In a stunning reversal, the Arizona Supreme Court tonight reversed an attempted power grab by Gov. Jan Brewer (R) and her Republican colleagues in the state legislature.

Last month, the state Senate took up Brewer’s push to impeach Colleen Mathis, the chairwoman of Arizona’s independent bipartisan redistricting commission. Even Brewer herself couldn’t explain how Mathis had exhibited “neglect of duty and gross misconduct,” the only grounds for impeachment in Arizona. Indeed, Mathis’ only real “crime” appears to be that she led a commission which drew a new congressional map with more competitive districts than had existed previously.

However, justice prevailed tonight as the Arizona Supreme Court rebuffed Brewer and decided to reinstate Mathis to lead the commission:

The Arizona Supreme Court Thursday evening reinstated the chairwoman of the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission, rebuffing Gov. Jan Brewer’s unprecedented action earlier this month.

The ruling came less than three hours after the court heard arguments on the case, which revolved around the extent to which the commission is free of outside political interference.

The court decided the governor’s Nov. 1 removal letter to Colleen Coyle Mathis did not demonstrate “substantial neglect of duty, gross misconduct in office or inability to discharge the duties of office.”

Now Mathis and the commission will resume their duty to finalize Arizona’s new congressional district maps. As Daily Kos notes, the group “published draft congressional and legislative maps last month, and since then, the commissioners have been hearing public feedback and have indicated that they plan to make changes to the maps in response.”

Barring any more unconstitutional power grabs from Brewer, the commission will be able to finalize the map in advance of next year’s election.

The realities of how drastically HB 56, Alabama’s extremely harmful immigration law, harms the state economy and daily lives of state residents has become abundantly clear, with farmers watching crops rot because they do not have enough workers, children being bullied in school, and proof of citizenship being required for everything down to getting a library card.

Now, Republicans legislators are beginning to talk about ways to change the law, and they even have removed the bill’s sponsor, state Sen. Scott Beason (R), as chairman of the Senate Rules Committee because of racist comments he made. Many say they want to fix the “unintended consequences” of the law. Specifically, state Sen. Gerald Dial (R), who is helping to write a series of amendments for the law, told the Birmingham News that requiring proof of legal residence or citizenship for every transaction with a state or local government is too burdensome. “It’s just common sense. Let’s step up and say we’ve made some mistakes,” Dial said.

But echoing other legislators, Dial also insisted that the changes will not take away from the law’s purpose: to prevent undocumented immigrants from working in the state. The New York Times reports that the law is still popular even as industries suffer from the loss of immigrant workers who were scared away by the law:

“Eighty percent of the population of the state thinks it’s a good bill, so politically you’re kind of careful to say anything negative about it,” said Judge James V. Perdue, president of the Alabama Probate Judges Association. “Those that passed it don’t want to admit that there’s anything wrong with it.”

But as lawmakers hear complaints from business leaders and constituents, several have become more willing to discuss changing, clarifying or in some cases scrapping sections of the law governing schools, government transactions and several of the law’s stiff penalty provisions.

Outside of farmers and poultry plant operators, who have complained of severe labor shortages, the most pointed criticisms concern a legally vague provision that requires proof of immigration status for “any transaction between a person and the state or a political subdivision of the state.”

The law lists three examples of such transactions: renewing driver’s licenses, business licenses and car tags. In a court filing in August, the state argued that the United States Justice Department, which is challenging the law, was exaggerating the law’s reach.

“Its fear that Section 30 would prohibit such aliens from having running water or sewer services, for example, has little basis,” the filing said.

But lawyers across the state are concluding that this section could be interpreted, in the words of Birmingham’s city attorney, Thomas Bentley, to apply to “almost everything that we do.”

As good as it sounds to hear Dial openly discuss changes to the immigration law, the damage from the extremely anti-immigrant law has already been done. The state’s economy will lose $40 million as an effect of the law, hampering its ability to recover from the recession. Even doctors in the state could have trouble this year renewing their professional licenses before the Alabama legislature takes up any amendments to the law in its 2012 session.

Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley (R) admits that the law is confusing for people. “I do believe we need to simplify this bill,” he said. But between the amendments being discussed by legislators and the governor’s admission that the law needs to be changed, it begs the question why they approved such an extreme measure without weighing the consequences in the first place.

