Patterico has more on the Henderson/Karlton/Reinhardt travesty on the main blog, along with links to earlier posts.  A few questions I’d like to see answered, though:

1) How does a special panel of this sort get established?  Two district judges and an appellate judge?  Who picks them?

2) Does this kind of panel have a name?  No, really.

3) How can this be appealed?  Does this count as an action by the 9th Circuit itself, or is it a district-level ruling?  Does one have to go straight to the US Supreme Court?

4) How the &%$# did these three loons get appointed?  Henderson had the case originally, sure, but I thought the idea of a three-judge panel was to give some breadth of viewpoint.

Obviously the system failed here.  Did it fall, or was it pushed?

All House republicans voted against the stimulus, but they knew it would pass anyway.

Exactly three Republican senators voted for cloture, and those were from blue states.

Do the Republicans want the stimulus to not pass, or do they want it to pass without their fingerprints on it?