As ThinkProgress previously reported, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) filed seventeen petitions to break Senate Republican filibusters on as many judges earlier this week. Initially, McConnell reacted to these petitions with an increasingly implausible list of reasons why the Senate could not vote on these nominees right away, before finally admitting that he was opposing the nominees because Reid made Senate Republicans “look bad” by pointing out their obstructionism.

As it turns out, this was not an effective messaging strategy for Mr. McConnell, who has now agreed to allow most of the seventeen judges to move forward:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) announced the agreement on the floor but said they wouldn’t provide any details until they briefed their respective caucuses later in the afternoon. However, aides said the deal will allow Democrats to move 12 district court judges and 2 circuit court judges by May 7.

Now, let’s be clear, this is not a perfect deal. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever why every judge who has cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee could not be confirmed today — and there is certainly no reason why judges who received little if any opposition in committee need to wait as long as May 7. It’s also inexcusable that one of President Obama’s most outstanding nominees, Ninth Circuit nominee Paul Watford, is not on the list of judges being confirmed (a list of the judges is below the jump).

Nevertheless, today’s deal is a massive improvement over the status quo. According to data provided by the Federal Judicial Center, the 112th Congress has confirmed judges at a rate of about 4.75 judges per month. Today’s deal, by contrast, means that fourteen new judges will be confirmed in just two months. This is a significant uptick — even if it is barely enough to make a dent in the 83 currently existing judicial vacancies — and Reid deserves credit for making this happen.

Indeed, there is an important lesson here for Reid and for progressive lawmakers in general. McConnell remains the most obstructionist Senate Leader in recent history, and he has been a constant barrier to ensuring our nation functions effectively from the moment President Obama took office. Nevertheless, we know now that he can be forced to back down. Harry Reid decided to fight this week, and he was rewarded for it. He should remember that fact the next time McConnell stands in the way.
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Arizona has taken up yet another draconian law for women’s health – this time replicating but broadening the federal push to let employers deny women access to birth control. The bill stipulates that, unless a woman brings in a note proving she is not using it to avoid getting pregnant, an employer can deny birth control to any woman in the workplace.

By a vote of 6-2, an Arizona State Senate Judiciary committee yesterday endorsed the measure:

Arizona House Bill 2625, authored by Majority Whip Debbie Lesko, R-Glendale, would permit employers to ask their employees for proof of medical prescription if they seek contraceptives for non-reproductive purposes, such as hormone control or acne treatment.

“I believe we live in America. We don’t live in the Soviet Union,” Lesko said. “So, government should not be telling the organizations or mom and pop employers to do something against their moral beliefs… My whole legislation is about our First Amendment rights and freedom of religion.”

The argument that providing birth control violates the First Amendment is bogus, debunked by a twenty year-old opinion by conservative Supreme Court Justice Scalia.

Needless to say, many women do not feel comfortable turning over their medical records to their employers, even if they do have a condition that qualifies them under Lesko’s proposed law. Especially since, as an at-will employment state, an Arizona employer would likely be able to fire a woman if they saw anything in her gynecological history that he (or, yes, she) didn’t like. But, under the proposed law, a boss could fire the woman if the woman didn’t turn it over, too.

You can read our top five reasons why contraception is important here. Aside from the obvious health benefits that lead some women to use birth control, contraceptive use has helped shrink the gender pay gap; it even benefits the economy as a whole.

In 2003, a panel of Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore’s fellow judges unanimously removed him from office due to his repeated refusal to comply with a federal court order requiring him to remove a giant Ten Commandments monument that he installed in the state’s judicial building. At the time, Moore’s removal by his own peers in a very conservative state’s judiciary was viewed as the end of his judicial career. As it turns out, that’s not likely to be true:

Roy Moore said about 2 a.m. Wednesday that even though he had not been declared the winner of the Republican primary for chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court that he expected to win without a runoff. … Moore was well ahead of former Alabama Attorney General Charlie Graddick and current Chief Justice Chuck Malone. He needed more than 50 percent of the vote to avoid a runoff.

With more than 98 percent of precincts reporting at about 2:15 a.m., Moore was hovering about 4,600 votes ahead of the 50 percent level he needed.

It’s important to understand why Moore’s decision to install his monument in a state courthouse was such a flagrant violation of the Constitution. Courts exist for the sole purpose of delivering equal justice under law. Yet, when the government endorses a particular religious view, it, in Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s words, “sends a message to nonadherents that they are outsiders, not full members of the political community, and an accompanying message to adherents that they are insiders, favored members of the political community.” It’s difficult to imagine any message that is less appropriate for a judge to send than the message that some Americans are more favored than others.