As Igor Volsky previously reported, the California Supreme Court held earlier today that the proponents of anti-gay Prop 8 may assert the state’s interest in defending this unconstitutional ballot initiative in federal court. As a legal matter, this is the right decision. Two elected officials — the state’s governor and its attorney general — should not have the power to effectively repeal a law they disagree with simply by refusing to defend it in court. As an immediate practical matter, however, today’s unanimous state supreme court decision reopens the possibility that Prop 8 could survive judicial scrutiny.

Had the California Supreme Court ruled the other way, it likely would have prevented any federal appeals court — including the Supreme Court — from reversing Judge Vaughn Walker’s opinion striking down the anti-marriage ballot initiative. Today’s opinion all but ensures that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit will decide whether or not Prop 8 is constitutional, and it raises the very likely possibility that this question will wind up in front of the Supreme Court.

Gay couples and their allies should be optimistic that the Ninth Circuit will affirm Judge Walker’s decision striking down Prop 8. The panel hearing this case includes Judge Stephen Reinhardt, one of the most liberal judges in the country, and Judge Michael Daly Hawkins. Although Judge Hawkins is far more moderate than Reinhardt, he strongly hinted at his sympathies during oral argument — his very first question on the merits of the case compared marriage discrimination to public school segregation. The panel’s third member, Judge N. Randy Smith, is a conservative — but two judges are more than one.

At the Supreme Court, the math is much more difficult. Like so many cases before the high Court, the fate of Prop 8 will probably hinge upon Justice Anthony Kennedy. Yet, unlike the overwhelming majority of issues that come before his Court, Justice Kennedy has a fairly progressive streak on gay rights. Kennedy wrote the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Romer v. Evans holding that laws motivated solely by anti-gay animus violate the Constitution, and he also wrote the decision in Lawrence v. Texas holding that the government has virtually no business regulating people’s sex lives.

If Kennedy is prepared to declare marriage equality the law of the land — or at least declare that Prop 8 must be struck down — it is likely there are four more justices who share his views. Moreover, there should be no doubt that this is the correct decision under our Constitution. The Supreme Court has long held that groups which share an unchangeable trait and are “subjected to such a history of purposeful unequal treatment, or relegated to such a position of political powerlessness as to command extraordinary protection from the majoritarian political process” are entitled to heightened constitutional protection under the Constitution. Gay men and lesbians unquestionably qualify.

At the very least, however, today’s decision drastically increases the possibility of a high-profile showdown over marriage equality in the Supreme Court — and it also highlights the dire importance of the judicial confirmation process. If the Supreme Court takes the Prop 8 case, it is unlikely that they will reach a final decision until some time in 2013. By that point, we could have an entirely different president and possibly even an entirely new justice — four of the Court’s current members are over the age of 70.

If just one member of the Court’s conservative bloc is replaced by President Obama, the possibility of a decision eliminating Prop 8 increases drastically. By contrast, if Kennedy or one of the Court’s four moderates is replaced by a more conservative president, then it is all but certain that Prop 8 will be upheld.

Later today, the House is expected to begin debate on a balanced budget amendment, with most of the amendment’s supporters hoping that it will impose sweeping and permanent austerity upon the United States. As ThinkProgress reported, if this amendment actually succeeded in balancing the budget entirely through spending cuts, it 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.” In other words, America would almost instantly suffer consequences that rival the Great Depression.

Yet, for those of us who are still old enough to remember when conservatives feared “activist judges,” the right’s recently invigorated obsession with writing fiscal policy into the Constitution is nothing less than bizarre. As Neil Kinkopf, a former constitutional advisor to the Clinton and Obama Administration explains, the most likely way to enforce this kind of amendment would be by requiring judges to strike down budgets that aren’t balanced — placing our fiscal policy in the hands the public officials who are least suited to make such decisions:

Our independent federal judiciary is highly skilled at deciding legal questions. It is not at all competent to make decisions of a political or policy nature. Judges are not, generally speaking, trained in matters of economics or finance. They have no special competency that would recommend committing such decisions to them. . . . Finally, legislators are politically accountable for their decisions. Judges are not and should not be. Decisions regarding how to achieve a balanced budget are precisely the type of decisions that involve will and not judgment, to use Hamilton’s phrase, and so should be made by accountable officials rather than judges.

