Texas federal Judge Fred Biery is a key villain in GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich’s narrative about why federal judges are out of control and must be intimidated into submission. Gingrich routinely cites a previous decision by Biery holding that the Constitution does not permit a public school district to sponsor a student-led prayer at graduation to justify eliminating courts that displease Gingrich.

Fortunately, the actual parties to this lawsuit were not nearly as unreasonable as Mr. Gingrich, and they eventually agreed to settle the case after mediation. In his order approving the settlement, Biery includes an unusual “personal statement” directed at the many lawmakers who, like Gingrich, have painted him as some kind of enemy of religion:

To the United States Marshal Service and local police who have provided heightened security: Thank you.

To those Christians who have venomously and vomitously cursed the Court family and threatened bodily harm and assassination: In His name, I forgive you.

To those who have prayed for my death: Your prayers will someday be answered, as inevitably trumps probability.

To those in the executive and legislative branches of government who have demagogued this case for their own political goals: You should be ashamed of yourselves.

Biery also includes a clever dig and the many Christian right groups that have attacked him: “Any American can pray, silently or verbally, seven days a week, twenty four hours a day, in private as Jesus taught or in large public events as Mohammed instructed.”

At this weekend’s Conservative Political Action Conference, Sens. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Marco Rubio (R-FL) suggested that everything that went wrong during the first two years of President Obama’s term must be laid at his feet because Obama “got everything he wanted” from Congress while both houses were controlled by Democrats. As a new ThinkProgress video demonstrates, this exact phrase has clearly become the centerpiece of the GOP’s messaging this election cycle. Watch it:

As the video also reminds these Republicans, however, there’s one giant problem with their talking point — the Senate GOP’s unprecedented abuse of the filibuster. Indeed, the number of votes attempting to break Sen. McConnell’s use of this tactic more than doubled the minute he took over as minority leader:

The following is the second of a multi-part series by Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor at The American Prospect, on the National Rifle Association’s exaggerated role in American politics.

In the first post in this series on the myth of the National Rifle Association’s power, I took apart the myth of the influence of NRA spending on congressional elections. In today’s installment, I will address the question of the NRA endorsement, something sought by not only Republicans but many Democrats as well. The organization’s stamp of approval, it is believed, not only sends a clear message to Americans who own guns, but brings with it indispensable grassroots organizing muscle that can make all the difference in House and Senate races.

The NRA endorsement, however, is seldom examined in anything resembling a systematic way. When we do so, we find that like the alleged power of the NRA’s money, the power of the NRA’s endorsement is largely a myth. There are some kinds of races where the endorsement might make a small difference, but these are only a tiny fraction of all the endorsements the group makes.

There are a few critical things to understand about NRA endorsements. First, they are overwhelmingly given to Republicans, as one might expect. But just as important, they are overwhelmingly given to incumbents. Over the last four elections, 86 percent of NRA House endorsements went to incumbents. In fact, not a single Democratic challenger won the group’s endorsement (though some certainly tried). And if you’re a Republican incumbent, the endorsement is almost guaranteed: 90 percent of GOP House incumbents got the endorsement in 2004, 91 percent in 2006, 96 percent in 2008, and 97 percent in 2010.

So contrary to what one might expect, the NRA endorsement isn’t delivered as a saving grace to a candidate struggling in a tough race. Instead, the typical NRA endorsee is a Republican incumbent from a strongly conservative district strolling to an easy victory. Over these four elections, 82 percent of NRA endorsees won their races by 10 points or more, and 62 percent won their races by 20 points or more. In other words, the NRA endorsement is mostly a reward for past service. In fact, in these four elections, the NRA endorsed a total of 106 House candidates who ran unopposed, and even donated money to 96 candidates with no opponent.

That isn’t to say an NRA endorsement can never have a positive impact on a candidate’s fortunes. But when I performed a series of regression analyses on these data to try to find such an impact, the results showed that an NRA endorsement has a significant effect in only a narrow sliver of races.

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Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, the anti-immigrant official who drafted Arizona and Alabama’s harmful immigration laws, has claimed his extreme laws have had no damaging effects on state economies where they have been implemented. He is an advisor to presidential candidate Mitt Romney, the GOP presidential candidate with the most extreme immigration plan, and Kobach has said he favors an “attrition through enforcement” national immigration plan, also known as self-deportation.

Kobach repeated his support for a self-deportation policy at a CPAC panel about immigration because it would serve as a jobs plan. To back up the claim, he said the immigration measures in Alabama and Arizona have helped the state economies. With 13 million Americans looking for jobs, Kobach said during the panel that deporting undocumented immigrants would open opportunities for those job seekers:

If it becomes our national policy we will accomplish many things, the restoration of the rule of law, and we will also create jobs for Americans all across America. [...] If you really want to create a job and you don’t want to use words like shovel-ready and do it through a gov program, here’s an idea for you: If you want to create a job for a U.S. citizen tomorrow, deport an illegal alien today.

