A study on voter fraud pushed by Maine Republicans concluded that there is absolutely no evidence of student voter fraud in the state — but the GOP has pledged to crack down on it anyway. Like conservative state legislatures across the country, Maine Republicans have been pushing a Voter ID law, ostensibly to prevent non-existent voter fraud. As ThinkProgress has documented, these laws are a transparent attempt to disenfranchise Democratic voters, especially students, the poor, and minorities.

The Maine secretary of state’s office began the investigation in July after Maine Republican Party Chairman Charlie Webster gave him a list of 206 out-of-state students attending public Maine universities he suggested were voting there illegally. Secretary of State Charlie Summers then broadened the investigation to go back several years and look into noncitizens as well:

After a two-month investigation into possible voter fraud by college students and noncitizens, Maine Secretary of State Charlie Summers said Wednesday his evidence showed that none of the students committed fraud and only one noncitizen voted in Maine.

Nevertheless, Summers said his investigation confirmed his belief that Maine’s election system is “fragile and vulnerable,” and he vowed to submit legislation in January to fix some of the problems.

“I feel very strongly based on what I’ve laid out here today that we have a situation in the state of Maine that if we don’t try to modernize our election practices and procedures eventually it will lead us down the road where something breaks down,” Summers said.

Although no students were found guilty of legal violations, Summers says they are still under scrutiny and sent letters to dozens of them warning them that if they intend to remain residents of Maine, they will need to register their car in the state.

State GOP Chair Webster shed light on his true motivations in June when he said that it was important for the state to make it more difficult to vote because “Democrats intentionally steal elections.” He also said recently that students should have to pay taxes if they want to vote.

After John Kasich won the Ohio gubernatorial election last fall, one of his first appointments was Gary Mohr to be the state Director of Rehabilitation and Corrections. Prior to his appointment, Mohr worked as managing director for the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), a company that not only pushes states to build more private prisons, but also lobbies lawmakers to put more people in jail in order to fill the new supply of prison beds.

In his first nine months on the job, Mohr has already made one major shift in Ohio correctional policy. This month, Ohio became the first state in the nation to sell off a public prison to a private company:

A lockup along the shores of Lake Erie has become the first state prison in the nation to be sold to a private company.

Lake Erie Correctional Institution in northeastern Ohio’s Ashtabula County is the only one of five state prisons up for sale that will be sold, state officials said Thursday. Corrections Corporation of America will buy it for $72.7 million, more than the $50 million needed from the privatization effort to balance the state’s prison budget.

The CCA said it plans to add 304 prison beds to the prison.

Though Mohr recused himself from the selection process of which corporation would buy the prison, Ohio lobbying records show that the CCA met with Mohr to lobby him just one month into Kasich’s tenure:

In addition, as the AP notes, the CCA’s Ohio lobbyist, Don Thibaut, “served as Kasich’s chief of staff when he was in Congress.” The CCA has retained the services of Thibaut’s firm, The Credo Company, which also employed Mohr as a consultant for five years. The CCA’s lobbying and connections paid off when it was awarded the newly-privatized Lake Erie Correctional Institution this month.

Even though Kasich has declared his goal of reducing the overall number of prisoners in Ohio, his administration has now sold one of the state’s prisons to the CCA, a company that profits by incarcerating people.

In a speech on the Senate floor yesterday, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) compared people who disagree with Justice Antonin Scalia to the Death Eaters, a racist, Ku Klux Klan-like band of terrorists who support the evil Lord Voldemort in the fictional Harry Potter books:

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) likened conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia to famous fictional character Harry Potter on Wednesday and suggested his liberal detractors were like the “death eaters” depicted in the popular children’s series.

“If this was a Harry Potter movie, liberals would put Justice Scalia on a wanted poster as undesirable number one,” said Hatch. “And yet they just can’t seem to look away. The principles and laws on which he stands are so compelling… that whether you love him or hate him, you simply must deal with him.”

In the seventh Harry Potter book, the “death eaters” refer to Harry Potter as “undesirable number one” and dispense wanted posters bearing his name across the wizarding world.

