The Associated Press is reporting that Department of Justice officials have confirmed that the U.S. federal government has filed a lawsuit challenging Arizona’s new immigration law, SB-1070, on the grounds that it “usurps federal authority.” “As other states and localities go their own ways, we face the prospect that different rules for immigration will apply in different parts of the country,” explained President Obama last week. “A patchwork of local immigration rules where we all know one clear national standard is needed.”

The federal government’s lawsuit will likely focus on “federal preemption,” or the notion that that the Constitution’s supremacy clause mandates that federal law preempts state law “in any area over which Congress expressly or impliedly has reserved exclusive authority or which is constitutionally reserved to the federal government, or where state law conflicts or interferes with federal law.” However, while the federal preemption argument presents the most common case brought up against SB-1070, a diverse set of challenges have been raised in amicus briefs filed over the course of the past couple months that demonstrate the extent to which SB-1070 interferes with a wide range of government responsibilities:

SB-1070 Will Be Disruptive To Federal Enforcement Of Immigration Laws
(American Immigration Lawyers Association – AILA)
AILA argues that not only is SB-1070 federally preempted, but it’s also at “cross-purposes with the enforcement efforts of the federal government and its implementation will be disruptive.” SB-1070 explicitly states that “attrition through enforcement” is the official policy of Arizona. In other words, the law’s purpose is to make life so miserable for undocumented immigrants that they choose to self-deport. However, that’s not the approach followed by the federal government which tends to focus its limited resources on catching undocumented immigrants who are violent criminals. In that vain, the federal government has established several programs that “are intended to provide tools for use by the federal government and localities in enforcing immigration law.” Yet, unlike SB-1070, all of the actors are under the “direction and supervision of the Attorney General.”

SB-1070 Will Burden The Court System
(American Bar Association – ABA)
The ABA believes that SB-1070 will place excruciating burdens on defenders and prosecutors alike. According to Padilla v. Kentucky, all defense attorneys representing criminal defendants must be familiar with the immigration consequences of their case. Given that police will be required to investigate immigration status as part of any legal stop or detention, every minor or misdemeanor offense that is accompanied by “reasonable suspicion” that the defendant is unlawfully present in Arizona will essentially compel civil offense lawyers to become versed in immigration law as well. Prosecutors, meanwhile, will find that their ability to decide the criminal charges to be brought will be routinely delayed by Padilla’s instruction that prosecutors consider the range of immigration consequences.

SB-1070 Will Have A ‘Chilling Effect’ On Latinos’ Access To Social Benefits
(National Council of La Raza – NCLR)
NCLR argues that SB-1070 “will have a profound chilling effect on the constitutional right of certain Latino children to an education.” In fact, several reports have already come out showing that school enrollment is down. NCLR predicts that the “chilling effect” would “extend to other public benefits that are provided regardless of immigration status,” including Medicaid assistance, immunization programs, school breakfast and lunch programs, testing and treatment for communicable diseases, and some forms of disaster relief. NCLR also holds that SB-1070 will “foster discriminatory animus against and harassment of Latinos, compromise the physical well-being of many in the Latino community, and lead to an increase in racial profiling and other civil rights violations against Latinos.”

SB-1070 Will Frustrate The Enforcement Of Anti-Hate Crime Laws
(Anti-Defamation League -ADL)
Close cooperation between local law enforcement and minority communities is “essential” to the proper enforcement of hate crime laws. ADL’s biggest concern is that SB-1070 will “eviscerate” the local enforcement of federal and state anti-hate crime laws. According to ADL, this is because SB-1070 will create an “underclass of people who have no meaningful access to police services out of fear that their perceived immigration status…will subject them to higher law enforcement scrutiny.” ADL predicts that Latinos will be “deterred” from serving as witnesses, seeking protection, and reporting hate crimes — which leaves the entire community they live in “victimized, vulnerable, fearful, isolated, and unprotected by the law.”

