ThinkProgress has been reporting on the catastrophic economic consequences of Alabama’s harshest-in-the-nation immigration law. Undocumented workers are the backbone of Alabama’s agriculture industry, and their exodus has already created a labor shortage in the state. Farmers say crops are rotting in the field and they are in danger of losing their farms by next season.

GOP politicians have crowed that driving immigrants out of the state will reduce unemployment by letting native citizens fill those jobs. But they’ve quickly discovered that Americans are simply unwilling to do the back-breaking labor of harvesting crops.

To stave off the disastrous collapse of state agriculture, Alabama officials are seriously considering replacing immigrant workers with prison laborers who they could perhaps pay even less than immigrants. Earlier this year, the head of Alabama’s agriculture department floated this idea. Now, the department is actively promoting it to the state’s farmers:

Alabama agriculture officials are considering whether prisoners can fill a labor shortage the agency blames on the new state law against illegal immigration.

The Alabama Department of Agriculture and Industries is meeting with south Alabama farmers and businesses in Mobile on Tuesday. Deputy commissioner Brett Hall says the agenda includes a presentation on whether work-release inmates could help fill jobs once held by immigrants.

Georgia implemented a similar scheme to deal with its post-immigration-law exodus, but the program had mixed results, with many inmates walking off the job early. In fact, some in Georgia were amazed Alabama did not learn from their mistakes before implementing an immigration law that jeopardized agricultural and construction industries. “It was like, ‘Good Lord, you people can’t be helped. Have you all not been paying attention?’” said Bryan Tolar, president of the Georgia Agribusiness Council.

Replacing skilled workers with virtually free (and sometimes actually free) prison laborers has become a trend in Republican-led states. Under Gov. Scott Walker’s (R-WI) anti-collective bargaining law, at least one Wisconsin county replaced some union workers with prison labor. And Georgia is considering replacing firefighters with prisoners to save money.

Earlier this afternoon, the Senate voted 54-45 to allow D.C. Circuit nominee Caitlan Halligan’s nomination to move forward — which, in the bizarro universe that is the United States Senate, is six votes shy of what she needs. Worse, this happened despite the fact that her opponents could barely even articulate an argument against her.

The case against Halligan essentially boils down to a claim that, because she wrote legal briefs when she was New York’s solicitor general that annoyed the NRA and other conservative interest groups, she must be branded a ultra-liberal and banned from judicial service. If anyone actually took this argument seriously, it would mean that President Bush’s first solicitor general could not serve on the bench because he once defended a campaign finance law, and Bush’s second solicitor general is also too liberal to serve because he won a Supreme Court case that conclusively establishes that the Affordable Care Act is constitutional.

Needless to say, this is not the standard that prevailed when George W. Bush was in the White House. Unlike Halligan, many of Bush’s appointees to the DC Circuit are among the most ideological judicial nominees selected in the last several decades — and yet Bush’s judges now control nearly half the active judgeships on this important court. Bush’s appointees to the D.C. Circuit include:

• Chief Justice John Roberts: Before Roberts joined the Supreme Court, he was a George W. Bush appointee to the D.C. Circuit. Roberts, of course, cast the key fifth vote in Citizens United permitting corporations to flood American democracy with unlimited amounts of money. He voted in Caperton v. Massey to allow a wealthy coal CEO to pay $3 million to elect a sympathetic justice to a state supreme court in order to stack that court with jurists who would overturn a $50 million verdict against his company. He’s consistently voted to give corporations a nearly unlimited power to force workers and consumers into a privatized, corporate-run arbitration system that overwhelming favors corporations. And he has been on the vanguard of efforts to give corporations even greater immunity from the law.
• Judge Brett Kavanaugh: Prior to joining the court, Kavanaugh served as an Associate Counsel under Clinton inquisitor Ken Starr, and was a principal author of the Starr Report to Congress on the Monica Lewinsky affair. As a judge, Kavanaugh penned a dissent claiming that Exxon could not be held accountable when it hired people who engaged in torture and other crimes against humanity in Indonesia because, corporations are immune from a law allowing private parties to be sued for some of the most atrocious violations of international law. He also wrote an opinion claiming that presidents have the power to refuse to enforce laws simply by calling them “unconstitutional.”
• Judge Janice Rogers Brown: Brown is one of the judiciary’s most outspoken tenthers. She once compared liberalism to “slavery” and Social Security to a “socialist revolution.”

