Richard Lee Pollard was a federal inmate when he slipped, fell and broke both his elbows. Prison officials then allegedly forced him into a jumpsuit and wrist restraints, despite the fact that these restraints caused him excruciating pain, and they also allegedly refused to allow him to wear a split his doctors ordered him to wear. For weeks, due to the prison’s alleged neglect, Pollard was unable to feed or bathe himself.

This treatment violates the Constitution. As the Supreme Court held 35 years ago, the Eighth Amendment’s guarantee against cruel and unusual punishment requires prisons to provide adequate medical care to inmates. Yet, if the Supreme Court agrees with a lower court decision immunizing many prisons from the Constitution, Pollard may find himself in a Constitution-free zone simply because his prison happens to be run by a private corporation:

A Supreme Court case could determine whether thousands of inmates in privately run prisons have the same rights to sue in federal court as prisoners in facilities run by the U.S. government.

The case, Minneci v. Pollard, involves a federal inmate who wants to sue his jailers for damages over alleged violations of the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. The prisoner claims he was painfully mistreated after an accident at a for-profit prison, operating under contract for the U.S. Bureau of Prisons.

Lower federal courts have split on whether federal private-prison inmates can bring such damage claims for alleged constitutional violations.

Shockingly, the Supreme Court already held, in its 5-4 decision in Correctional Services Corp. v. Malesko, that private prison corporations who run federal prisons are immune from constitutional lawsuits. The only issue in Pollard’s case is whether the corporation’s employees also enjoy the same immunity.

In other words, the corporate prisons industry has largely won its battle to ignore the Constitution in deciding how to treat federal inmates. Although people like Pollard might still be able to convince a state judge to hold these corporations accountable, he can forget about the Constitution.

As campaign reporters react to Politico’s bombshell allegation that GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain sexually harassed two former employees, Daniel Bice reveals potentially groundbreaking financial records suggesting the the Cain campaign received illegal corporate donations shortly after it launched. In essence, the records show that a corporation run by two senior Cain campaign staffers — including the now infamous Cigarette Smoking Man Mark Block — fronted nearly $40,000 to the Cain campaign. Cain campaign records, however, show no evidence that this debt was ever paid back:

Herman Cain’s two top campaign aides ran a private Wisconsin-based corporation that helped the GOP presidential candidate get his fledgling campaign off the ground by originally footing the bill for tens of thousands of dollars in expenses for such items as iPads, chartered flights and travel to Iowa and Las Vegas – something that might breach federal tax and campaign law, according to sources and documents.

Internal financial records obtained by No Quarter show that Prosperity USA said it was owed about $40,000 by the Cain campaign for a variety of items in February and March. Cain began taking donations for his presidential bid on Jan. 1. [...]

It is not known if Cain’s election fund eventually paid back Prosperity USA, which now appears defunct. The candidate’s federal election filings make no mention of the debt, and the figures in the documents don’t match payments made by the candidate’s campaign.

Although the Supreme Court’s egregious Citizens United decision gave corporations an almost unchecked license to attempt to buy elections, the decision deals with so-called “independent expenditures” where a corporation funds a third party that supports or opposes a candidate for office. Direct contributions from a corporation to a candidate’s campaign are one of the few things that still remain illegal after Citizens United. Accordingly, if Prosperity USA effectively donated money to the Cain campaign by fronting money to them and agreeing not to be paid back, that is a violation of federal election law.

Indeed, the alleged Cain/Prosperity USA arrangement violates the law even if Team Cain does eventually pay the money back. Federal law defines a campaign contribution as “any gift, subscription, loan, advance, or deposit of money or anything of value made by any person for the purpose of influencing any election for Federal office.” Although there are exceptions to this rule for banks and other businesses that ordinary provide loans, those exceptions do not apply here.

This is not the first time that Cain’s cancerman Mark Block found himself caught in a campaign finance scandal. Block — who previously led the Wisconsin chapter of the Koch-funded Tea Party group Americans For Prosperity — paid a $15,000 fine and agreed to remain out of Wisconsin politics for three years after he was accused of election law violations during his 1997 stint as a state supreme court justice’s campaign manager.

To be fair, the Prosperity USA records are consistent with illegal activity but they may not themselves be sufficient to prove the Cain campaign acted illegally. Nevertheless, two election lawyers quoted by Bice found them deeply troubling. In the words of one GOP attorney, “if the records accurately reflect what occurred, this is way out of bounds.”