SB-1070 Will Hurt U.S. International Relations
(United Mexican States)
One of the most highly criticized amicus briefs that was filed belonged to the Mexican government. However, while their complaints have largely been dismissed by America’s right wing, Mexico did raise a valid point: the U.S. is sending mixed messages to the rest of the world. Mexico understandably points out that “there needs to be one cohesive, consistent and controlling United States voice” on immigration. Mexico accuses Arizona of “impos[ing] its own independent and conflicting requirements” and “impinging upon the US-Mexico bilateral agenda and obstruct[ing] the bi-national collaboration to tackle immigration and border problems.” “Mexico cannot effectively cooperate or engage in meaningful bilateral relations with the U.S. when states are permitted to interfere with the sovereigns’ bilateral efforts,” states the amicus brief.

While Mitt Romney’s oped today in the Washington Post is largely a politically-motivated effort to boost his far-right foreign policy bonafides, it does however demonstrate how dangerous and extreme the anti-Obama narrative has become. That Mitt Romney’s oped attacking the New START Treaty in the Washington Post is full of distortions and false claims is not surprising. But what is really jaw-dropping however is Romney’s assessment that the treaty is Obama’s “worst foreign policy mistake.”

The fact that Romney thinks that the worst foreign policy mistake of the Obama administration is a modest treaty that reduces limits on nuclear weapons and extends and updates the verification and monitoring measures that Ronald Reagan himself negotiated in the initial START treaty, says something about how far out of the mainstream the conservative right has moved.

But moreover this vividly shows that there is an emerging civil war within the Republican establishment. This treaty has unanimous support from the military and is supported by senior and respected Republican foreign policy officials from every Republican administration of the last 40 years, including Nixon and Ford administration officials (Henry Kissinger, James Schlesinger) Reagan administration officials (George Schultz, Frank Carlucci), Bush Sr. administration officials (Brent Scowcroft, James Baker) and George W. Bush administration officials (Stephen Hadley, Colin Powell, and Linton Brooks). Opposition to this treaty puts Mitt Romney and the far right fringe that has seemingly taken over the reigns of the Republican foreign policy to the extreme right of even Ronald Reagan.

The fact that there is overwhelming support for the treaty from serious thinkers, is not surprising given the weakness of the recycled arguments Romney puts forth.

Apparently when a Republican former (and perhaps current) presidential candidate lies in the Washington Post it’s okay. Mitt Romney claims that Obama “acceded to Russia’s No. 1 foreign policy objective, the abandonment of our Europe-based missile defense program, and obtained nothing whatsoever in return.” This is just false.

The Obama administration last September didn’t “abandon” missile defense. Instead it expanded and improved the European missile defense program to focus not just on the long range missiles that the Iranians didn’t have, but on short and medium range Iranian missiles that they actually have. Yet the new program still contained long range missile interceptors, which has severely irked the Russians and was one of the main sticking points of the START negotiations and the reason why talks dragged on past December 5th – the date when the original treaty expired. If Obama caved to the Russians in September of last year, what was there to fight about?

But what makes this claim even sillier is that Romney spends the rest of the oped saying START “jeopardizes our missile defense system.” But how could this be, since according to the first paragraph of Romney’s oped the Obama administration had already abandoned it? If you are going to claim that Obama has killed missile defense in Europe then how can you possibly claim that the New START treaty “jeopardizes” something that Obama already ‘abandoned.’

The rest of the oped is just as logically inept and is filled with recycled Heritage talking points that have been thoroughly debunked (for a point by point refutation of Romney’s claims see these posts on the bomber counter rule, on rail-mobile missiles, on limits on missile defense, on tactical nuclear weapons, and on rushing the treaty through the Senate).

But what is never expressed and is conveniently missing in the op-ed is the alternative vision to the START treaty that Romney is proposing. That vision is nuclear anarchy.

