Alabama Attorney General, who is charged with defending the state’s toughest-in-the-nation immigration law in court, is finally speaking out about the need to seriously revise the measure:

The top legal official in the U.S. state with the country’s toughest immigration law has suggested throwing out parts of the law after challenges by the federal government and strong protests by rights and business groups.

In his first public concerns about the law, expressed in a letter to legislative leaders obtained by The Associated Press, Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange said the proposed changes would make the law “easier to defend in court” and “remove burdens on law-abiding citizens.”

The letter sent last week comes as the attorney general defends the law against a federal court challenge filed by about 30 organizations and individuals.

Strange specifically recommended repealing sections of the law that require public schools to collection information on the immigration status of students, and make it a crime for an undocumented immigrant to fail to carry registration.

Both sections of the law are currently on hold after the 11th Circuit temporarily suspended them pending further review. But the law has already had truly tragic effects on young school children in Alabama. Immediately after the law was passed, thousands of Hispanic students either stayed home or withdrew from school altogether, fearful that the new law was going to lead to the deportation of their families.

Hispanic students have been bullied by their peers, and one teacher even singled out a student in front of her peers simply because she looked foreign — even though she was an American citizen.

The Justice Department sent a letter to 156 sheriff’s offices and local police departments in Alabama that receive federal funds reminding them not to infringe on people’s constitutional rights while enforcing Alabama’s draconian immigration law, HB 56. Otherwise, the departments could risk losing federal funding.

In the letter that was sent Tuesday, Thomas Perez, assistant attorney general of Justice Department’s civil rights division, wrote that the Justice Department is monitoring how police enforce the section of the law requiring checking the immigration status of people who are stopped for questioning and that they could request data about the immigration law’s enforcement to make sure people were not being discriminated against. (Previously, DOJ requested data from schools in Alabama to ensure that students were not being denied their right to an education.) And Perez warned that law enforcement could suffer expensive consequences if they “engage in pattern or practice of conduct that deprives persons of their rights under the Constitution”:

I believe that the vast majority of of law enforcement officers live up to their oath to protect and to serve all persons with whom they interact. I am, however, writing to remind you that as you implement these provisions, you and your officers have a continuing responsibility to comply with the Constitution and the laws of the United States.

The Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice is closely monitoring the impact of H.B. 56 in a number of areas to ensure compliance with the applicable civil rights laws, including to ensure that law enforcement agencies are not implementing the law in a manner that has the purpose or effect of discriminating against the Latino or any other community. We are also very concerned about the impact of H.B. 56 on victims of crime, in particular in cases of sexual assault and domestic violence.

As a recipient of federal financial assistance, your agency is required to comply with various non-discrimination requirements under federal statutes and regulations . . . . The federal government may, in some circumstances, terminate federal funds or bring a civil lawsuit in federal court seeking affirmative relief to enforce [these laws].

Perez’s letter serves as another warning of the pitfalls in Alabama’s immigration law. Immigrants have already fled the state, and HB 56 continues to drag down Alabama’s economy. State Sen. Bill Beasley (D) is leading the effort to repeal HB 56, while even the Republican attorney general agrees that sections of the law need to be changed. Local law enforcement officials potentially losing funding because of the law’s enforcement is just another reason to support its repeal.

When Wisconsin citizens go to the polls next year, they will be asked to provide photo identification for the first time in the state’s history. If they don’t have an acceptable form of photo ID, they will not be allowed to vote.

Because many residents lack photo IDs, especially poorer and rural citizens, over 3 million people could be disenfranchised in the 2012 election, according to a nonpartisan Brennan Center study. Though Wisconsin offers a “free” photo ID to its residents, a birth certificate is necessary in order to obtain it, copies of which cost at least $20. This requirement creates a major barrier for many citizens, including Ruthelle Frank, an 84-year-old Wisconsin woman who, because of a difficult home birth, doesn’t have an official birth certificate and now must pay as much as $200 to get one simply to satisfy the “free” photo ID requirements.

However, if Wisconsin residents like Frank go online to print out the birth certificate application, the form asks at the top for “CURRENT VALID PHOTO ID” and “PHOTO ID NUMBER”. In other words, citizens simply looking to vote are led to believe they are caught in a catch-22: you need a birth certificate to get a photo ID, but you need a photo ID to get a birth certificate.

Read more

Yesterday, Senate Republicans voted nearly unanimously to block Caitlan Halligan’s nomination to the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Only Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) broke party lines to join the 54-45 vote to allow Halligan to move forward — leaving Halligan six votes short of what she needed to break the GOP filibuster.