More importantly, however one feels about the Constitution’s wall of separation between church and state, a judge’s first loyalty must always be to the law itself. Moore disagreed with the court order requiring him to remove his monument, and that is his right, but his decision to openly defy a court order was not just wrong, it was standing-in-the-schoolhouse-door wrong. Moore’s actions were lawless, plain and simple, and when a judge is defies the law in such a blatant and fragrant way, he sends a clear message that the law itself is irrelevant within the confines of his judicial chambers. America can ill-afford judges who place their own whims ahead of the law itself.

This is why Moore’s resurrection is such a sad commentary on the state of our nation’s respect for the rule of law. When Moore lost his job nearly a decade ago, it reflected a national consensus that there were some things that judges simply could not do. Moore can speak out for his position. He can advocate to change the law, but no judge is permitted to openly flout the law. The consensus in 2003 demonstrated that liberals and conservatives stood together in reaffirming this basic understanding of how a nation of laws must function.

Today, however, this consensus has broken down. The case against the Affordable Care Act has, in conservative Judge Laurence Silberman’s words, no basis “in either the text of the Constitution or Supreme Court precedent.” And yet Republicans almost unanimously demand that the Supreme Court cast aside our founding document and nearly 200 years of precedent in order to invalidate this law that they disapprove of. When Republicans disagreed with the Obama’s Administration’s contraceptive access rules, they were not willing to simply make their case to the voters. Instead, they dreamed up an utterly meritless constitutional challenge to the rules that was rejected by conservative Justice Antonin Scalia more than two decades ago. Tea Party lawmakers who disagree with Social Security, Medicare, the minimum wage or the national ban on whites-only lunch counters tout long-discredited arguments that these laws are unconstitutional.

In other words, contrary to the perception that Moore was a universally discredited rogue in 2003, it is now clear that he was a harbinger. Moore’s brand of lawlessness — his belief that judges can enforce the constitution they wish we had instead of the Constitution we actually have — now dominates the Republican Party. Roy Moore is not an Alabama problem; he is an American problem.

An athletic association of private and parochial schools in Texas declined membership to a Muslim school after asking it to fill out a questionnaire featuring probing questions about the school’s views “about the spread of Islam in America” and its “goals in this regard,” as well as other incendiary questions about Islamic religion. The questionnaire is the latest issue to arise for the Texas Association of Private and Parochial Schools (Tapps), which was founded in the 1970s as an athletic organization of private Christian schools and now has more than 200 members, including private Jewish schools.

Tapps drew national attention last week when it declined to reschedule a game in its state boys’ basketball tournament for an Orthodox Jewish school, whose players could not play in the Saturday afternoon game because its players celebrate the Sabbath. The game was ultimately rescheduled, but the attention raised awareness about the organization’s past practices regarding Muslim schools that applied for membership, including Houston’s Iman Academy SW, which received a questionnaire along with its membership application that included the following questions, the New York Times reports:

“Historically, there is nothing in the Koran that fully embraces Christianity or Judaism in the way a Christian and/or a Jew understands his religion. Why, then, are you interested in joining an association whose basic beliefs your religion condemns?”

“It is our understanding that the Koran tells you not to mix with (and even eliminate) the infidels. Christians and Jews fall into that category. Why do you wish to join an organization whose membership is in disagreement with your religious beliefs?”

“How does your school address certain Christian concepts? (i.e. celebrating Christmas)”

The questionnaire sent to Iman Academy SW, one of three Muslim schools to receive it, also asked, “When was the Bible allegedly polluted? Does the Koran actually state that the Bible is polluted?” Unlike the other two schools, Iman Academy responded to the questionnaire but was denied membership to Tapps. “We didn’t see how it had anything to do with Tapps or our kids and sports,” Cindy Steffens, an administrator with Iman Academy SW, told the Times.

In addition to the questionnaire, Tapps also surveyed its member schools about the inclusion of Muslim schools and found that 63 percent of the 83 respondents opposed their membership. Ten schools said they would leave Tapps if the Islamic schools were allowed. Keystone School, a multi-denominational private school in San Antonio, was the only school that threatened to leave Tapps if Iman Academy was denied membership, but has since decided to stay to try to “effect change in the situation.”

The Council on American-Islamic Relations has called on Tapps to change its policy, while state Sen. Randy Ellis (D) is considering taking legislative action to prevent similar situations in the future.