Will it be possible for House Republicans to get any immigration bills signed into law? No one is quite sure, but over the next few days I’ll be looking at some of the bills that pro-enforcement and pro-immigration reform groups think stand a chance. First on the list: an expansion of E-Verify, a controversial program that allows employers to use their workers’ Social Security numbers to verify that they can legally work in the United States.

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), who is expected to lead the Judiciary Committee, co-sponsored a bill in the current session to make use of E-Verify mandatory for all employers. The program is already mandatory for federal agencies and their contractors, but Republicans have said E-Verify should be expanded nationwide to better prevent undocumented workers from finding work.

Mark Krikorian, executive director of the pro-enforcement Center for Immigration Studies, told TWI that an expansion of the employment verification program could be passed in an effort by Democrats to show their commitment to immigration enforcement.

“I could see the administration deciding they need to back [mandatory E-Verify] to show their bona fides on enforcement so they can make a more conceivable case for amnesty in the future,” Krikorian said, referring to Obama’s support for paths to legal status for some of the illegal immigrants already in the country. “It undercuts the criticisms of the president as opposing enforcement and strengthens his hand for a possible second term.”

Of course, the Obama administration has already stepped up its immigration enforcement, sending more troops to the border and increasing deportation levels. Democrats may be unwilling to go further due to reported problems with E-Verify, said Grisella Martinez, director of policy and legislative affairs at the pro-reform National Immigration Forum.

Critics of the program say it contains flukes that allow some undocumented immigrants to escape detection and deny some legal workers employment. The Social Security Administration reportedly has an error rate of more than 4 percent in the databases E-Verify uses to check legal status. Critics in the business community say E-Verify puts unfair burdens on human resource departments that will have to be trained to use the program.

The projected high cost of implementing E-Verify nationwide could also deter Senate Democrats and Obama from supporting a bill. The Congressional Budget Office reported in 2008 that mandating E-Verify use could decrease federal revenues by about $17.3 billion between 2009 and 2018. Many experts say employers would still have a demand for labor from illegal immigrants, who in some sectors are likely to accept work that legal Americans often do not. E-Verify would therefore starve the government of tax dollars through a huge increase in the number of undocumented workers being paid untaxed wages under the table.

“I don’t think mandating E-Verify without a legalization program is possible,” Martinez said. “If it were to occur, we’d be looking at a real economic tailspin. Numerous government reports have all pointed to the fact that to mandate a program like E-Verify without legalizing the workers who are already in our economy would be absolutely catastrophic.”

Colbert will appear before the House subcommittee alongside United Farm Workers President Arturo Rodriguez, who was previously a guest on Colbert’s show. Rodriguez will likely talk about the UFW’s “Take Our Jobs” campaign, in which legal residents were given the opportunity to volunteer and replace migrant farm workers:

The UFW launched the campaign to counter claims that illegal immigrants are taking jobs from American workers — with the argument that most people would never take these jobs. Colbert signed up to be one of the few who did — for a day.

“Since we launched the “Take Our Jobs” more than three million people have visited our web site, www.takeourjobs.org. Of those visitors, 8,600 have expressed an interest in seeking employment as farm workers. Despite these numbers, only seven people have taken us up on the offer to take a job in agriculture,” the UFW said in a press release. “These numbers demonstrate that there are more politicians and finger-pointers interested in blaming undocumented farm workers for America’s unemployment crisis then there are unemployed Americans who are willing to harvest and cultivate America’s food.”

Colbert, apparently, was one of those seven people to sign up, and he aired footage of his experiences last night on his show. Needless to say, he didn’t last long.

The “Protecting America’s Harvest” hearing is scheduled to start this morning at 9:30.

“I urge the House Judiciary Committee to report this resolution out favorably and to demand that the attorney general answer the questions surrounding this case,” said Wolf. “The career attorneys and Appellate Division within the department sought to demonstrate the federal government’s commitment to protecting voting rights by vigorously prosecuting any individual or group that seeks to undermine this right.”

