Yesterday, Senate Republicans voted nearly unanimously to block Caitlan Halligan’s nomination to the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Only Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) broke party lines to join the 54-45 vote to allow Halligan to move forward — leaving Halligan six votes short of what she needed to break the GOP filibuster.

The Senate GOP’s decision to filibuster Halligan earned wide rebukes from Senate Republicans*, many of whom slammed this decision to filibuster a judicial nominee as unconstitutional:

• Lamar Alexander (R-TN): “I would never filibuster any President’s judicial nominee, period. I might vote against them, but I will always see they came to a vote.”
• Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) and Johnny Isakson (R-GA): “Every judge nominated by this president or any president deserves an up-or-down vote. It’s the responsibility of the Senate. The Constitution requires it.”
• Tom Coburn (R-OK): “If you look at the Constitution, it says the president is to nominate these people, and the Senate is to advise and consent. That means you got to have a vote if they come out of committee. And that happened for 200 years.”
• John Cornyn (R-TX): “We have a Democratic leader defeated, in part, as I said, because I believe he was identified with this obstructionist practice, this unconstitutional use of the filibuster to deny the president his judicial nominations.
• Mike Crapo (R-ID): “Until this Congress, not one of the President’s nominees has been successfully filibustered in the Senate of the United States because of the understanding of the fact that the Constitution gives the President the right to a vote.”
• Lindsey Graham (R-SC): “I think filibustering judges will destroy the judiciary over time. I think it’s unconstitutional”
• Chuck Grassley (R-IA): “It would be a real constitutional crisis if we up the confirmation of judges from 51 to 60, and that’s essentially what we’d be doing if the Democrats were going to filibuster.”
• Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX): “[T]he Constitution envisions a 51-vote majority for judgeships…. [Filibustering judges] amend[s] the Constitution without going through the proper processes…. We have a majority rule that is the tradition of the Senate with judges. It is the constitutional requirement.”
• Jon Kyl (R-AZ): “The President was elected fair and square. He has the right to submit judicial nominees and it is the Senate’s obligation under the Constitution to act on those nominees.”
• Mitch McConnell (R-KY): “The Constitution of the United States is at stake. Article II, Section 2 clearly provides that the President, and the President alone, nominates judges. The Senate is empowered to give advice and consent. But my Democratic colleagues want to change the rules. They want to reinterpret the Constitution to require a supermajority for confirmation.”
• Jeff Sessions (R- AL): “[The Constitution] says the Senate shall advise and consent on treaties by a two-thirds vote, and simply ‘shall advise and consent’ on nominations…. I think there is no doubt the Founders understood that to mean … confirmation of a judicial nomination requires only a simple majority vote.”
• Richard Shelby (R-AL): “Why not allow the President to do his job of selecting judicial nominees and let us do our job in confirming or denying them? Principles of fairness call for it and the Constitution requires it.”
• John Thune (SD): Filibustering judicial nominees “is contrary to our Constitution …. It was the Founders’ intention that the Senate dispose of them with a simple majority vote.”

*All quotes are taken from when George W. Bush was president. But, of course, that doesn’t matter because — in the words of Cornyn — “we need to treat all nominees exactly the same, regardless of whether they’re nominated by a Democrat or a Republican president.”**

**Cornyn’s statement was also made when George W. Bush was president.

Last week, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) became the latest GOP lawmaker to fabricate a reason why he thinks Justice Elena Kagan must recuse from the Affordable Care Act litigation. On Friday, Senate Republicans escalated these frivolous assaults on Kagan’s ethical integrity even further — sending a letter signed by Sens. Mitch McConnell (KY), John Kyl (AZ), and Chuck Grassley (IA), the #1 and #2 Republicans in the Senate and the Senate GOP’s top lawmaker on the Judiciary Committee, to Attorney General Eric Holder laying out the exceptionally weak case for Kagan’s recusal:

Federal law requires recusal from a case if a judicial officer of the United States “has served in governmental employment and in such capacity participated as counsel, adviser or material witness concerning the proceeding or expressed an opinion concerning the merits of the particular case or controversy.” 28 U.S.C. § 455(b)(3). In addition, a federal judge must disqualify herself from participating in a matter if her “impartiality might reasonably be questioned.” Id. at § 455(a). It appears that former Solicitor General Kagan’s participation in the Obama Administration’s defense of the PPACA may satisfy both requirements for recusal.

Then-Solicitor General Kagan acknowledged to the Senate Judiciary Committee last year that, in fact, she played a “role” in the Obama Administration’s defense of the PPACA, including attending “at least one meeting” that discussed the litigation. But she minimized her degree of involvement in the litigation, characterizing it as not “substantial.” Federal law, however, requires recusal if a government official participated in a matter that is the subject of litigation; it does not require the government official’s past participation in that same matter to be “substantial” (as determined by the self-same government official).

Unsurprisingly, the letter from McConnell and his colleagues misrepresents Kagan’s actions. Although Kagan did testify at her confirmation hearing that she was once present in a meeting where the existence of the Affordable Care Act litigation was brought up, she also testified under oath that she did no work whatsoever as an attorney on this litigation. Being in a meeting where a particular lawsuit is mentioned does not constitute participation “as counsel, adviser or material witness” on a case any more than attending a football game makes you a coach.

