Earlier this afternoon, just 261 members of the House voted in favor of a balanced budget amendment — far fewer that the two-thirds majority necessary for the amendment to move forward. One somewhat surprising “no” vote was House Budget Chair Paul Ryan (R-WI). Ryan is the House GOP’s chief Chicken Little on the deficit — Ryan spent the last two years of his life running around the country warning that the sky would fall unless we phase out Medicare and enact a long list of equally draconian budget reforms.

Yet, today, when Chicken Little had the opportunity to write a balanced budget amendment into the Constitution, he ran away screaming that the amendment wouldn’t do enough to transform the Constitution into a Tea Party fantasy:

The backstory here is that, just a few months ago, Ryan and his fellow congressional Republicans were pushing a permanent austerity amendment that would effectively lock Tea Party fiscal policy in place permanently. Among other things, amendment would make it functionally impossible to ever raise taxes, while simultaneously requiring the federal government to balance its budget entirely through spending cuts.

Were Paul Ryan’s fantasy scenario — a balanced budget achieved entirely through cuts — to actually play out, 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.”

The amendment Ryan rejected today, by contrast, contains no provision preventing the budget from being balanced through higher taxes — possibly even on rich people! This would allow Congress to save a percentage of these jobs by shifting the cost of deficit reduction to people who can afford it, but it would not protect the interests of the very wealthiest Americans. So Ryan voted it down.

Let’s be completely clear about what this means. Given the choice between an option that would kill 15 million jobs & drive the nation into another great depression, and a different option that could kill fewer jobs but would also not guarantee that David Koch and Paris Hilton pay low taxes, the House GOP’s top budget policymaker decided that he would rather protect poor Paris and hold out for the option that would force millions of American families into utter destitution.

A top Republican donor who helped recruit former Gov. Mark Sanford (R-SC) to run for South Carolina’s top job filed a lawsuit accusing current Gov. Nikki Haley (R) of trading off her former job in the state legislature to earn big corporate paychecks. If the allegations against Haley are true, she may have earned as much as $150,000 from wealthy interest groups eager to enlist a sitting lawmaker as an advocate for their interests.

According to the GOP donor’s lawsuit, Haley failed to disclose $42,500 in secret income she earned from a company called Wilbur Smith Associates, and she failed to recuse herself from a vote that financially benefited Wilbur Smith. Haley also took a $110,000 a year job from a hospital company and then allegedly worked as an illegal lobbyist for the company while she was a sitting lawmaker:

The lawsuit accuses Haley, first elected in 2004 to represent Lexington in the House, of lobbying the state Department of Health and Environment Control on behalf of Lexington Medical, as it sought permission for a new open-heart surgery center. Haley and hospital officials previously have said her job as a fundraiser – a $110,000-a-year job the hospital’s CEO created for her in August 2008 – had nothing to do with the heart center.

But the lawsuit points to an August 2008 email between Haley and her boss. Asked about a meeting on the heart center, she replies, “We have some work to do not only to switch votes but to hold the ones we have. We are as close as we are going to get and can’t afford to leave one stone unturned. … Fingers crossed!”

If these allegations prove true, they are quite serious. There is a clear and serious conflict of interest when a lawmaker is allowed to influence matters that benefit their employer — especially when the lawmaker is allowed to keep many of the details of that arrangement secret.

Last May, a sharply divided Judicial Council of the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals voted to permit a federal bankruptcy judge to remain a member of the Belle Meade County Club, despite the fact that this exclusive club has no women or African Americans as full-fledged members — and despite the fact that the Code of Conduct for United States Judges unambiguously states that “[a] judge should not hold membership in any organization that practices invidious discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, or national origin.”

Yesterday, a unanimous panel of the federal judiciary’s ethics committee ruled that the Sixth Circuit council’s decision was “clearly erroneous“:

[W]e easily conclude that Belle Meade invidiously discriminates against women and African Americans for purposes of Canon 2C and, consequently, that Judge Paine’s membership in the organization runs afoul of that Canon. Nashville, Tennessee, is one of the major cosmopolitan cities of the Southern United States. In particular, it boasts a 27% African American population. Its female population is just over 50%. Although few organizations perfectly mirror the population trends of their surrounding locales, a member of the public would reasonably expect to see at least some women and African Americans among Belle Meade’s Resident Membership barring (1) invidious discrimination or (2) something unique about the Club…that would suggest otherwise. There is, however, nothing about Belle Meade’s stated aims or activities that provides any such justification for the total absence of any female or African American Resident Members. The organization is a social club for prominent persons living in and around the Nashville area. Naturally, there is no shortage of women or – as Judge Paine proclaimed in his 1990 letter to the Club’s Board — African Americans fitting that description.

It’s worth noting that the Sixth Circuit council’s deeply erroneous opinion permitting judges to belong to this sort of club was authored by Sixth Circuit Chief Judge Alice Batchelder — a woman with her own unfortunate history of ethical lapses. Batchelder refused to recuse from a case where the Ohio Republican Party sought to prevent as many as 200,000 registered voters from having their votes counted, even though her husband — the current GOP speaker of the Ohio House — had an obvious interest in the case as a GOP candidate for re-election.

Batchelder also serves on the board of a notorious oil-industry funded “junkets for judges” organization that until very recently provided expense-paid trips to western resorts where the judges were instructed on how to decide cases by industry representatives, and she has repeatedly refused to resign from this board despite an opinion from the federal judiciary’s ethics committee saying that federal judges have an ethical duty not to serve on it.

As a final, unfortunate note about this story, it is worth noting that one of the five judges on the panel that disagreed with Batchelder in yesterday’s ethics opinion was Judge Edith Clement — who also sits on that same junkets for judges board as Batchelder. Although Clement reached the correct decision in yesterday’s opinion, it is tough to imagine a clearer example of a fox guarding the hen house that allowing a judge who unethically led a corporate junketing group to decide on judicial ethics issues.

New restrictions on voting rights this year aren’t confined to photo ID requirements at the polls. In a number of states, the hydra-headed war on voting is targeting people who want to help register others to vote as well.

Nowhere is this more true than the state of Texas. In a bill deemed by the Gov. Rick Perry (R) to be “emergency legislation,” the Texas legislature altered the state’s election law to not only require photo ID at the ballot box, but also place major new restrictions on groups and individuals conducting voter registration drives.

The new law – which is currently pending review by the Justice Department to determine if it satisfies Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act – forbids anyone from becoming a volunteer deputy registrar and helping register others to vote if that person is not an eligible Texas voter himself.

ThinkProgress spoke with a number of groups in Texas about what the changes will mean for voters. Luis Figueroa, an attorney at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, pointed out that the new law would bar permanent legal residents who are in the process of becoming citizens from engaging in the political process by registering others. Similarly, Jessica Gomez of Disability Rights Texas observed that a number of people with disabilities have a “full guardianship” – a term for those whose have a mental incapacity that restricts them from voting. As a result, they are not eligible Texas voters and would be forbidden from registering others.

Gomez noted one individual in particular who for years carried around voter registration forms in his wheelchair because even though he couldn’t vote, registering others made him feel more a part of the community.

Figueroa and Gomez both agreed that by banning certain people from helping register others, a large number of would-be voters will fall through the cracks of the political process.

Watch their interviews:

A major study by the Brennan Center for Justice found that in 2008 alone, over 5 percent of all new registered voters – 26,000 individuals – did so via a registration drive. If the Justice Department allows the new Texas law to go into effect, that number could drop significantly in 2012.