people have been arrested for misdemeanor domestic battery and then released from the county jail after charges weren’t filed. “Letting abusive partners out of jail with no consequences puts victims in incredibly dangerous positions,” said Becky Dickinson of the YWCA. “The abuser will often become more violent in an attempt to regain control.”

The YMCA also said that some survivors were afraid for their safety if the dispute wasn’t resolved soon. Town leaders and the district attorney all agree that domestic abuse cases should be prosecuted — but no one would step up to foot the bill. The city council is expected to make its decision on decriminalizing domestic violence next week, but the back-and-forth over funding has already put battered women and their families at increased risk of harm.

Domestic violence is still at epidemic levels in the United States, and too few cases are prosecuted as it is. According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, one in four women will be a victim of domestic violence. And domestic abuse is a crime that damages entire communities, not just women. Witnessing violence between one’s parents is the strongest risk factor of transmitting violent behavior from one generation to the next: boys who witness domestic violence are twice as likely to abuse their own partner when they grow up.

And while not prosecuting domestic violence cases may seem to save money in the short term, it actually has staggering financial consequences. The health-related costs of domestic violence exceeds $5.8 billion each year. Nearly $4.1 billion of that is for direct medical and mental health care services, and nearly $1.8 billion are for the indirect costs of lost productivity or wages. Victims lost almost 8 million days of paid work because of the violence.

It should go without saying, but apparently doesn’t, that preventing domestic abuse is essential to promoting communities’ economic and social well-being. That the Topeka City Council would even consider such action is a heartbreaking illustration of the consequences of austerity.

After months of complaints, the small Tennessee town of Whiteville will finally remove a cross placed atop its public water tower, but the town’s mayor isn’t happy about it. The Freedom From Religion Foundation, the nation’s largest association of atheists and agnostics, asked the town to take down the cross on behalf of a resident who was offended by its presence on public property, citing the Constitution’s Establishment Clause separating church and state.

The foundation sent four letters beginning almost a year ago asking for the cross to be taken down, but Whiteville Mayor James Bellar said, “I took it upon myself just to ignore them.” But even he admits the town would most likely lose in court, based on similar past rulings, so he’s relenting to head off a lawsuit.

Still, he’s not pleased. “Whiteville is a religious town,” Bellar told WREG. “I just think it’s a sad day when people in a small rural Western Tennessee town like Whiteville have to be the object of attention for non-believers.” “They’re the terrorists,” Bellar said to the Jackson Sun. “It’s not us.” Watch a report from WREG in Memphis:

“I’d just tell this one person that’s got a problem with it, that they just need to go ahead and pack and move. If anybody else has got a problem with the cross, they just need to pack and move also,” a resident told WREG. The mayor plans to move the cross to private property on the highway, “where it will be more visible than ever and no one can make them move it.”

The foundation has also recently complained about a nearby school district reading prayers over the loudspeakers at football games and has fought the distribution of of bibles on public school grounds.

Earlier this week, a Pennsylvania state Senate committee held a hearing on Gov. Tom Corbett’s (R-PA) plan to rig the 2012 presidential election by giving away up to a dozen of the state’s electoral votes to the GOP candidate. During the lengthy hearing, witnesses from the League of Women Voters and Common Cause mentioned a more sensible way to modify the presidential election process — the National Popular Vote (NPV) compact, which would ensure that the candidate who gets the most votes actually wins the election.

Yet the mere mention of allowing the president to be chosen according to the will of the people launched Republican state Sen. Mike Folmer into an unhinged rant about the Weimar Republic, the constitutional amendment process, eliminating the 50 states, and Adolf Hitler:

The changes to the Constitution should be and only be through the amendment process. If you don’t do it through the amendment process, then you are usurping the will of the people, and that’s my point. You’re right [the framers] weren’t saying the Constitution is closed. Do you know why the Weimar Republic failed, sir? And Adolf Hitler and the Nazis were able to take over? Because their constitution was closed, and Adolf Hitler and the Nazis were able to use their constitution on the German people and get the support of the German people that way, and they used the law against them. My point in this is this: if we go to a national popular vote, then we might as well get rid of the 50 individual states, we might as well get rid of it and go to a…

At this point in Folmer’s rant, he was cut off by the committee’s Republican chairman.

Watch it:

It’s difficult to count all the problems with Folmer’s rant, but one of his most glaring errors is his weak grasp of the U.S. Constitution. Contrary to Folmer’s suggestion that national popular vote would require a constitutional amendment, the NPV compact works by getting a bloc of states equal to the number of electoral votes necessary to elect a president to all agree that they will give their support to whoever the American people as a whole choose to lead them. This compact is constitutional because the Constitution expressly allows states to join together into multi-state agreements just so long as Congress approves the agreement.

