Last week, former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) delivered a lengthy attack on America’s constitutional system of government where he ultimately concluded that, if elected president, he is free to openly defy the Supreme Court and wage a campaign of intimidation against judges who disagree with him. ThinkProgress responded with a four-part series criticizing the speech.

Today, the Gingrich campaign published a lengthy and rambling response to our critique entitled “Newt 2012 responds to Ian Millhiser on Judicial Supremacy.” Although the bulk of this response is devoted to blockquotes from scholars who have critiqued the Supreme Court’s 208-year-old conclusion that the judiciary has the final say on matters of constitutional interpretation, it does include what appears to be a clarification:

Gingrich is not saying that a President and Congress can simply ignore court rulings they don’t like. Instead, Gingrich is making the point that in those circumstances when federal judges issue decisions that the executive and/or legislative branches believe to be seriously in constitutional error, then the political branches may decide on such exceedingly rare occasion to take corrective action supported by the Constitution, including limiting the application of a decision, ignoring the decision of the Court, limiting the future jurisdiction of certain federal courts, impeaching judge(s) for unconstitutional rulings, and abolishing judgeships.

So Gingrich isn’t saying that the president may simply ignore court rulings they don’t like. He’s saying that presidents may simply ignore court rulings they really, really disagree with. That’s an entirely different standard! The president has to hate a court decision a whole lot before they are allowed to thumb their nose at it.

This is obviously not a view that’s compatible with the rule of law. It deserves nothing more than scorn and no response other than a firm reminder that Gingrich’s brand of authoritarianism has no place under the American system of government.

The good news in today’s Eleventh Circuit order temporarily enjoining parts of Alabama’s draconian anti-immigrant law is that the provision requiring public schools to determine the immigration status of public school students is blocked until the appeals court has the opportunity to give the case a full hearing. The bad news is that it still left much of the law in place — including a provision that has actually made it a felony for undocumented immigrants to have water in their homes. So the law in Alabama is better today than it was yesterday, but some of the very worst provisions of the law are still in effect. Worse, although the schools provision is now suspended, it may already have successfully and permanently intimidated thousands of Alabama school children against attending school.

Although the court’s order is a respectable 16 pages, it focuses almost entirely upon summarizing Alabama’s law and explaining the history of the case and contains virtually no legal analysis whatsoever. Accordingly, it is impossible to know why the judges decided to block some parts of the law and not others. Nevertheless, there are a few useful observations to be made about the three judge panel that heard the case and their decision.

First, this is a very conservative panel. Although the panel did include one genuinely liberal judge — Judge Rosemary Barkett — its majority includes two solid conservatives. Before joining the court, Judge Edward Carnes was one of the nation’s top death penalty advocates. He wrote Alabama’s death penalty statute and defended it before the Supreme Court three times. To be fair, Carnes has not behaved as a kneejerk ideologue — he is probably most famous for being one of the appeals court judges that affirmed a lower-court decision requiring Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore to remove a giant Ten Commandments monument. But the Ten Commandments case also wasn’t even a close call under then-existing Supreme Court precedents.

The panel’s third judge, Judge Frank Hull, is even more aggressive in her conservatism. Hull was one of two judges that butchered nearly 200 years of precedent to strike down part of the Affordable Care Act. The fact that even she found Alabama’s schools law to be unacceptable is a very good sign that the law will ultimately be struck down.

Second, there is also some potentially bad news regarding the provision preventing state agencies — including state-run water services — from conducting business with undocumented immigrants. Judge Barkett is a very liberal judge, and she wrote a separate opinion indicating that she would block more of the law than Carnes and Hull. Nevertheless, even she agreed that the provision preventing people without documents from getting water service in their homes should not be enjoined.

Although this is bad news, it is not the end of the world. As the court explains, to obtain an injunction at this early stage of the appeal, the plaintiffs have to overcome a very heavy burden:

We grant the “extraordinary remedy” of an injunction pending appeal only if the petitioners can show “(1) a substantial likelihood that they will prevail on the merits of the appeal; (2) a substantial risk of irreparable injury…(3) no substantial harm to other interested persons; and (4) no harm to the public interest.”

It is possible that Barkett — or, for that matter Carnes and Hull — believe that the entire law is illegal but nonetheless thought that the contracts provision wasn’t going to cause any “irreparable” harm. Moreover, the panel that will hear the case on full appeal will not be the same panel that issued this order. Nevertheless, Barkett’s unwillingness to block the whole law is a cause for concern, if not alarm.

