ThinkProgress filed this report from a town hall in Derry, NH.

This weekend in New Hampshire, Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) doubled down on his belief that programs ranging from Medicaid to federal assistance to low-income public school students violate the Constitution.

Speaking to a town hall crowd in Derry, Perry told the audience that “there is nothing in that Constitution says Washington DC is supposed to be telling us how to deliver health care.” The Texas Governor went on to express his belief that “there’s nothing in there that says Washington DC is supposed to be telling us how to educate our children.”

PERRY: One of the last things, number 6 [on the pledge I just signed] is to faithfully and forcefully uphold, follow and protect the United States Constitution. There is nothing in that Constitution that says Washington D.C. is supposed to be telling us how to deliver health care. There’s nothing in there that says Washington D.C. is supposed to be telling us how to educate our children. That needs to stop. And I’m the president that’s going to stand up and say, “no longer is Washington D.C. going to mandate back to the states how to take care of health care or their children.”

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In fact, there is ample justification in the Constitution for the federal government to be involved in health care. Article I Section 8 of the Constitution allows the federal government raise revenues and use them to provide for the “general welfare” of the nation. As ThinkProgress legal expert Ian Millhiser explains this includes the power to offer money to states if they agree to comply with certain conditions:

The federal government does give Texas some extremely generous grants, which Texas is allowed to keep so long as it spends the money according to certain instructions, but Perry is perfectly free to give the money back if he doesn’t like these instructions. . . .

The federal government provides a very generous program called Medicaid that allows Texas to provide health care to millions of Texans. Rick Perry is perfectly free to give this money back if he doesn’t want the federal government in his business. Indeed, Perry even flirted with doing just that before he realized that Medicaid is actually a really great deal for Texas that he didn’t want to turn down.

Millhiser concluded that “Perry’s suggestion that he should get all the money without the strings doesn’t make him a hero of the 10th Amendment, it just makes him a mooch.”

Indeed, Perry has developed a habit in his campaign of simply dismissing those programs he dislikes as “unconstitutional.” Despite the fact that the federal government’s involvement in health care, from Medicare to Medicaid to the Affordable Care Act, has kept millions out of poverty and averted thousands of preventable deaths, Perry has made dismantling these “unconstitutional” programs the centerpiece of his political belief system.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s (R) radical belief that everything from Social Security to Medicare is unconstitutional rocketed him to the front of the GOP presidential race, but he collapsed just as quickly once GOP voters learned that he supports allowing undocumented immigrants to pay in-state tuition at public universities. Perry’s loss has been Herman Cain’s gain — Public Policy Polling most recent round of polls shows the former pizza executive springing to the front of the GOP pack.

Yet the GOP electorate’s quest for total ideological purity could be Cain’s downfall as well. Just last June, Cain told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that — although Cain claims to “support the Second Amendment” — he also believes that state governments should have the power to regulate or even ban firearms if they choose:

BLITZER: Should states or local governments be allowed to control the gun situation…

CAIN: Yes

BLITZER: So the answer is yes?

CAIN: Yes. The answer is yes, that should be a state’s decision.

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Cain’s belief that Congress can’t touch guns but states can not only places him well to the left of the NRA, it also places him at odds with the Supreme Court. In McDonald v. Chicago, the justices held 5-4 that the Second Amendment applies equally to the states and to the federal government. The four justices who agreed with Cain that states can freely regulate guns were left-of-center Justices Stevens, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Sotomayor.

Cain would only have to watch Sotomayor’s confirmation hearing to learn that his relatively moderate position on guns places him well outside the Republican mainstream. Senate Republicans savaged Justice Sonia Sotomayor during her confirmation hearings because she took the Herman Cain position on gun control while she was a lower court judge — although Sotomayor’s decision was the correct one because it came down before the Supreme Court changed its interpretation of the Second Amendment in McDonald.

Because McDonald was such a closely divided decision, the Supreme Court would drastically roll back Second Amendment rights if a hypothetical Cain Administration appointed just one more pro-gun control justice to the Supreme Court. If that happened, President Cain would do more to strike at gun owners’ rights with just one appointment that President Obama will accomplish in an entire presidential term.

One of the most surprising developments during this new Supreme Court term is the relative absence of blockbuster cases that could provide corporate America with broad new immunities from laws protecting consumers and other ordinary Americans. To be sure, corporate immunity is far from absent from the Court’s docket — sub-prime credit card companies could gain the ability to force their consumers into corporate-run arbitration, for example — but there is nothing like the mortal blow that the Court dealt to consumers class action lawsuits last term.

At a conference last August, Justice Anthony Kennedy offered this explanation for why this could be:

“The docket seems to be changing,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy told reporters at a judicial conference in August.

“A lot of big civil cases are going to arbitration,” he said. “I don’t see as many of the big civil cases.”

Of course, Justice Kennedy deserves much of the blame for the fact that so many big cases are going to privatized arbitration rather than real courts. Kennedy wrote the Supreme Court’s decision in Circuit City v. Adams, which held that corporations can force victims of workplace discrimination into corporate-run arbitration. He cast the key fifth vote in Rent-a-Center v. Jackson, which stripped individuals of their ability to challenge in court many of the most abusive contracts that force people into privatized arbitration. And he also cast the key vote holding that federal arbitration law allows corporations to strip ordinary Americans of their ability to join together and fight widespread corporate abuses through a class action lawsuit.

