An expansive “John Doe” corruption investigation targeting employees and former employees of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) has led to its first arrests today, nabbing three people, including two former aides to Walker. The investigation centers around Milwaukee County workers during Walker’s tenure their as executive, and has previously involved an FBI raid on the home of a fourth person, one of Walker’s top aides.

Today, police arrested former county employees Kevin Kavanaugh, who was appointed by Walker, and Tim Russell, who served on Walker’s gubernatorial campaign. The AP reports:

Former county housing director Tim Russell, 48, was charged with two felony and one misdemeanor embezzlement charges, according to the criminal complaint from the Milwaukee County district attorney’s office.

Kevin Kavanaugh, Walker’s appointee to the Milwaukee County Veteran Service Commission, was charged with one felony embezzlement charge of taking more than $10,000 from a business and four felony counts of fraudulent writings by a corporate officer.

Russell and Kavanaugh each face up to 10 years in prison if convicted of the most serious felony embezzlement charge.

A third person, who worked for six months for the state Department of Public Instruction, was charged with two counts of felony child enticement in a case the county prosecutor said was discovered while investigating the others.

Walker has been charged with no wrongdoing and there’s no evidence suggesting that he has personally been a target of the secret probe, now a year and half old.

At town hall event in Northfield, New Hampshire today, GOP presidential hopeful Rick Santorum reiterated his call for abolishing the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and floated the idea of shipping its judges off to Guam.

Santorum said the court is overly liberal and imposing a “reign of terror of California judges” on other Western states, but acknowledged that outright abolition of the court wouldn’t be exactly constitutional, as judges are guaranteed lifetime appointments. So, Santorum suggested, perhaps jokingly, “maybe we can create a court that puts them in Guam or something like that and keep their life appointments” and be safely quarantined. Watch it:

Santorum also channeled Rick Perry a bit, joking he harbors more nefarious intentions for the current Ninth Circuit judges: “I have some ideas that I won’t share publicly.”

When rival GOP candidate Newt Gingrich also proposed abolishing the Ninth Circuit, former George W. Bush Attorneys General Michael Mukasey and Alberto Gonzales called the plan “ridiculous,” “irresponsible,” and “troubling.” Indeed, as ThinkProgress’ Ian Millhiser has explained, abolishing a federal court because the president doesn’t agree with their rulings is a dangerous breakdown of the separation of powers.

Indiana was among the states where Republicans pushed laws requiring drug tests for various government benefits in 2011, and the state GOP successfully passed a version requiring unemployed workers to undergo drug tests for unemployment benefits or to participate in the state’s job training program. Anyone who didn’t pass such a test, the law stated, was considered to have “refused an offer of suitable work.”

In the immediate wake of the laws, little evidence has emerged that they were necessary. The first round of drug tests on those participating in the job training program, in fact, yielded just a 1 percent rate of failure, the Huffington Post’s Arthur Delaney reported today:

Just 1 percent of participants in an Indiana workforce training program failed their drug tests, according to the state’s Department of Workforce Development.

The department launched its drug testing scheme last July in response to complaints from local businesses that job applicants couldn’t pass drug tests, a department spokeswoman said. But of 1,240 job applicants tested from July to December, only 13 failed the test. Three additional people refused to provide a urine sample and seven submitted urine that was too watery.

Though conservatives around the country have been pushing similar laws — Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) signed a law requiring drug testing for recipients of welfare benefits in 2011 — and though government data suggests that those on benefits are twice as likely to use drugs as those who aren’t, outright evidence from the states has thus far yielded little evidence. In Florida, only 2 percent of welfare recipients failed the first round of tests, meaning the program isn’t likely to save much money, if any at all. If the 1 percent numbers hold up in Indiana, it isn’t likely to save a significant amount of money either, and like in Florida, the cost of the program could actually outpace the savings from it.

Meanwhile, should these laws face lawsuits, those challenges would likely succeed. As UCLA law professor Adam Winkler wrote after the Florida law passed, “Random-drug testing is what is known as a ‘suspicion-less search,’” and in most instances, courts have “generally frowned upon” drug testing that occurs without probable cause. “Indeed,” Winkler added, “courts have struck down policies just like the ones put in place by Florida.”