After the jump, read the Resolution and Wolf’s full statement.

Wolf Nbpp Roi

“I rise today to introduce a Resolution of Inquiry directing the attorney general to transmit to the House all information relating to the decision to dismiss an important voter intimidation case, United States v. New Black Panther Party. The case sought to enforce Voting Rights Act statutes against members of the New Black Panther Party that threatened Philadelphia voters — both verbally and physically — last year.

“This case was inexplicably dismissed earlier this year — over the ardent objections of the career attorneys overseeing the case as well as the department’s own appeal office.

“I regret that Congress must resort to oversight resolutions as a means to receive information about the dismissal of this case, but the Congress and the American people have a right to know why this case was not prosecuted.

“As ranking Republican member of the House Commerce-Justice-Science Appropriations Subcommittee that funds the Justice Department, I take oversight of the department very seriously.

“I also strongly support voting rights protections. In 1981, I was the only member — Republican or Democrat — of the Virginia delegation in the House to vote for the Voting Rights Act and was harshly criticized by the editorial page of the Richmond Times Dispatch, and when I supported its reauthorization in 2006, I was criticized again by editorial pages.

“Time and again over the last year, the department has stonewalled any effort to learn about the decision to dismiss this case. I have written Attorney General Holder on six occasions asking for an explanation for the dismissal of this case. To date, I have received no response from him.

“I wrote the DOJ inspector general to request a review of this decision. He deferred to the Office of Professional Responsibility – which reports directly to the attorney general. I have written the Office of Professional Responsibility seeking information on its investigation. The Office has refused to share any information.

“In fact, the only response I have received – from a legislative affairs staffer – was woefully incomplete and – in places – inaccurate.

“Two months ago, I met with House Judiciary Chairman Conyers to ask for his assistance in obtaining this information, but he has yet to take any action. This is a shameful failure to provide necessary congressional oversight.

“It is not only Congress that is being stonewalled by the attorney general. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has repeatedly sought this same information, in fulfillment of its statutory responsibility to ensure the enforcement of civil rights law.

“After being similarly rebuffed, the commission filed subpoenas with the department for this information as well as to interview the career attorneys that handled the case.

“However, we understand that the attorney general has instructed his department to ignore these subpoenas. The nation’s chief law enforcement officer is forcing these career attorneys to choose between complying with the law and complying with the attorney general’s obstruction.

“At least one of the attorneys has been compelled to obtain private counsel.

“I urge the House Judiciary Committee to report this resolution out favorably and to demand that the attorney general answer the questions surrounding this case. The career attorneys and Appellate Division within the department sought to demonstrate the federal government’s commitment to protecting voting rights by vigorously prosecuting any individual or group that seeks to undermine this right.

“This House must not turn a blind eye to the attorney general’s obstruction. He has an obligation to answer the legitimate questions of the House and the Civil Rights Commission. It is imperative that we protect the right of all Americans to vote — the sacrosanct and inalienable right of any democracy.”

Congress has held two hearings already on the cases of Ashcroft v. Iqbal and Bell Atlantic v. Twombly, which introduced a new “credibility” requirement in pleading standards that civil rights advocates and some Democratic lawmakers complain leaves the fate of discrimination victims to the prejudices of a particular judge assigned to the case. Now, instead of simply having to state clearly what the claims are, plaintiffs have to convince the judge that those claims are credible at the outset, before even having had an opportunity to collect evidence to support them.

While that pleases some conservatives who view most civil rights lawsuits with skepticism, civil rights experts say it rewards employers and others who discriminate but have learned to cover their tracks.

As the Times puts it today: “The practical impact in, say, an employment discrimination case is to disadvantage the wronged employee, who is unlikely to have access at the outset to the records needed to prove wrongful conduct.”

