For nearly the past two years, Republicans have argued that in order to bring down the debt and deficit, the Pentagon’s bloated budget must be part of the equation. “There’s a lot of waste in the Pentagon, no two ways about it,” Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) said late last year. Yet Ryan’s budget he released last week — which he intended as a deficit reducing plan — slashes Medicare and Medicaid and cuts taxes for the rich, but merely pays lip service to defense cuts by largely ignoring DOD’s budget.

Yesterday on the Sunday shows, President Obama’s top adviser David Plouffe announced that the President this week will announce his broad plan for deficit reduction and provided some details:

PLOUFFE: We’re going to have to look at how we get more health care cost savings. We already have a trillion dollars in deficit reduction over the last — next 10 — two decades with the health care act. We’re going to have to look at defense spending. We’re going to have to look at more programs here. So it’s going to have to be a balanced approach.

Yet Plouffe didn’t expound upon what looking at defense spending means. In fact, Plouffe appeared on CNN, ABC, Fox, and NBC yesterday and barely mentioned reductions in the Pentagon’s budget. And if Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s recently proposed cuts in defense spending are any indication, Obama’s plan to rein in DOD funding will be token or minimal at best.

Defense budget expert Winslow Wheeler recently said that simply getting the Pentagon’s books subject to an audit could be a good place to start:

“Congress does not know how the Pentagon spends money, and the Pentagon does not know how the Pentagon spends its money,” said Winslow T. Wheeler, a military analyst at the Center for Defense Information who worked on national security issues for 31 years for members of the U.S. Senate. “It is not that DOD annually flunks audits, it is the fact that it can’t be audited.”

He added, “If you flunk an audit, you can track the money and find that it was not spent as intended. If you can’t be audited, you can’t track the money. In other words, it is literally true that it would be a vast improvement if DOD were to flunk an audit.”

And just today, the Swedish think tank SIPRI reported that U.S. military spending has nearly doubled since 2001 and represents 43 percent of the world’s total — with China representing the next highest at 7.3 percent. As CAP’s Larry Korb and Laura Conley noted, “[E]ven if the United States were to cut its [defense] spending in half it would still be spending more than its current and potential adversaries.”

But as the Business Insider noted last year reporting on the President’s deficit commission, “For a Democratic president or just about any mainstream politician, cutting defense spending has always been a politically impossible proposal.” It remains to be seen if President Obama is willing to take on the challenge.

Back in July, federal district court judge Susan Bolton imposed a preliminary injunction on parts of the controversial immigration law passed by Arizona last year, SB-1070. She enjoined provisions relating to warrantless arrests of suspected undocumented immigrants and document requirements and also struck down the requirement that police check the immigration status of anyone they stop, detain, or arrest if they reasonably suspect the person is in the country illegally. Bolton argued that “the United States is likely to succeed on the merits in showing that…[the enjoined provisions] are preempted by federal law” and the “United States is likely to suffer irreparable harm” in the absence of an injunction.

A federal appeals court agreed. Today, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Bolton’s preliminary injunction on several major provisions of SB-1070. In their stinging legal critiques, 9th Circuit Judges Richard Paez and John Noonan wrote in their concurring opinions that each of the provisions blocked by Bolton are outright “unconstitutional” and that SB-1070 is preempted by federal law and foreign policy:

By imposing mandatory obligations on state and local officers, Arizona interferes with the federal government’s authority to implement its priorities and strategies in law enforcement, turning Arizona officers into state-directed DHS agents. [...] [T]he record unmistakably demonstrates that S.B. 1070 has had a deleterious effect on the United States’ foreign relations, which weighs in favor of preemption. [...]

Finally, the threat of 50 states layering their own immigration enforcement rules on top of the INA [Immigration and Nationality Act] also weighs in favor of preemption.

The 9th Circuit Court probably won’t have the final say on the issue. Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) has pledged to take her case all the way to the Supreme Court. SB-1070′s sponsor, state Senate President Russell Pearce (R), has entered the legal challenge now following a recent decision by the U.S. District Court to allow the Arizona State Legislature to intervene as a defendant in the Department of Justice’s lawsuit against Brewer and her state. Today also happens to be the deadline for U.S. Justice Department lawyers to file an answer to Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer’s countersuit that accuses the federal government of failing “to live up to its Constitutional duty to protect Arizona against invasion and domestic violence,” amongst other things.

In his opinion, Noonan recognized that SB-1070 has “become a symbol.” Noonan noted that, “For those sympathetic to immigrants to the United States, it is a challenge and a chilling foretaste of what other states might attempt.” The 9th Circuit’s decision comes as several states around the country are in the final stages of approving similar “copycat” pieces of legislation.