In a move that bucks the trend of many of his conservative colleagues, far-right Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX) came out today in support of protecting undocumented immigrants from domestic violence. During the House Judiciary Committee mark up of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), Poe offered an amendment to ensure that undocumented people would be protected under the bill — much like the amendments added by the Senate Democrats in their reauthorization of VAWA.

Though his provisions do not go far enough, or match Democratic efforts to protect the undocumented, they may build support among Republicans, who are hoping to pass a version of VAWA that violates the confidentiality of undocumented people.

Poe, generally not a fan of the undocumented community in his home state, argued that protections for undocumented victims are necessary and humane:

POE: The concept and the law of VAWA is good public policy. It is also good public policy that we understand that in immigrant communities there is a lawless element that preys on immigrants, sometimes that lawless element is also immigrants– immigrant gangs in some instances. And they use intimidation and fear tactics and one they use many times is the concept that they can commit crimes against other immigrants–spouses, children– and if the victim dare report the crime to law enforcement, the immigrant criminal will make sure that there is a deportation proceeding that takes place.

Whether that is true or not, that they are able to succeed in that, victims fear that. They fear the deportation because of being a victim. Public policy should be, in this country, that if you are a victim of crime, that should be paramount to us as a nation, as opposed to allowing intimidation and fear from those who wish to prey on immigrants to keep them from reporting crime. When crime is committed it effects our entire community and it effects our social stability. So I’m a supporter of VAWA.

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Poe has been an outspoken advocate for victims of domestic violence, and has previously sponsored an international Violence Against Women Act.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), a potential vice president contender and Mitt Romney supporter, is pushing a version of the DREAM Act that would not offer immigrant students a direct path to citizenship. But Romney immigration adviser Kris Kobach, who wrote Arizona’s extreme anti-immigrant laws while he was senior counsel at the legal arm of the anti-immigrant Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), declared the proposed bill to be unacceptable.

And FAIR, where Kobach continues to serve as “of counsel” of their legal arm, is opposing Rubio’s bill as well, deriding the idea as a political gimmick:

Although Rubio denies that his plan is amnesty, it would allow illegal aliens who arrived in the United States prior to age 16 to gain legal status and remain in the U.S. indefinitely. Rubio has also indicated that his DREAM Act would not preclude beneficiaries from gaining citizenship at some future time.

Rubio’s efforts have one clearly stated objective. Republicans believe that introducing their own version of the DREAM Act will help attract Latino voters.

There is an obvious split in the Republican party over immigration policy, and at some point, Romney will have to decide if he stands by his harsh anti-immigrant positions during the GOP primary or if he will try to Etch-a-Sketch them away to appeal to more moderate voters.

JANESVILLE, Wisconsin — “Every other country in the world calls it bribery. We call it campaign financing.”

“That’s BS,” a constituent told Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) during a town hall Friday. “I don’t think you or any of the rest of the politicians want to fix” it, the Wisconsinite declared as the crowd roared with applause.

Ryan, however, was less than sympathetic to their views. He insisted instead that money will always follow power, so because Washington is where policy is made, there is little we can do to mitigate the influence of money in politics. Worse, Ryan even claimed that the rush of corporate and billionaire donations authorized by the Republican justices in Citizens United justifies enacting his draconian budget.

CONSTITUENT: You have all these different things and I look up there and I say none of them will ever work because of one single item we have in our country today, and I don’t think you or any of the rest of the politicians want to fix. It’s called “campaign financing,” which makes special interests. [Crowd applauds.] This country is bought, it’s paid for, it’s gift-wrapped. Supreme Court didn’t help us one bit when they made corporations humans, now they can dump all this money in. When you dump $16 million into your campaign fund, I own you. You can look me in the eye and say, “oh no, that’s not going to me anything to me.” That’s BS. This is what’s wrong with our country today. We need to get rid of it. Every other country in the world calls it bribery. We call it campaign financing.

RYAN: The point I would make is so long as so much money is going to be handled and run through government, through Washington, there will always be an attempt to influence it. So to me the best antidote is not give all of our money and our power to Washington, keep it for ourselves and our communities so there’s less influence-peddling there in the first place. [...] Even under the so-called new clean law that Russ Feingold wrote, even with the Supreme Court ruling that affected parts of that law. So let’s try and have more transparency so you see where the money’s going, let’s not destroy the political parties which are more [inaudible] to elected officials. Right now you have all these groups that pop up and then they go down come the election cycle.

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Ryan’s argument is both roundabout and silly. Rather than fighting to remove the corrupting influence of money on politics, he thinks we should simply pack up our bags and accept draconian cuts to Medicare and Medicaid — because such programs are doomed to be corrupted by the very donations Ryan’s Supreme Court allies authorized in Citizens United. It’s a bit like saying that, rather than banning drunk driving, we should simply tear up all the nation’s roads.

Moreover, he may call for shrinking Washington in order to shrink the influence of campaign money, but even under Ryan’s own budget, the government still spends more than $3.5 trillion. With a budget that size, under our current campaign finance law, the Koch Brothers can spend a few million dollars and get a fantastic return on investment. In modern America, it is impossible to achieve Ryan’s “antidote” of having a national government small enough that those with money wouldn’t be tempted to influence it.

It’s worth noting that, while Ryan also touts transparency as an alternative to keeping big money out of politics, he hardly has credibility on this point either. He was given an opportunity to actually vote on requiring more disclosure, he voted against the DISCLOSE Act. If Ryan now wants groups like Crossroads GPS to be forced to disclose their multi-million-dollar donors, wonderful. If he’s simply using this as a rhetorical sleight of hand to justify unlimited campaign funding from billionaires, as many Republicans are now doing, shame on him.