The Times cites John Payton, president of the NAACP legal defense fund, who recently testified that some of the landmark cases of the civil rights era might never have survived the Supreme Court’s new standard. In his written testimony submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee earlier this month, Payton cites specific examples of potentially meritorious cases that didn’t survive the new standard because the plaintiffs couldn’t convince a skeptical judge that employment, voting or housing discrimination is “credible.”

As Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), a former U.S. Attorney, put it at that Senate hearing, “In my experience, misconduct is inherently implausible” because we generally expect people to act decently, fairly and lawfully.

Nadler’s legislation acknowledges the fact that sometimes, they don’t live up to that standard.

That’s the question a subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee examined Wednesday. Echoing a recent parallel hearing in the Senate, lawmakers and witnesses considered whether the Supreme Court’s recent rulings in two key cases undermined the ability of victims to have their day in court, or protected business and government from costly and intrusive lawsuits.

As in the Senate, House lawmakers appear divided along party lines. Democrats and their witnesses say that the Supreme Court’s recent decisions in Bell Atlantic v. Twombly and Ashcroft v. Iqbal have gutted the civil rights and antitrust laws and imposed an unfair and often insurmountable burden that will doom many valid claims. Republicans and their witnesses, meanwhile, say the court did the right thing to help reduce frivolous lawsuits that destroy small businesses and drag busy government officials into court unnecessarily.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), who testified at Wednesday’s hearing, has introduced legislation to effectively turn back the clock to before the Supreme Court’s rulings by restoring the previous standard for filing claims.That legislation, HR 4115, the Open Access to Courts Act, was the focus of the hearing.

The key question is, should a victim filing a lawsuit be required to produce evidence of specific credible facts supporting her claims in order to be allowed to proceed with the case? In the past, courts have required only “a short and plain statement” of the claims. The facts are adduced in the course of the lawsuit through a legal process known as “discovery.”

For those who view most lawsuits as frivolous, the Supreme Court’s new standard is a welcome change. Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) argued Wednesday that the high court’s recent requirement “seems to me to be very reasonable.” The proposed legislation, on the other hand, he argued, “is an economic stimulus package for trial lawyers.”

The Democrats’ witnesses, such as Eric Schnapper, law professor at University of Washington and a former attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, countered that the two recent Supreme Court cases “brought about sweeping changes in the lower courts, all for the worse.” In discrimination cases, now, so long as “discriminatory officials do a good job covering their tracks, under Iqbal and Twombly they can cut off any legal challenge before discovery is available to unearth their records or force them to answer questions under oath,” he said. The new standard “requires proof of a smoking gun,” which could doom many meritorious cases at the outset, he testified.

Gregory Katsas, a Justice Department official in the Bush administration who defended former Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller in the Iqbal case and now defends corporations at a private law firm, warned that the proposed legislation would “open the floodgates” for “fishing expeditions – intrusive and expensive discovery into implausible and insubstantial claims.” That would “impose massive costs on defendants who have engaged in no wrongdoing.”

When it comes to cases against government officials, such as Iqbal — which alleged that senior Bush administration officials discriminated against Muslims by improperly detaining them after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — “such discovery would vitiate an important component of the officials’ qualified immunity” even where the claims are against individual government officials “for actions undertaken to prosecute wars abroad or to respond to national?security emergencies at home,” said Katsas. “Such a result,” he added, “would be paralyzing if not deadly.”

Both sides came armed with statistics to support their case that the recent Supreme Court decisions were either a “sea change” in the law that decimated the ability of civil rights claimants to pursue their cases, or were merely a logical interpretation of existing law and had little impact on the actual outcome of cases in court.

As several of the expert witnesses pointed out, however, the statistics don’t really tell you all that much. Even if cases are being filed or dismissed at about the same rate as before, there’s no telling how many cases haven’t been filed because the new standard would doom them, or how many defense lawyers are relying on the new standards to ask courts to dismiss cases that they wouldn’t have dared tried to get dismissed so early in the game before.

