Two years ago, President Obama nominated Goodwin Liu (now Justice Goodwin Liu on the California Supreme Court) to a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Liu immediately stood out among the president’s nominees — and indeed, from most of the judges currently serving on the federal bench — for his brilliance and impeccable legal credentials. He is a former clerk to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, one of the top constitutional scholars in the nation, and he enjoyed wide support from all corners of the legal community. Clinton inquisitor Ken Starr called Liu an “extraordinarily qualified nominee” who will serve as a judge “with great distinction.” Torture memo author John Yoo called him a “very well qualified” nominee who will be a “good judge on the bench.”

Senate Republicans immediately started distorting his record, and they eventually filibustered his nomination into oblivion.

About a year later, we saw this same charade play out again. President Obama nominated Caitlin Halligan to serve as a federal appellate judge in DC. Like Liu, Halligan is an absolutely brilliant legal mind and a former Supreme Court law clerk. Unlike Liu, however, she did not have a paper trial because she has never been a law professor and spent her career advocating on behalf of her client’s views rather than expressing her own. Nevertheless, Senate Republicans filibustered her, relying on the thin argument that she is unconfirmable because she once represented a client whose views disagree with those of the NRA.

So when President Obama nominated former Supreme Court law clerk Paul Watford to a federal judgeship last October, ThinkProgress worried that he too would prove too qualified to be confirmed. Sadly, our fears seem justified. Yesterday, the Senate Judiciary Committee cast an entirely party-line vote to advance Watford to the full Senate — an action which, in the past, has proceeded a GOP filibuster. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) was given the unfortunate task of devising a flimsy rationale for opposing the nomination:

I have substantive concerns regarding Mr. Watford’s views on both immigration and the death penalty.

Mr. Watford partnered with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the National Immigration Law Center (NILC) in two cases to oppose Arizona’s 2010 immigration bill. In the first case, Friendly House, a class-action lawsuit, Mr. Watford served as co-counsel for most of the plaintiffs, including the class action representative, Friendly House. . . .

With regard to the death penalty, Mr. Watford assisted in submitting an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in Baze v. Rees on behalf of a number of groups who opposed Kentucky’s three-drug lethal injection protocol. In its plurality opinion, the Court rejected the arguments raised in the brief. Ultimately, Kentucky’s three drug protocol was upheld 7-2.

So there you go. In a legal career that stretches nearly two decades, Watford worked for two clients that Grassley disagrees with, and this fact evermore disqualifies him for a seat on the federal courts.

It’s impossible to describe how dangerous this standard is. Our system of law depends on all parties having adequate representation to assert their legal claims, and this is doubly true with respect to the kind of disadvantaged clients who stand against conservatives’ preferred legal outcomes. Grassley is sending a clear and unambiguous message to the entire legal profession here — if you want to be a judge some day, don’t even think about working for the poor, for immigrants, for unions or for criminal defendants. Sadly, many bright and ambitious attorneys will hear that message loud and clear, and will remain in corporate law firms representing well-moneyed clients who will be just fine with or without their services.

Ultimately, however, it’s likely that Grassley’s real motivations are slightly different. Like Liu and Halligan before him, Watford is guilty of being the kind of exceptionally talented attorney who could be on the Supreme Court some day — and so the Senate GOP appears poised to block him even if they can’t think of a plausible reason to do so.

Pomona College in southern California is facing heavy criticism for firing 17 workers in its dining halls after they were unable to produce documentation proving that they were eligible to work in the United States. Critics allege the firings were an attempt to derail the formation of a union:

For the last two years, many of the dining hall workers had been organizing to form a union, but the efforts stalled amid negotiations with the administration. Many on campus believe that the administration began looking into the employees’ work authorizations as a way to thwart the union effort [...]

“We were here for a very long time and there was never a complaint,” said Christian Torres, 25, a cook who had worked at the college for six years. “But now all of the sudden we were suspect, and they didn’t want us to work here anymore.”

College President David W. Oxtoby has denied charges that the investigation into the legal status of dining hall employees was a form of union busting. If he’s not telling the truth, however, a decision by the pro-corporate Supreme Court makes it unlikely that Pomona will be held accountable — despite the fact that it is illegal to retaliate against workers seeking to form a union. A 2002 Supreme Court decision drastically reduced the consequences for companies that violate national labor laws in ways that impact immigrant workers, leaving millions of workers without a safe guard against exploitative employers.

The decision at Pomona College has sparked plenty of criticism and debate on the small, liberal arts campus known for its progressive ideals and quality education. Students and alumni are pushing back against the administration’s decision, and are questioning the real motives behind the firings.

Yesterday, House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) convened the sixth hearing on one of a series of deeply misguided gun stings that began in 2006 under George W. Bush. Issa, however, has shown little interest in actually getting to the bottom of how these ill-conceived operations, which eventually led to illegal guns being turned against federal agents, came about and what can be done to prevent similar errors from occurring again — he’s refused, for example, to call Bush era Attorney General Michael Mukasey to testify. Instead, he’s relied on a series of increasingly paranoid and ridiculous conspiracy theories to try to lay the blame for these operations at Attorney General Eric Holder’s feet.

