Yesterday, President Obama nominated Paul Watford to a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. On paper, his nomination should be a cakewalk. Watford clerked for Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. He has a bright career as an appellate litigator. And, at the young age of 44 he could have many years of distinguished judicial service ahead of him. Plus, he has a strong list of conservative endorsers:

“He’s incredibly intelligent and has solid integrity and great judgment,” said Daniel Collins, who recruited Watford back to the firm after a three-year stint at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles and a year at the rival firm of Sidley & Austin. “He just embodies the definition of judicial temperament – very level-headed and even-keeled.”

Collins, who clerked for conservative U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and was a government lawyer in both Bush administrations, said he considered Watford a moderate who would be widely admired and respected. [...]

Eugene Volokh, a University of California, Los Angeles law professor who has known Watford for nearly 20 years, also expressed satisfaction. [...]

Jeremy Rosen, a partner at Horvitz & Levy and former president of the Los Angeles Lawyers Chapter of the Federalist Society, also said Watford was a choice many conservatives could support.

So Watford is super qualified! And a former Supreme Court clerk! And a bunch of right-wingers support him! What could possibly go wrong?

Well, former Ninth Circuit nominee Goodwin Liu could certainly answer that question. Like Watford, Liu is a young, super qualified former Supreme Court clerk. And, like Watford, Liu had high profile conservative endorsers like Clinton inquisitor Ken Starr and torture advocate John Yoo. Senate Republicans took one look at his resume, however, and envisioned a future where the Judge Liu of 2010 became the Justice Liu of 2014. So they spent nearly a year yanking lines from Liu’s scholarship out of context to paint him as a dangerous radical who wants to make America more like “communist-run China.”

Of course Liu was an easy target, since his many hundred pages of scholarship gave the GOP plenty of pages to comb through searching for attack lines. The same cannot be said about DC Circuit nominee Caitlin Halligan, however. Like Watford and Liu, Halligan is a young, super qualified former Supreme Court clerk. Unlike Liu, she spent most of her career in practice rather than in the academy. Beyond a trumped-up claim that Halligan is anti-gun because she once argued a guns case when she was solicitor general of New York — a position that is more indicative of the government of New York’s views than her own — there is virtually no case for conservatives to make against her nomination. Nevertheless, she has stagnated in the Senate for months, waiting for a vote.

Nor is this kind of rage against talent limited to judicial nominations. Earlier this year, Peter Diamond’s nomination to the Federal Reserve Board died because Sen. Richard Shelby declared Diamond too unqualified to serve in this economic policy position. Diamond is a Nobel Prize-winning economist.

So Watford is an exceptional attorney. He is at the top of his profession and he has received some of the greatest honors a lawyer can achieve. By all accounts, he is as prepared as anyone can possibly be to serve with distinction on the federal bench. If past is prologue, all of that will be his undoing.

Newly emerged GOP presidential frontrunner Herman Cain does not do well under public scrutiny. He has “no idea” how his gimmicky 999 tax plan works in practice. He mixes up our nation’s founding documents. And his weak grasp of foreign policy even inspired his fellow GOP contender Newt Gingrich to worry that Cain is “not ready for prime time.”

So it probably should be surprising that last week Cain actually managed to confuse himself — and everyone at Fox Business’s Stossel show — over a much more basic yes or no question: Should abortion be legal?

At first, Cain offered a simple answer: “I’m pro-life from conception, yes.” But when host Stossel asked whether there are any cases in which abortion should be legal (such as rape or incest), Cain then declared, “I don’t think government should make that decision.” Recognizing the conflict, Stossel endeavored to clear up exactly where Cain stood on abortion — an attempt that led Cain to completely contradict himself by offering three different positions. He began with his anti-choice stance:

CAIN: I support life from conception. No people shouldn’t be free to abort because if we don’t protect the sanctity of life from conception, we will also start to play God relative to life at the end of life.

An understandably “confused” Stossel then asks Cain whether a rape victim should have the right to get an abortion. Cain then offers position 2:

CAIN: That’s her choice. That’s not government choice. I support life from conception.

STOSSEL: So abortion should be legal.

CAIN: No abortion should not be legal.

A now thoroughly perplexed Stossel asserts, “I’m not getting it, I’m not understanding it” and helps Cain understand the obvious flaw: “If it’s her choice, then that means it’s legal.” Cain replies with position 3:

CAIN: No! I don’t believe a woman should have an abortion. Does that help to clear it up?

STOSSEL: Even if she is raped.

CAIN: Even if she is raped or she is the victim of incest because there are other options. We must protect the sanctity of life and I have always believed that. Real clear.

Watch it:

Cain has tried to have it both ways on an issue before. But his struggle to fully reject a sexual assault victim’s freedom offers a window into just how radical this increasingly common position among the right-wing is. Not only does such a blind position defy the constitution, it callously robs a victim who had no choice in whether or not to be assaulted her last remaining choice in regards to her own body. It is also important to note that Cain’s “life at conception” policy could criminalize pregnancy prevention methods for women as well.

Cain is no closer to figuring out exactly how he feels about this ludicrously radical position. On NBC Sunday, he declared that abortions should be illegal “under any circumstance” even in cases of rape or incest. However, when asked about whether the procedure should be allowed to save the life of the mother, he once again deviated from his position. “If it’s the life of the mother, that family is going to have to make that decision.”