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) reaches into his bucket of acorns at Tuesday's ACORN forum. (twitpic: darrellissa)

As legislators streamed into the room around him, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.), ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, peered over his glasses at the roughly 60 people who’d come to this special hearing on ACORN.

“I’m glad to see this turnout so early in the day,” said Smith. (The hearing began at 2:30 p.m. on Tuesday, but there was nothing happening in the House.) “Today’s hearing is an opportunity for Republicans to move forward on this issue of importance to the American people.”

With most of Washington’s attention focused on the health care debate happening a flew blocks away in the Senate, or President Obama’s upcoming speech on troop escalation in Afghanistan, Smith and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the sponsors of the hearing, were able to attractive an impressive amount of media. Six cameras were staged around the room, and national reporters filled out the seats behind the witness stand alongside members of ACORN-investigating conservative organizations like the Capital Research Center and Big Government. Officially titled a “Joint Forum on ACORN,” the hearing gave Republicans a chance to re-air allegations against the controversial activist group, which lost its long-standing federal funding in two lopsided September votes.

[GOP1]The eight Republican members of Congress who showed up for the hearing didn’t disappoint. With one exception, they labeled ACORN a “criminal enterprise” with close and current ties to the highest levels of the Obama administration and the labor movement.

“President Obama previously served as ACORN’s lawyer, participated in ACORN training sessions in Chicago, and presided on the board of two organizations that funded ACORN’s Chicago chapter,” said Smith. An old picture of Obama in an ACORN office was posted near the hearing stand to bolster his point. “The president’s ties with ACORN taint any conclusions the Department of Justice may reach with regard to whether or not to investigate ACORN employees. That’s why I’ve requested that the attorney general appoint a special prosecutor to investigate ACORN.”

To bolster their case, Republicans produced 81 pages of documents about ACORN’s voter registration activities in 2004 and 2006  — a supplement to Issa’s 99-page July 2009 report, “Is ACORN Intentionally Structured As a Criminal Enterprise?”

The 81 new pages, helpfully highlighted by staffers, put ACORN staffers on the record planning voter registration drives and campaigns for “progressive” candidates. They also touched on the organization’s social work — “within the next year Maryland ACORN will conduct 500 new lead tests for low and moderate-income renters and homeowners” — but members and witnesses argued that the organization’s political activity, clearly benefiting Democrats and President Obama, was at least reason to strip it of tax-exempt status.

“The current admin is becoming, in reality, the war room for ACORN’s political machine,” said Issa. “The poor will be better served when ACORN is no longer a go-to place for services.”

Issa kept his case simple: ACORN was intervening in, and tampering with, elections, using “money taken from poor people.” And he spent much of his time tossing friendly questions to Anita Moncrief, a former ACORN employee who has turned into a whistleblower against everything the group did while she worked there. Moncrief said that she joined the group to help the poor; when she decided that they were bilking people who asked for help, and that they were spending too much time assisting Democrats, she bolted.

“All of us, maybe with one exception, knew Albert Wynn,” said Issa, referring to  unpredictable former congressman from Maryland’s African-American suburbs of Washington, D.C. “He was well-liked, a good man.”

In a short round of questions, Moncrief charged ACORN with conspiring to aid progressive candidate Donna Edwards — who’s currently serving in Congress, having defeated Wynn. “Albert Wynn was pictured next to George Bush,” said Moncrief, describing a PowerPoint presentation she saw. “They tried to paint him in a light that he was friendly with George Bush. They wanted to support Donna Edwards, who happens to sit on the board of one of the organizations that supplied money for one of their campaigns.”

Issa shook his head. “Here, today, the distortion even in the Democratic primary, of ‘you’re not the right kind of Democrat,’ speaks legions about why this should be investigated by both parties,” said Issa. “Obviously we’d like the attorney general in Maryland to do something about that.”

