Warning labels and notices are a common feature of American life. Federal law requires most groceries to display detailed information about their ingredients, calorie content, and other nutritional facts. Federal fuel economy labels inform car buyers how quickly their new vehicle will burn through gas. Surgeon general warnings inform smokers of the dangers presented by tobacco. Employers who employ workers subject to federal minimum wage law must display posters informing these workers of their rights.

And yet, under a decision handed down today by three Republican judges, all of these information labels and more are now in jeopardy.

The decision by a panel of the conservative United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit strikes down federal regulations requiring employers to display posters informing workers of their right to organize and other rights under federal labor law. Although the opinion meanders quite a bit, its analysis begins by claiming this result is required by a federal statute protecting employers’ rights to express their views to their employees. That statute provides that “[t]he expressing of any views, argument, or opinion, or the dissemination thereof, whether in written, printed, graphic, or visual form, shall not constitute or be evidence of an unfair labor practice . . . if such expression contains no threat of reprisal or force or promise of benefit.” Although this language says nothing about employers also having the right not to post information they would prefer to keep their workers ignorant of, the three Republican judges fabricate such a right through the power of a rhetorical question:

Suppose that § 8(c) prevents the Board from charging an employer with an unfair labor practice for posting a notice advising employees of their right not to join a union. Of course § 8(c) clearly does this. How then can it be an unfair labor practice for an employer to refuse to post a government notice informing employees of their right to unionize (or to refuse to)? Like the freedom of speech guaranteed in the First Amendment, § 8(c) necessarily protects—as against the Board—the right of employers (and unions) not to speak. This is why, for example, a company official giving a noncoercive speech to employees describing the disadvantages of unionization does not commit an unfair labor practice if, in his speech, the official neglects to mention the advantages of having a union.

Of course, the easy answer to this rhetorical question is that it can be illegal to punish employers who express their view of unions but not illegal to require employers to inform workers of their rights because that’s what the law says. Typically, judges begin their legal analysis with the language of the law. These Republican judges chose a different path.

Perhaps sensing that their reading of federal law stands on shaky ground, the judges also weave a particularly aggressive reading of the First Amendment into their opinion. Under the Supreme Court’s decision in Zauderer v. Office of Disciplinary Counsel, commercial actors can be required to provide “purely factual and uncontroversial information” to the people they transact with. This is why cereal boxes can be required to display accurate information about the nutritional value of Rice Chex or Froot Loops, but businesses also cannot be forced to endorse a particular political candidate or to advise their workers to join a union. Because the new posters do nothing more than inform workers about uncontroversial facts involving their rights in the workplace, they should be no more invalid than labeling on a cereal box.

Although union-related speech is sometimes treated differently than speech involving sales of goods, the court does not question its applicability to labor decisions generally. Instead, the judges read Zauderer very narrowly — so narrowly that it does not apply unless the corporation required to display information appears poised to deceive their workers or consumers. Because no one “has even suggested that the posting rule was needed because employers are misleading employees about their rights under the National Labor Relations Act,” the court concludes that Zauderer does not apply. If taken seriously, this reasoning would threaten nearly all warning or informational labels required by law. There’s little evidence, for example, that General Mills is actively deceiving consumers about the number of calories in a serving of Count Chocula. Nor are Chevy dealers only required to post fuel efficiency labels if they lie to their customers about how quickly a Suburban burns through gasoline.

If nothing else, today’s decision should be a wake up call to unions and other advocates for workers that everything they care about is threatened so long as vacancies remain on powerful, GOP-dominated courts like the DC Circuit. Today’s decision bears the same resemblance to the law that Westeros bears to New Hampshire. It writes words that simply do not exist into a federal statute, and then fabricates a constitutional right to keep workers and consumers ignorant. The only way to prevent future decisions like this one is to confirm more judges who will do a better job of adhering to the law.

Nearly two centuries ago, South Carolina Sen. John C. Calhoun nearly sparked a civil war when he led an unconstitutional effort to nullify a federal law his state government disagreed with. One hundred and eighty years later, South Carolina lawmakers want to do it again. Last night, the South Carolina House passed an attempt to “interpose and refuse to enforce” much of the Affordable Care Act.