Senate Republicans saw no reason why these deeply ideological nominees should be kept off the bench when their names were before the Senate, and there is no evidence whatsoever that Halligan is a radical in the vein of Roberts, Kavanaugh or Brown. But, of course, in the era of Mitch McConnell, the only rule that really matters is the rule of obstructionism.

As GOP contender Newt Gingrich surges in the polls, conservative groups are finding, and exploiting, cracks in his record. Gun groups in particular are up in arms over what they’re calling Gingrich’s “anti-gun record.” They’ve even paid for robocalls to go out across the state of Iowa warning that Gingrich is no friend to the Second Amendment.

Their objection? When he was in Congress Gingrich supported legislation that made it a crime for people convicted of abusing their spouses and children to acquire guns:

A Robo-call in Iowa Friday accuses presidential candidate Newt Gingrich of having “an anti-gun record.”

It says it was paid for IowaGunOwners.org, a no-compromise gun rights group that Osceola County resident Aaron Dorr founded in 2009 to work to change state gun laws, and the National Association for Gun Rights.

“Newt supported the anti-gun Brady bill that created a national gun registry,” a male voice says.*** “Newt also supported the Lautenberg law that takes away gun rights for crimes as simple as spanking your child.”

The “Lautenberg law” the call refers to is officially called the Domestic Violence Offender Gun Ban, an amendment passed in 1996 when Republicans controlled the House. The act bans shipment, transport, ownership and use of guns or ammunition by individuals convicted of domestic violence, or who are under a restraining order for domestic abuse against a partner or child in all 50 states. The act also makes it illegal to knowingly sell or give a firearm or ammunition to domestic abusers.

A recent press release from the group Georgia Gun Owners echoes those claims and demands Gingrich “apologize to gun owners for his more than two-decade history of supporting gun control.”

The groups’ blase treatment of child abuse, dismissed in the call as “crimes as simple as spanking your child,” is particularly disturbing. Equally ridiculous is the suggestion that Gingrich isn’t sufficiently conservative or pro-Second Amendment because he supports common sense restrictions on gun ownership. Keeping guns away from people who have a record of domestic violence is a public safety issue.

Additionally, a Gingrich spokesman noted that he actually voted against the final conference report for the Brady bill.

Last year, Congress enacted a law creating a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to protect ordinary Americans from some of Wall Street and the banking industry’s worst abuses, and the Senate is expected to vote on CFPB Director-in-waiting Richard Cordray’s nomination this Thursday. Nearly every Senate Republican, however, signed a letter pledging to sabotage this agency by refusing to confirm anyone to lead it. And congressional Republicans manipulated the Senate’s calendar in a way that they claim — falsely — strips President Obama of his power to make recess appointments.

Should the Senate GOP keep its promise to filibuster Cordray, however, President Obama will soon have an airtight opportunity to recess appoint him to lead this essential agency. All that Obama needs to do is invoke the Roosevelt Precedent:

[T]his winter, Congress must adjourn — at least briefly — to inaugurate the new session of Congress. Theodore Roosevelt used such a brief intersession adjournment to ram through an appointment during his administration. From a congressional report on recess appointments:

Although President Theodore Roosevelt once made recess appointments during an intersession recess of less than one day, the shortest recess during which appointments have been made during the past 20 years was 10 days. Appointments made during short recesses (less than 30 days) have sometimes aroused controversy, and they may involve a political cost for the president.

Such an appointment would not be without political controversy — but would likely be upheld as legal given the Roosevelt precedent.

Each day the Senate GOP gets away with its unprecedented obstructionism makes a mockery of the rule of law. The CFPB was created by an Act of Congress, and it cannot be repealed except through an intervening law — not by kneejerk obstructionism by the minority party in the Senate. The Senate GOP’s nihilistic tactics require Obama to use all constitutional tools at his disposal to ensure that the law actually means something, and that includes invoking the Roosevelt Precedent if necessary.

Simply put, it’s time for President Obama to speak softly, and carry a big stick.