Yesterday, the Senate confirmed Judges Jacqueline Nguyen, Kristine Gerhard Baker, and John Lee to the Ninth Circuit and to federal trial courts in Arkansas and Illinois — bringing to a close a 14 judge deal Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) forced Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to strike when Reid threatened to force 17 votes to break Senate Republican filibusters of 17 different nominees. As we explained two months ago when this deal was struck, the deal represents a significant uptick in the rate of confirmations under President Obama, but it is far from enough to undo the three year campaign of obstructionism McConnell led the minute President Obama took office.

According to the Federal Judicial Center, Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush both had very similar judicial confirmation rates — 201 lower court judges were confirmed during Clinton’s first term, and 204 judges were confirmed under Bush. President Obama, by contrast, has seen only 142 judges confirmed so far according to the FJC’s data — or less than four judges for each month of his presidency. In order to catch up to his two predecessors, Obama will need to double that rate to about 7.5 judges a month for the rest of his current term.

The recently completed deal, however, proves that this rate is achievable. Indeed, 7.5 judges a month is almost exactly the rate of confirmations achieved under this deal. There is simply no reason why the Senate cannot repeat its recent performance and catch up to a normal rate of confirmations by the time either Obama or Mitt Romney takes the oath of office next January.

According to Yahoo News reporter Chris Moody, the Republican National Committee’s National Hispanic Outreach Director said earlier today that Mitt Romney’s “still deciding what his position on immigration is.” Romney’s apparent uncertainty, however, must come as an enormous shock to anyone who paid attention to his well-developed immigration policies during the Republican primary. Back before Romney decided he needs to appeal to Latino voters in order to win the general election, Romney frequently took the harshest, most anti-immigrant positions on immigration among all of the GOP candidates. Here are just a few examples of how clearly and completely unambiguous Romney’s stance on immigration was until the minute he no longer needed to appeal to a far right electorate:

• Self-Deportation: At a debate in January, Romney announced that the centerpiece of his immigration plan is to make undocumented immigrants “self-deport” because they “decide that they can do better by going home because they can’t find work here because they don’t have legal documentation to allow them to work here.” A Romney spokesperson later confirmed that Romney would do far more than simply target undocumented workers: “You turn off the magnets, no in state tuition, no benefits of any kind, no employment.”
• Killing The DREAM: Last December, Romney promised to veto the DREAM Act, which permits undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children to be placed on a path to citizenship if they graduate from college or serve in the military.
• Attrition By Enforcement: Former Arizona Senate President Russell Pearce (R-AZ), the lead sponsor of Arizona’s harsh immigration law, said that Romney’s “immigration policy is identical to mine.” Pearce said they both share the same goal of “attrition by enforcement.”
• The Kobach Connection: Romney proudly accepted the endorsement of Kris Kobach, the author of Arizona and Alabama’s immigration laws. In additional to serving as Kansas’ Secretary of State, Kobach is an attorney with the Immigration Reform Law Institute, the legal branch of Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), which the Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled as a “nativist hate group.” Yet Romney did not simply accept this questionable endorsement, he campaigned with Kobach in South Carolina — on Martin Luther King Day. Although the Romney made a failed attempt to distance itself from Kobach after the primary effectively ended, Kobach remains an immigration policy advisor to Romney and his campaign.

So the RNC’s claim that Romney does not know what he thinks about immigration is simply untrue. Romney spent many months campaigning on harsh immigration policies, and he took such firm and convincing positions on these issues that many of the nation’s leading anti-immigrant lawmakers and activists rallied behind him. It’s not at all surprising that the RNC wants to Etch-A-Sketch away Romney’s views in light of their stunning unpopularity with Latino voters, but Republicans simply cannot hide from Romney’s clearly articulated positions during the GOP primary.

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a tax-exempt coalition of conservative state legislators and corporations that “acts as a stealth business lobbyist,” has been subject to a steady stream of bad press and criticism in recent months. Critics have highlighted the group’s support for voter suppression, union busting efforts, environmental irresponsibility, harassment of immigrants, and “Shoot First” laws.

A new report by the Center for Public Integrity reveals that legislators in three states have explicitly exempted the organization from state lobbying registration and disclosure laws:

[In] three states — South Carolina, Indiana and Colorado — it turns out that ALEC has quietly, and by name, been specifically exempted from lobbyist status.

The laws in those states allow ALEC to spend millions annually hosting corporate lobbyists and legislators at three yearly conferences, send “issue alerts” to legislators recommending votes on pending legislation, and draft press releases for legislators to use when pushing ALEC model bills — all without registering as a lobbyist or reporting these expenditures.

Legislators can receive scholarships from ALEC’s corporate donors to attend conference events, or they can legally go on the taxpayer dime.

Last month South Carolina State Rep. Boyd Brown (D) announced a bill to remove the special exemption for ALEC. He noted the irony that under current state law, “I can’t get in a car with a lobbyist and drive up the street, but ALEC can give me a scholarship to fly across the country.” The bill awaits consideration in the House Judiciary Committee.

ALEC member and Iowa State Rep. Ralph Watts (R) has defended the group, saying “There is nothing secretive or sinister about it.”

But by pushing for and receiving special treatment, the group has evaded sunshine laws and done everything possible keep voters in the dark about their corporate-funded lobbying efforts and junkets. If that’s not secretive or sinister, one wonders what is.