Watch it:

Despite what Hatch may think, Scalia’s detractors do not actually want to bring about Justice Scalia’s destruction in order to fulfill a prophecy that will enable the unchecked reign of our Dark Lord. Indeed, even if we were to raise a magical army of evil wizards bent on destroying conservative justices, it is unclear why we would name Justice Scalia our leading enemy.

Unlike Justice Clarence Thomas, Justice Scalia does not believe that the national minimum wage, overtime and child labor laws violate the Constitution. Nor has Scalia shown any interest in striking down the federal ban on whites-only lunch counters — a law that would be unconstitutional under Thomas’ understanding of our founding document. Indeed, Justice Scalia even wrote an opinion in Gonzales v. Raich which clearly and unambiguously indicates that the Affordable Care Act is constitutional.

None of this is to say that Scalia is a saint. He defends torture and finds little wrong with executing the innocent. His views on gay rights are straight out of the Paleolithic Era, as is his belief that the Constitution does not provide any protection against gender discrimination.

But compared to Justice Thomas, Scalia is hardly the Harry Potter of people who want to do awful things to the Constitution. Scalia isn’t even the Ron Weasley of people who want to do awful things to the Constitution. He’s more like Neville Longbottom.

A federal grand jury indicted Jian-Yun Dong, CEO of a biotech firm known as GenPhar and a major donor to Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), for embezzling more than $3 million in federal funds and for illegally funding tens of thousands of foreign dollars to Graham’s senate campaign. Much of the money Dong allegedly stole from the American people came from earmarks secured for Dong’s company by Sen. Graham:

The indictments point to the connections between Dong’s biotechnology company, GenPhar, and Graham, who championed nearly $20 million in federal earmarks for the firm’s vaccine research.

GenPhar employees rank among the top givers to Graham in recent years, while also donating to other Republicans, according to Federal Election Commission records. Prosecutors say that at least $31,000 in donations to Graham came from an unidentified foreign national, who wired $36,000 from a Frankfurt bank in 2007 to bankroll the scheme. [...]

In September 2007, Dong suggested in an e-mail to the foreign national that the contributions had helped the company win federal funding. The project is not identified in court records, but the National Institutes of Health awarded $1.1 million to GenPhar on Sept. 7, 2007, for a “preclinical evaluation” of a vaccine for the Marburg virus, records show.

“This is your money at work,” Dong allegedly wrote in the e-mail six days later.

Federal prosecutors say that Graham did nothing illegal, and there is no reason to suspect that Graham violated the law in his dealings with Dong. The fact that Graham’s role in this scandal is sanctioned by U.S. law, however, is a much bigger problem than the fact that one biotech CEO may have siphoned some money away from a federal projected. So long as our electoral system requires candidates to raise millions of dollars — mostly from wealthy individuals — to compete against their opponents and against corporate-funded Citizens United attack ads, questionable appropriations benefiting major campaign donors are inevitable.

Nearly two centuries of precedent support the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act — and most judges understand that they do not have the authority to ignore such a well established line of Supreme Court decisions simply because they wish the law were otherwise. Of the nine judges to hear court of appeals cases challenging the Affordable Care Act, only three believe that they are not bound by these precedents. Tomorrow, however, a very conservative panel of the very conservative United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit will hear an Affordable Care Act challenge — and DOJ has good reason to be nervous that the panel will not follow established law.

The senior judge on the panel is Judge Harry Edwards, a Carter appointee who is unlikely to throw centuries of law under the bus. He is joined, however, by Judges Laurence Silberman and Brett Kavanaugh, both of whom have a long record of conservative activism.

Judge Silberman

A former banking executive and official in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan Administrations, Silberman is a close personal friend of Justice Thomas and encouraged a reluctant Thomas to accept his first appointment to the federal bench. Although Silberman’s position as a judge prevented him from being the public face of support for Thomas’ confirmation to the Supreme Court, Silberman worked actively behind the scenes — including with opposition researchers tasked with undermining Thomas’ opponents. Silberman reportedly speculated that Professor Anita Hill accused Thomas of sexual harassment because she was a lesbian “acting out,” and he insisted that Thomas would have never asked Hill out because Hill “had bad breath.”

