Last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit struck down an Arizona voter ID law on the basis that its requirements conflicted with the the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 which created a standard federal registration form in order to encourage more people to register to vote. The Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a brief echoing the court’s argument that the law’s registration requirements are pre-empted by federal law.

The DOJ says that the arguments in the legal brief speak for themselves, but Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne (R) thinks there are more cynical politics at play. Yesterday, Horne accused President Obama of standing in the way of his state’s voter ID law because he wants “illegals” to be able to vote for him:

Horne, a Republican, told Capitol Media Services he sees something more sinister.

“I think the motive is that the more illegals that vote, the better the Obama administration thinks it will do,’’ he said. As proof, Horne pointed out that the Department of Justice did not file its friend of the court brief until just last week. That is nearly three years after the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund and others first challenged the law. More to the point, Horne said, is that the administration waited until virtually the last minute: The case is set to be heard in just two weeks.

Logically, Horne’s reasoning falls flat. Undocumented immigrants usually prefer to keep a low profile and probably wouldn’t risk getting detected just to their name on the voter rolls. The notion that Obama would actually invite the controversy that massive voter fraud in Arizona would create around his reelection bid is even more ludicrous.

Horne is convinced that “illegals are voting and they shouldn’t be voting.” He blames the problem on organizations like ACORN and insists that the burden of the voter ID law’s requirements “is miniscule.” MALDEF attorney Nina Perales claims that Horne is misrepresenting a series of “scattered incidents’’ involving people who thought they were eligible to register to vote, did register, and later found that they were not eligible.

While Horne claims that there have been 200 incidents of non-citizens registering to vote (only a handful of which were prosecuted), he may want to pay more attention to the massive number of citizens who are being disenfranchised by the new law. The Arizona Advocacy Network claims that it has “already barred tens of thousands of citizens from exercising their most basic right in a democracy, the right to vote.” Most notably, Native Americans, the poor, the disabled, the elderly, some young voters, and a 97 year-old citizen.

The full 9th Circuit has agreed to reconsider the 2010 ruling by the three-judge panel.

As ThinkProgress previously reported, the North Carolina state house voted to gut the ability of the state’s municipalities to offer cheap and fast public broadband this past April. By doing so, these legislators were acting on behalf of some of the nation’s most powerful telecommunications companies, like Time Warner.

Now, another telecommunications company, AT&T, has found some Wisconsin Republicans to do its bidding and insert legislative language in a budget proposal that would effectively kill the ability of the University of Wisconsin system to support the public broadband system known as WiscNet. In fact, the legislation would even force the university system to give back federal funds that it received to extend broadband access:

The University of Wisconsin System would be forced to return about $37 million in federal funds intended to extend broadband Internet across Wisconsin, under a provision passed by the Legislature’s budget committee Friday. The legislation would also prohibit UW System campuses from supporting WiscNet, a cooperative that brings high-speed Internet to most schools and libraries across the state. Campus leaders say they fear the change could cripple the network. [...] But Republican lawmakers say the university should not be in the business of providing telecommunications services.

“It shuts down the research business. It shuts down the education business, and we all work together to try to create efficiencies,” said Dave Lois, the director of WiscNet, in response to the legislative language. As the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s Christopher Mitchell writes, the inserted language would actually prohibit the University of Wisconsin system from participating in any non-profit or cooperative telecommunications services — essentially barring it from providing any competition from the state’s major telecom corporation, AT&T. The company and its employees put $76,684 into Wisconsin’s 2010 elections, and it looks like it is getting a great return on its investment.

ThinkProgress filed the following report from Atlanta, Georgia.

The term “mixed bag” is generally used as a euphemism — when someone says that something was a “mixed bag,” they generally mean that the bag is full of bad news. Today, however, the Eleventh Circuit served up a bag full of mysteries regarding whether they will deem the Affordable Care Act (ACA) constitutional.

The plaintiffs in this case make the most common argument conservatives levy against the ACA — its provision requiring most Americans to either carry health insurance or pay slightly more income taxes violates the Constitution because Congress cannot “regulate inactivity” — only the states have this power — and therefore people who don’t buy insurance are somehow off limits.

The judges, however, expressed extreme skepticism at this argument. At one point, Judge Frank Hull, a conservative Clinton appointee nominated as part of a compromise with the GOP-controlled Senate, announced outright that “this whole inactivity business just doesn’t get me.” Judge Stanley Marcus, a similar compromise Clinton appointee, said on several occasions that the plaintiffs’ entire states’ rights theory didn’t make sense.

At the same time, however, the judges also asked some questions that suggest they are leaning the other way. They focused on severability — the question of how much of the law they need to kill if they strike down just one part — far more than the other two courts to hear this case. They also asked several questions that suggested they were considering the plaintiffs’ absurd argument that, under the ACA, Medicaid is now unconstitutional because it is too generous to the states. Even Tea Party Judge Roger Vinson rejected this Medicaid argument, so it is nothing less than bizarre that a court of appeals panel would pay it any attention.

Judge Marcus also raised an argument that has been almost entirely absent from these cases so far. The Constitution contains a laundry list of powers that Congress use to pass laws, one of which is the power to regulate “commerce…among the several states.” The plaintiffs argue that a law which imposes a consequence on people who don’t buy something is somehow not a commercial regulation, and therefore exceeds this power.

Marcus pretty clearly did not sympathize with this states’ rights claim at all, but he also seemed to suggest that some other part of the Constitution might create an individual right not to be required to purchase a product. This argument was also rejected by Judge Vinson, it has literally no basis whatsoever in existing precedents, and it closely resembles the reasoning of an infamous and long-ago abandoned case called Lochner v. New York.

For their part, the plaintiffs did not help themselves by making a pretty massive concession. They agreed that Congress may regulate how people buy and sell health care, so a law requiring them to finance such purchases through insurance is just fine; they just object to requiring people to actually purchase insurance in advance. Nothing in the Constitution or precedent suggests that Congress’ power to require people to buy insurance is like a light switch that suddenly flips on the moment a person shows up at the emergency room.

In the end, the judges did little more than leave the lawyers guessing. They were highly dismissive of the plaintiffs’ core arguments, but also floated new, unheard of challenges to the law that have no basis in the Constitution, precedent or even the plaintiffs’ briefs. If the judges ultimately strike down the law on one of these freshly created theories, it’s difficult to see how they will be upheld by the Supreme Court.