Rejecting START means eliminating the treaty that has ensured nuclear stability between the US and Russia in the post Cold War era. START’s collapse would also likely break the back of the brittle nuclear non-proliferation regime, which rests on a fragile bargain between nuclear and non-nuclear states. With the nuclear order in chaos, the world could quite easily slide past the nuclear tipping point, where – following the lead of others and with no disincentive (such as international sanctions) – a cascade of states like Brazil, Argentina, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Turkey, Myanmar, Venezuela could all decide to become nuclear powers. Consequently, any effort to control nuclear materials and to stop nuclear terrorism would also cease and the threat of nuclear terrorism would grow.

Furthermore, relations between the US and Russia would descend into acrimony. With the loss of nuclear monitoring, suspicions and tension would grow. With our right wing vigorously advocating the US start a new Cold War with Russia, it wouldn’t be long before the right wing gets there way and we begin building and testing new nuclear weapons, such an effort would lead Russia and perhaps China to do the same and suddenly we are in the midst of a new multi-polar arms race. This is the vision that Romney is posing and it is immensely dangerous.

Prominent conservatives and Republicans in Congress have been attacking RNC chair Michael Steele and calling for his ouster after Steele’s recent comments that the war in Afghanistan cannot be won. Today on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, conservative Pat Buchanan complained about the right’s reaction. “What bothers me is the effort here I think to force a position on the Republican Party before they’ve gone through their primary process,” Buchanan said, and addressed former Iraq Coalition Provisional Authority spokesman Dan Senor about the foolish right-wing charge to wage war in Iraq:

BUCHANAN: What I’m saying is, don’t start purging a guy because he said something different. [...] You guys were wrong on Iraq and you got us into that. … You had all that intel on WMD and got us into an unnecessary war.

Time’s Mark Halperin came to Senor’s defense, asking, “Why aren’t you asking him if we’re safer with Saddam Hussein gone?” “Yeah, thank you, Mark,” Senor said, then asking Buchanan, “Would we have been safer if Saddam Hussein were in power?” Surprisingly, when Buchanan offered a suggestion as to why the U.S. is perhaps not safer, Senor called his argument “legitimate”:

BUCHANAN: We would be safer if we had those 4,000 guys back alive and the 35,000 wounded weren’t wounded.

SENOR: That is a real discussion and a very legitimate point and we should have it.

Watch it:

Without much evidence to justify the invasion of Iraq, war supporters now claim that the entire adventure — hundreds of billions spent, tens of thousands killed or wounded, and distracted resources from Afghanistan — was worth it just to have Saddam Hussein out of power. Indeed, a report from CAP’s Matt Duss, Peter Juul, and Brian Katulis recently noted the flaw in this argument:

[T]he end of Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime represents a considerable global good, and a nascent democratic Iraqi republic allied with the United States could potentially yield benefits in the future.

But when weighing those possible benefits against the costs of the Iraq intervention, there is simply no conceivable calculus by which Operation Iraqi Freedom can be judged to have been a successful or worthwhile policy. The war was intended to show the extent of America’s power. It succeeded only in showing its limits.

It’s nice to see Senor finally recognize that perhaps that the war he fervently supported may not have made the U.S. safer.

In a story that’s at least ten years overdue, the New York Times reports today that “many groups in the United States [are] using tax-exempt donations to help Jews establish permanence in the Israeli-occupied territories — effectively obstructing the creation of a Palestinian state, widely seen as a necessary condition for Middle East peace“:

The result is a surprising juxtaposition: As the American government seeks to end the four-decade Jewish settlement enterprise and foster a Palestinian state in the West Bank, the American Treasury helps sustain the settlements through tax breaks on donations to support them.

A New York Times examination of public records in the United States and Israel identified at least 40 American groups that have collected more than $200 million in tax-deductible gifts for Jewish settlement in the West Bank and East Jerusalem over the last decade. The money goes mostly to schools, synagogues, recreation centers and the like, legitimate expenditures under the tax law. But it has also paid for more legally questionable commodities: housing as well as guard dogs, bulletproof vests, rifle scopes and vehicles to secure outposts deep in occupied areas.