Issa’s congressional colleague was not the only Democrat to take fire from the hearings. Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), who brought a plastic bucket of acorns with him as an illustration, asked witness Hans Von Spakovsky, a Bush Department of Justice veteran who now works at the Heritage Foundation, about the role new White House Counsel Bob Bauer might play in “scrubbing the trail between the president and ACORN.”

“He’s a nice guy,” said Von Spakovsky, “but he’s a fierce opponent. He was general counsel of the DNC. He’s willing to just about anything to win.”

King and Von Spakovsky agreed that Bauer, in writing a 2008 memo pre-emptively attacking the McCain-Palin campaign for hyping the bogus voter registration forms filled out in swing states — forms that did not result in illegal votes, but took considerable time to find illegitimate — had proven himself willing to go to bat for ACORN. King, going further, suggested that the October resignation of former White House Communications Director Anita Dunn, Bauer’s wife, was tied to local ACORN investigations. “It wasn’t planned,” said King, apparently not believing Dunn’s long-announced plans to hold the job for a few months and then leave. Von Spakovsky ignored that argument, but backed up the rest of King’s case.

“Bauer’s argument was that if you talk about voter fraud, you’re intimidating voters,” said Von Spakovsky. “I guess I should be looking in the mail for a subpoena because I write about voter fraud quite a bit.”

In another, tone-setting exchange, King explained that he always kept a Constitution and a real acorn, from the Capitol grounds, in his pockets. The purpose, he said, was to remind him of the threat ACORN posed to the Constitution.

“My opinions are my own,” said Von Spakovsky, “and not representative of the Heritage Foundation — although I must say, I think Congressman King was holding a Heritage copy of the Constitution.” King nodded and smiled at the witness.

The rest of the hearing was about that friendly. The other Republicans who grilled their witnesses were largely concerned with horror stories from their states and confirmation of their worst fears about ACORN.

“Every two years we talk about voter fraud, and then the media goes away,” said Rep. Ted Poe (R-Tex.). “I think it’s time folks go to jail for voter fraud in this country, and then they lose the right to vote. That’s what happens to convicted felons in this country.”

Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.), who was introduced by Issa as the former chairman the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee who’d signed the most subpoenas in history in order to investigate allegations of Democratic campaign finance abuse–”1,209! I got writer’s cramp!”–framed the ACORN issue as a battle for basic American freedoms. “Our forefathers fought for, I don’t know, what, eight years to defeat the British because they didn’t want taxation without representation,” said Burton. “And now we’re watching all these things being taken away, just frittered away, because we won’t enforce the law? It’s just criminal.”

The one dissonant note came from Rep. Joseph Cao (R-La.), who defeated the indicted (and now convicted) former Congressman William Jefferson last year to grab the most-Democratic seat currently held by a Republican. Cao, who represents New Orleans, explained that he was in the room to “gather information,” not to indict ACORN. “I’ve seen them work in Louisiana,” said Cao. “This organization has done some good things in order to address the issues of minorities.” Less than halfway through the two-hour meeting, though, Cao left, without asking questions of the witnesses.

Little was revealed about ACORN that has not been reported; King even referred witnesses to a Fox News documentary on the group for part of his evidence. And before closing the hearing, Issa admitted that “ACORN’s amount of money that they’ve received from the government is relatively small.” The point, he said, was to rattle Democrats into holding a real investigation.

“I regret that this forum is necessary,” said Issa. “The American people deserve official hearing into ACORN. This hearing is necessarily partisan, but I would like to have this be nonpartisan.”

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) made a simpler case for more hearings.

“From one acorn,” said Gohmert, “many nuts can grow.”

I don’t think anything that Rush Limbaugh said was offensive, but with Fergie and with J-Lo, they have, between the two of them, alleged that the CIA are terrorists and liars, they’ve promoted sexual abuse of women, they’ve used the N word, verbal pornography, recreational drug use, etc. And they are owners of the Dolphins. And it’s also ironic that Fergie was approved as an owner on the very day that you made your statement on Rush Limbaugh.

