The following is the first in a multi-part series on former Speaker Newt Gingrich’s speech to the Values Voter Summit

Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich just completed one of the most radical speeches ever delivered by a presidential candidate on the judiciary. Gingrich’s speech calls for a radical reshaping of our constitutional democracy, eliminating the judiciary’s power to make binding constitutional decisions. He promises to openly defy Supreme Court decisions he disagrees with, and pledges to intimidate judges who dare to part ways with the Constitution According To Newt.

Newt begins his speech with a rant about an unspecified 1958 Supreme Court decision which, he claims, wrongly created a doctrine of “judiciary supremacy”:

Imagine that, by a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court decided that 2+2=5. Under the current theory, which the Warren Court promulgated in 1958, the only effective recourse would be either a) to get a future Supreme Court to reverse them, or b) to pass a constitutional amendment declaring 2+2=4. . . . This is an absurdity, foisted on us in 1958 by an historic lie. There is no judicial supremacy, it does not exist in the American Constitution.

Watch it:

What Gingrich labels “judicial supremacy” is merely the Supreme Court’s authority to be the final word on constitutional interpretation, and this authority was recognized long before 1958. Indeed, it was first announced by the Supreme Court’s landmark 1803 decision in Marbury v. Madison‘s declaration that “[i]t is emphatically the duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is.” By questioning Marbury, Gingrich questions the very foundation of constitutional governance. If an independent judiciary cannot issue binding constitutional rulings, then the Constitution as a whole is meaningless because the only thing enforcing it is the willingness of government officials to comply with it completely voluntarily.

Additionally, Gingrich’s bizarre citation to the year 1958 turns out to be very revealing of what America would look like under Gingrich’s impotent Constitution.

A white paper published on Gingrich’s campaign website names Cooper v. Aaron as the 1958 case Gingrich finds so very offensive. In Cooper, Arkansas’ governor and state legislature decreed that the state was not bound by Brown v. Board of Education, and pledged to resist efforts to desegregate public schools. Eventually, they even called out the Arkansas National Guard to keep African-Americans from entering Little Rock’s Central High School. In a rare unanimous opinion signed by every single justice, Cooper held that lawmakers have no right to openly defy the Constitution in this manner:

[W]e should answer the premise of the actions of the Governor and Legislature that they are not bound by our holding in the Brown case. It is necessary only to recall some basic constitutional propositions which are settled doctrine.

Article VI of the Constitution makes the Constitution the “supreme Law of the Land.” In 1803, Chief Justice Marshall, speaking for a unanimous Court, referring to the Constitution as “the fundamental and paramount law of the nation,” declared in the notable case of Marbury v. Madison that “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.” This decision declared the basic principle that the federal judiciary is supreme in the exposition of the law of the Constitution, and that principle has ever since been respected by this Court and the Country as a permanent and indispensable feature of our constitutional system. . . . Every state legislator and executive and judicial officer is solemnly committed by oath taken pursuant to Art. VI, cl. 3, “to support this Constitution.”

So when Gingrich lashes out against what he calls “judicial supremacy,” it is important understand exactly what he is saying. Newt believes that the governor of Arkansas was right, and the Supreme Court was wrong, about who had the last word in deciding whether African-American children can attend integrated schools.

At least one utility company in Alabama posted a sign informing its customers that a section of Alabama’s extreme anti-immigrant law prohibits them from providing water service to undocumented immigrants. According to the sign at Allgood Water Works in Blount County, Alabama, customers must have “an Alabama driver’s license or an Alabama picture ID card on file” by the date that the immigration law went into effect; otherwise, they risked losing their water service.

Sadly, the picture for Alabama’s immigrants is even grimmer than this sign suggests. Indeed, under one provision of the state’s immigration law, HB 56, it is a felony for an undocumented immigrant to even attempt to do business with Alabama’s state-run water agencies:

An alien not lawfully present in the United States shall not enter into or attempt to enter into a business transaction with the state or a political subdivision of the state and no person shall enter into a business transaction or attempt to enter into a business transaction on behalf of an alien not lawfully present in the United States. [...]

A violation of this section is a Class C felony.

In Alabama, Class C felonies are punishable by up to ten years in prison — meaning that undocumented people in Alabama can now be locked up for an entire decade if they attempt to take a bath in their own home.

In addition to Allgood, the Birmingham News reported that the Montgomery Water Works Board and Sewer Authority started requiring customers to prove their legal status on Sept. 1 (when the law was slated to go into effect), but stopped after being told that a federal judge had temporarily sus­pended implementation of the state law. It was unclear if the Montgomery board started asking customers about their legal status again when the law went into effect.