Indeed, Justice Kennedy and his four conservative colleagues’ efforts to kick ordinary Americans out of court have been so widespread and so successful that corporate America appears to be running out of new favors it can ask from the nation’s most powerful Court.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) told Fox News host Mike Huckabee this weekend that he would support an amendment to his state’s constitution to define life as beginning at conception, which would outlaw abortion and potentially many forms of contraception as well. Noting that the state supreme court forced the inclusion of abortion coverage in Romney’s universal health care law, the GOP presidential front-runner said the only way to undo the decision would be a constitutional amendment. Asked if he would support such a move, Romney replied, “absolutely”:

HUCKABEE: Would you have supported a constitutional amendment that would have established definition of life beginning of life at conception?

ROMNEY: Absolutely.

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Constitutional amendments to define life as beginning at the moment of fertilization have been pushed in states across the country, and the radical anti-abortion group leading the effort, Personhood USA, is hoping to get proposals on the ballot in nearly half the states by 2012.

But laws that give legal rights to fertilized eggs go much farther than merely outlawing abortions. As ThinkProgress’ Marie Diamond noted, they could also have the effect of outlawing common forms of birth control, since contraceptives like the pill and IUDs can prevent fertilized egg from implanting in a woman’s uterus. Personhood amendments consider these types of birth control a form of abortion, and could potentially even treat them the same as homicide. If these amendments make terminating pregnancy a criminal act, they would also deter doctors from saving the lives of women with abnormal pregnancies because any doctor performing an abortion could risk prosecution.

Some of the Republican presidential field’s more radical candidates like Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), Herman Cain, and Newt Gingrich have already voiced support for giving legal rights to unborn children, but it’s surprising coming from Romney considering that he was staunchly pro-choice for much of his political career.

“I will preserve and protect a woman’s right to choose,” Romney said in 2002, “I will not change any provisions of Massachusetts’ pro-choice laws.” Romney’s retroactive support for outlawing abortion via constitutional amendment, expressed to Huckabee, clearly seem to contradict his earlier vows to protect his state’s pro-choice laws.

But while Romney griped about the inclusion of abortion coverage in his health law, abortion rates actually fell 1.5 percent in the first year his plan went into effect, suggesting that the best way to lower abortion rates is by expanding coverage, not limiting access to contraception.

While Romney has so far eschewed Personhood USA, in a different portion of the Huckbee interview, he vowed to support federal restrictions on abortion.

The Supreme Court is very unlikely to strike down the Affordable Care Act. Several of the most conservative justices have joined or authored opinions that are wholly inconsistent with meritless arguments against health reform. And, while the Roberts Court shows no lack of enthusiasm for cutting back people’s rights, they typically do not do so through sweeping, headline-earning constitutional decisions.

Instead, the Supreme Court’s conservatives typically push their agenda through the kind of hypertechnical procedural cases that rarely receive much attention, but which can leave millions of Americans defenseless against powerful corporations or overreaching states. The single most important case last Supreme Court term, for example, wasn’t the high-profile funeral protest or violent video games cases. It wasn’t even the decision immunizing Walmart from a massive class action. No, it was a lawsuit alleging that a cell phone company cheated its customers out of a mere $30. The Supreme Court took that $30 trick, and used it to effectively eliminate all class action lawsuits brought by workers or consumers against wealthy and well-lawyered corporations. Moreover, this decision built upon a long line of decisions enabling corporations to force ordinary Americans into privatized corporate-owned arbitration system that overwhelmingly favors corporate parties.

There are, of course, exceptions to this rule, such as the egregious Citizens United case, but the Roberts Court typically operates by creating opaque procedural barriers that shield the wealthy and the well-connected from lawsuits — they are much less prone to make substantive changes to constitutional law.

Which is why Court watchers wondering if the justices will cut back on Americans’ access to health care should pay less attention to the Affordable Care Act case and much more attention to a low-profile argument that will be held today. The specific legal issue at stake in Douglas v. Independent Living Center would even confuse most lawyers, but the short of it is this:

The federal government frequently enters into partnerships with the states where the feds where the state agrees to set up a program to help its citizens and the feds agree to put up much of the money necessary to keep this program running. Medicaid, the low-income health care program, is the largest and most well-known example of this kind of federal/state partnership. When a state agrees to participate in Medicaid, they must also agree to comply with the network of federal laws governing the Medicaid program, including a requirement that the state’s Medicaid program pays health providers enough to “ensure that enough providers will participate in the Medicaid program so that patients will have meaningful health care access.” Like any law, however, this requirement means nothing if it can’t actually be enforced.

About a decade ago, the Supreme Court started making it harder for private parties to hold states accountable in court if the state doesn’t comply with Medicaid and other federal laws. Douglas will likely complete this process, effectively making it impossible for individuals to sue states that fail to provide adequate access to health care.

If this happens, the short term effect will be that only the Obama Administration will have the power to enforce key provisions of the Medicaid law — and patients and health providers will just have to trust that Obama’s team does an adequate job of enforcing the law. That may not seem so bad, but what happens if the Obama Administration gets replaced with the Perry Administration or the Palin Administration or the Ryan Administration or some other administration that is actively hostile to enforcing the Medicaid laws? If a future Administration shows no interest in enforcing the Medicaid statute, then entire provisions of law could effectively cease to exist until a more progressive president is elected.

This is why Douglas will probably be the most important health care case argued this term. It is exactly the kind of case that the Roberts Court tends to use to keep individuals out of court, it could lead to millions of Americans losing access to Medicaid at some point in the future, and it will do so in such a complex and hypertechnical way that few people will notice when it happens.