The Senate last week failed to pass H.R. 1, the House Republican-approved bill that set spending levels for the rest of 2011, by a 44-56 vote. All but three Republicans (who didn’t think the bill cut enough government spending) voted aye.

Amongst H.R. 1′s many destructive and economically counterproductive measures is a provision rescinding unobligated money from the Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery II, or TIGER II, grant program. The program is designed to deliver competitive grants to states for high-need infrastructure projects.

Senator Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) voted for H.R. 1, and thus to dismantle TIGER II, but is still asking the Department of Transportation to give a Tiger II grant to a bridge refurbishing project in her state, calling it “the No. 1 transportation priority” for New Hampshire:

Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., wants Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood to speed up the review process so her state can get its $20 million, one-fifth the cost of replacing a bridge from Portsmouth, N.H., to Kittery, Maine. “This is the No. 1 transportation priority for New Hampshire and Maine as well,” Ayotte said in an interview.

Both of Maine’s Republican senators — Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins — also voted for H.R. 1, but are still trying to secure funding for the bridge project. Two other New Hampshire Republicans — Reps. Frank Guinta and Charlie Bass — voted for H.R. 1, but have said that they want the bridge funding. “Clearly, the Memorial Bridge in Portsmouth should be a priority for the New Hampshire delegation to preserve,” Bass said.

During an appearance before Congress last week, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood explained that voting for H.R 1 would mean eliminating these infrastructure projects. “We just want to make sure everybody understands that,” LaHood said.

But its not only Granite state’s Republicans that want funding they voted against. Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), who voted against H.R. 1, still wants a rail project in Fort Wayne funded. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) also voted to kill the grant program, but still wants a Salt Lake City streetcar project to receive funding. “This is a rail system that really is needed and has been promised, and I think it ought to be granted,” Hatch said.

Of course, Republicans have had no compunctions about first voting against infrastructure money and then taking credit for it back home. In fact, 114 different GOP lawmakers voted against the 2009 Recovery Act, yet took credit for various projects. Overall, the Republican spending bill “cuts funding for transportation infrastructure by 9 percent, slashing $2.7 billion from rail, $675 million from federal transit investments, and nearly $1 billion from highway investments.”

A recent study co-authored by conservative Court of Appeals Judge Richard Posner confirms something that has been obvious to Supreme Court watchers for years — the Roberts Court places a huge thumb on the scale in favor of corporate interests. According to the study, the Roberts Court rules in favor of business interests 61 percent of the time, a 15 point spike from the five years before when Chief Justice Roberts joined the Court.

While the Chamber of Commerce has recently tried to downplay the favorable treatment it receives from the Supreme Court, its own top lawyer admitted a few years after Roberts joined the Court that the justices give his client special treatment:

Carter G. Phillips, who often represents the chamber and has argued more Supreme Court cases than any active lawyer in private practice, reflected on its influence. “I know from personal experience that the chamber’s support carries significant weight with the justices,” he wrote. “Except for the solicitor general representing the United States, no single entity has more influence on what cases the Supreme Court decides and how it decides them than the National Chamber Litigation Center.”

Phillips’ confession, and the Posner study’s conclusion, corroborates other data showing the Roberts Court’s favoritism towards corporate interests. A recent study by the progressive Constitutional Accountability Center determined that every single justice is more likely to side with the Chamber than the justice who held their seat 25 years ago (the study did not include the Court’s two newest members because of an insufficiently large data sample):

Welcome to John Roberts’ America, where the wealthy and the well-connected receive the best justice money can buy.

As we’ve been documenting, several conservative governors have proposed placing the brunt of deficit reduction onto the backs of their state’s public employees, students, and middle-class taxpayers, while simultaneously trying to enact corporate tax cuts and giveaways. Govs. Rick Scott (R-FL), Tom Corbett (R-PA), and Jan Brewer (R-AZ) have all gone down this road.

Following suit, Gov. Rick Snyder (R-MI) has proposed ending his state’s Earned Income Tax Credit, cutting a $600 per child tax credit, and reducing credits for seniors, while also cutting funding for school districts by eight to ten percent. At the same time, as the Michigan League for Human Services found, the state’s business taxes would be reduced by nearly $2 billion, or 86 percent, under Snyder’s plan:

Business taxes would be cut by 86 percent from an estimated $2.1 billion in FY 2011 to $292.7 million in FY 2013, the first full year of the proposed tax changes…Taxes on individuals from the state income tax would rise by $1.7 billion or nearly 31 percent, from an estimated $5.75 billion in FY 2011 to $7.5 billion in FY 2013, the first full year of the tax changes.

