The numbers are now in on the just-completed Supreme Court term, and the Roberts Court remains the most pro-corporate Supreme Court in recent memory. Despite a slight downtick in corporate America’s win rate from the previous term, the Chamber of Commerce continues to perform better under Chief Justice Roberts than it did under either of his two conservative predecessors:

The Supreme Court’s October 2009 Term, featuring the Court’s blockbuster ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission and producing an overall 81% success rate (13 wins in 16 cases) for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, focused a national spotlight on the business rulings of the Roberts Court. The Court’s just-concluded October 2010 Term featured even more cases of considerable importance to business interests and may ultimately prove just as momentous. While the Chamber’s success rate dipped to 57% (12 wins in 21 cases), the Chamber prevailed in the term’s biggest cases and all but one of the cases split the Court along ideological lines. Overall, the Chamber has prevailed in 65% of its cases before the Roberts Court, a figure that is still significantly higher than the Chamber’s success rate of 56% in our study of the Rehnquist Court, and dramatically higher than its success rate in our study of the Burger Court, when the Chamber only won 43% of its cases.

Corporate America’s big wins this term include another big victory for corporate money in elections, a license to lie for Wall Street, two decisions effectively eliminating access to class action suits for millions of Americans, lawsuit immunity for generic drug manufacturers, and a green light for health data mining by drug companies.

Last year, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit had to dismiss a case brought by Katrina victims against the energy industry because so many judges were required to recuse themselves that there weren’t enough judges left to hear an appeal. More recently, two Fifth Circuit judges, Jerry Smith and Eugene Davis, ruled in favor of the oil industry in a major drilling moratorium case, despite the fact that they both attended expense-paid “junkets for judges” sponsored by an oil-industry funded organization. As of last year, a majority of the court’s active judges had oil investments, even though their court is frequently called upon to resolve questions involving the oil industry.

And yet, one year after their oily conflicts of interest became so severe that the court was unable to hear a major case, only one judge has divested from oil:

The new reports show that only one judge who formerly had stocks in an oil and gas company is now free from any association with the industry.

That is Judge Catharina Haynes, an appointee of President George W. Bush who previously held up to $15,000 in BP PLC stock but sold several weeks after the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig began the Gulf spill. BP was the owner of the leaking oil well. [...]

“It seems to me that someone who is a federal judge has some responsibility to avoid holding onto financial assets that will compromise his or her ability to do the job,” said Arthur Hellman, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law.

Owning energy stocks while sitting on the 5th Circuit “has that effect because they are so many of those cases,” he added.

Sadly, this is not the only example of Fifth Circuit judges placing their corporate connections above ethical concerns. Fifth Circuit Judge Edith Clement actually serves on the junkets for judges organization’s board, despite an opinion from the federal judiciary’s ethics committee saying that Clement violates her ethical obligations by doing so.

Walmart and Koch Industries connected groups pushing to kill clean elections

The decision, a “hard uppercut following Citizens United‘s body blow to American democracy,” did not happen in a vacuum. According to Politico, the case was “brought by a pair of small-government groups — the Washington-based Institute for Justice and the Phoenix-based Goldwater Institute — on behalf of Arizona state candidates who rejected public funds and argued the provision infringed on their freedom of speech.” These two litigation groups share one thing in common: both are heavily financed by right-wing corporate money, particularly from Koch Industries and Walmart:

– Institute for Justice: Founded with “initial seed money” from Charles Koch, the Institute for Justice is a nonprofit litigation group focused on bringing cases to decrease regulations on corporations and to remove clean election laws. Foundations connected to Koch Industries have given the Institute for Justice well over $2.6 million. The Walton Family Foundation, a foundation run by the three children of Walmart founder Sam Walton who have a controlling stake in the company, has donated $1.64 million, and is one of the Institute’s other top donors. Recent 990 disclosures from the group showcase amicus briefs filed in the Citizens United and the Arizona clean election case as top priorities for the Institute.

– The Goldwater Institute: The Goldwater Institute is one of the premiere right-wing think tanks on the state level. Most recently, the group has taken a leading role in challenging the constitutionality of health reform. The Goldwater Institute is funded by a number of conservative foundations. However, both the Walton Foundation and the Charles Koch Foundation are among its top donors.

Of course, the disclosed foundation funds noted here may only be a fraction of the money received by the Institute for Justice and the Goldwater Institute. Both organizations accept secret donations from individuals and corporations.

As the courts dismantle decades of campaign finance reform, it is important to remember that a small cabal of well-heeled corporate interests are guiding the way. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Koch Industries, Walmart, and a number of other highly political corporate actors paved the way for the decision yesterday by funding the groups responsible for bringing the challenge. And as ThinkProgress has reported, the chamber and Koch have been at the forefront at exploiting the new Wild West of unmitigated corporate electioneering.

Appearing yesterday on Glenn Beck’s show, Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) embraced a truly radical vision of the 10th Amendment, suggesting that everything from Medicaid to pollution controls violates the Constitution:

It’s really that competition [among states] that’s going to make America strong again. It’s the federal government kinda getting out of our hair. The idea that they’re telling us how to educate our children or how to deliver health care or how to, for that matter, clean our air is really nonsense. If you really want to get America back to this vibrant economy then respect the Tenth Amendment allow the states to be the laboratories of innovation.

Watch it:

If anyone is an expert at nonsense, it is Perry. For starters, The federal government has never, ever told states how to educate their children — nor could it do so if it tried. The federal government does give Texas some extremely generous grants, which Texas is allowed to keep so long as it spends the money according to certain instructions, but Perry is perfectly free to give the money back if he doesn’t like these instructions. Perry’s suggestion that he should get all the money without the strings doesn’t make him a hero of the 10th Amendment, it just makes him a mooch.

Similarly, the federal government provides a very generous program called Medicaid that allows Texas to provide health care to millions of Texans. Rick Perry is perfectly free to give this money back if he doesn’t want the federal government in his business. Indeed, Perry even flirted with doing just that before he realized that Medicaid is actually a really great deal for Texas that he didn’t want to turn down.

Lest there be any doubt, both federal education funding and federal health spending are clearly constitutional, as the Constitution gives Congress power to “to lay and collect taxes” and to “provide for the . . . general welfare of the United States.” Likewise, Perry’s strange suggestion that Texans should be immune from federal clean air laws is also nonsense. The Constitution gives national leaders sweeping power to regulate “commerce…among the several states,” and that includes the power to regulate polluting industries and polluting products such as automobiles.

Amusingly, Perry spouted his nonsense vision of the Constitution during an interview intended to tout how his massively deregulatory governance has made Texas a wonderful place to live — but it turns out that even this claim is nonsense. Texas has the highest percentage of minimum wage jobs in the nation and the worst health insurance rate in the country. Moreover, despite incessant right-wing claims that Texas is a Mecca for new jobs, its unemployment rate ranks 24th in the country — slightly worse than New York’s.

So Rick Perry’s Texas is a really terrible place to live, and that’s in spite of the fact that, as a major oil producer, Texas should be doing unusually well in an era of sky-high gas prices. “The Dallas Fed has found that, every time oil prices rise 10 percent, Texas gets a 0.5 percent GDP bump.” Take away Texas’ oil money, and all that is left is a crumbling economy and a governor spouting nonsense.