It’s probably worth mentioning that the House Judiciary Committee hearing was titled “Legal Issues Related to Football Head Injuries.”

Here’s the video:

Elliot Madison, who counsels seriously mentally ill patients, first came under suspicion when, at the G-20 gathering of world leaders in Pittsburgh in September, he was arrested for allegedly listening to a police scanner and then sending out the information on Twitter to help protesters avoid the heavily armed police. Wired notes that the State Department applauded the same activity when protesters did it in Iran.

But in Madison’s case, the following week the Joint Terrorism Task Force got a warrant and raided the 41-year-old social worker’s home, where he lives with his wife and some roommates. The feds seized his computers, books, camera memory cards, air-filtration masks, bumper stickers and political posters. These were all supposedly evidence of his breaking the federal anti-rioting law. If found guilty, he could spend up to five years in prison.

Among his possessions taken were an electronic manuscript of a book he was working on. His first book, written with the “Curious George Brigade,” is called “Anarchy in the Age of Dinosaurs.”

Madison and his lawyer are now claiming that the search and seizure were unconstitutional.

Wired reporter Ryan Singel is decidedly sympathetic, suggesting that Madison is “yet another casualty of the government’s nasty, post-9/11 habit of considering political dissidents as threats to national security.”

The House Judiciary Committee is actually holding a hearing on a related subject this afternoon — the case of Ashcroft v. Iqbal, in which one of the thousands of Muslims rounded up, treated harshly and detained in the United States just after 9/11 sued the government for wrongful imprisonment and violation of his constitutional rights. In May, the Supreme Court dismissed Iqbal’s claims.

After the House Judiciary Committee worked for days shortly after September 11, 2001 to hammer out a bill that both parties’ representatives unanimously agreed to, Conyers recalled with obvious irritation, the House Rules committee managed to hack it up so much behind closed doors that by the time the full House voted on it the next day, it was unrecognizable.

“Then Chairman Dreier” — referring to Rep. David Dreier (R-Calif.), then chairman of the House Rules Committee — “under lord knows whose instructions, substituted that bill for another bill, that we at Judiciary had never seen. So we come here today now to consider what we do with those parts that are expiring.” Conyers proceeded to say that many of the problems being discussed at the hearing with the current law would have been addressed by the original bipartisan one, such as offering an opportunity for people harmed by the Patriot Act’s abuses to seek redress. The original law also “may have eliminated, or simplified, litigation about Patriot Act abuses that continue today,” said Conyers.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), who chaired today’s hearing of the Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties, backed up Conyers’ version of what happened.

“We held in this committee five days of markup and achieved unanimity on the Patriot Act. Then the bill just disappeared. And we had a new several-hundred-page bill revealed from the Rules Committee” that had to be voted on the next day, before most members of Congress even had a chance to read it, said Nadler.

None of the Republicans at today’s hearing challenged the Democratic chairmen’s version of events.

The Washington Post has obtained those emails and reports that they reveal contacts between Rove, Bush aides and White House lawyers about the firing of three of the nine federal prosecutors dismissed in 2006.  According to The Post, those prosecutors are “New Mexico’s David C. Iglesias, the focus of ire from GOP lawmakers; Missouri’s Todd Graves, who had clashed with one of Rove’s former clients; and Arkansas’s Bud Cummins, who was pushed out to make way for a Rove protégé.”

Rove had previously described himself as “merely passing along complaints by senators and state party officials to White House lawyers.”

Rove yesterday finished his second day of closed-door testimony to the committee — testimony that was negotiated after he and former White House counsel Harriet Miers had refused to testify, and the House sued to compel their testimony. As part of the negotiation, transcripts of their testimony could be released in August.

Meanwhile, Assistant U.S. Attorney Nora R. Dannehy is still investigating whether the apparently politically motivated firings could warrant any criminal charges.