Photo Courtesy of News Corpse

Last week, ThinkProgress raised questions about the timing of a $1 million contribution from News Corp. to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that came shortly before the Chamber launched a high-profile campaign to weaken the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) — the very same anti-bribery law that News Corp. could be prosecuted under in the United States. The Chamber quickly dismissed any links between the News Corp contribution and its campaign as “preposterous.”

Today, however, it was revealed that News Corp. has retained Debevoise & Plimpton, the firm of former Bush Attorney General Michael Mukasey, the very same lawyer who just so happens to be leading the Chamber’s campaign to weaken the FCPA.

The legal blog Main Justice, which has been covering the unfolding scandal, spoke to a legal expert about News Corp.’s new lawyers and writes:

The reports linking the two “might have been described fairly speculative before today,” said Heather Lowe, legal counsel at Global Financial Integrity.  But the decision to hire Mukasey “goes a long way toward shoring up that allegation,” Lowe said.

Last month, Mukasey testified before Congress and suggested changes to the FCPA, some of which would appear to potentially benefit News Corp., such as limiting the liability of a parent company if it can prove it was not aware of its foreign subsidiary’s criminal activities. (Yesterday during testimony before Parliament, James and Rupert Murdoch both disclaimed any knowledge of the alleged criminal activities taking place at U.S.-based News Corps’ U.K. subsidiary, News International.)

For Mukasey’s services fronting their campaign to weaken the anti-bribery law, the U.S. Chamber’s Institute for Legal Reform (ILR) paid Debevoise & Plimpton, News Corp’s new firm, $10,000 during the first quarter of this year. Just two days ago, Debevoise & Plimpton reported that it had been paid another $110,000 by the Chamber’s ILR during the second quarter. The Chamber’s ILR has also engaged several other DC lobbying firms to assist it with its campaign.

The Chamber’s campaign to weaken the FCPA is already paying dividends, with Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), the chair of a key subcommittee on the House Judiciary Committee, indicating that he is writing a bill to weaken the FCPA based on the Chamber’s complaints and Mukasey’s testimony before his committee during last month’s hearing.

For its part, News Corp’s PAC has contributed $28,000 to Sensenbrenner’s campaigns since 1989 (the oldest year available) — enough to make News Corp. Sensenbrenner’s 11th largest all-time donor.

The National Black Pro-Life Coalition, an anti-abortion group targeting African-Americans, recently released a video claiming that “the #1 killer of black Americans is Planned Parenthood and the abortuaries [sic] that target” African-Americans, and saying we need to “stop Planned Parenthood” in order to “bring an end to the genocide.” Watch it:

The ad echoes a seven-year-old campaign, which claimed that Democrats want to kill “black babies.” That campaign featured an ad voiced by former pizza executive and current GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain, which suggested that African-Americans who don’t vote Republican believe that “if you make a little mistake with one of your ‘hos,’ you’ll want to dispose of that problem tout suite, no questions asked.” Listen:

The bizarre claim that, by allowing women of all races to choose when they become a parent, Planned Parenthood and its supporters are somehow carrying out a campaign to eradicate black people is obviously false — but it obscures a very real injustice in American society. Black women are more likely to terminate their pregnancies, not because of some genocidal conspiracy among women’s health clinics, but because America still suffers a legacy of racial and economic injustice that forces millions of African-Americans to grow up in poverty. Three in four women who seek abortions do so because they cannot afford a child. Nearly half of women obtaining abortions live below the poverty line, and more than a quarter of women obtaining abortions have incomes between 100-199 percent of the federal poverty level.

So if anti-abortion groups are really serious about reducing the number of black women who seek abortions, they should focus on the surest, most obvious way to actually achieve this goal — fighting poverty and the legacy of racial discrimination — rather than spouting paranoid fantasies about genocidal plots.

Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL)

Despite pressure from Hispanics and Republican groups, GOP Rep. Mo Brooks (AL) refuses to back away from his inflammatory comment that he would do “anything short of shooting” illegal immigrants to get them out of the United States. Brooks made the comment at a June town hall meeting — the same month when Alabama’s governor signed the toughest state immigration measure into law.