Additionally, Alabama Power told one family that they could not get electricity because of the new immigration law, according to the National Immigration Legal Center. It’s not clear, however, why Alabama Power did so because they are a private company and the law only applies to arms of the state government. To their credit, the electricity company has since told officials at the legal center that they no longer interpret the immigration law to mean that undocumented immigrants cannot receive power.

Yet there are no shortage of routine activities that are now felonies thanks to Alabama’s draconian law. Indeed, because the law defines unlawful “business transactions” very broadly to include “any transaction between a person and the state or a political subdivision of the state,” the mere act of paying income taxes might qualify. Thus, if an undocumented immigrant pays their taxes, they will be guilty of a felony, but if they don’t they will also be guilty of a felony because Alabama punishes tax evaders with up to five years in prison.

In other words, Alabama’s anti-immigrant law effectively makes it a crime to simply live as an undocumented immigrant in the state.

After Georgia passed its harsh immigration law in the spring, the state lost about 11,000 agricultural workers, and farmers were left with their crops rotting in the field because they did not have enough laborers to pick everything. One solution the state tried was to have people on probation and out of work fill in as an opportunity for them to learn some job skills. But the program only had mixed results, with many inmates walking off the job early.

Now, Alabama looks to be following Georgia’s path. John McMillan, head of Alabama’s agriculture department, suggested the state could have prison inmates take the jobs left by migrant workers who fled after Alabama’s extreme anti-immigrant law went into effect. It would be a short-term solution, he said, but would help farmers who risk losing crops if they can’t pick them in time:

“We are optimistic that by Monday we will have some help for farmers,” McMillan said. [...]

Last summer in Georgia, which also passed an anti-immigra­tion law, Republican Gov. Nathan Deal started a pro­gram to offer fieldwork to probationers at minimum wage. During the first two days of the program, the pro­bationers picking cucumbers couldn’t keep up with their Latino counterparts and had all quit by mid-afternoon.

“That is why I’m em­phasizing that this is a short-term solution to get the cur­rent crops up,” McMillan said Thursday. “Then, we’ll look at the long term.”

But even short-term, it is not clear how well McMillan’s suggestion will work. Farmers have reported trouble finding Alabamians willing to do the farm work. “They don’t have the moti­vation to work,” said Kent Scott, who grows blueberries in Alabama. “(Immigrants) are willing to work. They are trying to feed their families. They’re hustling.” Even state Rep. Scott Beason, who sponsored the harshest-in-the-nation immigration law, refused a challenge to pick tomatoes just like the immigrant workers who Beason thought could be replaced. The St. Clair County farmer who challenged Beason said his family could lose $150,000 this year because they only had a quarter of the workforce they normally would during harvest.

Georgia is revising its own plan to allow inmates to work as farm laborers as farmers continue to lack the number of workers they need. And back in July, some in Georgia were amazed Alabama did not learn from their mistakes before its immigration law put its agricultural and construction industry in jeopardy. “It was like, ‘Good Lord, you people can’t be helped. Have you all not been paying attention?’” said Bryan Tolar, president of the Georgia Agribusiness Council.

Yesterday, House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan (R-WI) predicted that the Supreme Court will embrace the meritless claim that the Affordable Care Act violates states rights and “knock down the individual mandate.” Yet, if there is one person who shouldn’t be hiding behind states rights arguments, it is Paul Ryan. The truth is that Ryan’s infamous health plan does far more than simply phase out Medicare, it outright declares war on the states’ ability to protect their citizens from insurance company abuses.

One of the centerpieces of Ryan’s plan is an element from the McCain/Palin presidential campaign’s plan that supposedly allows Americans to “purchase health insurance across state lines”:

Currently, individuals and families can purchase health insurance only in the States in which they live, because insurance companies are prohibited from selling polices outside their respective States. Thus the consumer is prevented from purchasing coverage from another State that might offer more suitable, or more affordable, coverage. [...]

Allowing consumers to shop across State lines will balance State regulation of health insurance. Individuals no longer will have to pay for health benefits mandated by their home States that they do not need; they will be able to choose policies from States whose mandates better fit their personal circumstances. States will then have an incentive to balance their insurance mandates against costs to remain competitive with other States.

This sure sounds great! Why shouldn’t you be able to buy a plan from an Arizona insurance company if you happen to live in Ohio? The truth, however, is that the McCain/Palin/Ryan plan’s promise to let people “shop across State lines” is nothing more than a code for completely immunizing the insurance industry from state laws that protect consumers.

