Ever since Chief Justice Roberts joined the Supreme Court, the Chamber of Commerce has treated his Court as their personal genie, and Roberts has been more than happy to grant even many of their most outlandish wishes. Indeed, big business’ wins before the Supreme Court have spiked massively under Roberts’ leadership:

If the Roberts Court continues its pattern of favoritism to corporate interests, voters, workers and consumers could easily be left in the cold during three cases being argued this week:

• Buying Elections

In the wake of the Court’s infamous Citizens United decision, the Chamber pledged to spend a massive $75 million to elect corporate-aligned conservatives, and the Chamber’s right-wing allies kicked in hundreds of millions of dollars more. This kind of corporate influence over elections not only places a huge thumb on the scale in favor of pro-corporate candidates, it also corrupts existing lawmakers by forcing them to either play ball with corporate fundraisers or find some other source of funds in order to remain in the game.

Public financing provides a partial shield against this effect, but public financing schemes only work if they allow candidates who opt into them to remain competitive. If a state offers only a few thousand dollars in public funds to a candidate whose opponent is backed by tens of millions of corporate dollars, than the non-corporate candidate will have no choice but to raise money on their own. To defend against this problem, Arizona developed a two-tiered public financing system. Candidates receive additional funds if their opponent or corporate interest groups overwhelm them with attack ads, and thus candidates who are determined not to be tainted by the corrupting influence of major donors are not left defenseless.

Yet, in a case called McComish v. Bennett, the Court’s five conservatives appear poised to strike this two-tiered system down. If they do so, it could be the death knell for public financing, since no candidate is safe from massive infusions of corporate money after Citizens United.

• Making Courts Inaccessible

Many of the Court’s most corporate-friendly decisions create complicated and arcane procedural barriers to Americans seeking justice. The Court’s infamously Ledbetter decision didn’t literally take away women’s right to equal work for equal pay, it just created a procedural rule that made it nearly impossible for women to learn that they were victims of discrimination until after the statute of limitations to file a claim had run out. In Wal-Mart v. Dukes, the Supreme Court will decide whether to shut off another opportunity for women in the workplace to seek relief — class actions.

Class action lawsuits are brought by groups of plaintiffs who share a common injury with each other. These suits are essential to allow ordinary Americans, who often lack the resources to hire lawyers capable of taking on a major corporation on their own, to pool their resources in order to hire counsel that are capable of facing off against someone like Wal-Mart. There is substantial evidence that women who work for Wal-Mart stores have endured systematic pay and promotion discrimination and thus should be able to bring a class action. If the Supreme Court denies them this right, many of them will be left powerless before Wal-Mart’s legal team.

• Lawsuit Immunity

Finally, many corporate sectors have been given almost total lawsuit immunity by the Supreme Court. The justices gave sweeping legal immunity to medical device manufacturers and health insurers, and even gave the thumbs up to a biased system of corporate-owned courts that overwhelmingly rule against consumers and employees. In a case called PLIVA, Inc. v. Mensing, the justices will now decide whether to give lawsuit immunity to the makers of generic drugs.

Former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty (R) is now disputing Adam Serwer’s suggestion that the presidential explorer may have a “Sharia law problem” with his conservative Republican base because he attempted to increase minority home ownership in Minnesota, including a program that would have made it easier for Muslims to purchase homes. As Serwer’s piece explains, “many Muslims hold that the paying or charging of interest is prohibited, which makes it difficult to purchase a home in the United States.” Banks have begun offering “Sharia compliant” products “which structure the payments in a sort of house-buying layaway plan” and in 2004 — with Pawlenty’s urging to increase minority home ownership — the Minnesota Housing Financing Agency “decided to partner with a local group, the African Development Center, in ‘developing culturally sensitive products,’ that would allow Muslims to enter the market.”

But as Ben Smith reports, Pawlenty is now denying he ever approved the partnership and says he dissolved the program as soon as he heard about it:

“This program was independently set up by the Minnesota state housing agency and did not make any mention Sharia Law on its face, but was later described as accommodating it,” the spokesman, Alex Conant, said. “As soon as Gov. Pawlenty became aware of the issue, he personally ordered it shut it down. Fortunately, only about three people actually used the program before it was terminated at the Governor’s direction.”

Pawlenty’s objection: “The United States should be governed by the U.S. Constitution, not religious laws,” Conant said.

But that’s not what Pawlenty tells Christian audiences in Iowa and New Hampshire, where he’s been using his personal faith (he is an Evangelical Christian) to build support for a presidential bid. In fact, during an interview with Christianity Today in late January, Pawlenty argued that elected officials should apply their faith to government:

I started with the perspective of someone who says that faith is separate from public law and public service; it really isn’t. We have, as a country, a founding perspective that we’re founded under God; our founding documents reference and acknowledge God, and acknowledge that our rights and privileges come from our Creator. [...]

