In what may be the most bizarre lawsuit to emerge from a Tea Party devoted to bizarre legal theories, former House Majority Leader Dick Armey sued the federal government seeking a declaration that he is not eligible for Medicare, even though he is, well, eligible for Medicare. Yesterday, in an opinion by conservative George W. Bush appointee Judge Brett Kavanaugh rejected this claim:

This is not your typical lawsuit against the Government. Plaintiffs here have sued because they don’t want government benefits. They seek to disclaim their legal entitlement to Medicare Part A benefits for hospitalization costs. Plaintiffs want to disclaim their legal entitlement to Medicare Part A benefits because their private insurers limit coverage for patients who are entitled to Medicare Part A benefits. And plaintiffs would prefer to receive coverage from their private insurers rather than from the Government.

Plaintiffs’ lawsuit faces an insurmountable problem: Citizens who receive Social Security benefits and are 65 or older are automatically entitled under federal law to Medicare Part A benefits. To be sure, no one has to take the Medicare Part A benefits. But the benefits are available if you want them. There is no statutory avenue for those who are 65 or older and receiving Social Security benefits to disclaim their legal entitlement to Medicare Part A benefits.

To be fair to Armey, there is apparently some significance to his desire to not simply refuse Medicare benefits, but also be declared ineligible for them — private insurers do not provide certain benefits to people who are Medicare eligible. Nevertheless, it is truly strange that Armey would seek this declaration. Why would someone decide to pay for inferior private insurance when they have the option of enrolling in Medicare for free, especially when Medicare is in many ways superior to private insurance?

For weeks, Republicans have pretended that President Obama is waging some kind of war on religion because his administration recently approved regulations requiring insurers to cover contraceptive care — spurred on in large part because the conservative U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops opposes the contraceptive care regulations. Their claim is utterly absurd. The new rules exempt churches from the requirement to offer insurance that covers contraception. And they align closely with the beliefs of actual Catholics, 58 percent of whom believe that employers should be required to provide insurance that cover contraception.

On Fox News this morning, GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum doubled down on this bizarre claim that Obama is going after religion — falsely claiming that the president wants to tell Catholics who they can hire as priests:

What they’ve done here is a direct assault on the First Amendment, not only a direct assault on the freedom of religion, by forcing people specifically to do things that are against their religious teachings. . . . This is a president who, just recently, in this Hosanna-Tabor case was basically making the argument that Catholics had to, you know, maybe even had to go so far as to hire women priests to comply with employment discrimination issues. This is a very hostile president to people of faith. He’s a hostile president, not just to people of faith, but to all freedoms.

Watch it:

It’s not clear exactly which First Amendment Santorum is talking about here, because he clearly isn’t talking about the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. As conservative (and Catholic) Justice Antonin Scalia explained in a Supreme Court opinion more than twenty years ago, a law does not suddenly become unconstitutional because someone raises a religious objective to it — if this actually were true, anyone at all could immunize themselves from paying taxes or from any other law simply by claiming they have a religious objection to being a law-abiding citizen.

Moreover, Santorum’s claim that the Obama Administration wants to force Catholics to hire female priests (something which, incidentally, 53 percent of Catholics support) is the opposite of true. The Obama Administration’s brief in the case Santorum cites expressly stated that it would be unconstitutional to tell the Catholic church to do so, a fact that Santorum would have been aware of if he had actually bothered to read the Supreme Court’s opinion in Hosanna-Tabor. That opinion explains that the administration “grant[s] . . . that it would violate the First Amendment for courts to apply [anti-discrimination] laws to compel the ordination of women by the Catholic Church or by an Orthodox Jewish seminary.”

Ultimately, however, Santorum’s objection to the president doesn’t come down to some paranoid debate over whether President Obama is hostile to “all freedoms,” but a very important debate over what the word freedom actually means. President Obama does believe that women’s access to contraceptive care is fundamentally important to ensuring their freedom to participate in society and the in the workforce. Santorum, on the other hand, harshly criticized the Supreme Court’s longstanding decision saying that woman have a constitutional right to use birth control at all. Given that Santorum’s long history of radicalism on women’s health and the Constitution, it’s no surprise that he couldn’t be bothered to check basic facts before mouthing off about what the Obama Administration does and does not believe.

Because a portion of Alabama’s harmful immigration law makes it a felony for undocumented immigrants to enter into a “business transaction” with the state, some public utility companies have interpreted this measure so broadly that they have prevented undocumented immigrants from receiving water or power at their homes. And a library has even required people show proof of citizenship before they can sign up for a library card because of the “business transactions” provision.

Now U.S.-born children with undocumented immigrant parents even have been denied food stamps because of this portion of the anti-immigrant law. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) reports that five people have called the group’s hotline to report that they were denied food stamps under the law because of their immigration status even though the benefits are for their American citizen children. SPLC President Richard Cohen said the civil rights group is considering suing the state over the denial of food stamps because of the “business transactions” portion in HB 56. Barry Spear, a spokesman for Alabama’s Department of Human Services, told Yahoo News that demanding proof of citizenship from the guardians of Americans who need food stamps is not the agency’s policy. “We are unaware of any violations of the policy,” Spear said.

But last month, Kansas changed its food aid program to deny benefits to children who are citizens if their parents are undocumented, removing more than 1,000 mixed families. “This policy not only hurts these families, it hurts us, too, especially because we’re talking about U.S. citizen children,” said Elena Morales, who works at El Center, an anti-poverty agency in Kansas City.

In the U.S., roughly 4.5 million American citizens under 18 years old have at least one undocumented parent, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. So while undocumented immigrants cannot access most welfare programs, their children are still able to access the programs as citizens. Policies like the one in Kansas and the interpretation of Alabama’s immigration law only serves to harm these American citizens who, through no fault of their own, happen to have undocumented parents.