One of the most important, if overlooked, provisions in the law creating the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is a provision allowing the agency to push back against one of the most egregious errors committed by the Supreme Court in recent years — a line of decisions allowing companies to force their consumers into a privatized, corporate-owned arbitration system that overwhelming favors corporate parties. Now that CFPB Director Richard Cordray is in place, his agency can ban this practice altogether from much of the consumer finance industry:

(a) STUDY AND REPORT.—The Bureau shall conduct a study of, and shall provide a report to Congress concerning, the use of agreements providing for arbitration of any future dispute between covered persons and consumers in connection with the offering or providing of consumer financial products or services.

(b) FURTHER AUTHORITY.—The Bureau, by regulation, may prohibit or impose conditions or limitations on the use of an agreement between a covered person and a consumer for a consumer financial product or service providing for arbitration of any future dispute between the parties, if the Bureau finds that such a prohibition or imposition of conditions or limitations is in the public interest and for the protection of consumers. The findings in such rule shall be consistent with the study conducted under subsection (a).

In essence, this provision enables CFPB to prevent many lenders, investment advisers and other financial service providers from using one of the most abusive tools endorsed by the Supreme Court’s misreading of federal law — locking consumers out of real courts and forcing them into corporate-run arbitration. Moreover, because the Supreme Court recently piggybacked on its forced arbitration decisions to allow corporations to immunize themselves from the class action lawsuits that are essential to prevent companies from bleeding their consumers dry a few ill-gotten dollars at a time, CFPB can also eliminate this practice within much of the financial industry.

Lest there be any doubt, corporate arbitrators simply cannot be trusted to provide a fair hearing to consumers — in large part because corporations typically have a great deal of influence over who will arbitrate their cases. One of the most notorious forced arbitration firms — which thankfully was largely shut down after the state of Minnesota challenged its many abusive practices — once ordered a woman to pay a credit card company almost $8,000 because she had the same name as another woman who owed that company money. When a Harvard law professor who used to work part-time as an arbitrator handed down a single decision against a credit card company she was stripped of her caseload by the arbitration firm at the request of the credit card industry.

Our justice system cannot work when one side gets to choose who judges them. The CFPB’s new director has an important opportunity to restore a functioning system of justice to much of the financial industry — he should not hesitate one second before he takes it.

There is a history of U.S. citizens who were accidentally deported by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, and thousands of American citizens have been illegally detained as the federal government cracks down on undocumented immigrants. Now comes the story of a Texas teenager who is a citizen and was still deported.

Dallas resident Lorene Turner had been searching for her granddaughter Jakadrien Turner since she ran away from home at the age of 14 in fall 2010. She searched for months until Dallas police helped her locate her granddaughter — in the South American country of Colombia, it turns out. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had deported Jakadrien in April 2011, even though the African American teenager spoke no Spanish:

News 8 learned that Jakadrien somehow ended up in Houston, where she was arrested by Houston police for theft. She gave Houston police a fake name. When police in Houston ran that name, it belonged to a 22-year-old illegal immigrant from Columbia, who had warrants for her arrest.

So ICE officials stepped in.

News 8 has learned ICE took the girl’s fingerprints, but somehow didn’t confirm her identity and deported her to Colombia, where the Colombian government gave her a work card and released her.

“She talked about how they had her working in this big house cleaning all day, and how tired she was,” Turner said.

Through her granddaughter’s Facebook messages, Turner says she tracked Jakadrian down.

U.S. Federal authorities got an address. U.S. Embassy officials in Colombia asked police to pick her up.

But that was a month ago, and the Colombian government now has her in a detention facility and won’t release her, despite her family’s request.

It is unclear how the teenager was mistaken for a foreign national, and ICE officials told Dallas TV station News 8 that ICE has seen cases where people provide inaccurate information about who they are. “ICE takes these allegations very seriously,” ICE Director of Public Affairs Brian Hale told News 8. “At the direction of [the Department of Homeland Security], ICE is fully and immediately investigating this matter in order to expeditiously determine the facts of this case.”