Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, appeared on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show yesterday to discuss Elena Kagan’s Supreme Court nomination. Kyl complained that during the hearing, Democrats attempted to paint the Supreme Court led by Chief Justice John Roberts as “coming down on the side of big business“:

HH: With Chief Justice Roberts, was any review of those documents held by a — for example, the senior minority member of the Judiciary Committee?

JK: No. No, not to my knowledge, no.

HH: How did the first day go?

JK: Pretty much as expected. Republicans raised appropriate questions. It was respectful. She noted that all of her meetings with Senators have been courteous. Democrats primarily not only applauded her for having a wonderful background and being a great person, but also took the opportunity to slam what they call the Roberts Court and its activism in coming down on the side of big business repeatedly at the expense of the little guy. All a fraudulent claim, but that’s what they’re arguing.

Of course, the Senate Democrats’ arguments were far from “fraudulent.” The Roberts court has been one of the most pro-corporate in history. A recent study from the Constitutional Accountability Center documented how the court “has a decidedly probusiness tilt.” Demonstrating this bent, the court last week strengthened corporations’ power to force their customers and employees into biased, privatized courts whenever a dispute arises between them.

And, the court’s far-right voting bloc famously upended precedent to defend corporations’ supposed right to spend unlimited sums on elections in Citizens United. Today, in a piece on Roberts’ dramatic impact on the court, the New York Times said that decision “showed great solicitude to the interests of corporations.”

- William Tomasko

Today, Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) brought her bill — the Homeless Women Veterans and Homeless Veterans With Children Act — to the Senate floor seeking unanimous consent. Murray said the bill would “expand assistance for homeless women veterans and homeless veterans with children and would increase funding and extend federal grant programs to address the unique challenges faced by these veterans.” However, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) objected on behalf of Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) to this seemingly non-controversial issue:

McCONNELL: Madam president, reserving the right to object and I will have to object on behalf of my colleague Sen. Coburn from Oklahoma. He has concerns about this legislation, particularly as he indicates in a letter that I’ll ask the Senate to appear on the record that it be paid for up front so that the promises that makes the Veterans are in fact kept. So madam president I object.

Watch it:

“This is pretty low, even for Republicans,” the Washington Monthly’s Steve Benen said. While Murray pledged to continue to fight for the bill’s passage, Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-NV) spokesperson said “Republicans have their priorities backwards — according to them, it’s OK to give tax breaks to CEOs who send American jobs overseas, but not to help out-of-work Americans and homeless veteran.”

This past weekend, President Obama attended the G-20 Summit on international economic cooperation in Toronto, which ended with a declaration calling for member countries to work “to ensure a full return to growth with quality jobs, to reform and strengthen financial systems, and to create strong, sustainable and balanced global growth.” Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), however, fears that the 20 countries were really working to set up “a one world government.”

In an interview on Scott Hennen’s radio show today, Bachmann claimed that the purpose of the G-20 was to “bind together the world’s economies.” Neglecting the already interconnected nature of the global economy, Bachman declared that “President Obama is trying to bind the United States into a global economy”:

BACHMANN: What really concerned me was Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said that we don’t want to see one country’s economy doing better than another. What? This is the U.S. Treasury Secretary? We don’t want to see Zimbabwe’s economy do better than the United States? Aren’t we supposed to be about the United States and making sure that our economy can be the greatest in the world. If you look at the G20, what they’re trying to do is bind together the world’s economies. Look how that played out in the European Union when they bound all of those nations economies together and one of the smallest economies, Greece, when they got into trouble, that one little nation is bringing down the entire EU. Well, President Obama is trying to bind the United States into a global economy where all of our nations come together in a global economy. I don’t want the United States to be in a global economy where, where our economic future is bound to that of Zimbabwe. I can’t, we can’t necessarily trust the decisions that are being made financially in other countries.

“So I think clearly this is a very bad direction because when you join the economic policy of different nations, it is one short step to joining political unity and then you would have literally, a one world government,” said Bachmann. “I don’t want to cede United States authority to a transnational organization.” Listen here:

Matt Yglesias notes that “the existence of a global economy in which events outside our borders impact us is not something Barack Obama dreamed up, and the idea that having world leaders gather for occasional meetings constitutes a ‘one world government’ is insane.”

But it’s not new for Bachmann to dream up nightmarish scenarios about the U.S. ceding its economic sovereignty. Around the time of the 2009 G-20 Summit, she peddled a false conspiracy theory that the world was moving toward a unified global currency. “This is not Michele Bachmann being a kook,” declared the Minnesota congresswoman. It was and is.

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