I remind people that our country is founded under God, and the founders thought that was an important perspective.

During a recent address to the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition, Pawlenty proclaimed, “The Constitution was designed to protect people of faith from government, not to protect government from people of faith.” He added, “we need to be a coutnry that turns toward God, not a country that turns away from God.”

Gov. Sean Parnell’s (R-AK) nominee to the Alaska Judicial Council says he won’t “let his personal beliefs influence which candidates he’d approve for judgeships,” but given Don Haase’s extreme position that sex outside of marriage should be illegal, his assurances may fall on deaf ears. Parnell says he appointed Haase to the Council — which vets applicants for district, superior, and appellate courts and submits the names to the governor — to fulfill a constitutional requirement of “area representation.” Haase ssured lawmakers that imposing his views on marriage through the council would be “inconvenient.” From the hearing:

SEN. JOE PASKVAN (D): Do you believe it should be a crime?

HAASE: Yeah, I think it’s very harmful to have extramarital affairs. It’s harmful to children, it’s harmful to the spouse who entered a legally binding agreement to marry the person that’s cheating on them.

PASKVAN: What about premarital affairs — should that be a crime?

HAASE: I think that would be up to the voters certainly. If it came before (the state) as a vote, I probably would vote for it … I can see where it would be a matter for the state to be involved with because of the spread of disease and the likelihood that it would cause violence. I can see legitimate reasons to push that as a crime.

But Judiciary Committee Chairman Hollis French (D) was not impressed and “closed the hearing without a vote on Haase’s nomination, saying he wanted to take a ‘deeper look’ at the constitutional requirement” for area representation.

Meanwhile, it’s unclear where Parnell stands on the divorce issue, but he has his own share of very conservative social positions. A big fan of Focus on the Family, Parnell vetoed a $3 million expansion of a public health program for lower-income women and children because less than one percent of the funding could go to cover abortion services. “I want to be able to provide those services. But if your governor doesn’t stand for life and liberty, as he understands it in his conscience, then you don’t have a governor,” Parnell said at the time, apparently oblivious to the fact that the veto denied health services to “1,200 to 1,300 children and 218 pregnant women.” Parnell is also the only governor who has not accepted planning grants to establish a new health care insurance exchange in 2014.

During a debate in 2010, Parnell was asked how old the earth was. He refused to answer, replying simply, “only God knows.” “I really don’t know. I mean, for either one of us to do it, would be quite speculative.” You can watch that exchange here.

Yale Deputy General Counsel Susan Carney is an uncontroversial nominee to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit who recently earned a lopsided 16-2 vote supporting her nomination in the Senate Judiciary Committee. Yet the right-wing Washington Times published a deeply misleading editorial this morning claiming that she is caught up in some kind of ethics scandal:

As the general counsel for Yale Law School, Ms. Carney played a key role in “Shin gate,” an incident in which a Korean university was so embarrassed by Yale’s ethical lapse that it filed a $50 million lawsuit against the prestigious Ivy League institution. Dongguk University had contacted Yale in 2005 to verify a prospective hire’s claim to a doctoral degree from the college. Yale falsely confirmed the doctorate, causing a great deal of harm to the Korean university’s prestige. Ms. Carney, who was in charge of ethics, covered up her school’s mistake. Dongguk’s president wrote that Ms. Carney’s “inaccurate information of July 10, 2007 has ruined our 100-year-long built reputation.”

The origin of this smear appears to be a statement by a radical group called Americans for Limited Government, which falsely claims that Carney showed a “lack of integrity during her tenure at Yale University as Deputy General Counsel.” There should be little doubt, however, why ALG is really interested in keeping Carney off the bench — Carney is unlikely to uphold its radical “tenther” vision of the Constitution if she is confirmed by the Senate.

ALG believes that the Affordable Care Act is the first stage of a liberal plot to bring back slavery and that all federal education programs violate the Constitution. Its Chairman, Howard Rich, sits on the board of the Cato Institute, a far-right think tank that believes that Medicare and Social Security are unconstitutional.

Lest there be any doubt, ALG’s defamatory suggestion that Carney engaged in some kind of cover up has absolutely no basis in reality. According to Dongguk’s legal complaint against Yale, Dongguk asked a mid-level Yale administrator to confirm whether a prospective hire earned a PhD from Yale. The administrator violated Yale’s procedures by sending an informal fax erroneously confirming that the prospective hire was a Yale PhD.