Earlier this month, Senate Republicans cobbled together many of their longstanding objectives, and called it a “jobs” bill to try to draw attention away from President Obama’s popular American Jobs Act. Yet this plan backfired on the Senate GOP leadership when Tea Party lawmakers began lining up to denounce a key provision of their makeshift “jobs” bill as unconstitutional. This provision — a proposal to impose damage caps on medical malpractice suits in both state and federal court — has now attracted the ire of yet another Tea Party heartthrob, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli:

With Senate Bill 197 — legislation that would have the federal government dictate how state judges are to try medical malpractice cases and cap what state courts may award — several Republican senators have reminded us that federal impositions on states that run contrary to the U.S. Constitution and to the spirit of federalism have never been the sole prerogative of just Democrats. . . . This legislation expands federal power, tramples the states and violates the Constitution. And if it were ever signed into law — by a Republican or Democratic president — I would file suit against it just as fast as I filed suit when the federal health-care bill was signed into law in March 2010 (15 minutes later).

In reality, the constitutional case against federal tort reform is very weak. Congress enjoys broad authority to regulation national economic markets, such as the market for health care, and that includes the power to regulate those markets badly. If people don’t like the laws their elected officials put in place, our democratic Constitution empowers them to vote those officials out of office — it does not empower the law’s opponents to simply declare anything they want unconstitutional.

Nevertheless, Cuccinelli’s strident opposition to this law — and that of others such as tenther Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) — should stand as a warning to Republicans who raced to embrace a crackpot theory of the Constitution the minute President Obama signed a health care law they disapproved of. Federally imposed tort reform has been a centerpiece of GOP health care policy for many years, and now this longstanding Republican goal many be unachievable because too many Republican lawmakers were conned into embracing Cuccinelli and Lee’s tenther vision of the Constitution.

Those that live by crackpot distortions of our Constitution, die by crackpot distortions of our Constitution.

Crockett Keller, a state-certified gun safety instructor in Texas, wants to help you get a concealed handgun lesson — that is, unless you’re Muslim or liberal. “If you are a non-Christian Arab or Muslim, I will not teach you the class with no shame,” he says in a controversial new radio playing around Mason, TX, where Keller owns a gun store. “If you are a socialist liberal and or voted for the current campaigner in chief, please do not take this class. You have already proven that you cannot make a knowledgeable and prudent decision as under the law,” he added. In an interview with a local ABC affiliate, Keller made it clear he was serious: “I will give up my license to teach before I will teach them.”

“I consider all Muslims our enemies, no matter how nice they are,” Keller said. “I could not trust one and I, as an instructor, am not going to teach one how to shoot a gun and aid him in getting a license.” Watch KVUE’s report:

As a growing number of states rush to gun regulations and make concealed handgun licenses easier to obtain, Keller’s cases raises questions about who’s training this influx of new people owning and carrying firearms.

As the Southern Poverty Law Center’s HateWatch blog noted, “It’s not clear whether this type of discrimination is lawful,” as business owners have considerable discretion in whom they serve. The Texas Department of Public Safety, which certifies individuals to teach concealed handgun lessons, said discrimination puts instructors’ certification at risk of “suspension or revocation,” but that they need a formal complaint with evidence before they can act.

Earlier this month, federal prosecutors in California announced that they were stepping up enforcement against medical marijuana clinics that have allegedly become de facto dealerships where people without a medical need can still buy pot. In response to this unfortunate diversion of scarce resources to minor drug crimes that cause, at most, negligible harm to society, a medical marijuana advocacy group called Americans for Safe Access filed an equally unfortunate lawsuit seeking to have the Justice Department’s actions declared unconstitutional:

Adamant in its disagreement with the policy choice made by the States of California to decriminalize marijuana for medical use — which is California’s sovereign right under our federalist system of government — the federal government has instituted a policy to dismantle the medical marijuana laws of the State of California and to coerce its municipalities to pass bans no medical marijuana dispensaries. . . . While the federal government is entitled to enforce its criminal laws against marijuana in the states that have decriminalized it for medical use in an even-handed manner, the Tenth Amendment forbids it from selectively employing such coercive tactics to commandeer the law-making functions of the State. This case is brought to restore the constitutional balance embodied by the federalist principles of our Constitution and the Tenth Amendment.

This is strong rhetoric, but it’s tough to find an actual legal argument in here. In essence, the lawsuit appears to claim that the federal government is violating something known as the “anti-commandeering doctrine,” which forbids the federal government from requiring a state government to take a particular action. As the Supreme Court held in Printz v. United States, “the Framers explicitly chose a Constitution that confers upon Congress the power to regulate individuals, not States.”

