Last month, a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit reinstated a lawsuit alleging that that members of the Indonesian military hired by Exxon to guard one of its natural gas facilities committed numerous atrocities under Exxon’s employ:

In addition to extrajudicial killings of some of the plaintiffs-appellants’ husbands as part of a “systematic campaign of extermination of the people of Aceh by [d]efendants’ [Indonesian] security forces,” the plaintiffs-appellants were “beaten, burned, shocked with cattle prods, kicked and subjected to other forms of brutality and cruelty” amounting to torture, as well as forcibly removed and detained for lengthy periods of time.

Needless to say, Exxon is very upset that they might be forced to endure slightly lower profit margins over something as minor as widespread human rights violations, so they’ve now asked the full Court of Appeals to immunize them from this lawsuit. And, sadly, Exxon has a good chance of prevailing despite the existence of a federal law that allows private parties to be sued for many of the most atrocious violations of international law.

The D.C. Circuit is one of the most conservative courts in the nation, and it includes several of America’s most ideological judges. Judge Janice Rogers Brown once compared liberalism to “slavery” and Social Security to a “socialist revolution.” Judge Douglas Ginsburg is an avowed tenther who is most famous for suggesting that the Depression Era vision of the Constitution that struck down everything from the minimum wage to child labor laws is a “Constitution in exile” that should be revived. And Judge Brett Kavanaugh, who dissented from the panel’s decision, believes that Exxon should not be held accountable for atrocities because Exxon is a corporation, and corporations enjoy complete immunity from the international legal norms forbidding such barbaric behavior.

So if Exxon triumphs before this court, the reason will likely have nothing to do with the law and everything to do with the identities of the people trusted to apply it.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) just completed a damaging campaign stop in Iowa where audience members responded angrily to his plans, and Romney frequently responded belligerently to their anger. In one of the most contentious exchanges, Romney defended his belief that we “should consider a higher retirement age” for Social Security and Medicare to preserve tax breaks for corporations:

ROMNEY: There’s various ways of [preserving Social Security and Medicare’s solvency]. One is we could raise taxes on people. That’s not the way . . .

AUDIENCE: Corporations! Corporations!

ROMNEY: Corporations are people, my friend.

AUDIENCE: No they’re not.

ROMNEY: Of course they are. Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to people. Where do you think it goes?

AUDIENCE: It goes into your pocket!

ROMNEY: Whose pockets? Whose pockets? People’s pockets. Human beings, my friend.

Watch it:

Romney’s antagonists are right that corporate money flows right into Romney’s pockets. Indeed, Romney has taken more money from corporate and other lobbyists than all the other GOP candidates put together, and this will likely only be the beginning for Romney if he becomes the GOP nominee.

Ever since the Supreme Court revealed that it shares Romney’s inability to distinguish between corporations and actual human beings, corporations have lined up to buy GOP victories in elections across the country. After Citizens United, conservative secret donors outspent progressives 8 to 1 in the 2010 election cycle.

So Romney has good reason to favor tax breaks for corporations over maintaining the current Medicare and Social Security retirement age — corporate America is doing a whole lot more to line his pockets than America’s seniors ever will.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) is like something the Tea Party grew in a vat. He flirted with ending Medicaid in Texas. Believes his state should be able to opt out of Social Security. He embraces outlandish claims that everything from federal public school programs to clean air laws are unconstitutional. And he even once claimed that Texas might secede from the union unless the federal government does exactly what he wants it to do.

Yet for all his eagerness to spearhead America’s march back to the 19th Century, there is one blemish on Perry’s conservative credentials — he lacks a long record of irrational hatred for immigrants. Übernativist and former Congressman Tom Tancredo (R-CO) isn’t happy:

When I ran for president in 2008, I tried to pressure the Republican candidates to take a hard line against illegal immigration. For this, Perry called me a racist.

When he first took office as governor in 2001, Perry went to Mexico and bragged about his law that granted “the children of undocumented workers” special in-state tuition at Texas colleges, the first state in the nation to do so.

“The message is simple,” Perry concluded, “educacion es el futuro, y si se puede.” Education is the future, and (echoing Cesar Chavez’s slogan) yes we can. [...]

Perry opposed Arizona’s tough anti-illegal immigration law SB 1070. “I have concerns,” he explained, “with portions of the law passed in Arizona and believe it would not be the right direction for Texas.”

He spoke out last year against using E-Verify to prevent illegal immigrants from getting jobs as state employees, who get their paychecks from the taxpayers. He insisted it “would not make a hill of beans’ difference.”

Numbers USA, a group that supports immigration control, gives Perry a “D-“ for his positions supporting amnesty, open borders, and opposing border security.

In other words, Rick Perry dreams of an America where the children of white citizens and the children of undocumented Mexican immigrants can both have a place together in crumbling classrooms led by an underpaid teacher. He has a dream where immigrants and native-born Americans can someday toil together in minimum wage jobs that barely allow them to feed their families. He has a dream that one day the sons of immigrants and the sons of native-born citizens will be able to sit down together in an overcrowded emergency room and wait hours for inadequate care.

And yet, Rick Perry’s dream may not be harsh enough to please the American right.

There is little to love in Tancredo’s nativist assault on one of the few humane aspects of Perry’s record, but he closes his op-ed with the best description anyone has ever made of Rick Perry’s stance on immigration. “Even a broken clock is right twice a day.”