In a week, the GOP will again vote on a Balanced Budget Amendment, the cockamamie economic proposal they have toyed with several times over the last several months, including during the debate over raising the debt ceiling. The vote is part of the final compromise to raise the debt limit, in which President Obama and Senate Democrats promised to hold a vote on such an amendment, despite the fact that such votes have failed numerous times in the past.

Republicans have taken to ignoring the obvious perilous consequences of the amendment even as voices on both sides of the aisle denounce it as the “worst idea in Washington.” The current amendment, former Reagan adviser Bruce Bartlett said, “looks like it was drafted by a couple of interns on the back of a napkin.” Today, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) added to that criticism, releasing a study highlighting a piece from Macroeconomic Advisers that notes that such an amendment would make future recessions “deeper and longer” and saying that if a BBA had been enacted prior to the 2008 recession, the “effect on the economy” would have been “catastrophic.”

And according to CBPP, passing a Balanced Budget Amendment now, with the country trying to climb out of the hole of joblessness caused by the recession, would have the exact opposite affect one would expect policy makers to try and achieve. In fact, the budget cuts required by such an amendment now would double the unemployment rate and slide the country back into the throes of recession:

If the 2012 budget were balanced through spending cuts, those cuts would total about $1.5 trillion in 2012 alone, the analysis estimates. Those cuts would throw about 15 million more people out of work, double the unemployment rate from 9 percent to approximately 18 percent, and cause the economy to shrink by about 17 percent instead of growing by an expected 2 percent.

That should be a reality check for Republicans who claim to be focused on job creation. Yet, despite evidence that the amendment would have disastrous consequences for our economy, Republicans — even those who pitch themselves as credible on the economy, like former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney — continue to support it. Some even distort the past positions of Democrats to make it look like the proposal has bipartisan support.

In reality, such an amendment would only serve to exacerbate the very problems the GOP says it is trying to fix. And, as CBPP notes, the idea is utterly impractical: “[T]he only way to implement a BBA without some fiscal drag is to ratify it when the budget is in balance or surplus. Of course, then we wouldn’t have needed the BBA to achieve balance in the first place.”

Washington apple growers could have had one of the best apple harvests in the state’s history — if not for the lack of workers. Orchard owners say a federal immigration crackdown and extreme anti-immigrant laws in states like Alabama and Arizona have scared off many of their workers.

Some farmers have tried to hire domestic workers. Orchards have “pickers wanted” signs, and growers have asked neighbors for extra workers. But their efforts have been unsuccessful to replace the immigrant farm workers they typically hire. So just like farmers in Alabama and Georgia, their crops will go to waste without without the experienced workers to pick the apples by hand:

Growers have struggled for years with labor shortages, but they say this harvest season is one of the toughest yet. Typically, about 70 percent of the state’s farmworkers are in the country illegally. But many Mexican and other migrant workers stayed away this year after some states passed tougher immigration laws and the federal government cracked down.

“We’ve been dealing with this for a number of years now, and until something changes at the federal level, growers are going to struggle having enough workers,” said Mike Gempler, a farm labor contractor for Washington growers.

Gov. Chris Gregoire assembled a delegation of 15 farmers last month for a trip to Washington, D.C., where they urged Congress to enact comprehensive immigration reform. At the time, Gregoire estimated the state still needed 4,000 workers to complete the harvest, which could have been the third-largest in state history.

The Supreme Court held nearly 70 years ago that a state cannot set its own immigration policy separate from federal law because of how it will affect every other state in the United States of America. As the Court explained in Hines v. Davidowitz, “[e]xperience 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.” 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, not someone who is only accountable to the people of Alabama.

Washington’s plight demonstrates that this problem is not limited simply to foreign policy. The voters of Alabama elected an anti-immigrant government, and the people of Washington suffer for it without any ability to hold Alabama’s leaders accountable at the polls.

It’s no secret that migrant farm workers on whom American agricultural industry depends often face deplorable conditions, from starvation wages to back-breaking labor. According to the National Agricultural Workers Survery, nearly three-quarters of U.S. farmworkers earn less than $10,000 a year, and three out of five farmworker families have incomes below the poverty line.

Now a recent incident in Washington state illustrates what happens when farmworkers try to stand up for themselves and demand fair compensation. Stemilt, one of the nation’s largest fruit producers, stranded dozens of workers hours away from their homes as retaliation when they refused to work for below the minimum wage:

Nearly 60 farmworkers from a rural Washington state community just outside of Seattle said they were stranded with no way to get home last week after refusing to work for less than minimum wage.

The workers were bused to a Stemilt Grower’s Apple Orchard, where they were told they’d only make roughly $25 for about four to five hours of work, local news station KIMA-TV reports. When the workers refused to pick for that amount, they say they were left stranded miles away from their homes. (The current federal minimum wage is $7.25.)

“It’s completely outrageous,” Gorge Valenzuela with United Farm Workers told KIMA-TV. “You have workers with no way home. They had to walk an hour and a half just to get to the street so they could wave at cars to find a way home, which is an hour and half away.”

Watch it:

The over 3 million migrant and seasonal workers in the U.S. are the backbone of the country’s $30 billion fruit and vegetable industry. In fact, farmworkers have been shown to increase the overall economic output of regions where they work. Yet they are some of the most economically disadvantaged people in the U.S. In addition to low wages, farmworkers rarely have access to workers compensation, disability benefits, Medicaid or food stamps.

Despite working harder than most segments of the population, farmworkers’ wages have declined dramatically over the past few decades, making it difficult to afford basic necessities like housing, food, health care and education for their children.

The Voting Rights Act requires many parts of the country to “preclear” any changes to their voting law to ensure that those changes do not discriminate on the basis of race. Either the Department of Justice or the federal courts in DC can preclear a new voting law, but states have almost always sought preclearence in the past from the Justice Department because it is both better equipped to evaluate new laws than the overburdened federal courts and better able to do so quickly.

Despite this fact, a few GOP-led states turned to the federal courts this year either to make a political statement about their distrust of the Obama Administration or because they actually believed some of the paranoid fantasies voter suppression attorneys told them about the Administration’s plans to block Republican-friendly policies. One of these states was Texas, which just received a very disappointing answer from George W. Bush-appointed judges Thomas Griffith and Rosemary Collyer:

The three-judge panel appointed to hear the case received extensive briefing and held lengthy oral argument on November 2, 2011. If any one of the plans is not precleared by this Court at this stage in the proceedings, the District Court for the Western District of Texas must designate a substitute interim plan for the 2012 election cycle by the end of November. Therefore, the Court issues its Order promptly and will issue a memorandum opinion hereafter.

Having carefully considered the entire record and the parties’ arguments, the Court finds and concludes that the State of Texas used an improper standard or methodology to determine which districts afford minority voters the ability to elect their preferred candidates of choice and that there are material issues of fact in dispute that prevent this Court from entering declaratory judgment that the three redistricting plans meet the requirements of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

We eagerly await Gov. Rick Perry’s (R-TX) outraged statement accusing two George W. Bush appointed judges of unvarnished partisanship by denying preclearence to Texas’ map.