Before anyone is allowed to challenge a law in federal court, they have to show that they have been injured in some way by the law — a requirement known as “standing.” To date, the overwhelming majority of courts to hear challenges to the Affordable Care Act have dismissed those cases because the plaintiffs lacked standing or because of other procedural flaws with their case. Recently, the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit added itself to this list:

[A]ppellants’ complaint here is “barren” with respect to standing: appellants have provided no information about themselves beyond the fact that they are New Jersey residents and believe that the Act is unconstitutional. These allegations are insufficient to establish standing.

To be sure, these standing cases are unlikely to wipe out the ACA litigation entirely as it moves forward towards the Supreme Court — the lower courts have largely agreed that ACA plaintiffs can overcoming this standing problem if they simply put in their complaint that they are currently arranging their finances in order to pay for health insurance when the law goes into effect in 2014. But it is not at all unlikely that one or more justices could conclude that they lack jurisdiction to hear the ACA cases while the law is not in effect.

The Fourth Circuit recently held that it lacks jurisdiction to review the ACA because of a law known as the Tax Anti-Injunction Act, which prevents a court from stopping the government from collecting a tax, including the taxes in the Affordable Care Act — although a plaintiff may sue to get the money back after the tax is collected. At least one conservative member of the DC Circuit also expressed sympathy with this claim at a recent oral argument.

The Supreme Court’s conservatives have historically been very sympathetic to arguments that their jurisdiction is limited, and if just one of them decided either that the plaintiffs in this case lack standing or that the Tax Anti-Injunction Act applies, then there will be no way for the ACA’s opponents to assemble the five votes they need to win this case.

Considering the case of Florida death row inmate Manuel Valle in August, the Florida Supreme Court ruled that the state’s use of its lethal injection drug is constitutional and lifted his temporary stay of execution. The 61-year-old Cuban was executed in September after 33 years on death row for killing a police officer.

Florida state Rep. Brad Drake (R) is angry that Valle’s execution took so long. So angry, in fact, that he introduced a bill yesterday to eliminate lethal injection as a execution method altogether in favor of electrocution or the firing squad. “I’m sick and tired of this sensitivity movement for criminals,” Drake declared.

Drake got this ingenious idea to bring back electrocution and firing squads from an equally ingenious place: a Waffle House. Overhearing a constituent call for such methods, Drake said he decided to file the bill. After all, “if it were up to me we would just throw them off the Sunshine Skyway bridge,” he said:

In a Waffle House in DeFuniak Springs, Drake said he heard a constituent say, “‘You know, they ought to just put them in the electric chair or line them up in front of a firing squad.’” After a conversation with the person, Drake, 36, said he decided to file the bill.

“There shouldn’t be anything controversial about a .45-caliber bullet. If it were up to me we would just throw them off the Sunshine Skyway bridge and be done with it,” Drake said.

Under his bill, electrocution would be the standard method of executions, but inmates could opt for an execution by firing squad. This bill “end[s] the debate,” Drake said. “We still have Old Sparky. And if that doesn’t suit the criminal, then we will provide them a .45 caliber lead cocktail instead.” Of course, Florida’s electric chair “Old Sparky” is nowhere near humane. In the late 1990s, “Old Sparky” left one inmate “alive for moments after the electrocution, and sparked a fire on another inmate’s face during the execution.”

Seeing executions by electrocution and firing squad as unnecessarily inhumane, few states now utilize these methods. Almost every state has banned executions by firing squads, with the exception being Utah — where prisoners can still be executed in this manner if a prisoner requested it before the phasing out of the method in 2004 — and Oklahoma, where a prisoner can be executed by firing squad as a secondary method if both lethal injection and electrocution are ruled unconstitutional. Nine states allow electrocution, but lethal injection is the primary method in all of these states.

Of course, Drake does not give a hoot about what is or isn’t humane. “In the words of Humphrey Bogart (sic), ‘Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.‘ I am so tired of being humane to inhumane people,” he said.

The centerpiece of former pizza czar Herman Cain’s presidential campaign is his radical “999″ tax plan that would create the largest deficits since World War II, slash taxes on the wealthy and jack up taxes on the poor by as much as nine times. At last night’s GOP presidential debate, however, former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) attacked Cain’s plan — not because it is both fiscally irresponsible and morally indefensible — but because he feared that future generations could increase Cain’s proposed national sales tax. In response, Cain claimed the right to effectively permanently entrench his 999 plan in American law no matter what future generations tried to do:

SANTORUM: Cain is giving, naively, a tool in his 999 plan of giving Washington a huge new tax opportunity to get money through a sales tax. Can we trust you that, with your lack of experience, you won’t continually give Washington the ability to take freedom away from freedom-loving people here in the Live Free or Die state? [...]

CAIN: There are three deterrents to this nightmare scenario that you described. [...] The first deterrent is that I’m going to ask the United States Congress to include a two-thirds majority vote before they can raise the 999 tax.

Watch it:

Once again, Cain reveals that his grasp of the Constitution is even weaker than his grasp of economic policy. The Constitution forbids lawmakers from tying the hands of their successors. Lawmakers have broad discretion to enact the laws they think are best for the country, but the voters almost always retain the power to vote them out of office and have their newly elected leaders implement different policies. As the Supreme Court held more than a century ago, newly elected legislators “have the same power of repeal and modification which [past legislators] had of enactment.”

To be sure, Cain might try to justify his unconstitutional supermajority requirement by citing the filibuster — a Senate procedure that has certainly prevented much lawmaking at all from occurring in recent years. But Cain’s proposal goes much further than the filibuster. For one thing, there is a big difference between a 60-vote rule in one house of Congress and a two-thirds rule in both houses. The first requirement can occasionally be overcome; the second is virtually the same thing as a total ban on changing the law. Additionally, the filibuster doesn’t single out one law for special treatment — insulating it from repeal in a way that no other law is protected.

There are non-frivolous arguments that the filibuster itself is unconstitutional. But even if the Supreme Court were to uphold it, Cain’s ubermajority requirement is something else altogether. Indeed, it is just one more sign that Cain thinks the Constitution means whatever he feels like he wants it to mean.

Last week, former Speaker Newt Gingrich revealed that, if elected president, he would simply ignore Supreme Court decisions he disagrees with and intimidate judges into towing his line through subpoenas and targeted removals from office. According to conservative attorney Bruce Fein, a former associate deputy attorney general under Ronald Reagan, this intimidation scheme isn’t just unconstitutional — it is so flagrantly unconstitutional that it would justify removing Gingrich from office:

One of the indictments against King George III in the Declaration of Independence was making judges “dependent on his will alone.” In the landmark case of Marbury v. Madison, Chief Justice John Marshall explained that judicial review was the difference between a government of laws and a government of men. The 1805 acquittal by the United States Senate of Associate Justice Samuel Chase accused by the House of Representatives of impeachable offenses because of judicial rulings favorable to the Federalist Party established the time-honored principle that federal judges are not accountable to any other branch for their judicial opinions.

Gingrich unwittingly is proposing to overthrow the Constitution that he would be pledged to uphold and defend if elected to the presidency. Attempting to subvert the Constitution, however, it an impeachable high crime and misdemeanor justifying removal of the President from office.

Gingrich, of course, knows more than anyone about what it is like to impeach the president. Unlike Gingrich’s politically motivated impeachment of President Clinton, however, impeaching presidents who wage an illegal and authoritarian campaign against another branch of government is exactly what the framers intended a president to be removed for.