It’s little surprise that Folmer doesn’t understand how the Constitution works, since he is a big supporter of efforts to write a time bomb directly into our founding document. Folmer recently proposed a federal constitutional amendment that would “give the citizens of the United States a direct vote on Federal borrowing and indebtedness through national referenda.” If Folmer’s amendment every became law, it would lead to routine national votes on whether or not the United States should have a catastrophic default on its national debt.

In other words, Folmer thinks its a grand idea to have regular elections on whether or not American should commit suicide, but he is utterly outraged by the suggestion that a majority of the American people should be able to choose the president.

As ThinkProgress has been reporting, a federal judge’s decision last week to allow Alabama’s harshest-in-the-nation immigration law to go into effect has had heartbreaking consequences. Hispanic families have been fleeing Alabama in droves and thousands of children have been too terrorized to show up for school. The law allows police to racially profile and pull over anyone they suspect might be in the country illegally, and blatantly violates children’s constitutional right to an education by forcing schools to check students’ immigration status before they can be enrolled.

But Republican lawmakers who supported the measure have been remarkably short on compassion for immigrant families that have been torn apart. During an interview on conservative radio host Laura Ingraham’s show, Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions (R) said Hispanic children being too afraid to go to school is merely the just consequence of immigrants’ unlawful decision to live in the state:

INGRAHAM: Do you think it’s bad all these Hispanic kids have disappeared from the schools? Do you think that’s a bad thing?

SESSIONS: All I would just say to you is that it’s a sad thing that we’ve allowed a situation to occur for decades that large numbers of people are in the country illegal and it’s going to have unpleasant, unfortunate consequences.

Listen here:

Sessions said he “couldn’t agree more” with Ingraham when she called this a “sob story” that simply proves that “enforcement of the law works!” It’s a good thing, Ingraham suggested, that immigrants are responding by leaving Alabama. “This is a rational response,” Sessions remarked, arguing that “one of the sad consequences of illegal immigration is families can be hurt in the process” — indicating that families brought the government’s harsh crackdown on themselves by seeking a better life here.

Around 2,285 Hispanic students failed to show up for school on Monday, which amounts to 7 percent of the entire Hispanic population of the school system. On a conference call this week, Wendy Cervantes, the vice president of child rights policy at First Focus, pointed out that because federal education funding is based on attendance numbers, Alabama schools lose money every day these children don’t attend. Additionally, according to the Institute for Taxation & Economic Policy, undocumented immigrants in Alabama paid $130.3 million in state & local taxes in 2010 — money that state and local governments will have to do without if the new law succeeds in driving them from the state.

A growing number of conservative lawmakers embrace tentherism, a radical overreading of the 10th Amendment which claims that nearly all of the federal budget is unconstitutional. Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) believes that Social Security and Medicare “contradict[] the principles of limited, constitutional government that our founders established to protect us.” Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) mocked President Franklin Delano Roosevelt for calling upon the federal government to provide “a decent retirement plan” and “health care” because “the Constitution doesn’t give Congress any of those powers.” Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) shares their belief that Medicare violates the Constitution, and he’d also eliminate all Pell Grants, student loan assistance and other federal spending on education.

During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing yesterday, however, conservative Justice Antonin Scalia openly mocked their suggestion that his Court should simply declare all these programs unconstitutional in response to a question from committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT):

LEAHY: Justice Scalia, under our Constitution, what is the role, if any, that the judges play in making budgetary choices or determining what the best allocation of taxpayer resources is? Is that within their proper role, or is that somewhere else?

SCALIA: You know it’s not within our proper role Mr. Chairman. [laughs] Of course it’s not.

Watch:

Scalia is right to laugh at people like Perry and Lee, because their views do not survive even the most superficial contact with the text of the Constitution. The Constitution gives Congress the power to “to lay and collect taxes” and to “provide for the…general welfare of the United States.” No plausible interpretation of the words “general welfare” does not include programs that ensure that all Americans can live their entire lives secure in the understanding that retirement will not force them into poverty and untreated sickness, or programs that ensure that young Americans can begin their careers with the skills they need to provide for themselves.

Yet this break between Scalia — who has long been considered one of the nation’s leading conservative legal thinkers — and the increasingly vocal tenther movement demonstrates just how far today’s conservatives have strayed from the mainstream. Indeed, congressional Republicans have largely abandoned Scalia’s sensible view that people who are accountable to the electorate and not unelected judges should be responsible for the federal budget. Last year, the congressional GOP leadership released a so-called “Pledge to America” which made the false tenther claim that “lack of respect for the clear Constitutional limits and authorities has allowed Congress to create ineffective and costly programs that add to the massive deficit year after year.”

If these tenthers ever have the opportunity to start selecting Supreme Court justices of their own, America could wind up with a Supreme Court that makes Scalia look like a raging liberal.