At last night’s GOP presidential candidates debate, former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) was asked why he’s promised to address “the dangers of contraception in this country” if elected president. In response, he cited a particularly unfortunate author:

What I was talking about is, we have a society — Charles Murray just wrote a book about this and it’s on the front page of the New York Times two days ago — which is the increasing number of children being born out of wedlock in America, teens who are sexually active. What we’re seeing is a problem in our culture with respect the children being raised by children, children being raised out of wedlock, and the impact on society economically, the impact on society with respect to drug use and a host of other things, when children have children. And so, yes, I was talking about these very serious issues. and, in fact, as I mentioned before, two days ago on the front page of the New York Times, they’re talking about the same thing.

Watch it:

First of all, Santorum’s decision to justify his skepticism of contraception by citing the problem of unwed mothers is like something out of the Bizarro Planet. Here in the actual world, contraception is the solution to the problem of unplanned pregnancies, not the cause.

Likewise, Santourm’s decision to rely on Charles Murray is no less distressing. Murray co-authored The Bell Curve, which argues that black people score lower on IQ tests because they are genetically inferior to whites. To reach this conclusion, Murray relied on studies backed by the Pioneer Fund, whose original mission was to pursue “race betterment” for people “deemed to be descended predominantly from white persons who settled in the original thirteen states prior to the adoption of the Constitution.”

Murray’s latest book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, is a similarly rigorous work of scholarship. In the words of former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum, Murray’s latest opus proves that the racially-challenged author is unwilling “to submit his politics to the check of uncongenial evidence” and instead would “prefer[] to avoid encountering the evidence that might shake his politics.” Sadly, this description also applies to Santorum.

The following is the third of a multi-part series by Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor at The American Prospect, on the National Rifle Association’s exaggerated role in American politics.

In the first two installments in this series (see the first and second), we analyzed two widespread misconceptions about the power of the National Rifle Association, that its money and its endorsements have a substantial effect on the outcome of congressional elections. Today, we’ll look at the foundations of these myths: the mistaken reading of history that allows the NRA to continue to make legislators live in fear of taking on the gun lobby.

What Really Happened in 1994

All myths have a genesis story, and this one begins in the early 1990s. The first two years of Bill Clinton’s presidency saw an unusual number of controversial legislative battles – the gays-in-the-military debate resulting in the creation of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the 1993 budget with its upper-income tax increases, the unsuccessful attempt at health care reform, NAFTA, and the passage of an omnibus crime bill, which included a ban on the sale of assault weapons. When Republicans took control of both houses of Congress in the 1994 elections, the NRA immediately claimed credit for the GOP landslide, and many Democrats agreed. Bill Clinton himself validated the NRA’s argument in January 1995 when he told a reporter, “The fight for the assault-weapons ban cost 20 members their seats in Congress. The NRA is the reason Republicans control the House.”

Indeed, not a single incumbent Republican lost in 1994. But how much credit can the NRA claim for the GOP’s success? Studies by political scientists addressing this question produce the following conclusion: some, but nowhere near the Republicans’ margin of victory that year.

One study directly examined the effect of the NRA in that election. This research, by Christopher Kenny, Michael McBurnett, and David Bordua, examined NRA endorsements and election results in 1994 and 1996, and did find an impact of those endorsements – but determined that that impact was limited and highly conditional. Their results showed that an NRA endorsement helped Republican challengers to a small degree in 1994, but had almost no impact for Democrats who were endorsed, Republican incumbents who were endorsed, or any kind of candidate in 1996. These results, as well as the magnitude of the effect they found – about a 2-point boost for Republican challengers, but nothing for anyone else – were almost exactly what I found in my analysis of the 2004-2010 congressional elections.