As the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found, the practical upshot of Snyder’s tax increases is to place even more of a burden on Michigan’s poorest residents, who will see a bigger hike than those at the upper end of the income scale:

Michigan already has a regressive tax system, which Snyder’s proposal will only make worse. Currently, someone in the poorest 20 percent of Michigan taxpayers pays a tax rate of 8.9 percent, while someone in the richest one percent pays 5.3 percent.

In addition to trying to make an unfair tax system even more problematic for Michigan’s low-income residents, Snyder has also asked that the state be given the power to dismiss local government and appoint emergency “town managers” who could break contracts and “strip powers from elected officials.”

On Friday, two dozen protesters gathered outside of an event for the St. Louis Regional Chamber and Growth Association, where U.S. Chamber of Commerce president Tom Donohue gave a lunchtime presentation about the economy. As ThinkProgress first reported in April of 2010, the U.S. Chamber operated as a front group for banks like J.P. Morgan and Bank of America to kill Wall Street reform. The local CBS affiliate in St. Louis noted that, while Donohue gave a speech demanding more deregulation of the economy, the protesters outside called for better government oversight of Wall Street. Asked by a reporter at the event what he thought of the protesters, Donohue mocked their intelligence:

When a reporter informed U.S. Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Tom Donohue that protestors were planning to demonstrate against his visit to St. Louis, he questioned their intelligence. “Do you think they even know what a derivative is?” Donohue said.

Asked about the massive protests against Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI), Donohue said that public servants have “over bloated” compensation:

Donohue turned truculent when asked whether events in Wisconsin are weakening unions and the right of workers to collective bargaining. [....] He went on to express his concerns that public sector pensions are “out of control” and that public workers compensation is “over bloated.”

Speaking of “over bloated” compensation, Donohue “travels in a chauffeured Lincoln and a leased jet, and his salary, $3.7 million last year, makes him the sixth highest paid lobbyist in the country.”

Donohue apparently has no problem taking cheap shots at people who have dedicated themselves to public service, but what does he do to deserve so much money? As we’ve reported, Donohue runs nothing more than a shell organization to help big corporations pursue nasty lobbying campaigns under the brand of the “U.S. Chamber of Commerce,” a group misleadingly associated with local chambers of commerce. For instance, the health insurance industry secretly funneled $86 million to the Chamber in 2009 to try to kill health reform. Similarly, oil companies, chemical firms, and defense industry corporations have used to the Chamber to run ads or lobby against regulations.

Congressional Republicans last week joined the banking industry in decrying a settlement — proposed by the nation’s attorneys general — that would involve the banks modifying about $20 billion in mortgages in order to avoid litigation over the “robo-signing” scandal and other mortgage abuses. Multiple bank CEO’s took their complaints public, while Republicans called the settlement proposal a “shakedown” by regulators.

And now, a few far-fight Republican attorneys general have broken with their counterparts in order to carry water for the banking industry. Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (R) said that he opposes the settlement because modifying mortgages to keep troubled homeowners out of foreclosure amounts to “welfare”:

Cuccinelli said he opposes principal reductions. “That sounds like a welfare discussion, not a regulatory discussion,” he said. “That’s not the appropriate role for attorneys general.”

Cuccinelli believes that restricting a woman’s right to choose, smearing climate change science, and attempting to overturn the Affordable Care Act are all within the purview of the attorney general’s office. But policing mortgage fraud is somehow inappropriate? Also, as Paul Krugman explained today, the notion that mortgage modifications constitute welfare is simply nonsense:

The proposed settlement only calls for loan modifications that would produce a greater “net present value” than foreclosure — that is, for offering deals that are in the interest of both homeowners and investors. The outrageous truth is that in many cases banks are blocking such mutually beneficial deals, so that they can continue to extract fees. How could ending this highway robbery be bad for the economy?…Getting banks to clear up mortgage debts — instead of stringing families along to extract a few more dollars — would help, not hurt, the economy.

Cuccinelli is not the only right wing attorney general to go to bat for the banks; Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt (R) also opposes the loan modification portion of the settlement.

At the same time that Republicans are criticizing a modest settlement following the widespread malpractice in the mortgage servicing industry, they are actively voting in Congress to “pull the plug” on federal foreclosure prevention programs, instead of fixing them to better serve homeowner who are faced with losing their home through no fault of their own. Analysts predict that more than one million homes will be foreclosed upon this year.