Brooks’ comments led to bipartisan calls for a retraction and apology. Rep. Charles Gonzalez (D-TX), who is head of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, called on Republicans in Congress to repudiate Brooks’ comments; on its website, the national group “Somos Republicans!” called for Brooks to apologize; and Arizona Hispanic Republicans said Brooks is “no Christian Compassionate.”

Brooks insisted this week that he was speaking in hyperbole when he said in June: “I will do anything short of shooting them. Anything that is lawful, it needs to be done because illegal aliens need to quit taking jobs from American citizens.” But even this new interpretation of his own violent rhetoric cannot be squared with the facts.

When Georgia’s draconian anti-immigration law recently caused undocumented workers to flee the state, it led to such a severe shortage of farm workers that the governor had to “beg convicts to take these jobs.” Similarly, Alabama’s own anti-immigrant law, which is the subject of a pending lawsuit, could threaten reconstruction in parts of the state destroyed by April tornadoes while further straining the state’s already severe budget woes.

As Lee Fang wrote about Brooks’ original comments, “Undocumented immigrants have faced attacks, police brutality, and other forms of violence because of exactly the same type of dehumanization and hatred espoused by lawmakers like Brooks,” and Brooks is hardly alone even among Alabama lawmakers in his use of violent rhetoric against immigrants. Earlier this year, Alabama state Sen. Scott Beason (R) advised Republicans to “empty the clip” on illegal immigrants.

Failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork is the slain martyr at the center of the conservative legal movement’s creation myth. In reality, Bork was a brilliant but deeply radical judge who once attacked the federal ban on whites only lunch counters as a law of “unsurpassed ugliness.” And yet, in the right’s narrative, the bipartisan vote rejecting Bork’s nomination was the moment America turned into Gomorrah.

So Republicans pushing an even more radical constitutional amendment that would force America to return to 1966 federal spending levels should consider Bork’s advice before they move forward with this dangerous agenda. Four years before President Reagan attempted to put Bork on the Supreme Court, Bork warned that such an amendment would be completely unworkable:

Even assuming no problems of enforcement or of distortion in the enforcement process, government has ways of commandeering society’s wealth and redistributing it that do not depend upon taxation, borrowing, or inflation. The most prominent, of course, is regulation. Government need not spend a dime on a program if it can find groups in the private sector who can be made to spend their own funds. [...] Social Security benefits could be handled largely in this way, ending governmental deficits but not the share of wealth appropriated by government for its purposes. So far as I know, no one has suggested a workable way around this difficulty. [...]

Also troubling is the problem of enforcing such a constitutional provision. In the early stages of discussion, a lot of people, including most economists, apparently thought this was no problem: if Congress exceeded the constitutional limits on spending, someone would sue. That much is true. The result, however, would likely be hundreds, if not thousands, of lawsuits around the country, many of them on inconsistent theories and providing inconsistent results. By the time the Supreme Court straightened the whole matter out, the budget in question would be at least four years out of date and lawsuits involving the next three fiscal years would be slowly climbing toward the Supreme Court.

Bork’s first concern is amusing because it describes the exact same structure used by the Affordable Care Act, which requires most Americans to either carry health insurance or pay slightly more income taxes — rather than simply taxing those same Americans and using that money to provide them with health care. Bork’s anticipation of this model suggests that he would have been baffled by the recent constitutional attacks on the ACA when he wrote his critique of constitutionalizing fiscal policy, but it also flags a bizarre irony in the GOP’s proposed constitutional amendment. If it ever became law, it would force Congress to pass many more laws similar to Obamacare.

But Bork’s second concern highlights just how unworkable the GOP’s amendment would be. Several of the currently pending challenges to the Affordable Care Act were filed more than a year ago, and they are still no where near a Supreme Court decision. If the Supreme Court strikes down the 2014 budget in 2016, what exactly is the government to do? Does it have to take back the money it already spent, and if so, how? And what does this do to America’s credit rating if every bill sent to the federal government is subject to reexamination by nine judges in black robes?

There are, of course, much stronger arguments against the GOP’s amendment — forcing the federal government to making spending cuts that even Ronald Reagan viewed as far too draconian is a terrible idea — but Bork’s long-forgotten article highlights just how far off the deep end the GOP has fallen. The Myth of Robert Bork is second only to the lionization of Reagan in GOP mythology, yet both Reagan and Bork wanted no truck with the Republicans’ flagship fiscal policy proposal.