As I explained in that analysis, there were few races in the last four congressional elections where such a boost from an NRA endorsement would have made a difference – only four races, in fact, out of the 1,038 times the NRA endorsed House candidates. In 1994, however, there were an unusual number of close races, and 12 Republican challengers won by a margin of 4 points or less. Of those, nine were endorsed by the NRA. The GOP needed a net gain of 41 seats to take control of the House, and their actual net gain on election night was 54 seats. So even if we were to attribute every last one of those nine victories to the NRA and assume that without the organization each race would have gone Democratic – an extremely generous assumption – the Republicans would still have gained 45 seats and won control of the House.
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Last October, ThinkProgress observed that the Affordable Care Act case will probably only be the “second most important health care case this SCOTUS term.” Part of this assessment stemmed from the fact that the case against the ACA is so weak — a leading conservative judge said that it has no basis “in either the text of the Constitution or Supreme Court precedent” — that it is unlikely that the Court will do anything other than uphold that law. But this assessment was rooted as much in the potential harm that could emerge from a far less well-known case called Douglas v. Independent Living Center.

Fortunately, our assessment of Douglas was not correct. By a narrow 5-4 margin, the Supreme Court decided to put off until another day a complex legal issue that could render much of our Medicaid law unenforceable.

As we explained last October, Medicaid is the largest example of a federal/state partnership where the state agrees to set up a program to help its citizens and the feds agree to put up much of the money necessary to keep this program running. When a state agrees to participate in Medicaid, they must also agree to comply with the network of federal laws governing the Medicaid program, including a requirement that the state’s Medicaid program pays health providers enough to “ensure that enough providers will participate in the Medicaid program so that patients will have meaningful health care access.”

Beginning about a decade ago, however, the Court began making it harder for these laws to actually be enforced. Under this new line of cases, it became harder and harder for private individuals to actually enforce Medicaid and similar laws — only an action by the federal government itself could be used to ensure that states comply with the law. Douglas threatened to complete this process, making much of the law largely unenforceable by the people it is intended to protect.

The Court’s four conservatives joined a dissent indicating that they are ready to do exactly that. Justice Anthony Kennedy, however, broke with his fellow conservatives to punt this question until another day — ordering a lower court to consider whether a recent decision by a federal agency makes deciding the issue in the Douglas case unnecessary. In other words, today’s decision is largely a nothingburger.

Should the Court eventually adopt the dissenting justices’ view, the result would be that the availability of programs like Medicaid could swing wildly depending on who is in the White House. As we wrote in October:

[T]he short term effect will be that only the Obama Administration will have the power to enforce key provisions of the Medicaid law — and patients and health providers will just have to trust that Obama’s team does an adequate job of enforcing the law. That may not seem so bad, but what happens if the Obama Administration gets replaced with the Perry Administration or the Palin Administration or the Ryan Administration or some other administration that is actively hostile to enforcing the Medicaid laws? If a future Administration shows no interest in enforcing the Medicaid statute, then entire provisions of law could effectively cease to exist until a more progressive president is elected.

Hopefully, today’s surprising vote by Justice Kennedy to punt this case means that he is not prepared to turn this prediction into a reality.

Yarelis Bonilla, a 5-year-old Leukemia patient in New Jersey, has been released from the hospital after successfully receiving a bone marrow transplant from her sister last month. But her life-saving procedure almost did not happen because her 7-year-old sister Giselle lived in El Salvador with the girls’ grandmother. After doctors diagnosed Yarelis with Leukemia in August, U.S. officials twice denied a visa for Gisselle to come to the U.S. to donate her bone marrow for her sister:

Gisselle and every member of Yarelis’ family were tested as possible donors when Yarelis was diagnosed with leukemia. Only Gisselle, who lived thousands of miles away, matched perfectly.

Without a transplant, the extremely acute form of leukemia is treated with three years of chemotherapy, [Dr. Alfred] Gillio said. The chance of survival is about 30 percent.

With a transplant, the chance of survival is 70 to 75 percent, he said.

The challenge was to get Gisselle to the United States. She lived with her maternal grandmother in Ilobasco, about 30 miles northeast of San Salvador. Her parents had left for the United States when she was a baby. Yarelis was born two years later in the United States, making her a U.S. citizen.