The Senate GOP’s decision to filibuster Halligan earned wide rebukes from Senate Republicans*, many of whom slammed this decision to filibuster a judicial nominee as unconstitutional:

• Lamar Alexander (R-TN): “I would never filibuster any President’s judicial nominee, period. I might vote against them, but I will always see they came to a vote.”
• Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) and Johnny Isakson (R-GA): “Every judge nominated by this president or any president deserves an up-or-down vote. It’s the responsibility of the Senate. The Constitution requires it.”
• Tom Coburn (R-OK): “If you look at the Constitution, it says the president is to nominate these people, and the Senate is to advise and consent. That means you got to have a vote if they come out of committee. And that happened for 200 years.”
• John Cornyn (R-TX): “We have a Democratic leader defeated, in part, as I said, because I believe he was identified with this obstructionist practice, this unconstitutional use of the filibuster to deny the president his judicial nominations.
• Mike Crapo (R-ID): “Until this Congress, not one of the President’s nominees has been successfully filibustered in the Senate of the United States because of the understanding of the fact that the Constitution gives the President the right to a vote.”
• Lindsey Graham (R-SC): “I think filibustering judges will destroy the judiciary over time. I think it’s unconstitutional”
• Chuck Grassley (R-IA): “It would be a real constitutional crisis if we up the confirmation of judges from 51 to 60, and that’s essentially what we’d be doing if the Democrats were going to filibuster.”
• Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX): “[T]he Constitution envisions a 51-vote majority for judgeships…. [Filibustering judges] amend[s] the Constitution without going through the proper processes…. We have a majority rule that is the tradition of the Senate with judges. It is the constitutional requirement.”
• Jon Kyl (R-AZ): “The President was elected fair and square. He has the right to submit judicial nominees and it is the Senate’s obligation under the Constitution to act on those nominees.”
• Mitch McConnell (R-KY): “The Constitution of the United States is at stake. Article II, Section 2 clearly provides that the President, and the President alone, nominates judges. The Senate is empowered to give advice and consent. But my Democratic colleagues want to change the rules. They want to reinterpret the Constitution to require a supermajority for confirmation.”
• Jeff Sessions (R- AL): “[The Constitution] says the Senate shall advise and consent on treaties by a two-thirds vote, and simply ‘shall advise and consent’ on nominations…. I think there is no doubt the Founders understood that to mean … confirmation of a judicial nomination requires only a simple majority vote.”
• Richard Shelby (R-AL): “Why not allow the President to do his job of selecting judicial nominees and let us do our job in confirming or denying them? Principles of fairness call for it and the Constitution requires it.”
• John Thune (SD): Filibustering judicial nominees “is contrary to our Constitution …. It was the Founders’ intention that the Senate dispose of them with a simple majority vote.”

*All quotes are taken from when George W. Bush was president. But, of course, that doesn’t matter because — in the words of Cornyn — “we need to treat all nominees exactly the same, regardless of whether they’re nominated by a Democrat or a Republican president.”**

**Cornyn’s statement was also made when George W. Bush was president.

As ThinkProgress has been reporting, Republican presidential candidates have been engaged in a bizarre game of one-upsmanship on the issue of immigration, competing to offer the most merciless approach America’s undocumented population. After Michele Bachmann proposed deporting every single one of the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country — a plan that would cost more than $2.6 trillion — Gov. Rick Perry (TX) vowed that he too would “deport every illegal alien who is apprehended in this country.”

Now Bachmann is upping the ante with perhaps the most cruel anti-immigrant statement to date. Media Matters reports that in an interview with Fox host Bill O’Reilly, Bachmann dismissed the humanitarian crisis of mass deportations and reiterated her baseless fear-mongering about “anchor babies.” Bachmann then expressed a “can do” attitude when it came to O’Reilly’s mock idea of dragging immigrants onto buses in front of their screaming children:

O’REILLY: [T]here are a lot of people here who’ve been here for a lot of years. And if you’re gonna start dragging them out of here, it’s gonna be very, very difficult to do that…I’m just saying on a human basis, I don’t think that — theory is one thing. Dragging people out, putting them on a bus with their children’s crying can be quite something else.

BACHMANN: It can be done. That’s the thing, it can be done.

O’REILLY: It can be done, but at what cost?

Watch it:

Bachmann then cited the patently false claim that “50 percent of Mexico’s population has moved north of the border,” apparently hoping people wouldn’t do the math and realize that 56 million Mexicans have not, in fact, relocated to the U.S.

She concluded by insisting “I’m a compassionate person” — all evidence to the contrary.