In 2007, I profiled the Hebron Fund, a New York-based charity supporting Jewish settlements in and around the West Bank city of Hebron. To put it simply, life for Palestinians in Hebron is hell. They are literally forced to live in cages to avoid harassment and violence by radical, racist Jewish settlers, abetted by Israeli troops, who are there to protect the settlers. On a recent trip to Israel, a U.S. official I spoke to acknowledged settler harassment and incitement against Palestinians as “a real problem” for U.S. goals. It is, to put it mildly, reprehensible that this problem should continue to be supported, tax-free and below the radar, by private American donors.

It would be one thing if support for settlements were just a phenomenon of the Israeli extreme right and a handful of American zealots, but it’s not. In addition to the millions of dollars going to the settlements from American citizens, a substantial portion of the conservative media establishment — Fox News, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, National Review — either supports the expansion of settlements, or opposes any meaningful efforts to stop them, which essentially amounts to the same thing.

Key members of the GOP have also been very explicit about their support for the settlements. Last August, Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) led Congressional delegation to Israel, offered his support for Israel’s evictions of Palestinian families from their homes in East Jerusalem to make way for Jewish settlers, and criticized the Obama administration’s efforts to halt the evictions.

In May, Republican National Comittee Chairman Michael Steele spoke at a rally sponsored by a number of pro-settlement groups, including the Hebron Fund, accusing the Obama administration “and its Congressional collaborators” of “[leaving] Israel to fend for herself.”

Republican activist and former presidential candidate Gary Bauer said in a speech to AIPAC that “God granted the Land of Israel to the Jewish people and there is an absolute ban on giving it away to another people.” A close associate of Kristol’s, Bauer recently launched Keep Israel Safe, cloned off of Bill Kristol and Liz Cheney’s Keep America Safe. I recently contacted Bauer to see if it was still his position that the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza — which became official U.S. policy under George W. Bush — was a violation of God’s “absolute ban” against dividing the land. Speaking through his press representative Kristi Hamrick, Bauer had no comment.

Last November, former governor and current Republican celebrity Sarah Palin told Barbara Walters that “I disagree with the Obama administration” — and decades of U.S. policy — on settlements. “I believe that the Jewish settlements should be allowed to be expanded upon,” Palin said. “I don’t think that the Obama administration has any right to tell Israel that the Jewish settlements cannot expand.”

And, of course, former presidential candidate/current Fox News host/future presidential candidate/radical cleric Mike Huckabee — who actually believes that there’s “no such thing as a Palestinian” — has made numerous trips to Israel sponsored by the radical group Friends of Ateret Cohanim, voicing his support for the continued growth of settlements and the expulsion of the Palestinians, stating that they should be made to find a homeland “elsewhere.”

A new report from Israeli human rights group B’Tselem makes clear what it is that these people really support, and what is really at stake:

The cloak of legality that Israel has sought to give to the settlement enterprise is aimed at covering the ongoing theft of West Bank land, thereby removing the basic values of legality and justice from Israel’s system of law enforcement in the West Bank. The report exposes the system Israel has adopted as a tool to advance political objectives, enabling the systematic infringement of the Palestinians’ human rights.

The extensive geographic-spatial changes that Israel has made in the landscape of the West Bank undermine the negotiations that Israel has conducted for eighteen years with the Palestinians and breach its international obligations. The settlement enterprise, being based on discrimination against the Palestinians living in the West Bank, also weakens the pillars of the State of Israel as a democratic country and diminishes its status among the nations of the world.

The bottom line here is that we shouldn’t be surprised that private American citizens can support the settlements with impunity, given that much of the American conservative movement is institutionally –and, in regard to key leaders, personally — also committed to the Israeli settlement enterprise. Whatever talking points they may issue, these people simply do not support the goal of a two-state solution, at least not in any way that genuinely merits the term. The question is whether they’ll ever have to pay political price for it, and whether they’ll have to answer for the damage they’ve done to American security and interests in the region, as well as to Israel’s future as a Jewish and democratic state.