Previously, the Eleventh Circuit court of appeals blocked several parts of Alabama’s immigration law, including a provision requiring teachers or principals to determine the immigration status of their students. Today, a Federal appeals court blocked two more sections of the law, known as H.B. 56:

A federal appeals court on Thursday temporarily blocked two sections of Alabama’s tough new law targeting illegal immigration pending the outcome of legal challenges.

The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued an order blocking a section that says courts can’t enforce contracts involving illegal immigrants and another that makes it a felony for an illegal immigrant to do business with the state.

Alabama’s law was challenged last year by both the federal government and a coalition of activist groups, and the cases have been appealed to the 11th Circuit. A three-judge panel in that court heard arguments in the case last week but said it won’t rule on the challenges to Alabama’s law and another in Georgia until the U.S. Supreme Court rules on a federal challenge to a similar law in Arizona.

As defined in Alabama’s law, denial of business transactions with undocumented immigrants meant that families could not get water in their homes, and they were not even allowed to do something as simple as get a library card. Even children who were U.S. citizens were unable to get food stamps,

The same provisions could have made it so that it would have been illegal to rent to an undocumented immigrant. No other state or nation has a ban like Alabama’s against contracts.

In an interview with the AP, Sam Brooke from the Southern Poverty Law Center, who argued before the court last week, said “We are very pleased that the Eleventh Circuit understood the harms these provisions were causing in Alabama, and saw fit to enjoin them… This is a great day for the residents of our state.”

The order handed down today, which can be read in full here, is more wide-reaching than any previous court decision. And while Alabama has considered new legislation that would change H.B. 56, none has made it very far.

The Governor of Alabama, Robert Bentley, has already acknowledged that the law “need[ed] revision.” But ThinkProgress has argued that the law should be repealed. This ruling proves even more how important repeal is.

With the number of states requiring photo identification in order to vote multiplying rapidly — just two states required it in 2008; now, seven states have passed voter ID bills — some members of Congress are beginning to explore how they can help protect voting rights, particularly for minorities and poorer voters, from reactionary state legislatures.

This month, Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) introduced H.R. 4126, or the Voter ID Accessibility Act of 2012. If enacted, it would at least mitigate the loss of voting rights that will occur in November when millions of Americans who lack photo identification realize they will no longer be permitted to vote. Specifically, the bill would require states with voter ID laws to provide IDs free of charge:

To amend the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 to require each voter registration agency in a State which requires an individual to present a government-issued photo identification as a condition of voting in an election for Federal office to provide such an identification without charge upon request to any such individual who does not otherwise possess one, and for other purposes.

Cohen’s home state of Tennessee is one of the states that passed strict new voter ID bills in 2011. As a result, thousands who are unable to obtain photo IDs have been or will be disenfranchised, such as 96-year-old Tennessee resident Dorothy Cooper. She said the experience was worse than anything she’d encountered in the Jim Crow era.

Unfortunately, H.R. 4126 would not eliminate the multitude of fees that a citizen must incur prior to obtaining an ID. For instance, most states require certain forms of primary identification in order to receive an ID, such as a birth certificate. This can run as high as $200. For those living in rural areas, it can be difficult and costly to get to the identification agency, especially since they typically lack a driver’s license in the first place. In addition, agencies are generally only open during normal business hours, making the prospect of getting an ID exceedingly difficult for individuals who work during the day.

Still, Cohen’s bill would be a good first step to enforcing the Constitution’s prohibition on poll taxes.

Harvard Professor Derrick Bell (1930 – 2011)

Breitbart.com and Fox News believe that President Obama’s affiliation with the late Harvard professor Derrick Bell, as evidenced from a hug they share in a video from 1990, is some kind of “smoking gun” for his perspectives on “racial division and class warfare.” Bell was the first tenured African-American law professor at Harvard University and helped establish the study of Critical Race Theory (CRT). This morning, Breitbart.com editor Joel Pollak appeared on CNN to repeat this claim, but Soledad O’Brien was quick to point out that he had absolutely no understanding of CRT and that the clip presented no “bombshell” for the President:

O’BRIEN: What part of that was the bombshell? Because I missed it, I don’t get it. What was the bombshell?

POLLACK: Well, the bombshell is the revelation of the relationship between Obama and Derrick Bell—

O’BRIEN: Okay, so he’s a Harvard law student and a Harvard law professor. Yeah?

POLLACK: That’s correct. And Derrick Bell is “the Jeremiah Wright of academia.” He passed away last year, but during his lifetime he developed a theory called Critical Race Theory, which holds that the Civil Rights Movement was a sham and that White Supremacy is the order and it must be overthrown. Barack Obama was—

O’BRIEN: I’ll stop you there for a second and then I’m going to let you continue, but that is a complete misreading of Critical Race Theory. As you know, that’s an actual theory and you could Google it and someone would give you an good definition, so that’s not correct.

Watch it:

Critical race theory does not have an absolute set of principles, but later in the interview O’Brien accurately describes it as a theory that “looks into the intersection of race and politics and the law.” CRT emerged from a broader movement known as critical legal studies, which examines how factors such as race, gender and social class can often skew legal decisions in favor of privileged groups. Critical legal theory is, by definition, critical of how our law has developed and often calls for significant departures from existing law—but its central premise that judges are prone to decide cases in ways that advantage their own social group has certainly been vindicated by cases such as Citizens United.