The bill includes a number of attempts to undermine health reform, some of which are unconstitutional, others of which are merely unwise. The most insidious provision of the bill, however, is this:

A South Carolina resident taxpayer who is subjected to a tax by the Internal Revenue Code under 26 U.S.C. Section 5000A of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act shall receive a tax deduction in the exact amount of the taxes or penalty paid the federal government pursuant to 26 U.S.C. Section 5000A. The tax deduction allowed by this section must be used in the year the federal tax or penalty is paid.

“26 U.S.C. Section 5000A” refers to the so-called individual mandate that was the primary subject of a losing attempt to convince the Supreme Court to repeal Obamacare last year. That provision works by requiring people who are not insured to pay slightly more income taxes in order to give them an incentive to buy insurance. Such an incentive is necessary because the Affordable Care Act also prohibits insurers from denying coverage to people with preexisting conditions. So if people did not have a financial incentive to buy insurance before they get sick, they would wait until they got sick to buy insurance, and would eventually drain all the money out of an insurance plan that they paid virtually nothing into.

The South Carolina bill would erase this incentive by effectively having the state refund taxpayers hit with additional taxes because they did not purchase insurance. What the federal government takes, the state of South Carolina would give back. As a result, smart South Carolina residents would soon figure out that they can drop their insurance plans, save the cost of paying premiums, and then pick those plans back up the minute they are about to be hit with an expensive medical bill. Beginning in the 1990s, seven different states passed laws allowing health care consumers to behave this way, and it ended in disaster every single time. Some consumers saw their premiums rise over 350 percent. Others lost access to individual insurance plans entirely.

Beyond the fact that this bill could literally collapse the individual health insurance market in South Carolina, it is also a tribute to fiscal irresponsibility. By giving a tax deduction to South Carolinians who do not carry insurance, the state is essentially paying people to free ride. That’s money, by the way, that will not go to hiring teachers or putting cops on the streets or building schools because it is being diverted to this crusade against Obamacare.

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A high school in central Mississippi finds itself in court after allegedly holding a mandatory religious assembly earlier this month.

According to the lawsuit, which was filed by the American Humanist Association on Wednesday, students were given no advance notice about the nature of the assembly, but were told that attendance was required. It soon became clear, however, when a member of Pinelake Baptist Church opened his presentation by talking about finding hope in Jesus Christ.

The assembly allegedly also warned students against premarital sex, pornography, and homosexuality. As the lawsuit detailed, the program included a video of four speakers explaining how their troubled lives had been saved by Christianity:

The first speaker talked about his addiction to pornography. The second speaker talked about issues with his father. The third speaker also talked about problems with his family,as well as promiscuity and suicide. The fourth speaker said he had a great family that introduced him to the church. He said at first he did not think he could measure up to Jesus Christ so he sought hope in “other things.”

The first speaker said he used to find hope in “cars and clothes.” The second said he “used to find hope in people” and in “other guys.” He looked to these people for “brotherly love” and “fatherly love.” He said he then struggled with suicidal thoughts, and resorted to “cutting himself.” [...]

About five minutes into the video, Speaker One stated: “But now I find my hope in something that’s more eternal that is not in this world.”

In turn, each of the speakers explained how turning to Jesus Christ solved their problems and recommended that other people turn to Jesus Christ as well.

Soon after, “the assembly immediately turned into a full-blown lecture on the supposed miracles, powers, and teachings of Jesus Christ and the Church Representative encouraged all students to find sanctity in him,” and no one was permitted to leave. “The School’s truancy officer, Jeff White (“Officer White”), harassed several students who attempted to leave and told them to sit back down,” read the complaint.

According to the complaint, the school repeated the same assembly for 11th graders on April 10. A few juniors had been tipped off that it would be a religious assembly and “attempted to go to the library or another classroom instead but they were prevented from doing so by Officer White.” A third mandatory assembly was held this Monday for 10th graders, the suit alleges.

The Supreme Court ruled more than 50 years ago in Engel v Vitale that school-led prayer is an unconstitutional infringement on the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, a decision they reaffirmed in the 1992 case Lee v. Weisman.

As ThinkProgress explained on Monday, the CEO of a company challenging the Obama Administration’s rules promoting access to birth control made statements to the press which could destroy the basis of this case. Since then, the CEO went even further in undercutting the basis of his case. Indeed, the CEO’s most recent statements are so damning they could require his own attorneys to scuttle his case.