Nearly two years later, Dongguk’s president wrote Yale asking whether the administrator’s informal fax was accurate. Carney initially told Dongguk that the fax, which was not produced using Yale’s standard procedures, “is not authentic.” A few months later, when Yale discovered the administrator’s mistake, Carney wrote Dongguk again to inform them that the erroneous fax was “indeed authentic.” In other words, Carney’s alleged “cover up” of her colleague’s mistake ended after Carney herself told Dongguk that Yale had erred.

If ALG wants to argue that Carney should not be a judge because she won’t strike down Social Security or because she believes that health reform does not in any way resemble slavery, then they are free to do so. But its attempt to smear a good woman’s name because she won’t push their radical agenda is simply beneath contempt.

Although Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) anti-union crusade has received the biggest headlines, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) is poised to sign an even more drastic assault on working Americans into law. Yesterday, the Michigan legislature passed a “financial martial law” bill that allows Snyder to appoint “emergency financial managers” with the power to terminate collective bargaining agreements:

Contracts & Collective Bargaining Agreements. The bill would authorize the emergency manager to reject, modify, or terminate one or more terms and conditions
of an existing contract.

After meeting and conferring with the appropriate bargaining representative and, if in the emergency manager’s sole discretion, a prompt and satisfactory resolution were unlikely to be obtained, the emergency manager could reject, modify, or terminate one or more terms and conditions of an existing collective bargaining agreement.

There’s a pretty serious problem with this power grab, however — invoking it would violate the Constitution. The Constitution forbids state laws “impairing the Obligation of Contracts.” This provision provides a robust limit on a state’s ability to dissolve contracts between the government and a private party. As the Supreme Court explained in United States Trust Co. v. New Jersey, state laws impairing such contracts must be “reasonable and necessary to serve an important public purpose.”

The bill does contain some language requiring the emergency manager and the state treasurer to determine that they are not violating this constitutional limit before a collective bargaining agreement can be blown up, but Snyder’s own budget gives the lie to any claim that an assault on working Americans is “necessary” to ensure that Michigan governments can pay their bills. Snyder proposed a massive $1.73 billion business tax cut even as he was arguing that his anti-union power grab was necessary to restore the state’s fiscal balance.

The consequences of Snyder’s actions could be stark. If a state is free to break contracts whenever they feel like it, than no one will agree to do business with the state. Investors will refuse to buy the state’s bonds, and state contractors will demand all payments upfront out of fear that the state will accept their work and then tear up the contract requiring the workers to be paid. Creditors will charge the state enormous interest rates to secure against the risk that the state will just waive its hand and make its obligation to repay go away.

In other words, Snyder is so determined to chip away at collective bargaining, he’s demanded a power that he cannot constitutionally use and that would drive his state into an even deeper financial hole if he ever tried.

Cross-posted on ThinkProgress.

Later today, the Senate is expected to confirm two judges to one of the most understaffed courts in the country, and this vote is long overdue. Three of the four active judgeships on the Central District of Illinois are currently vacant, and the nominations of Justice Sue Myerscough and Judge James Shadid to fill two of these seats have twice received the Senate Judiciary Committee’s unanimous approval. Nevertheless, Myerscough and Shadid have waited months for a confirmation vote despite the broad bipartisan support both nominees enjoy.

Yet Myerscough, Shadid — and the Illinois residents who will now have restored access to justice — are in many ways the lucky ones. The vacancy crisis has become so severe in the District of Rhode Island that its chief judge has been forced to ship civil cases to judges in New Hampshire and Massachusetts — a solution that only serves to delay justice in those two states.

Yet GOP senators are blocking Obama’s nominee to the Rhode Island court, an attorney named John McConnell, because the right-wing Chamber of Commerce objects to the fact that McConnell once represented the State of Rhode Island in a suit to get a lead paint manufacturer to clean up the damage caused by its toxic product. Other nominees are being blocked solely so that they can be used as bargaining chips to prevent completely unrelated messages from passing the Senate.

Indeed, because of the Senate’s inability to do its job, federal judges are now retiring far faster than the Senate is confirming new ones. If this pace does not speed up, half of all federal judgeships will be vacant by the end of the decade.

To understand what America will look like as its bench slowly empties out, one needs to look no further than the southern border, where a spike in criminal and immigration cases has left border courts barely able to function. At a recent panel sponsored by the Brookings Institution, Texas federal Judge W. Royal Furgeson explained just what passes for justice in the struggling border courts:

[A] normal federal court will handle during this period of time something like 75 to 85 to 90 criminal cases and I was handling 450. . . . I would sometimes look out in the evening at the mass of people assembled in my courtroom and it would take me back to the days when I was a very young lawyer and my firm was assigning me to handle clients in night traffic court. And I felt like I was in night traffic court.