CRT looks specifically at how race and racial privilege shapes the law. The purpose of CRT isn’t to wage war against white people, as Pollak and others of his anti-liberal ilk would have us believe. Indeed, its entire goal is to ensure that race not be forgotten as a significant factor in the operation of society. The value of this perspective is certainly demonstrated through voter ID laws, immigration policies, and drug enforcement penalties that disproportionately impact non-white populations. Policies that target racial majorities, by contrast, would never become law in the first place because the majority possesses the power to veto them.

The President should be applauded for standing with great minds who do not accept that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 marked an endpoint in the fight for racial equality. It is those who seek to disregard the experiences of all people of color — lest they confront the persisting effects of racial injustice — who should be ashamed.

The Wisconsin GOP has not worn well with that state’s voters. Two GOP senators were removed from office last year in a recall election, and as many as four more could lose their jobs this year — along with the state’s anti-union Gov. Scott Walker (R).

Rather than accept that these mass recalls are a sign that they should abandon their current policies and pursue effort that won’t incur such ire from the electorate, however, the Wisconsin GOP has decided to pursue a very different tactic — changing the rules of the game:

In the face of an expected recall election targeting Gov. Scott Walker and four Republican state senators, the Wisconsin state Assembly voted Tuesday to amend the state constitution to make it more difficult to toss an official from office.

The measure, which still faces major hurdles before taking effect, would allow officeholders to be recalled only if they have been charged with a serious crime or if there is a finding of probable cause that they violated the state code of ethics. [...]

Republican supporters, including the amendment’s sponsor Rep. Robin Vos, R-Caledonia, argued changes are needed to limit recalls given the flurry of such efforts over the past year. Republicans have said Walker and the others are being unfairly targeted simply for doing their job.

For the record, Scott Walker’s job is to serve the very people who have decided that he is doing such a terrible job of it that he needs to be fired immediately.

Normally, we would not let more than 48 hours pass between a major speech by the Attorney General of the United States defending targeted killings of U.S. citizens and our first discussion of this event. The speech Eric Holder gave on this topic Monday, however, does not exactly lend itself to rapid response. It presents one of the most difficult questions in national security policy — how to balance the need to react to threats quickly with the fact that quick action prevents intensive review or preemptive oversight of a commander’s decision to order a strike. And it concerns one of the most ambiguous passages in our Constitution.

Holder’s strongest point is his statement that there are ample precedents for military strikes that “target specific senior operational leaders” of hostile forces. He cites Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the Japanese commander U.S. forces killed in a targeted strike during World War II, and Osama bin Laden as two examples. Ultimately, however, Holder has to confront a more challenging legal question, what if bin Laden had been born in California, and thus was an United States citizen?

In Holder’s analysis, this question turns upon the meaning of the notoriously ambiguous Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment, which ensures that no person is deprived of “life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” The Constitution’s text, however, offers little guidance on just what kind of process is “due” in a particular case. Must a court approve a targeted strike? Or Congress? Should a board of generals be convened? And just what would a review board or judge have to determine before authorizing a strike to move forward?

Holder proposes several questions that could guide this determination. The government would conduct a review to determine that the “individual poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States.” It would determine that “capture is not feasible” and that “the operation would be conducted in a manner consistent with applicable law of war principles.” Holder places the responsibility for determining whether or not these limits have been adequately addressed at the feet of the Executive Branch — and ultimately, the President himself.

As a constitutional matter, this is probably correct. Courts have historically stayed far away from tactical military decisions, and for good reason — judges are neither expert in military affairs nor equipped to review an order to execute a strike before the window of opportunity for an attack passes. Moreover, there’s nothing in the Constitution suggesting that, once Congress has given the president a broad grant to use military force against a particular enemy, that the president must go back to Congress to get new authorization to take actions that fit within the scope of that grant.

At the same time, however, any Post-Bush evaluation of the president’s wartime powers must take account of the problem of John Yoo. If President Obama has the power to authorize targeted strikes without first seeking outside approval, than so too would a less responsible president. Similarly, Yoo himself defended many of the Bush Administration’s most egregious human rights violations on the theory that the power to kill an enemy combatant must also include the power to do what you wish with them. In Yoo’s words, “death is worse than torture, but everyone except pacifists thinks there are circumstances in which war is justified. War means killing people. If we are entitled to kill people, we must be entitled to injure them.” So if the president can kill citizen combatants, why can’t he torture them?

As it turns out, there is a simple answer to this question, and you can find it right in the United States Code:

Whoever outside the United States commits or attempts to commit torture shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both, and if death results to any person from conduct prohibited by this subsection, shall be punished by death or imprisoned for any term of years or for life.

One of the most well established principles in American law — stretching at least as far back as the Supreme Court’s 1804 decision in Little v. Barreme — is that Congress has the power to forbid the president from waging war in certain ways. John Yoo was wrong in no small part because Congress said he was wrong — the president cannot ignore the law, and thus cannot authorize torture.

Ultimately, this may be the only answer for Americans who do not want their president to have the power to target other Americans. Congress may forbid the practice, or require additional review before such attacks may occur. Until they do, however, Holder’s analysis is likely a correct statement of the law.