Finally, even if the whole law is eventually struck down, the damage may already be done. The reason why the schools provision is so offensive is because very few undocumented families will send their children to public school if the school is collecting data on whether or not they should be deported. The law is nothing less than an effort to intimidate children against exercising their constitutional right to public education, and it has been very successful. Thousands of students stopped showing up to school the minute this law went into effect.

The law is now suspended, but every single child who didn’t attend school during the brief period it was in effect may as well have the words “illegal immigrant” tattooed across their face in scarlet letters. It is likely that many of them will never return to school again.

The defining feature of fading former GOP frontrunner Rick Perry is his radical understanding of the Constitution. Perry believes that Social Security and Medicare are unconstitutional. He considers Medicaid and federal school programs unconstitutional “nonsense.” And has even suggested that the most basic national labor protections may be unconstitutional.

Herman Cain is worse.

In case there is any doubt that Cain shares Perry’s bizarre view that federal health programs like Medicare and Medicaid violate the Constitution, consider a clip from Cain’s radio show that was recorded during the debate over the Affordable Care Act:

CALLER: Um, I want to thank you for keeping everybody informed as to the constitutional problems we’re having right now. And, ah, quick question, can you find anything constitutional in the health care bill?

CAIN: No. No. Nothing at all.

Listen:

If it were actually true that nothing in the Affordable Care Act survived constitutional scrutiny, then Medicare, Medicaid, and all other programs that provide Americans with health coverage would also be unconstitutional. The backbones of the Affordable Care Act are a Medicaid expansion that provides health care to low-income Americans and new subsidies to help middle class Americans afford insurance. Both of these are constitutional for the same reason that America is also allowed to provide coverage to older Americans and the very poor — the Constitution gives Congress the power to “to lay and collect taxes” and to “provide for the…general welfare of the United States.”

Yet Cain’s vision of the Constitution doesn’t stop at ignoring America’s power to provide Medicare to seniors and affordable coverage to all Americans. At another point on his radio show, Cain made the bizarre claim that all national bankruptcy laws are unconstitutional, even though the Constitution expressly states that Congress may establish “uniform laws on the subject of bankruptcies throughout the United States.” Not even Rick Perry has endorsed Cain’s textually indefensible understanding of the Constitution and bankruptcy.

Similarly, Cain touted an unconstitutional plan to effectively lock his regressive “999″ tax plan in place permanently, even though the Supreme Court held more than a century ago that newly elected legislators “have the same power of repeal and modification which [past legislators] had of enactment.” Perry has not claimed the unconstitutional power to make laws functionally unrepealable.

When Perry announced his candidacy last August, he immediately became the most radical major party frontrunner since Barry Goldwater. Herman Cain, however, makes Perry look like Barack Obama.

Last month, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit voted to kick Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s challenge to the Affordable Care Act out of court. ThinkProgress spoke with Cuccinelli about the ruling this past weekend at the Values Voters Summit in Washington, DC. The attorney general was unfazed about his defeat, arguing that “this was always going to be decided at the Supreme Court.” When we asked what his next step would be if his challenge were to meet a similar fate in the Supreme Court, Cuccinelli proposed a radical solution: rewrite the Constitution to make the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional.

KEYES: Did you take it to heart that the Circuit Court didn’t side with you guys?

CUCCINELLI: This was always going to be decided at the Supreme Court. We’re 1-1 at the moment and we’ll see what the Supreme Court has to say and finish it up.

KEYES: And what if they don’t end up ruling your way? What next?

CUCCINELLI: We’ll have to reassess at that point. Then we’ve got a much more powerful federal government than we had anticipated. If people are up to it, that’s going to take a constitutional amendment to reduce. Just if all you care about is the health care bill you’ve got to get it repealed. Those battles happen at the ballot box.

Watch it:

As CAP’s legal expert Ian Millhiser explains, the Affordable Care Act is clearly constitutional and should survive challenges from Cuccinelli and other tenther conservatives. Because Cuccinelli cannot tolerate this outcome, however, he apparently thinks the solution is to simply to rewrite the Constitution to fit his worldview. The law may be constitutional now, but it sure as heck won’t be after conservatives like Cuccinelli change the rules.

Of course, this type of legal Calvinball is nothing new for tenther conservatives. Cuccinelli is just one of a growing number of tenthers who dismiss any laws they don’t like as unconstitutional.