Don’t trust former Clinton and Obamaistas? How about Robert Bork, the failed Supreme Court nominee who became the centerpiece of the legal conservative movement’s persecution complex? Here’s what he had to say about balanced budget amendments:

Also troubling is the problem of enforcing such a constitutional provision. In the early stages of discussion, a lot of people, including most economists, apparently thought this was no problem: if Congress exceeded the constitutional limits on spending, someone would sue. That much is true. The result, however, would likely be hundreds, if not thousands, of lawsuits around the country, many of them on inconsistent theories and providing inconsistent results. By the time the Supreme Court straightened the whole matter out, the budget in question would be at least four years out of date and lawsuits involving the next three fiscal years would be slowly climbing toward the Supreme Court.

Bork, of course, is right to be worried about the judiciary’s unfitness to balance the budget. If the Supreme Court strikes down the 2014 budget in 2016, what happens next? Does the government have to take back the money it already spent, and if so, how? And what does this do to America’s credit rating if every bill sent to the federal government is subject to reexamination by nine judges in black robes?

But, none of this will probably bother the kind of conservatives who now dominate Congress. They were willing to push America to the brink of fiscal implosion during the debt ceiling fight earlier this year. Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), a leading supporter of a balanced budget amendment, even admitted he wants America’s “house to come down” unless we agreed to his extortionist demand to rewrite the Constitution.

So conservative lawmakers have demonstrated time and time again through their actions that they don’t care one bit if their reckless tactics destroy the American economy. They have made absolutely clear, however, that they will never, ever vote to raise taxes on the rich, even though doing so is one of the least harmful ways to bring the budget closer to balance.

And that’s the real reason why conservatives in Congress would oppose the upcoming balanced budget amendment if they had any idea what it would actually entail — and it explains why the right-wing Heritage Foundation is already whining that this version of the amendment doesn’t do anything to save David Koch and Paris Hilton from paying more taxes.

In a desperate effort to rig the Supreme Court in order to strike down the Affordable Care Act, conservatives spent the last year generating increasingly more and more ridiculous arguments for why Justice Kagan should recuse herself from the Affordable Care Act cases. First, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) suggested that Kagan perjured herself at her confirmation hearing when she testified that she did no legal work whatsoever on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act — a claim he was forced to walk back after he was criticized for effectively calling a Supreme Court justice a felon without any evidence supporting this libelous claim.

After Hatch embarrassed himself, health reform’s opponents shifted tactics — filing a Freedom of Information Act request seeking evidence that Kagan did indeed work as an attorney defending the ACA. Unfortunately for them, this also proved to be a dry well. Even National Review writer Carrie Severino, a former law clerk to Justice Thomas, was forced to conclude that the documents contain no evidence requiring Justice Kagan’s recusal.

Round three was particularly clever. House Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) sent a letter to DOJ demanding that they turn over a pile of documents that included obviously privileged internal communications about how the Justice Department’s lawyers planned to defend health reform. When DOJ did not leap to comply with this ridiculous request, the law’s opponents’ feigned outrage.

Now we’ve reached round four, with Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) playing the role of supreme inquisitor:

Administration emails recently obtained by the conservative CNSNews.com through a Freedom of Information Act request show Kagan telling a former colleague “I hear they have the votes, Larry!! Simply amazing,” regarding the reform bill. The emails have rekindled calls for Kagan to recuse herself from ruling on the healthcare reform law next year because of a provision of the U.S. code that calls on justices to disqualify themselves when they have “expressed an opinion concerning the merits of the particular case in controversy” while in government service. . . .

“I am deeply disturbed by these developments and believe that the Justice Department should have provided these documents to the Senate Judiciary Committee during Justice Kagan’s confirmation hearing,” Sessions wrote to Holder in a series of questions for the record. “The Department’s failure to provide this information to Congress and to comply with FOIA requests, as well as your apparent inattention to these matters, is unacceptable.”

Once again, health reform’s opponents are so desperate to stack the Court against the Affordable Care Act that they have forgotten to pay attention to what the law actually requires Kagan to do. The law does indeed require a judge to recuse “[w]here he has served in governmental employment and in such capacity participated . . . expressed an opinion concerning the merits of the particular case in controversy,” but Kagan’s statement that the vote on the Affordable Care Act is “simply amazing” is in no way a statement “concerning the merits” of a particular lawsuit. Kagan did not say “this is amazing and the law is constitutional,” she just said that a particular whip count is “amazing.” Nothing in the law requires her to recuse.