Last December, for example, Issa touted the absurd notion that the Obama Administration is somehow using the high-profile gun violence that occurred during this operation as part of an intentional campaign to discredit the Second Amendment. In Issa’s words, “they’ve made a crisis and they’re using this crisis to somehow take away or limit people’s second amendment rights.” Issa, of course, was not able to cite a single example of people’s Second Amendment rights being taken away, because none exist.

At yesterday’s hearing, Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI) was left with the unfortunate task of asserting this Fox Mulderesque theory:

This thing has gone wrong, was set up to go wrong, and, frankly, I think was set up to deal with Second Amendment liberties of law abiding citizens and pushing into a perception that it was the problem of the Second Amendment as opposed to law enforcement.

Watch it:

It’s difficult to even get your head around this accusation, which originates from a former militiaman who supports violent resistance to imagined government attempts to seize his guns. The claim appears to be that a series of botched gun stings that begun during the Bush Administration were actually part of a secret Obama plot to release guns to Mexican drug lords, so that those guns could then be used to kill federal agents, which would then cause a national uprising in support of gun control. Maybe when the Obama Administration was done executing this Rube Goldberg plan, they would then sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.

But there’s another, even more disturbing aspect to this hearing, and the five others that have proceeded it. The reason why Attorneys General Mukasey and Holder did not stop these unfortunate operations from occurring is because they cannot reasonably be expected to know about every single operation conducted by every single field operative in every part of the country. The Attorney General supervises nearly 112,000 employees. It is neither desirable for him to be aware of every single operation being conducted by low-level field agents nor physically possible to brief him on all of these operations if he wanted to be. For this reason, the Attorney General and DOJ’s other senior most managers must focus their attention on the very most important matters that concern their agency — serious questions of national security, or major policy decisions, or trials or appeals that impact the entire nation.

When Issa drags Holder before a House committee for four hours to be nothing more than a pawn in an elaborate game set up to embarrass President Obama, that means many more hours — most likely days — that Holder and other key Justice Department officials must spent prepping for their role in Issa’s withhunt. Every minute they spend preparing for this witchhunt is a minute they cannot spend ensuring that the law is fairly enforced, that national security officials in DOJ have the tools they need to operate, or that dangerous criminals are tracked down and prosecuted.

A real investigation is necessary to determine how these botched gun stings continued across two presidencies, which is why DOJ’s inspector general is conducting just such an investigation. Likewise, real accountability is necessary when a government operation goes so horribly wrong, which is why the senior officials who allowed this to happen have correctly been removed from their jobs or demoted. But there are real costs to the country when people like Issa can turn a very real tragedy into embarrassing and time consuming political theatre. The American people deserve to have an Attorney General who can focus on doing his job.

The biggest critic of a massive prison privatization scheme in Florida was stripped of his chairmanship of the Budget Subcommittee on Criminal and Civil Justice Appropriation for opposing Gov. Rick Scott’s (R) plan to outsource prison oversight to the lowest bidder.

Sen. Mike Fasano (R) is one of ten Senate Republicans who opposes the plan to give private, for-profit vendors control over 26 prisons, but his vocal criticism provoked retribution from one of the bill’s biggest supporters, Senate President Mike Haridopolos (R):

Amid the mounting tension, Senate President Mike Haridopolos refused to bring up the bill for debate, a sign that it faced defeat. Ten of 28 Senate Republicans have voiced strong reservations or opposition to such a major policy shift, a serious rift in the GOP caucus.

The drama intensified as Haridopolos stripped Sen. Mike Fasano, R-New Port Richey, of his chairmanship of a budget subcommittee overseeing prisons, saying Fasano “was not rowing in the same direction” as Senate leaders on budget decisions.

“It’s become clear to me that Sen. Fasano was not willing to make these choices,” Haridopolos said.

Fasano said Haridopolos told him he was being punished for his anti-privatization comments in an MSNBC interview Monday.

This week Fasano introduced an amendment that would effectively stop the plan and require further study on its fiscal impact. Critics of the plan say that it will save little if any money and cost thousands of state workers their jobs. The price of paying the displaced prison workers for unused sick leave and vacation could well offset the estimated $16 – $30 million in savings. “It’s really just a gift to the private-prison industry,” David Murrell of the Police Benevolent Association said of the plan.

Yet Haridopolos claimed he outed Fasano because he had “lost confidence in him to fulfill [the] mission” of balancing the budget and not raising taxes because Fasano raised concerns about the real cost of prison privatization.

Last year a judge threw out a similar plan because proponents tried to sneak it into the budget, but Republican sponsors have revived the bill. And they have a clear personal interest in fighting so hard. The country’s biggest private prison companies, who stand to make millions from the Florida plan, have given generously to many state legislators.

GEO Group, a private prison company based in Boca Raton and one of the largest contributors to the Florida Republican Party in 2010, gave over $11,000 to the campaigns of 14 of the 20 members of the Budget Committee that approved the privatization bill. They also gave the maximum $25,000 to Gov. Scott’s inaugural fund.

The Corrections Corporation of America, the nation’s largest corrections company, also has close connections to GOP statehouses across the country. The company has spent $373,000 in political contributions in Florida since 2003, over 60 percent of which have gone to Republicans.