The problem with this lawsuit is that there is no indication whatsoever that DOJ is ordering California to do anything. The Justice Department is targeting marijuana clinics and individuals who do business with them. None of these people are the state of California.

Yet the fact that DOJ’s attacks on these clinics is constitutional does not make them right, and they expose a very real political danger for anyone worried about the tenther movement’s effort to replace our Constitution with a radical libertarian vision that would declare much of the Twentieth Century unconstitutional. The polling trend on marijuana policy is clear and unambiguous, and it leaves no doubt which side is on the right side of history:

Our current policy, which criminalizes an activity that nearly half of all Americans will engage in is unsustainable. And many people who want to take a machete to the Constitution are eager to exploit this fact. Randy Barnett, the extremist law professor who wants to make everything from Social Security to Medicare to child labors law unconstitutional, began his crusade by unsuccessfully arguing to weaken federal marijuana laws in the Supreme Court. The Tenth Amendment Center, an even more extremist organization that lists unconstitutional nullification of federal laws as one of its primary objectives, touts an unconstitutional hemp bill as one of its top priorities.

Progressives cannot afford to cede an increasingly popular issue to a movement that wants nothing more than to dismantle our social safety net, strip workers of their most basic legal protections and create a society where wealth becomes destiny. Our current federal marijuana policy is unambiguously constitutional, but that does not make it right.

The birther movement, thought dead by multiple debunkings and the release of President Obama’s actual birth certificate, was thrust back into the national spotlight this week when Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R), a former frontrunner in the race for the GOP’s presidential nomination, called birtherism “a good issue to keep alive” and claimed he wasn’t sure where Obama was born. Perry later dismissed his flirtation with birtherism as a distraction, but inside the movement, there are still those who refuse to give up in their futile quest to prove that the president was born anywhere other than the United States.

This week, birther queen Orly Taitz joined radical Arizona immigration sheriff Joe Arpaio — who is conducting his own investigation into Obama’s birthplace — at a Tea Party town hall in Arizona, where she sought to provide Arpaio with further evidence to bolster his case. Arpaio, however, surprised the crowd by telling Taitz that he has evidence even she doesn’t have. And though he can’t tell her, or anyone else, what it is, he promises it will surprise even the harshest critics of the birtherism movement:

TAITZ: Sheriff Arpaio, all I’m asking you, all you need to do, if you please forward this officially to your governor, to your secretary of state, so they can see this before they allow him to go on the ballot in 2012. (applause) [...] Sheriff Arpaio, the whole country depends on you. (applause)

ARPAIO: Thanks for your info. We’re looking at this very closely. I can’t tell you everything, but there could a shock somewhere my guys came up with, and we’ll see how that — again, I can’t talk too much about it. [...] I gotta be careful sometimes, because it’s very complex.

Watch it:

Another kingpin of the birther movement, real estate tycoon and former potential presidential candidate Donald Trump, is trying to keep the birther movement alive as well, saying Perry’s reigniting the birther flame was a “positive thing.”

Pizza mogul Herman Cain desperately wants to be a “pro-life” candidate, but he just can’t seem to figure out exactly what that means. After weeks of contradictory positions on whether abortion should be legal, Cain finally seemed to land on the idea that he is “pro-life, no exceptions.” In an attempt to clarify if that indeed means “no exceptions,” CNN reached out to Team Cain to get a definitive answer. As it turns out, “no exceptions” does not mean “no exceptions” to Cain. According to the campaign, Cain now believes that abortions should be allowed in cases of “rape, incest, and when the life of the mother is at stake”:

[A] campaign adviser said Cain follows the same policy used by the George W. Bush administration, which said abortions should be allowed in the instances of rape, incest and when the life of the mother is at stake.

“He has learned more about the issue,” including the number of women affected in those instances, the adviser told CNN, explaining Cain’s view.

Cain’s latest position will undoubtedly roil anti-choice activists who have been leading the country down a radical road towards bans on abortions under any and all circumstances. That walk is not so easy for Cain, who struggles to reconcile his “pro-life from conception” stance with his belief that government should stay out of people’s private lives. As such, he’s left a confusing trail of conflicting abortion positions that complicate any consistency or conviction he claims to have. In fact, Cain has traveled from one side of the issue to the other over the span of one month:

Abortion Is ‘Her Choice’: Over the course of one Fox News interview on Oct. 11, Cain insisted that “people shouldn’t be free to abort because if we don’t protect the sanctity of life from conception, we will also start to play God relative to life at the end of life.” But when asked whether a rape victim should have the choice, Cain said, “That’s her choice. That’s not government choice.”

