Last December, the Communications Workers of America filed a request for a union election endorsed by 35 percent of American Airlines’ ticket agents and airport workers, which at the time was the percentage necessary to trigger an election to decide whether those workers could be unionized. Two months later, Congress changed the law to require 50 percent of the union-eligible workers in an airline to call for an election before one could happen, raising the question of whether a valid election request filed under then-valid law must still be honored. Yesterday, George H.W. Bush-appointed Judge Terry Means effectively said no, issuing a temporary restraining order against an election campaign that was supposed to begin today.

Whatever the merits of Means’ thinly-reasoned decision — nearly all of Judge Means’ legal reasoning on the merits of this case is confined to a brief footnote contained in a separate three-page order — his orders leave little doubt about his hostility towards unions. At one point, Judge Means opines that merely allowing American’s workers to vote on whether they want to exercise their right to organize will “irreparably” injure the company “by damage to its reputation among its employees and loss of marketplace goodwill likely to result from a contentious election campaign.”

Ultimately, however, this decision is far more of an indictment of the absurdity of American labor law — especially in the context of airlines — than it is of a single judge’s order. The entire purpose of a union election is to determine whether a majority of the workforce wishes to organize under a particular union or not. If 50 percent of the workforce have already answered that question in the affirmative, there’s absolutely no reason why a redundant election such be necessary.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) defended Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s (R) attempted voter purge on Wednesday, brushing off its disproportionate targeting of Latino voters.

“How could anyone argue against a state identifying people who are not rightfully on the voter rolls and removing them from the voter rolls?” Rubio argued during an interview at a Bloomberg event.

When a reporter asked how they justified this costly move during a state budget crisis, Rubio dismissed the concern, saying that “I think one is too many.”

However, when the conversation shifted to why Florida had shortened its early voting period from two weeks to eight days — including cutting out the final Sunday of voting when many African-American churches go with their congregations to the polls — Rubio justified the move precisely because he said it would save money. “The cost-benefit analysis of the first week of voting was really not – was really not cost effective,” he said.

Scott’s voter purge list is heavily targeted at Democratic and Hispanic voters, according to an analysis by the Miami Herald. Latinos make up more than half — 58 percent — of those on the list. Nevertheless, Rubio said the he “wouldn’t characterize it as an effort to purge Latinos from the voting rolls.”

Two counties in southwest Florida are continuing a voter purge that the Department of Justice says is illegal. Officials in Lee and Collier county will soon remove voters based on a list that has been riddled with errors, the AP reports. Hundreds of eligible U.S. citizens were included on the list.

Notably, the two Florida counties are persisting with the purge against the advice of general counsel of the Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections. From the Palm Beach Post:

The Justice Department letter and mistakes that the 67 county elections supervisors have found in the state list make the scrub undoable, said Martin County Elections Supervisor Vicki Davis, president of the Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections.

“There are just too many variables with this entire process at this time for supervisors to continue,” Davis said.

Ron Labasky, the association’s general counsel, sent a memo to the 67 supervisors Friday telling them to stop processing the list.

“I recommend that Supervisors of Elections cease any further action until the issues raised by the Department of Justice are resolved between the parties or by a Court,” Labasky wrote.

In the two counties “at least nine people have been removed from the voter rolls under Scott’s program, and elections officials have no solid proof that those people are noncitizens.”

Despite, hundred of documented errors Lee County Election Supervisor Sharon Harrington said she has “confidence in the process.”

For most of President Obama’s time in office, Senate Republicans engaged in such an aggressive campaign to hold up his judicial nominees that even their fellow Republican Chief Justice John Roberts urged them to quit it. After three years of roadblocks, however, they’ve now decided to tear up the road:

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) made the decision to blockade nominations official Wednesday when he informed his colleagues that he would invoke the “Thurmond Rule” from now until after the elections.

Named after the late Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) — and alternately called the “Leahy Rule” by some Republicans after Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) — the doctrine holds that within six months of a presidential election, the opposition party can, and typically does, refuse to allow votes on circuit court judges.

First of all, there is no doctrine saying that court of appeals judges cannot be confirmed six months before an election. According to data from the Federal Judicial Center, President Carter had 5 appeals judges confirmed between this day in 1980 and that year’s election, one of whom was future Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. President Reagan had 7 in his first term and 2 in his second. The first President Bush had 7. No appellate judges were confirmed in the lead up to the 1996 election, but one was confirmed at the end of President Clinton’s second term. The second President Bush had 3 confirmed during this period in 2004 and 2 in 2008.

