In the wake of this week’s deal where Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) agreed to stop obstructing 14 of President Obama’s judicial nominees and allow them to be confirmed by early May, Al Kamen runs the numbers on how President Obama’s confirmation rate compares to the rate of confirmations under Presidents Bush and Clinton:

After the Senate acts on the 14 agreed-upon judges, there are eight more already teed up for a full Senate vote. An additional eight are in the Senate Judiciary Committee pipeline. And that panel’s chairman, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), says he’ll begin work on 11 more judges in the next few weeks.

That’s a total of 41 potentially approved judges.

If the Senate does, in fact, approve them all, Obama’s number of confirmed judges will stand at 172.

To put that in perspective, by the end of May in their respective first terms, George W. Bush had 175 judges approved, and Bill Clinton had 183.

In other words, even if the Senate were to confirm every single one of Obama’s pending nominees before the end of May — a tall order in the hyper-obstructionist era of Mitch McConnell — the president would still lag three judges behind his immediate predecessor. But, of course, there is no deal currently in place to confirm more than 14 of these nominees, which means the Obama Administration is now on track to be 30 judges behind President Bush absent additional confirmations.

The Mississippi House passed an anti-immigrant bill on Thursday, putting the state one step closer to having a controversial, Alabama-style immigration policy. Gov. Phil Bryant (R) has endorsed this measure to deal with what he calls the nation’s “massive, uncontrolled” immigration policy,” and will likely sign it if the Senate passes it as well.

Lawmakers took out several controversial provisions before approving the bill 70-47, including one that required schools collect data on a new student’s immigration status and another that allowed officers to ask a person’s immigration status during a traffic stop. After HB 488 had failed at first, a Republican took out a provision that could have let public utilities refuse service to undocumented immigrants — a federal judge recently blocked the same policy in Alabama — so that legislators would approve it. And before debate had started, they stripped a clause that would have allowed police to arrest people for not carrying identification. But the changes were not enough for opponents of the bill, no matter how many times supporters insisted it was a good measure:

House Judiciary B Committee Chairman Andy Gipson, a Braxton Republican, denied opponents’ claims that the measure was racist or immoral, saying it was about enforcing the law. Gipson said he tried to craft a bill that would survive court challenges and allow charity toward migrants.

“It’s about the rule of law,” he told House members. “We want to say you’re welcome here, we just want you to follow the proper procedures, the proper protocols.”

Opponents warned families would be shattered by deportations and that the bill would reinforce outsiders’ stereotypes of Mississippi.

“If we pass this bill, it will set Mississippi back 60 years,” said Rep. Sonya Williams-Barnes, D-Gulfport. “Let us show America we are not the narrow-minded people they say we are.”

Williams-Barnes is right. No matter how many tweaks legislators make, this is still a bad, discriminatory policy that unfairly targets immigrants. Taking out the absolute worst provisions does not change the fact that this bill is designed to make the lives of undocumented immigrants unbearable in Mississippi so that they’ll leave. The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Becky Currie (R), has said the goal of the immigration policy is to ensure that all workers are legal, but she clearly has not learned from Alabama’s mistake.

By making the state hostile to immigrants, Alabama is facing billions in economic losses and thousands of jobs gone. Farmers lost their crops without enough workers, and families have suffered greatly.

If the Mississippi Senate does not pass this immigration bill, then the state has a chance to avoid Alabama’s fate. Because as one immigration advocate asked, “Can Mississippi afford such a law?” The state should not have to learn the answer.

In an article that would appear to be a poorly-executed parody of Texas Senate candidate Ted Cruz’s (R) right-wing beliefs it Cruz had not posted it on his own website, the Tea Party stalwart touts a truly ridiculous conspiracy theory about George Soros secretly partnering with the United Nations to come into our cities and eliminate our right to play golf:

In 1992, the United Nations adopted Agenda 21 to “achieve a more efficient and equitable world economy,” outlining a process to eliminate environmental decay and social injustice through micromanaging industries, communities, and culture. They will meet again next year to discuss its “progress” in over 100 nations.

The originator of this grand scheme is George Soros, who candidly supports socialism and believes that global development must progress through eliminating national sovereignty and private property. He has given millions to this project. But he is not the only one promoting this plan; in fact, the International Council of Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI) now consists of over 600 cities in the United States.

Agenda 21 attempts to abolish “unsustainable” environments, including golf courses, grazing pastures, and paved roads. It hopes to leave mother earth’s surface unscratched by mankind. . . . Agenda 21 subverts liberty, our property rights, and our sovereignty.