In an interview last night with CNN’s John King, GOP pizza czar and presidential frontrunner Herman Cain offered an odd immigration policy proposal — simply turn immigration over to 50 different states:

Enforce the laws that we already have, the immigration laws—and here’s how I would enforce those laws, and here’s how I would deal with the illegals [sic] that are already here. Empower the states to do what the federal government is not doing. If you’ve got 50 states working on what to do with the illegals [sic] in their particular state, that’s the way I believe we ought to approach solving that problem.

Watch it:

Cain’s tenther proposal to simply turn over national immigration policy to 50 different governments is one more example of his “not ready for primetime” understanding of foreign policy and the Constitution. As the Supreme Court explained nearly 70 years ago in a case called Hines v. Davidowitz, allowing individual states to set their own immigration policy isn’t just misguided — it is downright dangerous because nations have gone to war over another nation’s treatment of their citizens:

One of the most important and delicate of all international relationships, recognized immemorially as a responsibility of government, has to do with the protection of the just rights of a country’s own nationals when those nationals are in another country. Experience has shown that international controversies of the gravest moment, sometimes even leading to war, may arise from real or imagined wrongs to another’s subjects inflicted, or permitted, by a government.

America does not allow Minnesota to negotiate most favored nation trade status with China. It does not allow Nebraska to unilaterally impose sanctions on Iran. It does not allow Florida to declare war on Lebanon. And it must not allow Alabama to decide its own immigration policy for the exact same reason. If an American government is going to imperil our foreign relations with another nation, that decision should come from a decision maker that has actually been elected to represent the entire nation. The people of New Jersey have no recourse against an Arizona governor who foolishly starts a war.

Moreover, Cain’s proposal is fundamentally at odds with our constitutional design. The framers understood that America must act as one nation on matters of foreign policy — both by not conducting war among the states and by speaking with a single voice to foreign powers. That’s why the Preamble says our Constitution is intended to “provide for the common defence,” and it is why the national government has the power “[t]o establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization.” Cain’s 50 state immigration plan isn’t just misguided, it is a fundamental assault on the idea that we are the United States of America.

The Roberts Court is rightly mocked for its seemingly single-minded willingness to immunize corporations from the laws intended to protect ordinary Americans, but the question presented in a corporate immunity case the justices just agreed to hear is so stark that a decision granting such immunity would verge on self-parody. Or, at least, it would if the consequences of such a decision wouldn’t be so tragic and far-reaching.

Indeed, as Judge Pierre Leval explains, if the Supreme Court upholds a Second Circuit decision holding that corporations have total immunity from a law holding the most atrocious human rights violators accountable to international norms, it would enable corporations to profit freely from some of the greatest acts of evil imaginable:

According to the rule my colleagues have created, one who earns profits by commercial exploitation of abuse of fundamental human rights can successfully shield those profits from victims’ claims for compensation simply by taking the precaution of conducting the heinous operation in the corporate form. Without any support in either the precedents or the scholarship of international law, the majority take the position that corporations, and other juridical entities, are not subject to international law, and for that reason such violators of fundamental human rights are free to retain any profits so earned without liability to their victims. [...]

The new rule offers to unscrupulous businesses advantages of incorporation never before dreamed of. So long as they incorporate (or act in the form of a trust), businesses will now be free to trade in or exploit slaves, employ mercenary armies to do dirty work for despots, perform genocides or operate torture prisons for a despot’s political opponents, or engage in piracy – all without civil liability to victims. By adopting the corporate form, such an enterprise could have hired itself out to operate Nazi extermination camps or the torture chambers of Argentina’s dirty war, immune from civil liability to its victims. By protecting profits earned through abuse of fundamental human rights protected by international law, the rule my colleagues have created operates in opposition to the objective of international law to protect those rights.

The centerpiece of this case, Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, is a U.S. law known as the Alien Tort Statute which allows private parties to be sued for the very worst violations of international law. Nothing in this law distinguishes between violations by actual persons and violations by corporations — and indeed a footnote in a 2004 Supreme Court opinion strongly suggests that the opposite is true. Nor is there any international legal consensus granting lawsuit immunity to corporations. Rather, the Second Circuit’s majority seems to have invented a new corporate immunity doctrine out of whole cloth.

Moreover, lest there be any doubt, Judge Leval’s warning of the consequences of their decision is not hypothetical. Earlier this year, the DC Circuit parted ways with Leval’s colleagues — holding that corporations are not free to commit mass atrocities. Had the court gone the other way, it would have completed immunized Exxon from allegations that their agents committed shocking human rights violations while in Exxon’s employ:

In addition to extrajudicial killings of some of the plaintiffs-appellants’ husbands as part of a “systematic campaign of extermination of the people of Aceh by [d]efendants’ [Indonesian] security forces,” the plaintiffs-appellants were “beaten, burned, shocked with cattle prods, kicked and subjected to other forms of brutality and cruelty” amounting to torture, as well as forcibly removed and detained for lengthy periods of time.

Now that the Supreme Court has agreed to consider this issue, Exxon gets another bite at the apple. If the Roberts Court rules their way, Exxon may be the first corporation to celebrate the birth of Leval’s nightmare scenario.