In other words, if history is any guide, the supposed ban on late term confirmations does not exist, and it has never existed except arguably during the Clinton presidency, when then-Judiciary Committee Chair Orrin Hatch (R-UT) routinely played Calvinball with the Senate’s rules in order to keep President Clinton’s judges from being confirmed.

Indeed, in 2004, when George W. Bush was in the White House, Senate Republicans had very different things to say about the nature of the Thurmond Rule. In Hatch’s words, “”There is no ‘Thurmond Rule’ . . . . we’re going to keep on pushing ahead on judges and hopefully get a number of them through before the end of the year.”

House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) continues to threaten Attorney General Eric Holder with a contempt of Congress citation should he not comply with Issa’s request for a wide-range of documents relating to the Bush-administration-initiated “Fast and Furious” program. The Department of Justice has said releasing some of the documents Issa is demanding could jeopardize ongoing criminal investigations.

But, Issa has not always favored executive branch compliance with Congressional records requests. In 2007, Issa complained to the Press Enterprise of Riverside, CA that scrutiny into Bush Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and the firings of numerous U.S. Attorneys amounted to a “political witch hunt” by Democrats:

“I see no evidence it (the attorneys’ firing) was political,” Issa, R-Vista, said by telephone between votes on the House floor. “They want to imply there was criminal behavior when there isn’t even a criminal allegation.” …

Justice Department officials said the firings were based largely on performance issues, and released thousands of pages of e-mails and other documents to substantiate the claim. Issa said releasing the documents was a mistake on the part of the administration. U.S. attorneys are “at will” employees and can be let go without reason or public explanation.

An Issa spokeswoman attempted to explain away the discrepancy to ABC News claiming that the Bush administration used executive privilege in Gonzales’s case, while Holder has not done. She refused to provide any additional explanation.

Of course, the Bush administration had already released the documents in question — making it bizarre that Issa’s office now claims they were somehow protected by executive privilege.

And unlike “Fast and Furious” — a relatively low-level screw-up — the “fundamentally flawed” firing of U.S. attorneys for purely political reasons was a senior-level scandal as it involved actions by officials at the highest levels of the Department of Justice. Attorney General Gonzales ultimately resigned his position, in large part due to the scandal and a report by the DOJ’s Office of the Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility found Gonzales and his deputy for “abdicated their responsibility to adequately oversee the process and to ensure that the reasons for removal of each U.S. Attorney were supportable and not improper.” Issa dismissed the real political scandal and now attempts to make political hay from an inflated one.

Though he supports voter ID laws writ large, Mitt Romney once offered a strong progressive solution that, if enacted, would likely prevent any eligible citizen from being disenfranchised.

In previously-unnoticed footage from a New Hampshire campaign stop in December, Romney was asked by a Republican primary voter about whether he supported controversial voter ID laws that are spreading across the country. Though he backed such measures, he acknowledged that some people lack photo IDs — over 20 million American citizens, according to the Brennan Center — and proposed a solution that would actually ensure these citizens were guaranteed a vote:

ROMNEY: You can get a photo ID free from your state. Get it at the time you register to vote. [...] For people who don’t have photo IDs, we could actually provide them at the voting place. People could come in, give their name, and give them a photo ID. There are ways we could do this that would protect our voting system.

Watch footage from the Londonderry event:

Of course, it’s not entirely clear that Romney understood the significance of his statement when he made it. Nevertheless, if Romney is serious about providing IDs to anyone who shows up at the polls, that would be extremely effective at ensuring voters’ access to the ballot box — even if it would also be an enormous waste of time and money. Every state that currently has strict voter ID laws will turn away voters who don’t already have a voter ID when they show up at the polls. By providing IDs to voters at the polls, states could prevent widespread voter disenfranchisement.

In fact, Romney’s idea is similar to one that was offered by leading progressive officials in Minnesota. Gov. Mark Dayton (D) and Secretary of State Mark Ritchie (D) proposed outfitting polling locations with an electronic “poll book” where voters who don’t have a photo ID could pull up their electronic information from state records.

Even if Romney’s plan is as simple as he says — giving a poll worker your name and they print you a photo ID, which you then hand back to them in order to vote — that would also prevent disenfranchisement, although by creating a circuitous and wasteful process.

The optimal solution for voter ID is still not to have it. But Romney’s proposal is a major improvement over existing voter ID laws, which would turn away people like 84-year-old former elected official Ruthelle Frank and 93-year-old Thelma Mitchell who cleaned the Tennessee Capitol for 30 years.