In reality, Agenda 21 is a twenty year-old non-binding resolution which speaks largely at a very high level of generality about reducing poverty and building sustainable living environments. The United States is one of 178 nations that signed onto this non-binding agenda — and we did so during the Bush Administration. So if Agenda 21 actually were a nefarious Soros plot to destroy paved roads and take away our sacred right to golf courses, it has worked very badly. Two decades after Agenda 21 was produced, Ted Cruz himself is still allowed to sell golf shirts on his website with minimal intrusion from UN peacekeepers.

Sadly, however, Cruz’s conspiracy mongering about George Soros’ war on Tiger Woods is par for Cruz’s course. When Cruz isn’t inventing fantasies about international plots to turn fairways into rough, he invents unconstitutional proposals to nullify federal laws or calls for a radical rereading of the Constitution that would lead to Medicaid and most federal education programs being declared unconstitutional.

There’s no word, however, on whether Cruz believes that the Constitution provides all of us with an inalienable right to play eighteen holes at Pebble Beach.

Arizona’s county sherriff’s are not exactly known for setting the standard for effective law enforcement and loyalty to the Constitution — indeed, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio is currently under federal investigation for widespread mistreatment of Latinos and other violations of the law. Nevertheless, an Arizona senate committee just approved a unconstitutional bill which would require federal law enforcement officers to provide advance notice to Arpaio and his fellow sheriffs before taking action in their counties:

A Senate panel voted Thursday to fire a warning shot of sorts over the heads of federal law enforcement agencies: Don’t come around here unless you get local OK.

The legislation, crafted by Rep. David Gowan, R-Sierra Vista, would require employees of those agencies to first notify the sheriff of the county “before taking any official law enforcement action in a county in this state.”

The only exception would be if the notification would impede the federal officer’s duties. But even then, HB 2434 has a requirement to notify the sheriff “as soon as practicable after taking the action.”

The Constitution simply does not allow states to order federal officials to do anything. Under our Constitution, federal law is “the supreme law of the land,” so when Congress enacts an otherwise valid federal law and empowers federal officers to enforce it, the states have no power whatsoever to limit that enforcement or place conditions on it.

Disturbingly, the bill may also be connected to a radical anti-government group known as the “Oath Keepers.” The Oath Keepers is a right-wing group that pushes local law enforcement to pledge to defy federal “orders” the Oath Keepers believe are unconstitutional. Their website is riddled with paranoid rhetoric about government officials “disarm[ing] the American people,” “confiscat[ing] the property of the American people, including food and other essential supplies,” and “blockad[ing] American cities, thus turning them into giant concentration camps.” In early 2008, the Oath Keepers’ founder warned that a “dominatrix-in-chief” named “Hitlery Clinton” would impose a police state on America and shoot all resisters. After Democratic primary voters chose President Obama over Clinton, the Oath Keepers simply rewrote their paranoid fantasy to include a taller, African-American lead. Rep. Gowan, the lead sponsor of this bill, is listed as a member of the Tucson Oath Keepers on their Meetup page.

So, while merely notifying local law enforcement of federal actions may seem like a minor imposition, the bill makes sense in the context of a broader Oath Keeper agenda, because it gives local sherriffs advance notice of which federal actions they wish to defy.

Earlier this year, Texas Lt. Gov. and Senate candidate David Dewhurst (R) told ThinkProgress that he thinks that it is unconstitutional for the Department of Justice to enforce the Voting Rights Act by preventing Texas’ racially discriminatory Voter ID law from taking effect. At a forum featuring Dewhurst’s fellow GOP candidates last night, the Republicans would-be senators lined up to join Dewhurst’s opposition to this landmark law

It’s time to do away with the nearly 50-year-old federal rule that let U.S. officials block a new state law requiring Texans to show photo ID to vote.

That’s what Republicans candidates running to replace Kay Bailey Hutchison in the U.S. Senate said during a forum Thursday night.

They called for repeal of the Voting Rights Act provision that requires Texas and other Southern states with histories of discrimination to receive pre-clearance when changing election laws.

“Right now, Texas is subjected to different standards than much of the country,” former Texas Solicitor General Ted Cruz said during the forum, hosted by the Dallas Bar Association. “I think we need to be fighting to ensure the law is colorblind and fair to everyone.”

It’s a strange definition of “fair to everyone” that says we should allow laws that enable a state to systematically disenfranchise minority voters. DOJ recently blocked Texas’ illegal Voter ID law because, like all Voter ID laws, it disproportionately disenfranchises minority voters. As DOJ determined, “a Hispanic registered voter is at least 46.5 percent, and potentially 120.0 percent, more likely than a non-Hispanic registered voter to lack” the identification required to vote under Texas’ law.

The GOP candidates’ lockstep opposition to voting rights comes at the same time that the state’s Republican leadership argued that the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional in a federal court in DC. Significantly, the Voting Rights Act was last reauthorized in 2006, after it passed the House 390-33 and the Senate 98-0 and was signed into law by President George W. Bush.