Family friends highlighted Yarelis’ plight to a local newspaper and Sen. Robert Menendez’s (D-NJ) office. Menendez intervened and the American Friends Service Committee pressured the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau before ICE granted Gisselle “humanitarian parole” in December to come to the U.S. for the procedure.

“The government’s role is to ultimately protect its citizen. [...] In this instance, that happens to mean having this young girl get her sister here to give her a transplant is something we should be able to do,” Menendez said in November. And after ICE granted Gisselle “humanitarian parole,” Menendez said it was “shocking” that “common sense could not prevail over bureaucracy to help save a young child’s life.”

But Nancy Erika Smith, the friend who told Menendez’s office about the visa denials, said she remains angry at ICE officials for denying Gisselle’s visa in the first place. And she is right — it should not require the intervention of a U.S. senator for the immigration system to work in a humane way.

Friday marked the final deadline for amicus briefs discussing the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act in the Supreme Court, and a pattern that has proven true throughout this litigation repeated itself once again — organizations with real, on the ground expertise in health care lined up almost entirely in support of the law. Amici on the pro-health reform side include health provider groups such as the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Nurses Association, patient groups such as the March of Dimes, the American Cancer Society, the American Diabetes Association, and the American Heart Association, and hospital groups such as the American Hospital Association, the Association of American Medical Colleges, and the Catholic Health Association of the United States.

The anti-ACA side, however, includes a very different list of groups:

• Right-Wing Think Tanks: The Cato Institute, a radical group which believes that Medicare is unconstitutional, filed numerous briefs on the side of the plaintiffs in this lawsuit. They are joined by other conservative think tanks such as the Pacific Research Institute, the Rutherford Institute and the Texas Public Policy Foundation in opposing the law.
• Right-Wing Legal Groups: Also weighing in against the law are conservative law firms such as the Institute for Justice, the American Center for Law and Justice and the Landmark Legal Foundation.
• Republican Lawmakers: Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), who also believes that Medicare is unconstitutional, makes an appearance in his own amicus brief. He is joined in other briefs by Republican luminaries like Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and, indeed, much of the Senate GOP caucus.
• Other Anti-ACA Plaintiffs: Numerous plaintiffs from other lawsuits challenging the ACA also filed briefs. They include groups such as the Thomas More Law Center and, of course, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (R).
• Nullificationists: Several supporters of unconstitutional state laws attempting to nullify the Affordable Care Act also filed a brief. No word on whether they will also attempt to secede from the union if the ACA is upheld.
• Other Random Conservative Groups: It is not entirely clear what stake the Montana Shooting Sports Association has in this lawsuit. Nevertheless, they filed a brief.

This is not to say, of course, that progressive groups and Democratic lawmakers didn’t also weigh in in favor of the law. Nor is it to say that health groups were entirely absent from the conservative side — they just weren’t particularly well represented either in numbers or in quality. The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, a small conservative medical group best known for publishing an article falsely claiming that undocumented immigrants were bringing an epidemic of leprosy into the United States, filed a brief. So did a group of six anti-abortion health provider groups. Unless additional briefs become public that are not already available, however, it appears that every brief filed by a non-ideological health group supports the law.

Earlier this month, the nation was barraged with media coverage of the Catholic Bishops’ opposition to regulations promulgated under the Affordable Care Act protecting working women’s access to contraception. The loudness of the bishops’ complaints, which were echoed by conservative luminaries ranging from Speaker John Boehner to GOP presidential frontrunners Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney, easily could have conveyed the misimpression that churches and other religious groups are at odds with the Affordable Care Act.

