Unlike most states, where congressional district are drawn by partisan lawmakers with an obvious interest in ensuring that their party comes out ahead, Arizona uses a much more sensible process where a bipartisan commission draws lines that are not intended to favor either party. This fundamental fairness irks Jan Brewer, so she’s laying the groundwork for a truly drastic response:

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer is trying to impeach her state’s independent redistricting commission because it recommended political districts that do not disproportionately favor Republicans.

Brewer’s actual charge is that the commission—composed of two Republicans, two Democrats, and one independent—tried to “elevate ‘competitiveness’ over other goals,” an outcome that is apparently now synonymous with “neglect of duty and gross misconduct” in her mind.

To execute this power grab, Brewer is expected to call a special legislative session as soon as today to impeach the commission’s independent chair Colleen Mathis. Actually removing one or more commissioners will require a two-thirds vote of the state Senate, which has a 21 to 9 GOP majority.

Two years ago, “International Burn A Koran Day” pastor Terry Jones’ church distributed shirts emblazoned “ISLAM IS OF THE DEVIL” to many of the school-aged members of his church. The students were subsequently sent home when they wore these offensive shirts to school.

Unfortunately, this incident also sparked a lengthy — and no doubt costly — lawsuit. Nevertheless, a recent federal district court opinion held that the school was entirely within its rights to send these children home:

School facilities are not public forums and speech within them may be regulated consistent with “legitimate pedagogical
concerns.” [...] In regulating speech, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals has explained that “school officials are on their most solid footing when they reasonably fear that certain speech is likely to appreciably disrupt the appropriate discipline in the school.” [...]

“Islam is of the Devil” presents a highly confrontational message. It is akin to saying that the religion of Islam is evil and that all of its followers will go to hell. The message is not conducive to civil discourse on religious issues; nor is it appropriate for school generally. “Part of a public school’s mission must be to teach students of differing races, creeds and colors to engage each other in civil terms rather than in terms of debate highly offensive or highly threatening to others.”

As the opinion explains, the shirts did indeed cause very real disruptions to the school’s learning environment. In one rather delightful example of middle school justice, a group of eighth grade students broke out into a chant of “we love Islam” to confront a student wearing the offensive shirt. In another, less delightful incident, a student told one of the shirt wearers that “my friend is a Muslim, and he’s going to kill you.”

This decision will be appealed to the Eleventh Circuit, which, unfortunately, has a history of placing conservative dogma ahead of well-settled law. Nevertheless, the law is quite clear that schools do have the authority to prevent students from disrupting their learning environment, so the district court’s decision is likely to be upheld.

[HT: Eugene Volokh]

It was no doubt inevitable when news broke that GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain was once accused of sexual harassment that his defenders would rush to compare him to Justice Clarence Thomas. Both men are black! And conservative! And they were once accused of doing vaguely similar things! Clearly this must be a liberal plot:

Ann Coulter said it first, in a Sunday night interview with Fox News when the Politico story first broke: “This is a high-tech lynching.”

“In the eyes of the liberal media, Herman Cain is just another uppity black American who has had the audacity to leave the liberal plantation. So they must destroy him, just as they tried destroying Clarence Thomas,” wrote Brent Bozell of the Media Research Center.

Rush Limbaugh also lashed out at the news media for pursuing “the ugliest racial stereotypes they can to attack a black conservative.” He went on to say on his radio show: “This is about blacks and Hispanics getting uppity.”

The allegations against Cain, which have yet to be proven or disproven, obviously have nothing to do with Justice Thomas. It is impossible to imagine that when two women accused Cain of sexual harassment in the 1990s, they envisioned Cain’s future presidential campaign and hoped to scuttle it by reenacting the Thomas scandal with themselves in the role of Anita Hill. Yet, while the similar allegations against the two men are merely a coincidence, Cain and Thomas do share one very important trait in common — their utter disregard for the Constitution.

Upon joining the Supreme Court, Thomas embarked on an Ahab-like quest to declare most of the Twentieth Century unconstitutional. In three separate cases — U.S. v. Lopez, U.S. v. Morrison, and Gonzales v. Raich — Thomas claimed that the constitutional basis of national labor laws and most national civil rights laws is “at odds with the constitutional design.” It’s difficult to count how many laws would simply cease to exist under Thomas’ vision of the law, but a short list includes the federal ban on workplace discrimination, laws protecting older Americans and Americans with disabilities, the national minimum wage, national child labor laws and the federal ban on whites-only lunch counters.

Stunningly, Cain goes even further in his belief that the Constitution is nothing more than a Tea Party manifesto. Under Cain’s vision of the Constitution, Medicare and Medicaid are also unconstitutional — as are many things that are expressly authorized by the Constitution such as national bankruptcy laws. Cain claims an unconstitutional power to lock his agenda in place permanently once it passes Congress, and his unconstitutional immigration policy seems designed to undermine America’s relations with other nations.

Cain, of course, also named Thomas as a “model” for the kind of justices he would appoint if elected president. Given their shared disdain for the Constitution, there should be little doubt as to why.

Currently, the Department of Justice is battling Arizona and Alabama’s unconstitutional assaults on undocumented immigrants in federal court, leading federal appeals courts to block much of both laws. Yesterday, DOJ expanded its challenges to South Carolina’s equally unconstitutional copycat of Arizona’s “Papers, please” law:

In our constitutional system, the federal government has preeminent authority to regulate immigration matters and to conduct foreign relations. This authority derives from the Constitution and numerous acts of Congress. [...] Although States may exercise their police power in a manner that has an incidental or indirect effect on aliens, a State may not establish its own immigration policy or enforce state laws in a manner that interferes with federal immigration laws. The Constitution and the federal immigration laws do not permit the development of a patchwork of disparate state and local immigration policies throughout the country. [...]

Despite the preeminent federal authority and responsibility over immigration and foreign relations, the State of South Carolina recently enacted Act No. 69, which addresses multiple aspects of immigration regulation and enforcement and is scheduled to become effective on January 1, 2012. The provisions of Act No. 69, working individually and in concert, seek to punish unlawful entry and presence of aliens such as by requiring, whenever practicable, a determination of immigration status during any lawful stop, detention, investigation, or arrest by the police where there is “reasonable suspicion” that an individual is unlawfully present, and by establishing new state criminal sanctions against unlawfully present aliens.

It’s worth noting that this law is less draconian than a similar Alabama law that seeks to intimidate children against attending school and even makes it a felony for many immigrants to take a shower. And yet, DOJ’s suit is an important reminder that these Arizona-style laws are still cruel and unconstitutional.

South Carolina’s law will cause innocent residents — potentially even United States citizens — to be detained because police suspect them of being undocumented. It makes it a crime for lawful immigrants “to fail to carry in the person’s personal possession any certificate of alien registration or alien registration receipt card,” and subjects them to up to 30 days in prison for failure to carry their papers. Because the Alabama law is so absurd in its overreach, it is easy to forget that other states’ anti-immigrant laws are still quite bizarre and oppressive in their scope.

They are also a direct assault on 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 “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 South Carolina 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.