Silberman overturned Oliver North’s felony conviction in the wake of the Iran-Contra scandal, but his most significant opinion is probably Parker v. District of Columbia, which struck down DC’s handgun law on Second Amendment grounds. Like the Affordable Care Act, the DC gun law was supported by many years of Supreme Court precedent. In its 1939 decision in Miller v. United States, the Court held that the Second Amendment only protects the right to keep and bear arms for the purpose of serving in a state militia–lawmakers were free to regulate firearms used for non-militia purposes. Miller was binding Supreme Court precedent at the time Silberman decided the Parker case, so he should have upheld the DC law.

Instead, Silberman took a gamble that the Supreme Court would overrule Miller — and he was right. DC appealed Silberman’s decision, and a 5-4 Supreme Court affirmed Silberman in its landmark DC v. Heller decision. So Silberman has already flouted precedent once in a successful bid to get the Roberts Court to change longstanding law. It is easy to see him trying to spin the wheel again on the Affordable Care Act.

Judge Brett Kavanaugh

Kavanaugh’s partisan credentials make Silberman look like Ted Kennedy. Kavanaugh served as an Associate Counsel under Clinton inquisitor Ken Starr, and was a principal author of the Starr Report to Congress on the Monica Lewinsky affair. Kavanaugh then served in the Bush White House, where he worked on President Bush’s effort to fill the federal bench with conservative judges. At one point, Kavanaugh also advised the Bush Administration on the likelihood that the Supreme Court would allow it to deny detainees access to lawyers — although he later testified in his confirmation hearing that “I was not involved and am not involved in the questions about the rules governing detention of combatants and so I do not have any involvement in that.”

As a judge, Kavanaugh is a reliably conservative vote — especially in detainee treatment cases. He also recently penned a dissent claiming that Exxon could not be held accountable when it hired people who engaged in torture and other crimes against humanity in Indonesia because, as a corporation, Exxon is immune from a law allowing private parties to be sued for some of the most atrocious violations of international law.

The Silver Lining

So the Affordable Care Act is in for a rough ride tomorrow, but there are at least two silver linings for the law. The first is the fact that the panel recently requested additional briefing on whether the law counts as a tax and therefore must be upheld under Congress’ power to levy taxes. To date, two of the three courts of appeals hearing ACA cases have issued such letters, and in each case the request for additional briefing telegraphed how a key member of the panel intended to reject the challenge to the law.

The second silver lining is the possibility of a surprise decision. A 2-1 decision with Silberman and Kavanaugh striking down the Affordable Care Act would merely confirm what anyone familiar with these two judges expects to happen. If just one of them voted to uphold the law, however, it would be extremely unlikely that one of the Supreme Court’s conservatives won’t do the same.

Before he announced his presidential bid, Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) was commendably honest about his radical view of the Constitution. Perry repeatedly and proudly called Social Security and Medicare unconstitutional — even doing so on video at least once. Now that Perry wants to be president, however, he has unleashed a blizzard of falsehoods, claiming untruthfully that he never said Social Security and Medicare are unconstitutional.

Last night, in an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity, Perry showed similar disregard for the truth in claiming that he never suggested Texas might secede from the union:

HANNITY: Some people said, well, you used the term once “secession.” That’s not anything—is that something you believe?

PERRY: No, and I never used that term, at all.

HANNITY: Then why was it reported so heavily?

PERRY: I have no idea to be real honest with you, because it was never a really factual piece of reporting. It was shouted out by an individual at an event—at a Tea Party, actually—and I said “listen, America is a great country. We have no reason why we would ever dissolve this union.”

Watch it:

Perry is technically correct that he never uttered the word “secession,” but he did say that “when we came into the nation in 1845, we were a republic, we were a stand-alone nation. And one of the deals was, we can leave anytime we want. So we’re kind of thinking about that again.” Just in case Perry doesn’t remember saying that he is “thinking about” seceding, he can listen to himself saying it here:

For the record, Perry isn’t just wrong about his own previously stated views on secession, he was also wrong the first time when he claimed Texas has the right to secede from the union. Just in case the Civil War didn’t resolve this question enough to suit Perry’s unusually fluid understanding of the Constitution, the Supreme Court resolved the question just a few years later in 1869. As the Court held in Texas v. White, “[t]he union between Texas and the other States was as complete, as perpetual, and as indissoluble as the union between the original States. There was no place for reconsideration, or revocation, except through revolution, or through consent of the States.”