Michael Potter is the owner and CEO of Eden Foods, one of several for-profit companies challenging federal rules expanding access to contraception on the grounds that he has a religious objection to complying with those rules. Earlier this week, however, he made several statements to Salon’s Irin Carmon suggesting that his true reason for opposing the birth control rules are libertarian objections to employer regulation, not the religious objections he claims to have in his legal complaint. This distinction is important because federal law protecting religious liberty only applies when someone has a religious objection to complying with the law — not when their objection is merely rooted in a “philosophy or way of life.” So if Potter does not actually hold religious objections to birth control, he loses his case.

In a second interview with Carmon, Potter fairly explicitly states that his objections are not religiously motivated:

[T]here were the allegations, made by two sources associated with the company, that it isn’t Catholicism but rather macrobiotics, extensively discussed on the company website, that motivates Potter’s opposition to birth control, which would also contradict the lawsuit’s claims.

Potter sounded angry when he called me back, but he did answer questions. (I asked him twice if anything had been inaccurate or misleading in my earlier reporting, and he didn’t point to anything.) Asked about macrobiotics, he said, “It didn’t come into play at all in any of the discussions we have.” So, I asked, it’s motivated by his belief as a Catholic?

“Not so much that as our denial of our rights to exercise our conscience,” he said, confusingly. “And the government overreach into that. They’re infringing the religious freedoms that are supposedly in the Constitution. I think those are more important than any particular religious dogma.”

I rephrased. “What particular belief leads you to oppose this regulation?”

“Well, there isn’t any one particular religious belief, Irin,” he said, sounding irritated. “I find it hard to get my head around the question.”

Potter makes several significant statements here, but the most significant is his direct denial that his objections to birth control are motivated by religious objections rooted in his Catholic beliefs. When Carmon asks whether his objections to the birth control regulations are motivated by his Catholicism, Potter responds “[n]ot so much that as our denial of our rights to exercise our conscience.” This statement directly conflicts with a sworn affidavit Potter’s attorneys filed in federal court. In that document, Potter claims that his company’s health plan does not cover birth control because “[a]s a practicing Catholic, I steadfastly make efforts to avoid practices that subvert the teaching of the Catholic Church.”

This contradiction also puts Potter’s lawyers in a serious bind. The lead counsel representing Potter is Erin Mersino, an attorney with the conservative Thomas More Law Center and a member of the Michigan Bar. Under the Michigan Rules of Professional Conduct, “[i]f a lawyer has offered material evidence and comes to know of its falsity, the lawyer shall take reasonable remedial measures.” Official commentary on this rule provides that “if necessary to rectify the situation, an advocate must disclose the existence of the client’s deception to the court or to the other party.” At the very least, this rule suggests that Ms. Mersino and her colleagues should conduct an investigation to determine whether or not Potter’s previous statements to the court are accurate. If Mr. Potter misled the court about the nature of his religious beliefs, Ms. Mersino has an obligation reveal that fact — despite the fact that it will likely destroy her client’s case.

To be absolutely clear, there is no evidence that Potter’s legal team knowingly deceived the court or that they violated any ethical obligation when they initially filed Potter’s affidavit with the court. Ms. Mersino is now aware of Potter’s statements to the media, however — I emailed them to her as part of a request for comment and received a terse response pointing me to Potter’s affidavit and other documents filed in this case.

Yesterday the Senate voted 54-46 in favor of a provision that would expand background checks for gun sales, which, in the bizarro world of the United States Senate, means that the provision fails. Under the Senate’s broken rules, it takes 60 votes to do virtually anything.

As Jonathan Cohn and Eric Kingsbury point out, this result is even more anti-democratic than it appears at first glance. “If you assume, for sake of argument, each senator represents half of his or her state’s population, then senators voting for the bill represented about 194 million people, while the senators voting against the bill represented about 118 million people. That’s getting close to a two-thirds majority in favor of the measure.”

To put this in perspective, Wyoming Sens. Mike Enzi (R) and John Barrasso (R) both voted against the gun safety provision. Together, they represent a little more than half a million people. California Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D) and Barbara Boxer (D) both voted for gun safety. They represent over 38 million Americans. In other words, a voter in Wyoming enjoys 66 times as much representation in the Senate as a voter in California.