As Sen. McCain explained during his failed campaign, the McCain/Palin/Ryan plan is modeled after the process banks used to systematically dismantle state laws protecting consumers from excessive interest rates. Once upon a time, banks were governed by something known as “usury laws,” state laws which prohibited lenders from charging excessive interest to homeowners and other borrowers. In 1978, however, the Supreme Court held that banks are only required to follow the usury laws of the state where they are “located,” effectively immunizing banks from the interest rate caps in each of the other 49 states.

The result was a race to the bottom where states competed to enact the least protective usury laws in order to coax the banking industry into relocating within their borders. Eventually, South Dakota “won” this race by repealing its usury laws altogether, and Citibank rewarded South Dakota by moving its lending offices to that state. The rest of the industry soon followed suit, immunizing itself from interest rate caps altogether by locating in places like South Dakota.

So the effect of this chain of events was to completely neutralize states’ ability to regulate interest rates — hardly the kind of states rights result that 10th Amendment absolutists pine for. And the McCain/Palin/Ryan plan would impose the banking model’s approach to state regulation on health insurance regulation. If the Ryan is successful in enacting this plan, a short list of laws that would effectively cease to exist includes:

• Women’s Health: 49 states and the District of Columbia require health plans to cover reconstructive surgery after breast cancer, mammograms, and maternity stays;
• Fair Appeals: 44 states and the District of Columbia allow patients to appeal denials of coverage to an external review board;
• Preexisting Conditions: 38 states and the District of Columbia restrict how far into the past a insurance company can “look-back” to determine whether a patient is disqualified because of a preexisting condition;
• Healthy Children: 31 states require health plans to cover well child care.

In other words, Ryan’s preeminence as the right’s leading health policymaker does nothing more than prove that they couldn’t care less about states rights and the 10th Amendment. They’re just happen to pretend to care in order to undermine President Obama’s signature accomplishment.

Earlier this week, the state of Tennessee denied Dorothy Cooper, a 96 year-old African-American, the voter ID she is now required to produce in order to vote at her polling place — citing her inability to produce her marriage certificate. Cooper voted in every election but one since she became eligible to vote, including many elections during the Jim Crow Era.

Indeed, in an interview yesterday with MSNBC’s Al Sharpton, Cooper explained that Tennessee’s new voter suppression law did more to keep her from voting than anything she experienced during Jim Crow:

SHARPTON: Even during Jim Crow days you didn’t have any problems voting in Tennessee?

COOPER: No, I haven’t had any problems at all until this time. This is the only times that I’ve had problems. [...]

SHARPTON: Do you feel that this kind of law is something that you and others that have lived through the Jim Crow Era and other eras—do you feel that this is something that you never thought at this stage in your voting life that you’d have to face? [...]

COOPER: No, I never thought it would be like this, ever.

Watch it:

Earlier this year, former President Bill Clinton described the recent round of state anti-voter laws as the most determined disenfranchisement effort since Jim Crow. For Cooper, though, they’ve turned out to be even more restrictive.

Justice Antonin Scalia has a long history of skepticism toward the Constitution’s shield against laws that discriminate against women. In a 1996 Supreme Court decision limiting gender discrimination in Virginia’s higher education system, Scalia cast the sole dissenting vote in favor of allowing the state to continue to deny educational opportunities to women. And he has repeatedly claimed that the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of “equal protection of the laws” does not prevent gender discrimination. Yet, in a response to a question from Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing earlier this week, Scalia appeared to back off this longstanding view:

FEINSTEIN: This is your quote, Mr. Justice, in California: “Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn’t. Nobody ever thought that that’s what it meant. Nobody ever voted for that. If the current society wants to outlaw discrimination by sex, hey we have things called legislatures, and they enact things called laws.” So why doesn’t the Fourteenth Amendment then cover women?

SCALIA: The Fourteenth Amendment, senator, does not apply to private discrimination. I was speaking of Title VII and laws that prohibit private discrimination. The Fourteenth Amendment says nothing about private discrimination, only discrimination by government.

Scalia is correct that the 14th Amendment only applies to government discrimination, but he is wrong about what he has said in the past. The quote Sen. Feinstein read came from an interview where Scalia was asked if “we’ve gone off in error by applying the 14th Amendment” to sex discrimination and discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Scalia began his response by saying “yes, yes” he does think applying the 14th Amendment to gender discrimination was an error.

It’s possible that Scalia simply misremembered his past statement on gender discrimination, although this is unlikely because the statement was widely reported and just as widely criticized. Nevertheless, if Scalia is now backing off this strange position and is willing to embrace the mainstream view that laws singling out women for inferior treatment do indeed violate the Constitution, then that is a positive development and Scalia deserves credit for rejecting his unfortunate past statements.