Earlier this month, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) threatened to exact revenge for President Obama’s decision to recess appoint four critical consumer and worker protection officials by escalating the Senate GOP’s campaign of obstruction against the president’s nominees. In a speech on the Senate floor last night, Grassley named the first victim of his campaign of retribution — DOJ Office of Legal Counsel head Virginia Seitz — flagging OLC’s opinion saying that Obama has the constitutional authority to make the recess appointments as justification:

[Seitz] stated [in her confirmation hearing] that if the Administration contemplated taking action that she believed was unconstitutional, she would not stand idly by. [...] Ms. Seitz is the author of this wholly erroneous opinion that takes an unprecedented view of recess appointments clause [sic]. And I suppose that it is literally true that Ms. Seitz did not stand idly by when the administration took unconstitutional action. Rather, she actively became a lackey for the administration. She wrote a poorly reasoned opinion that placed loyalty to the president over loyalty to the rule of law. [...] After reading this misguided and very dangerous legal opinion, I’m sorry the Senate confirmed her. It’s likely to be the last confirmation that she’ll ever experience.

Watch it:

Grassley’s attack on Seitz is troubling on many levels — not the least of which is the fact that her opinion reached the correct interpretation of the Constitution. As Seitz’s predecessor from the Bush Administration explained in a 2010 op-ed, the Senate is in recess when it is “not capable of acting on the president’s nominations.” When the president announced his recess appointments, the Senate was adjourned under an order stating that there will be “no business conducted” for weeks. So the Senate was in no shape to confirm a nominee until it returned to Washington, and the president acted entirely within his legal rights in making recess appointments.

Moreover, the attack on Seitz is particularly troubling in light of the unique nature of Seitz’s job. Unlike most lawyers in the Department of Justice, OLC’s attorneys are not advocates. Their job is to provide neutral, objective and correct legal advice to the executive branch, regardless of whether their advice agrees with the view held by powerful politicians. That is exactly what Seitz did here when she correctly reasoned that the Constitution means exactly what her Bush era predecessor said that it means — the Senate must be engaged in actual work to defeat the recess appointment power.

By punishing Seitz for issuing a legally correct opinion that he disagrees with, Grassley places dangerous pressure on Seitz and on all future OLC heads. OLC is an important office in its own right, but it is also frequently led by ambitious attorneys who go on to do greater things — both Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justice Scalia once held Seitz’s current job. Grassley’s thinly veiled threat sends a clear message to future OLC heads: hand down a decision that I disagree with and I will destroy your career.

Needless to say, this kind of incentive is neither conducive to honest reasoning by OLC heads nor likely to attract the best applicants to lead this office. If the executive branch is to receive accurate and unbiased legal advice, it must come from attorneys who are focused solely on the law — not on trying to anticipate what Chuck Grassley thinks the law should be.

Our guest blogger is Angela Maria Kelley, vice president for immigration policy and advocacy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Today, Demián Bichir was nominated for the Oscar for Best Actor In a Leading Role for his portrayal of undocumented day laborer Carlos Galindo in the film A Better Life. Demián immediately dedicated his nomination to the undocumented. As he told me when we spoke recently, “I played a role that 11 million people play in real life. They don’t get the attention I do, but they deserve our respect and a chance at a better life.”

On its surface, A Better Life is a moving portrayal of the relationship between parents and their children, and the lengths that people go through to provide for their families. But dig a bit deeper, and the movie pulls back a curtain that 11 million undocumented immigrants live in fear behind.

In our everyday lives, we constantly see the undocumented — some, like Galindo, do our landscaping, others raise our children, prepare our food, and contribute greatly to our economy and tax revenue. At the end of the day they are no different than the rest of us, save for a piece of paper.

Yet the debate around immigration is polarized as never before, and the partisan stranglehold is so intense that meaningful immigration reform is elusive. The undocumented are left with little hope that their status can be changed and their lives normalized. Republican candidates “debate” the issue by pretending that immigrants will leave if we make conditions sufficiently hostile.

Carlos Galindo shows us otherwise. He struggles daily to live and work under the radar and provide for his teenage son. Like millions of immigrants, he must avoid seeking help from the police, even when his truck is stolen. He reminds us that our nation’s immigration policy is not simply a question of more enforcement, visas, or unauthorized entry, but is instead a deeply human story.

Demián’s performance was certainly exceptional, but sadly the story is not – it’s all too common for the millions of unauthorized immigrants living in the country.

Consider this: undocumented immigrants make up 5.2 percent of our workforce, and over 60 percent of them have been in the country for more than 10 years. And while we might think that the plight of undocumented immigrants doesn’t affect U.S. citizens, 4.5 million U.S.-born children have at least one unauthorized parent.

Undocumented immigrants contribute more than $11 billion in taxes every year. The nation’s agriculture industry could not get by without them. The cost of deporting the undocumented population would total $285 billion over five years, which amounts to $922 in new taxes for every man, woman, and child in this country.

Hopefully the publicity from Demián’s well-deserved nomination will stir policymakers to act in the interest of the newcomer and native-born alike, and move the Galindo story from the red carpet to Rose Garden ceremonies.

In a decision that broke with every other judge to consider the issue, including at least one judge who effectively fined birther queen Orly Taiz $20,000 for pressing the absurd claim that President Obama is not a citizen eligible to serve as president, a Georgia administrative law judge sided with Taitz and several of her clients’ in an effort to force President Obama to testify in a birther case:

In a surprising ruling Friday, a Georgia state administrative judge declined to quash a subpoena directing Obama to attend a hearing Thursday at the Fulton County courthouse on a challenge to strike him from the Georgia ballot this fall on claims he is not a U.S. citizen. [...]