As the least populous state, Wyoming makes out like bandits when it comes to Senate representation, but they are far from alone in enjoying such a windfall. A voter in Idaho (population 1,595,728) counts as almost 24 Californians. A voter in Nebraska (population 1,845,525) counts as nearly 21 Californians. And a voter in North Dakota (population 699,628) counts as more than 54 Californians. Indeed, if you add up the combined populations of Wyoming, North Dakota, Alaska, Idaho, Nebraska, Utah, Kansas, Arkansas, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Kentucky, South Carolina, and Alabama, that still adds up to over 3 million fewer people than live in the state of California. That also adds up to 26 senators, all of whom opposed background checks.

The original Constitution created the Senate as the malapportioned body we live under today, but subsequent amendments cast serious doubt on whether the Senate still comports with our constitutional values. The Fourteenth Amendment guarantees every person “the equal protection of the laws,” a guarantee that’s since been incorporated into the protections all Americans enjoy against both states and the federal government. Moreover, as the Supreme Court explained in its landmark “one person, one vote” case, the promise of equal protection of the law includes the right to have your vote count exactly the same as anyone else’s vote. It is difficult to square the Senate with the Constitution’s one person, one vote guarantee.

Except that there’s one serious obstacle in the way of bringing the Senate in line with one person, one vote. Article V of the Constitution, which explains how constitutional amendments can be ratified, provides that “no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate.” In other words, the only way to reapportion the Senate is to pass two constitutional amendments: the first to remove the ban on amendments that end Senate malapportionment, and the second to actually end Senate malapportionment. And, of course, three-quarters of the states are required to ratify an amendment before it is written into the Constitution — ensuring that at least a few states would have to sign away their overrepresentation in the Senate in order to end overrepresentation in the Senate.

Center for American Progress Action Fund intern Jacqueline Odum contributed research to this post.

Following up on a failed effort by eleven North Carolina lawmakers to declare that their state can ignore the Constitution’s ban on government establishments of religion, a Huffington Post/YouGov poll finds that just over one in three American adults would actually support making Christianity their state’s official faith. The same poll shows that only 11 percent of the country incorrectly believes that the Constitution would permit such an outcome.

The Constitution “does not grant the federal government and does not grant the federal courts the power to determine what is or is not constitutional” according to a resolution sponsored by North Carolina House Majority Leader Edgar Starnes (R) and ten of his fellow Republicans — a statement that puts them at odds with over 200 years of constitutional law. In light of this novel reading of the Constitution, Starnes and his allies also claim that North Carolina is free to ignore the Constitution’s ban on government endorsement of religion:

SECTION 1. The North Carolina General Assembly asserts that the Constitution of the United States of America does not prohibit states or their subsidiaries from making laws respecting an establishment of religion.

SECTION 2. The North Carolina General Assembly does not recognize federal court rulings which prohibit and otherwise regulate the State of North Carolina, its public schools, or any political subdivisions of the State from making laws respecting an establishment of religion.

This resolution is nothing less than an effort to repudiate the result of the Civil War. As the resolution correctly notes, the First Amendment merely provides that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,” and, indeed, the Bill of Rights was originally understood to only place limits on the federal government. For the earliest years of the Republic, the Bill of Rights were not really “rights” at all, but were instead guidelines on which powers belonged to central authorities and which ones remained exclusively in the hands of state lawmakers.

In 1868, however the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified for the express purpose of changing this balance of power. While the early Constitution envisioned “rights” as little more than a battle between central and local government, the Fourteenth Amendment ushered in a more modern understanding. Under this amendment, “[n]o State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States,” nor may any state “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” The Fourteenth Amendment completely transformed the nature of the American Republic, from one where liberties were generally protected — if at all — by tensions between competing governments to one which recognized that there are certain liberties that cannot be abridged by any government.

There is some academic debate about whether the architects of the Fourteenth Amendment intended the freedoms protected by the Bill of Rights to be applied to the states because these liberties are part of the “privileges or immunities” of U.S. citizens, or because they are liberties that cannot be denied under the Constitution’s “due process” guarantees. Regardless of the correct answer to this academic question, however, one of the most important judicial projects of the Twentieth Century was a series of Supreme Court decisions applying most of the Bill of Rights’ limits to state governments. This project completed the work the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment began nearly 150 year ago — reconstructing America as a nation that recognizes certain civil rights which no lawmaker is allowed to trample. The right to be free from government endorsements of religious is one of these civil rights.

So when Starnes and his colleagues lash out against this one freedom, they are not simply lashing out against some court decisions that they disagree with. They are rejecting the most transformative moment in American constitutional history and denying that their side lost the Civil War.