The problem, of course, in night traffic court if my client got fined it was going to be a couple of hundred bucks at the most, and the problem that I had with the defendants before me, they were looking at years — potentially years and years in a federal prison. And I was able to give them about as much attention as I could see those traffic judges giving their — the defendants before them attention when the fines were about $100 or $200. It was not a good feeling and federal judges all across the border continue to deal with this problem of not having the time it takes to really consider what they’re doing, especially in sentencing. And I don’t think there’s a federal judge in American that will tell you — that will disagree with this statement. The hardest job we have is to sentence human beings. You know, it’s something to judge another human being. And it’s a very hard job. And to feel like you’re not being able to give it near the attention it deserves creates a desperate sense of failure on your part.

Listen:

Judge Furgeson’s tale is the border’s present, but if the Senate doesn’t get its act together, it will also be America’s future.

At an event sponsored by the right-wing Federalist Society, Justice Clarence Thomas lashed out at his many critics — including ThinkProgress — claiming that we are attacking him as part of some nefarious plot to undermine the Supreme Court as an institution:

He also lashed out at his critics, without naming them, asserting they “seem bent on undermining” the High Court as an institution. Such criticism, Thomas warned, could erode the ability of American citizens to fend off threats to their way of life.

“You all are going to be, unfortunately, the recipients of the fallout from that – that there’s going to be a day when you need these institutions to be credible and to be fully functioning to protect your liberties,” he said, according to a partial recording of the speech provided to POLITICO by someone who was at the meeting.

Listen:

As the news outlet which originally broke the story that Justice Thomas unethically attended a Koch-sponsored political fundraiser, ThinkProgress is honored by Thomas’ suggestion that we have become so powerful that we are capable of undermining an entire branch of the federal government. Yet, if Thomas is really concerned that the Supreme Court’s legitimacy is being undermined, he should direct his criticism far closer to home:

• Unethical Fundraising: The Code of Conduct for United States Judges forbids those judges from “personally participate in fund-raising activities, solicit funds for any organization, or use or permit the use of the prestige of judicial office for that purpose,” except in very limited circumstances that don’t apply to the Koch’s political fundraising sessions. Although the nine justices have exempted themselves from their binding legal obligation to follow these ethical rules, they have also long followed a policy of “look[ing] to the Code of Conduct for guidance” in determining when they may participate in fundraising activities. Thomas’ decision to thumb his nose at judicial ethics has already triggered a bill that would end the justices longstanding immunity to ethics laws.

 

• Failure to Disclose: Federal judges and justices are required by law to disclose their spouse’s income — thus preventing persons who wish to influence the judge or justice from funneling money to them through their husband or wife. Nevertheless, Thomas falsely claimed that his wife — a lobbyist and high-earning member of the professional right — earned no non-investment income whatsoever while she was working at the right-wing Heritage Foundation. When asked to explain this error, Thomas — who is one of the nine people responsible for issuing binding interpretations of the nation’s founding document — claimed that he “misunderst[ood] the filing instructions.”

 

• Potential Conflict of Interest: Ginni Thomas, Justice Thomas’ wife, used to lead an organization that vigorously opposes the Affordable Care Act, and she even briefly signed a memo calling that Act unconstitutional. Ginni also may be earning lobbying fees for working to have this Act repealed. A team of conservative lawyers recently argued that such activities by a judge’s spouse requires the judge to recuse from the lawsuits challenging the ACA, but Thomas’ defiant speech to the Federalist Society leaves little doubt that he will not recuse.

 

• A Financial Stake in His Own Decisions?: Ginni Thomas may also be getting rich off of her husband’s vote in the infamous Citizens United decision — which freed corporations to spend billions of dollars to buy U.S. elections. Ginni’s new lobbying firm “offers advice on optimizing political investments for charitable giving in the non-profit world or political causes,” a line of work which has obviously become much more lucrative since Citizens United.

 

• Discredited Understanding of the Constitution: Perhaps most disturbingly, Thomas embraces a discredited theory of the Constitution which would return America to a time when federal child labor laws were considered unconstitutional.  Other cherished accomplishments that would likely cease to exist in Clarence Thomas’ America include “the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, the sick leave portions of the Family and Medical Leave, the Freedom of Access to Clinics Act, as well as minimum wage and maximum hour laws.”

 

So the truth is that ThinkProgress and other Thomas doubters hardly deserve the credit he gives us for undermining the Court’s credibility. Justice Thomas is inflicting far greater wounds on the Court’s legitimacy than any of his critics could ever cause.