Lawyers for those pursuing the challenges recently issued a subpoena for Obama to attend the upcoming hearing. Obama’s legal team filed a motion to quash the subpoena, but [Deputy Chief Judge Michael] Malihi declined. In his order, Malihi noted that Obama’s legal team had argued that no president should be compelled to attend a court hearing.

“This may be correct,” Malihi wrote. “But [Obama] has failed to enlighten the court with any legal authority.”

Obama’s court filings fail to show why his attendance would be “unreasonable or oppressive” or why his testimony would be “irrelevant, immaterial or cumulative,” the judge wrote.

The arrogance of Malihi’s decision is astounding. If he needs legal authority showing that the president cannot be simply commanded to present himself in court on a very specific date, he might start with the Supreme Court of the United States, which strongly implied in Clinton v. Jones that a court cannot “compel the attendance of the President at any specific time or place.” Likewise, if he needs proof that summoning the president of the United States to testify on a frivolous issue would be “cumulative” of existing evidence, he might consider discovering something called “Google.”

Fortunately, it is unlikely that Malihi’s gross overreach will actually amount to something. As an administrative law judge, Malihi lacks any real authority to enforce this subpoena, and must refer the matter to a trial judge in order to actually try to haul Obama into court. It is unlikely that a state trial judge will share Malihi’s disrespect for the law or his disconnect with commonly known facts about the president’s birth.

Nevertheless, there is an important lesson to be learned from this incident, which is that it is always possible to find a judge who is willing to accept just about any ridiculous legal argument if you are willing to search hard enough. Indeed, the Affordable Care Act’s opponents demonstrated the impact of this strategy when it found a longtime GOP activist and judge who makes explicit shout outs to the Tea Party who were willing to accept the utterly meritless case against the Affordable Care Act. Hopefully, Malihi’s decision will not legitimize the equally ridiculous claim that President Obama is not a natural born citizen.

GOP contender Newt Gingrich has built up quite a record of making derogatory, racially-charged remarks on the campaign trail. He frequently derides President Obama as a “food stamp president” and said he would go to the NAACP and tell African Americans they should “demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps.” Last week he said work is a “strange, distant concept” to Fox anchor Juan Williams, who had the audacity to ask Gingrich at a recent debate if he understood why blacks might be offended by his remarks.

More than 40 Catholic leaders recently challenged Gingrich to “stop perpetuating ugly racial stereotypes” with his divisive rhetoric.

For Gingrich, perpetuating ugly racial stereotypes is nothing new. Today, the Huffington Post reports that at the height of Gingrich’s power in Congress, one of his major speeches had to be edited to remove a racist characterization of Asians, Latinos, and black Americans:

But before Gingrich could deliver his grand new theory of American civilization to the public in a 1993 speech, his deeply divisive racial stereotypes would need to be removed.

“For poor minorities, entrepreneurship in small business is the key to future wealth,” Gingrich wrote by hand in a first draft. “This is understood thoroughly by most of the Asians, partially by Latinos, and to a tragically small degree by much of the American black community.” [...]

By the time a member of Gingrich’s staff typed up the notes and prepared the speech for delivery at the National Review Institute, the racial stereotypes were gone.

Here are Gingrich’s handwritten notes, which were among the more than 1,000 pages of records in evidence from the former speaker’s case before the House Ethics Committee:

Yesterday, the Supreme Court denied a request by the right-wing group Freedom Watch to hear oral arguments on whether Justice Elena Kagan should recuse herself from the Affordable Care Act litigation. Normally, ThinkProgress would not comment upon such a banal and obviously correct decision, except that it is worth highlighting Freedom Watch’s brief which, sadly, is indicative of the kind of penetrating legal reasoning that characterizes claims that Kagan may not hear this case. Here is just a brief sample:

Simply put, “We the People” are fed up and have already entered into what is in effect a Second American Revolution because judges and other government officials behave as if they are “above the law,” in effect nobility who can do as they please. . . . In short, the comments of Chief Justice Roberts [suggesting that Kagan does not need to recuse] are an affront to the high ethical standards of our Founding Fathers and amount to a subversion of our laws. They are disgraceful at best and at worst amount to obstruction of justice. They are the result of someone who became Chief Justice by first ingratiating himself to the “Washington establishment,” and now seeks to act as the Chief Justice not just of the Court, but of this same establishment – which for decades has pushed the nation to the brink of revolution by representing mostly its own interests, perpetuating and consolidating its power and selling out “We the People.” This is why in large part the nation is in a deep crisis; the majority of Americans have little if any respect for either the Supreme Court or our judiciary as a whole, notwithstanding their current similar disdain for the other two branches of government.

The situation is as bad as in 1776 when “We the People” declared independence from King George III and the British Crown. In the 236 years since the start of the first American Revolution, our current ruling class, which is not of the mettle of our Founding Fathers, – who pledged their sacred honor, fortunes and risked their lives to create a free nation – has come full circle. Today, the Supreme Court and the other two branches of government have assumed the role of a “royalty” – in some ways worse than even King George III – who feel free to ignore the legitimate interests and grievances of “We the People,” because they believe they are a “protected class” and above the law.

So, to be clear, the claim here is that far-right Chief Justice John Roberts is part of a giant conspiracy to help Kagan preserve President Obama’s chief legislative accomplishment, that this conspiracy is “in some ways worse” than monarchy, and that the American people are presently responding to it with a “Second American Revolution.” And this is what passes as legal argument among the Kagan recusal crowd. Sadly, this argument is only slightly better than the absurd claim that the Affordable Care Act itself is unconstitutional.