A federal court in Indiana struck down a state law on Friday that would have enabled police to arrest many immigrants even if they had no evidence whatsoever that those immigrants had committed a crime.

Under the Indiana law, police are authorized to arrest immigrants who are the subject of various federal immigration-related actions. Some of these actions indicate the immigrant is to be deported, others have little or nothing to do with whether the immigrant is allowed to remain in the country lawfully. Indeed, as the court points out, one of the documents authorizing police to arrest immigrants in Indiana is a document that is used “to notify an individual that he or she has been granted lawful status.” So effect of the Indiana law is that an immigrant could learn that they may lawfully remain in the United States, only to have this lawful status used against them when Indiana police decide to arrest them.

The court found several problems with the Indiana law, but it reserved its harshest words for the law’s disregard for immigrants’ right to be free from unlawful searches and seizures under the Fourth Amendment:

Section 20 expressly provides that state and local enforcement officers “may arrest” individuals for conduct that all parties stipulate and agree is not criminal. The statute contains no reference to Fourth Amendment protections nor does it include a requirement that the arrest powers granted to law enforcement officers under Section 20 be used only in circumstances in which the officer has a separate, lawful reason for the arrest. Moreover, accepting Defendants’ proposed construction would, in effect, read the statute out of existence. Apart from the exclusion of Fourth Amendment requirements regarding probable cause to arrest, Section 20 bestows no authority on law enforcement officers beyond the power to arrest for the noncriminal conduct enumerated therein, creating a deafening silence as to what happens to the arrestee post his or her arrest. There is no mention of any requirement that the arrested person be brought forthwith before a judge for consideration of detention or release. There is, in fact, a complete void within the newly enacted statute regarding all other due process protections. . . .

[W]e find that Section 20 is susceptible to only one interpretation, to wit, that it authorizes the warrantless arrest of persons for matters and conduct that are not crimes. Because such power contravenes the Fourth Amendment, Section 20 is unconstitutional.

Unfortunately, other federal courts have twisted the law into knots in order to limit the Fourth Amendment rights of immigrants. One federal appeals court, the severely conservative Fifth Circuit, even went so far as to suggest that undocumented immigrants do not have any Fourth Amendment rights at all.

Last December, a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit denied a request from crafting retail chain Hobby Lobby, which sought to temporarily block Obama Administration rules requiring most employer-provided health plans to cover birth control. Hobby Lobby claimed that the religious liberties protected by the Constitution and federal law extend not only to a religious person’s own conduct, but they also effectively enable an employer to restrict someone else’s access to birth control by denying them benefits guaranteed by the law. The panel’s decision rejected this argument.

Yesterday, however, the full Tenth Circuit agreed to hear the case in an unusual nine-judge hearing — a procedure known as “en banc.” Typically, federal appeals are heard by three-judge panels, and this is especially true when no such panel has fully considered the case on the merits. The court’s previous order concerned a preliminary motion seeking a temporary injunction, not a final consideration of the case.

The court’s decision to hear the case en banc is an ominous sign for women in the workforce. More often than not, courts of appeals agree to hold an en banc hearing only when a majority of the court’s judges disagree with a panel’s previous disposition of a case. Even if that was not the motivation behind this particular decision to en banc this particular case, the fact remains that 6 of the Tenth Circuit’s 10 active judges are Republican-appointees (although one of the Republicans, Judge Jerome Holmes, is recused).

It should also be noted that the fate of the birth control rules would likely be much brighter in the Tenth Circuit if the White House was swifter at nominating judges and if the Senate had pushed through real filibuster reform that would have prevented Senate Republican obstruction of the President’s nominees. Two seats on the Tenth Circuit are vacant, and President Obama has yet to nominate anyone to fill these seats.

One of the most surprising things about the lawsuits challenging the Obama Administration’s birth control rules is how quickly many judges decided they object to the rules when that would have been a fringe position just a few years ago. In 2004, the California Supreme Court overwhelmingly rejected a similar challenge to a similar state birth control law, with five of the court’s six Republicans voting to uphold the law even under the strictest level of constitutional scrutiny. Only then-Justice Janice Rogers Brown, a future George W. Bush-appointee to the federal bench who once compared liberalism to “slavery” and Social Security to a “socialist revolution,” voted to strike down the birth control law.

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