Watch Kobach’s comments (the very last line):

Of course, if Kobach were actually paying attention to the effects of his pet laws, he’d realize this claim simply isn’t true. In Alabama, one report shows that the state could lose as many as 140,000 jobs because of the state’s immigration law. After Latinos fled new, harmful immigration policies in Alabama and Georgia, farmers watched their crops rot in the field because they did not have enough workers to harvest them. Businesses in Arizona eventually turned against SB 1070, the state’s extreme immigration policy, because of the negative impact it had on jobs and the recovering economy.

And economists have reached the consensus that immigrants are good for the economy and help create jobs. And in 2010, the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank released a study that conclusively found that “there is no evidence that these effects take place at the expense of jobs for workers born in the United States.” The study, which did not distinguish between legal and undocumented immigrants, found that immigrants in the workforce have a “significant positive effect in the long run.”

No matter how many times Kobach claims self-deportation will create jobs — or how long Romney embraces extremely anti-immigrant policies — reports have show that his claims are simply wrong.

A new bill in Arizona is seeking to impose harsh restrictions on teachers’ conduct, even in their own homes. The bill, SB 1467, states that educators at the state’s public schools and universities can be fined, suspended and ultimately fired if they “engage in speech or conduct that would violate the standards adopted by the Federal Communications Commission concerning obscenity, indecency and profanity if that speech or conduct were broadcast on television or radio.”

That does a great deal to limit what can be taught in classrooms. Banning books is certainly not a new practice, but this law would cover far more than controversial books. Here’s a look at some of the key books that would be outlawed in Arizona classrooms:

Worse, as Angus Johnston notes, the bill is so ineptly drafted that it could intrude deeply into teacher’s private lives. SB 1467 doesn’t just ban public speech or conduct, but all speech and conduct. That means public school teachers in Arizona will be forbidden from engaging in any FCC-regulated activities no matter where they are. That means no sex, no going to the bathroom, no cursing and no showering. Ever.

One of the bill’s five sponsors, State Senator Lori Klein (R-AZ), has some experience in the national spotlight. Last summer she raised eyebrows when, during an interview with a reporter from the Arizona Republic, she took out a loaded handgun and pointed it at the reporter’s chest. And in the middle of Herman Cain’s sexual harassment scandal, Klein dismissed the allegations against Cain because he had “never been anything but a gentlemen” to her, “and I am not an unattractive woman.”

Last month, a bill intended to combat the nearly non-existent problem of courts citing Sharia law was cruising to passage in the Virginia House of Delegates. For the moment, however, the bill appears to be dead after numerous business groups stepped forward to oppose it:

One bill, HB825 from Republican Del. Bob Marshall of Prince William County, would have prohibited judges and state administrators from using any legal code established outside the United States to make decisions. [...]

But when legislators started hearing from business groups concerned about how the proposal could affect their dealings abroad and foreign companies located here, they sent the bill back to committee.

“I had some business concerns,” said Del. Terry Kilgore, R-Scott County, after making the motion Thursday to kick back the bill. “It’s just something that needs some work.”

It’s unfortunate, if far from unexpected, that similar protests from religious groups, both Islamic and otherwise, were not enough to kill the bill. Nevertheless, the emergence of business opposition to these sorts of bills is a very important development.

The first wave of anti-Islamic bills introduced in state legislatures specifically named “Sharia” or Islamic law as off limits to state court judges. Such laws are unambiguously unconstitutional, as the First Amendment forbids any law that exists for the sole purpose of lashing out at a particular faith. Del. Marshall’s bill short circuits this constitutional limit because it does not expressly call out something unique to a particular faith. Instead, it paints with a broad brush by forbidding citations to any legal code that’s not established in the United States.

The problem with this tactic, however, is that there are all kinds of legitimate reasons why a judge may need to rely on foreign legal sources in order to render a decision. Most significantly, contracts between U.S. and foreign companies frequently require any disputes between them to be resolved under a foreign nation’s law. Needless to say, business don’t like it when lawmakers take away an important tool that they need to conduct international business just to push back against some baseless fantasy about judges lining up to replace the Constitution with Islamic law.

So the punchline is that anti-Islamic lawmakers are now in a bind. They can either push a narrow law targeting Islam, and have that law be struck down in the courts, or they can broaden the law, and wind up pushing something with spillover effects that will greatly annoy powerful interest groups.

Or, alternatively, they could simply abandon their anti-Islamic crusade altogether, and devote their attention solving problems that actually exist.