Moreover, even though a far-right group filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking evidence that Kagan must recuse from the Affordable Care Act litigation, this request proved so fruitless that even the National Review’s Carrie Severino — a former clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas — was forced to conclude that the documents uncovered by this request contain no evidence requiring Justice Kagan’s recusal.

Yet, while McConnell’s letter is clearly just the latest chapter in a witchhunt seeking to discredit Kagan, it is nonetheless significant simply because McConnell’s name is on it. Previously, only a few senators such as Sessions and Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) — both of whom represent the Senate’s far right fringe — had jumped onboard the anti-Kagan witchhunt. The fact that McConnell, Kyl, and Grassley are now lighting up torches and demanding that Kagan be burnt at the stake indicates that this witchhunt is the official position of the Senate GOP caucus.

As ThinkProgress has been reporting, a federal judge’s decision last week to allow Alabama’s harshest-in-the-nation immigration law to go into effect has had heartbreaking consequences. Hispanic families have been fleeing Alabama in droves and thousands of children have been too terrorized to show up for school. The law allows police to racially profile and pull over anyone they suspect might be in the country illegally, and blatantly violates children’s constitutional right to an education by forcing schools to check students’ immigration status before they can be enrolled.

But Republican lawmakers who supported the measure have been remarkably short on compassion for immigrant families that have been torn apart. During an interview on conservative radio host Laura Ingraham’s show, Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions (R) said Hispanic children being too afraid to go to school is merely the just consequence of immigrants’ unlawful decision to live in the state:

INGRAHAM: Do you think it’s bad all these Hispanic kids have disappeared from the schools? Do you think that’s a bad thing?

SESSIONS: All I would just say to you is that it’s a sad thing that we’ve allowed a situation to occur for decades that large numbers of people are in the country illegal and it’s going to have unpleasant, unfortunate consequences.

Listen here:

Sessions said he “couldn’t agree more” with Ingraham when she called this a “sob story” that simply proves that “enforcement of the law works!” It’s a good thing, Ingraham suggested, that immigrants are responding by leaving Alabama. “This is a rational response,” Sessions remarked, arguing that “one of the sad consequences of illegal immigration is families can be hurt in the process” — indicating that families brought the government’s harsh crackdown on themselves by seeking a better life here.

Around 2,285 Hispanic students failed to show up for school on Monday, which amounts to 7 percent of the entire Hispanic population of the school system. On a conference call this week, Wendy Cervantes, the vice president of child rights policy at First Focus, pointed out that because federal education funding is based on attendance numbers, Alabama schools lose money every day these children don’t attend. Additionally, according to the Institute for Taxation & Economic Policy, undocumented immigrants in Alabama paid $130.3 million in state & local taxes in 2010 — money that state and local governments will have to do without if the new law succeeds in driving them from the state.

Yesterday, the Wonk Room wrote that tomorrow’s cloture vote on the Goodwin Liu judicial nomination is a truth-telling contest for conservatives — will Senate conservatives side with Ken Starr and John Yoo, who support Liu’s nomination, or will they buy various right-wing interest groups’ distortions of Liu’s record? Sadly, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) lost this contest today in an interview on Fox News:

Well, he has no real experience. He’s never tried a case. … He’s one of the most activist judges I think most of us have ever seen to be nominated. He believes there’s a constitutional right to welfare, for example. He has written some extraordinary things that have caused great concern.

Watch it:

Liu does not believe in a “constitutional right to welfare,” but Liu’s opponents have consistently made this baseless claim because of an article Liu published which actually says the opposite. As law Professor Jesse Choper explains:

Liu’s “conception of the judicial role does not license courts to declare rights to entirely new benefits or programs not yet in existence.” Welfare rights, Liu says, “cannot be reasoned into existence by courts on their own.” The main thrust of the article is to reject the view, advanced by legal scholars in the 1960s and 1970s, that courts can read into the Constitution a theory of distributive justice. Instead, Liu argues for “legislative supremacy” in defining welfare rights. For example, he says, there is “no role for courts” to question Congress’s decision in the 1996 welfare reform law to end the sixty-year old entitlement of poor families to cash assistance.

Liu does believe that the Constitution provides certain protections that ensure fair and equal access to welfare — but so does conservative Justice Antonin Scalia. Scalia, who, like Liu, spent most of his career in the legal academy and government service before becoming a judge, joined the Supreme Court’s decision in Saenz v. Roe. Saenz struck down a California law on constitutional grounds because it denied some California residents a portion of their welfare benefits. So if Liu’s stance on constitutional welfare disqualifies him from the federal bench, it also disqualifies Scalia.

This is hardly the first time that Sessions and his fellow conservatives held one of Obama’s judicial nominees to a standard that Scalia himself would fail. Sessions grilled Justice Elena Kagan because she wouldn’t label the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional — even though Scalia has also rejected the right’s arguments against this law. Kagan was also attacked because she once worked on a presidential memorandum preventing foreign gun manufacturers from importing military-grade firearms such as Uzis into the United States, even though Scalia wrote in D.C. v. Heller that it is perfectly constitutional to ban “weapons that are most useful in military service.”

The lesson that emerges from Sessions and others’ attacks on Liu isn’t that he is some kind of radical — why, then, would the likes of Ken Starr and John Yoo support him? The lesson that emerges from this entire debate is that Liu’s opponents have moved so far to the right that mainstream nominees like Liu — or even strident conservatives like Scalia — are no longer acceptable to them.