On Friday, however, a broad coalition of religious organizations filed an amicus brief supporting the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion that should give the lie to any claim that the faith community opposes the ACA. The brief includes a number of major religious denominations, including the policy arm of the United Methodist Church, the General Synod of the United Church of Christ and the Presbyterian Church. Additionally, the brief’s signatories include a wide range of Catholic groups:

Benedictine Sisters, Boerne, Texas; Congregation of the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word, Texas; Dominican Congregation of Our Lady of the Rosary, New York; Dominican Sisters of Hope; Justice and Peace Committee of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Springfield, Massachusetts; Marianist Province of the United States; Sisters of Charity of St. Elizabeth Leadership Team, New Jersey; Sisters of Charity of St. Vincent De Paul of New York; Sisters of the Holy Cross Congregation Justice Committee; Sisters of the Incarnate Word and Blessed Sacrament, Corpus Christi, Texas; Sisters of Mercy West Midwest Justice Team, Nebraska; Sisters of the Most Precious Blood, Missouri; Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, New York; Sisters of St. Dominic Congregation of the Most Holy Name; Society of the Holy Child Jesus, American Province Leadership Team; Ursuline Sisters of Tildonk, US Province; JOLT, Catholic Coalition for Responsible Investing; Region VI Coalition for Responsible Investment, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee; School Sisters of Notre Dame Cooperative Investment Fund

None of this religious support for the ACA should be surprising. After all, all that these religious groups are doing is following Psalm 82′s command to “Defend the cause of the weak and fatherless; maintain the rights of the poor and oppressed. Rescue the weak and needy; [and] deliver them from the hand of the wicked.”

Pope Benedict XVI has called health care an “inalienable right,” and added that it is the “moral responsibility of nations to guarantee access to health care for all of their citizens.”

Rick Santorum has been trying to shed the notion that he’s obsessed with sex and show voters that he has more to offer than hard-line stances on social issues. But, a visitor to his website would be forgiven for thinking otherwise.

Despite the myriad serious issues the country faces, the top item on Santorum’s “Issues” page is “Enforcing Laws Against Illegal Pornography.” The very first post makes ominous claims about pornography’s “profound” negative effect on the brain and society that many Americans would likely find hyperbolic. A screen grab:

Meanwhile, the word “tax” appears only 4 times on the issue page and “job” only 5 times — the same number as “abortion” and fewer than “pornography,” which appears 8 times.

While it’s not clear if the items are listed on the page in any particular order — the campaign did not return a request for clarification — the top-billing pornography gets will likely not help Santorum convince voters that his priorities reflect reality. Although, his stance should come as no surprise as Santorum has signed a pledge vowing to crack down on porn.

Billionaire casino mogul Sheldon Adelson has already given the pro-Newt Gingrich super PAC Winning Our Future $21 million this year. Now, as his preferred candidate flounders in the polls, Adelson is floating the possibility of donating an additional $100 million.

A political contribution of that magnitude from a single source would be absolutely unprecedented. The next largest single contribution — a mere $5 million that “singlehandedly revived Gingrich’s campaign” last month — came from Adelson as well. All super PACs combined have raised $98.5 million this cycle, less than the possible $100 million Adelson check.

With net worth estimated at approximately $25 billion, Adelson is the eighth richest person in the United States. When asked if uber-wealthy plutocrats making political purchases of this magnitude was fair, he offered this response:

“I’m against very wealthy ­people attempting to or influencing elections,” he shrugs. “But as long as it’s doable I’m going to do it.”

Setting aside Adelson’s Orwellian hypocrisy, progressives could not have said it better themselves. They are not only opposed to rich people buying elections, but also against it being perfectly legal to do so.

Indeed, one need look no further than Gingrich’s rhetoric and policy proposals in the Middle East to see where Adelson is receiving a return on his investment. For nearly two decades, Adelson has lobbied for an extremely controversial proposal to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Now, Gingrich has said he will do so on his very first day as president. Adelson has also lauded Gingrich’s characterization of Palestinians as “an invented people.”

Individuals should not be permitted to buy public policy in this country, yet our campaign system post-Citizens United and the rise of super PACs permits them such undue influence. As long as unlimited political contributions remain legal, billionaires like Adelson will continue to take advantage of the system.