In an exchange that seems designed to prove why fewer Americans approve of Congress than approve of communism or the BP oil spill, Senate Leaders Harry Reid (D-NV) and Mitch McConnell (R-KY) engaged in a long debate this morning over why Reid is currently trying to break seventeen filibusters of President Obama’s judicial nominees. The exchange culminated with McConnell admitting that, even though all these judges will be confirmed eventually, he is blocking them now because he is upset that Reid’s making him look bad:

REID: I’ve got a great idea. My friend the Republican Leader said these judges are all going to get approved anyway, so I’ve got an idea. Let’s go to this IPO bill immediately after finishing the highway bill, with the agreement that we’ll dispose of these judges immediately after that. . . .

McCONNELL: It is highly unlikely any of these district judges are not going to be confirmed. We’ve done a number of them this year. We’ve done seven this year. District judges are almost never defeated. This is just a very transparent attempt to try to slam dunk the minority and make them look like they are obstructing things they aren’t obstructing. We object to that. We don’t think that meets the standard of civility that should be expected in the Senate. And, so, any effort to make the minority look bad or attempt to slam dunk them that is sort of manufactured as this is is gonna, of course, be greeted with resistance.

Watch it:

Let’s explain what’s going on here. Both Reid and McConnell agree that there is nothing objectionable about these judges — in McConnell’s words, “it is highly unlikely any of these district judges are not going to be confirmed.” Additionally, both men agree that the Senate should vote on the “IPO bill” that Reid refers to, a bill dealing with investments in small businesses that recently passed the House. Initially, Reid wanted to vote on the seventeen judges awaiting confirmation before moving on to the IPO bill, but he even concedes this point — saying that he is willing to “go to this IPO bill” first as McConnell prefers.

And then McConnell says this deal is unacceptable because Reid “ma[de] the minority look bad.”

If this is truly McConnell’s reason for blocking these judges, then he just made an absolutely shocking admission. Thanks to excessive judicial vacancies, America’s courts are increasingly unable to function. In some courts, judges are so overburdened they have to rush major felony cases through as if they involved minor traffic violations. In one court, felony caseloads nearly doubled in just two years. Every court that is unable to handle its caseload means wrongly fired workers waiting months or years for justice and businesses that must delay making new hires until they are sure they won’t be hit with an unwarranted legal judgment. And yet McConnell says he is willing to punish all of these workers and businesses because he is upset that Reid has made him look bad. America can ill afford this kind of tantrum.

This morning, The New York Times published an article outlining the Catholic Church’s apparent new strategy for dealing with lawsuits brought by the victims of sexual assault. Namely, filing legal actions designed to cripple organizations that support victims of pedophile priests.

The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, or SNAP, is the target of one such suit. The church is asking a court to force SNAP to turn over 20 years worth of email correspondence between the group and victims, journalists and whistle-blowers, a demand that SNAP officials say would cripple their ability to continue supporting victims of sexual assault.

The church would not comment to the New York Times citing a judge’s order, but radical conservative Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, had plenty of words for victims and their supporters:

“[Donohue] said targeting the network was justified because “SNAP is a menace to the Catholic Church.” …

He said bishops were also rethinking their approach of paying large settlements to groups of victims. “The church has been too quick to write a check, and I think they’ve realized it would be a lot less expensive in the long run if we fought them one by one,” Mr. Donohue said.

Donohue was one of the most vocal defenders of the Catholic Church during the height of the church’s pedophile scandal in the early 2000s, and more egregiously, he remains one of the only people to publicly attack the victims and their supporters. During a radio interview in 2009, Donohue downplayed the charges being leveled by victims because “almost everybody who was abused wasn’t raped.” He also dismissed complaints of priests kissing and engaging in “inappropriate sexual talk” to minors as a non-issue, saying that he “think[s] a lot of these people are gold diggers looking to get money from the Catholic Church.”

Donohue’s outrageous remarks are not limited to defending pedophiles either. As ThinkProgress has noted, he has delivered equally offensive remarks about gay couples after New York passed marriage equality and has said that homosexuality is connected to the abuse of minors.

Yesterday, South Dakota Gov. Dennis Daugaard (R) signed an unconstitutional law that purports to target courts applying religious law, but which is almost certainly part of a broader push by Islamophobic advocates to fight the imaginary problem of courts substituting Islamic law for American law. The brief bill Daugaard signed provides simply that “[n]o court, administrative agency, or other governmental agency may enforce any provisions of any religious code.”

Although this bill does not specifically call out any particular religion for ill treatment, it violates the Free Exercise Clause of the Constitution. As the Supreme Court explained in Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye v. Hialeah, “the protections of the Free Exercise Clause pertain if the law at issue discriminates against some or all religious beliefs or regulates or prohibits conduct because it is undertaken for religious reasons.”

While it is uncommon for American courts to apply religious law, it is not unheard of. Private parties sometimes enter into contracts where they agree to resolve their disputes under something other than U.S. law, and individuals sometimes write wills devising their property according to the tenets of their faith. Under the bill Daugaard signed, however, courts will be allowed to enforce contracts requiring disputes to be resolved under French law or ancient Roman law or under the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons second edition rules, but they won’t be allowed to enforce contracts requiring disputes to be resolved under the requirements of someone’s religious beliefs. This is discrimination “against some or all religious beliefs,” and is therefore unconstitutional.