Don’t Tell Women What To Do: On Oct. 19, Cain seemed to further his seemingly pro-choice position. “It’s not the government’s role, or anybody else’s role, to make that decision” on whether a sexual assault victim should seek an abortion, he said. “It ultimately gets down to a choice that that family or that mother has to make. Not me as president.”

A Family Can Have An ‘Illegal’ Abortion: On Oct. 20, Cain tried to shut out the uproar over his confusion: “I am 100 percent pro-life. End of story.” But the very next day, he added another chapter to his position. “Look, abortion should not be legal. That is clear. But if the family made a decision to break the law, that’s that family’s decision. That’s all I’m trying to say,” he said on Fox.

Pro-Life, No Exceptions: In that same interview, Cain finally declared that he was “pro-life from conception, no exceptions.” Apologetic for his “problematic” answers, he stated with finality, “I don’t know how much more I can say that if I am pro-life from conception no exceptions.

Pro-Life, With Exceptions: As noted, Cain’s campaign clarified yesterday that Cain actually does believe in exceptions and that “Abortions should be allowed in the instances of rape, incest and when the life of the mother is at stake.”

Cain’s confusion has already caused “real damage” with anti-choice activists who see him as holding a “pro-choice” position. The only thing that can be confidently stated is that whatever position he holds now, it is unlikely to be his position in the next few days.

Last June, the Supreme Court tossed out a class action lawsuit brought by over a million Walmart employees alleging that the company systematically discriminates against women. The Court did not allow the women to try to prove that such discrimination exists, instead holding that the women did not have enough in common with each other to come together in one lawsuit. Yesterday, the women responded to this setback with the first of several cases breaking them down into smaller groups:

The lawyers promised an “armada” of other lawsuits in the next six months making discrimination claims in other regions of the country, as opposed to nationwide. “The case we are starting today is the first of many,” said Brad Seligman, one of the lead plaintiff lawyers. He added that the new lawsuits are “what we like to call Wal-Mart 2.0.” [...]

The lawsuit filed Thursday in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California contends that Wal-Mart’s discriminatory practices on pay and job promotion affected more than 90,000 women currently or formerly employed at Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club stores in four regions in California and neighboring states.

This tactic could ultimately prove successful, and it is possible that many hundreds of thousands of women could receive long overdue justice by joining together in somewhat smaller groups. Even if they win, however, the sad truth is that this victory could probably never be repeated thanks to an enormous gift the Supreme Court gave powerful corporations last April.

When the Supreme Court’s Wal-Mart case was handed down, ThinkProgress called it only “the second worst class action case this Supreme Court term.” The worst decision — indeed, one of the very worst Supreme Court decisions in the last decade — was AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion. Concepcion built off a long line of misguided decisions allowing corporations to force their consumers and workers to sign away their right to sue the company in a real court and shunt any disputes into a secretive, privatized arbitration system that overwhelming favors corporate parties. Under Concepcion, corporations can not only take away your right to hold them accountable in a real court, they can also take away your right to join together with other victims of the corporation’s lawbreaking to form a class action lawsuit.

Thanks to this deeply erroneous decision, Walmart can now force each and every one of their workers to sign away their rights or they are fired. And without the ability to bring class actions in the future, many of these workers will be completely powerless against their megacorporate employer.

The class action one of the very few tools enabling vulnerable Americans to stand up to a wealthy and influential corporation. If a major corporation cheats a thousand of its workers out of a thousand dollars each, for example, very few of them will decide it is worth the hassle and expense of a major lawsuit and virtually no lawyer will be willing to take such a low dollar case on a contingency fee basis — meaning that the plaintiffs will have to pay more for legal counsel than they are likely to win in the end. If these thousand workers are able to join together into a class action, however, their million dollar claim suddenly becomes very attractive to top litigators — and the hassle of litigation will be virtually non-existent for most of the plaintiffs. Thanks to Concepcion, however, that is probably no longer an option.

Concepcion was an earthquake, and it shook one of the foundations of our civil justice system to the ground. Walmart may still be held accountable for its past actions, but it is doubtful that any of its workers will ever be able to join a class action against them again.