Earlier this year, after Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice David Prosser’s razor-thin reelection victory led to a recount, Prosser hired an attorney named Jim Troupis to represent him in the recount proceedings. Now, less than three months after that recount ended, Troupis is set to argue a campaign finance case brought by various Tea Party groups before Prosser’s court, and Prosser’s former campaign director says that Justice Prosser will hear the case.

As it turns out, Prosser’s participation in this Tea Party case raises very serious ethical questions:

“A lawyer-client relationship is one of the highest fiduciary relationships,” said professor Monroe Freedman, a professor at Hofstra Law School in New York. “The judge has put his trust and confidence in this lawyer in retaining him. The fact that the judge has had this kind of extremely close relationship with this lawyer – a relationship built on dependency and trust – in the recent past is something that might well cause a reasonable person to question the judge’s ability to be impartial.

“Ordinarily a judge listens to each lawyer, giving each lawyer the weight the argument is entitled to without having a thumb on the scale. . . . (This relationship) is one of those thumbs on the scale.”

Another expert on legal ethics, New York University School of Law professor Stephen Gillers, said Prosser shouldn’t hear the case because Troupis’ work was so important to keeping Prosser on the bench and because it occurred so recently. He said legal scholars may differ on the issue, but the argument for recusal is strong.

“I think under the rules on disqualification, Justice Prosser should step aside now,” Gillers said.

Agreeing was Charles Geyh, a professor at the Maurer Law School at Indiana University Bloomington.

“It’s a bad idea” to stay on the case, he said. “The perception is you would act to do your own attorney a good turn.“

Of course, if Prosser does not recuse himself from the Tea Party case, it will hardly be the first time he undermined Wisconsin litigants’ ability to receive justice free from the taint of potential conflicts of interest. Prosser cast the key vote rejecting an ethics rule that would have prevented him and his colleagues from hearing cases involving their major campaign donors. Instead, he enacted an ethics rule written by corporate lobbyists. Those same lobbyists later showed their support for Prosser by raising hundreds of thousands of dollars in “unlimited and undisclosed” funds to keep Prosser on the state supreme court.

Prosser is also the subject of a special prosecutor’s investigation into whether he seized fellow Justice Ann Walsh Bradley by the neck and placed her in a chokehold.

At a campaign stop in Iowa yesterday, Perry added something else to the long list of things he insists are beyond the federal government’s power — any involvement whatsoever in education:

QUESTION: I would like to know your position on the federal government’s role in my children’s education.

PERRY: I don’t think the federal government has a role in your children’s education. . . . I know there’s probably a few of you in here who have not read my book “Fed Up.” But I talk about the intrusion into our lives by the federal government in a host of different areas. Education is one of them.

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Of course, this is hardly the first time time that Perry took a constitutional swipe at federal education programs. In a recent interview with Glenn Beck, Perry suggested that Texas should not have to comply with any of the conditions associated with the billions of dollars of federal education funds it gladly accepts.

But Perry’s blanket statement that the federal government doesn’t have any role in education whatsoever goes much further than his previous position that Texas should simply be able to suckle at the federal Department of Education’s teat. If the federal government truly has no role in education, that means millions of college students must lose their Pell Grants and federal student loans overnight, depriving many of them of their ability to pay for higher education altogether. And that’s just the lucky students who are still able to get accepted into college after their public schools lose all federal funding — funding that disproportionately benefits the most needy schools.

Sadly, federal education programs are hardly the only thing Perry wants to eliminate. For those of you keeping track at home, Perry has also called Social Security, Medicare, the Clean Air Act, Medicaid, SCHIP, federal bank regulation and federal consumer financial protections unconstitutional.

It is, sadly, all too common for courts to hand down decisions that are poorly reasoned and wrongly decided. Few decisions, however, present such an immense and undeniable threat to the American people’s welfare as the Eleventh Circuit’s decision striking down part of the Affordable Care Act. If this decision is upheld in its entirety, millions of Americans will lose their health insurance and millions more will lose their ability to purchase insurance altogether.

The reason why is because the court chopped off one leg of the ACA’s “three-legged stool” — the provision requiring most Americans to either carry health insurance or pay slightly more taxes — while leaving in place a provision that cannot exist without such an insurance coverage requirement.

The ACA contains eight titles, nine of which have nothing whatsoever to do with its coverage requirement. This is why Judge Roger Vinson’s lower court decision striking down the entirely law wasn’t just wrong, but embarrassingly so. At the same time, however, there is one provision of the ACA that must not take effect without an insurance coverage requirement in place:

The act eliminates one of the insurance industry’s most abusive practices—denying coverage to patients with pre-existing conditions. This ban cannot function if patients are free to enter and exit the insurance market at will. If patients can wait until they get sick to buy insurance, they will drain all the money out of an insurance plan that they have not previously paid into, leaving nothing left for the rest of the plan’s consumers.

This concern is not simply theoretical. Seven states enacted preexisting conditions laws without also enacting a minimum coverage provision, and all seven stakes experienced sharp spikes in insurance premiums — or worse. Kentucky, Maine, New Hampshire, and Washington each lost most or all of their individual market insurers after those states enacted a preexisting conditions provision without enacting a minimum coverage provision, and the cost of some New Jersey health plans more than tripled after that state enacted a similar law. For a while, there were entire counties in Washington state where it was literally impossible to buy an individual insurance plan, until Washington finally amended its law to eliminate most of the protections for people with preexisting conditions.

Meanwhile, the one state to enact a preexisting conditions provision and an insurance coverage requirement saw drastically different results. In the few years after Gov. Mitt Romney signed Massachusetts’ health reform law, the number of insured fell 60 percent and the cost of individual insurance premiums fell 40 percent.

As ThinkProgress explained on Friday, the fact that the preexisting conditions provision of the ACA depends on the insurance coverage provision is enough to render the insurance coverage provision constitutional. The Eleventh Circuit should have upheld the law in its entirety. By carving out just the coverage requirement and leaving the preexisting conditions rule intact, however, the two judges in the majority revealed that they don’t understand health economics any more than they understand the Constitution.

At a campaign stop in Iowa this weekend, former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) doled out a frothy mixture of revisionist history about what it was like to be alive in the late 1700s:

Our founders said [our] rights were given to us to pursue life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Does anyone here believe that first inalienable right is as whole as it was at the time of our founding? It isn’t. Does anyone believe that our freedom is as whole as it was at the time of our founders? It is not.

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Santorum’s understanding of the word “freedom” leaves a whole lot of Americans out of the picture. There’s a reason, for example, why the authors of our Constitution are sometimes referred to as the “Founding Fathers” — none of them were women. Indeed, women did not actually gain the guaranteed right to vote until the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920, more than a century after Santorum’s utopia era of “freedom.”

Another person who probably disagrees with Santorum’s definition of the word “freedom” — this guy: Read more