Yesterday, Judge Richard Niess became the second Wisconsin state judge to strike down that state’s Voter ID law as inconsistent with the Wisconsin Constitution. Like a previous decision striking down the voter disenfranchising law, Niess held that the Voter ID restriction cannot be squared with the state constitution’s command that “[e]very United States citizen age 18 or older who is a resident of an election district in this state is a qualified elector of that district,” regardless of whether or not they have an ID.

Because the state constitution is unambiguous on this point, that really should be the end of the discussion. Unfortunately, however, Wisconsin also has a notoriously conservative majority on its state supreme court that may be more interested in helping Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) disenfranchise liberal voters than it is in following the clear command of their state’s constitution. According to Niess, however, upholding this illegal law could only be done if the Wisconsin justices are willing to overrule more than a century of precedent. His opinion relies heavily on an 1880 decision that leaves no doubt that voter disenfranchisement of this kind is not allowed:

The elector possessing the qualifications prescribed by the constitution is invested with the constitutional right to vote at any election in this state. These qualifications are explicit, exclusive, and unqualified by any exceptions, provisos or conditions, and the constitution, either directly or by implication, confers no authority upon the legislature to change, impair, add to or abridge them in any respect.

Unfortunately for the voters of Wisconsin, of course, conservatives have shown little affection for precedent in recent years. The case against the Affordable Care Act requires the Supreme Court to overrule nearly 200 years of established precedent.

Independent expenditure-only “super PAC” committees have accounted for a stunning 91 percent of the television campaign advertising over the past month in Alabama and Mississippi — the two states holding their Republican primaries today. But while the more than $75 million already spent nationally by these groups has undoubtedly altered the dynamics of the presidential race, it has also annoyed the vast majority of Americans.

A new Washington Post-ABC poll shows that nearly 7 out of 10 adults don’t just dislike super PACs — groups that can accept unlimited individual and corporate donations to run ads to support or oppose political candidates; they want to see them to be banned entirely.

The survey question was:

Organizations known as Super-PACS can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money on behalf of candidates they support. (Supporters say this is a form of free speech) while (opponents say this allows groups or wealthy individuals to have unfair influence.) Do you think it should be legal or illegal for these Super-PACS to operate?

A whopping 69 percent of the more than 1,000 respondents said they believe it should be illegal for super PACs to operate. And 52 percent of those polled said they strongly support a ban. Just 25 percent said they believe super PACs should be allowed to operate in the U.S.
Even 55 percent of Republicans want an end to super PACs.

Super PACs became legal in 2010 after an appellate court ruling in the Speechnow.org v. FEC case. This ruling was, in large part, based on the U.S. Supreme Court’s controversial ruling earlier that year in the Citizens United v. FEC case. Under the court rulings, Congress could not simply ban super PAC’s legislatively.

With a Montana campaign finance law currently under judicial review, the Supreme Court has a chance to correct its mistake and overturn these rulings.

Last month, federal court of appeals Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, an influential conservative who has one of President George W. Bush’s five finalists for the Supreme Court nomination that eventually went to Chief Justice Roberts, published a book calling the lawsuit against the Affordable Care Act a “heavy judicial lift.” In a rare op-ed by a sitting federal judge, Wilkinson went even further yesterday, warning that the attempts to strike down the ACA could have disastrous consequences:

In curbing federal excess, courts risk lessening our national economic strength. That strength resides partly in the national aspects of our founding document, among them the now maligned commerce clause and the newly mistrusted supremacy clause, which gives preference to federal over state law when there is a conflict. States’ rights are important in many spheres, but the benefits of a national economic policy must also be considered. A vibrant economic order requires some political predictability, and the prospect of judges’ striking down commercial regulation on ill-defined and subjective bases is a prescription for economic chaos that the framers, in a simpler time, had the good sense to head off.

It is tempting to shout states’ rights when deeply flawed federal legislation is enacted, but the momentary satisfactions of that exercise carry long-term constitutional costs. Badly conceived bills die a thousand political deaths — in the appropriations process, in the states, through electoral retribution, in the executive appointments of a succeeding administration and ultimately in amendment and repeal. However, if courts read the Constitution in such a way that it enables them to make Congress ineffectual, and instead to promote 50 state regulatory regimes in an era of rapidly mounting global challenges, the risks should escape no one. Making our charter more parochial while other nations flex their economic muscle seems like poor timing.

Wilkinson is right to invoke the framers in defending the Affordable Care Act, because they embraced his very views at the Constitutional Convention that created our founding document. Before the framers drafted the Constitution itself, they adopted several resolutions intended to guide this drafting process. One of those resolutions, Resolution VI, established that the federal government must have authority over all problems that are national in character. In the framers’ words, the United States must be able to “legislate in all cases for the general interests of the Union and also in those to which the States are separately incompetent.”

More than two centuries later, Wilkinson’s fellow conservative Judge Laurence Silberman would echo the framers’ views in his own opinion upholding the Affordable Care Act: “The right to be free from federal regulation is not absolute, and yields to the imperative that Congress be free to forge national solutions to national problems, no matter how local—or seemingly passive— their individual origins.”