Ninth Circuit Judge Jay Bybee, who signed an infamous memo approving the Bush Administration’s use of torture while he led the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, received $3.4 million in free legal and consulting services to help him avoid accountability for his legally and morally indefensible memo. The lion’s share of this massive gift came from Latham & Watkins, a massive corporate law firm whose clients include Koch Industries, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, ExxonMobil, and Phillip Morris:

Latham & Watkins’ Maureen Mahon­ey took on a major assignment when she agreed to represent Jay Bybee, a federal appellate judge who was accused of violating ethics rules for his work at the U.S. Department of Justice on so-called “torture memos.” Newly released records show just how big the assignment was. . . . Nearly all the assistance, $3,251,893, came from Los Angeles-based Latham, whose lawyers used to appear before Bybee in the courtrooms of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.

Its worth noting that Mahoney isn’t just any big corporate law firm attorney, she is a former law clerk to then-Associate Justice William Rehnquist and is widely considered one of the top appellate litigators in the country. Although it is common — and indeed admirable — for attorneys of this caliber to provide pro bono services, those services are typically offered to the genuinely needy and not to powerful government officials who could resign their judgeship and immediately receive a job in private practice earning a high six or seven figure salary.

Also worth noting is the fact that Miguel Estrada, another top right-wing lawyer and former Bush judicial nominee, represented Bybee’s fellow torture apologist John Yoo. As a law professor, Yoo does not have the same obligation Bybee has to disclose gifts, but it is likely that Estrada’s legal services are no less expensive than Mahoney’s, and unlikely that Yoo’s salary as a law professor pays him enough to hire Estrada on his own unless Estrada’s firm made much or all of his services available for free.

To Bybee’s credit, he is currently recusing himself from cases that Latham & Watkins participates in — an example that Justice Clarence Thomas could learn something from. Nevertheless, Mahoney’s willingness to provide hours upon hours of free legal services in order to protect a key player in President Bush’s torture policy is a frightening sign of just how far conservatives are willing to go to protect their own.

Igor Volsky catches pizza mogul and GOP presidential frontrunner Herman Cain pledging to “sign” a constitutional amendment outlawing abortion if he is elected president. There’s a big problem with Cain’s plan to sign this amendment, however, Article V of the Constitution:

The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress; Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.

Notice who is not mentioned at all in this description of the constitutional amendments process? The president! Even if Cain were to move into the White House, his signature on a proposed amendment wouldn’t matter any more than if Rick Astley signed the amendment.

Sadly, Cain’s weak understanding of how the constitutional amendments process works is hardly an isolated problem. To the contrary, the man seems utterly incapable of reading the Constitution correctly:

• Confusing Founding Documents: In his speech announcing his candidacy for the presidency, Cain lectured the nation to “reread the Constitution.” Rather than take his own advice, however, Cain quoted the Constitution as saying that “when any form of government becomes destructive of those ideals, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.” Those words are not in the Constitution, although a very similar phrase appears in the Declaration of Independence, which, in case Cain is not aware, is actually an entirely different document than the Constitution.
• Banning Worship: As part of a wide-ranging campaign of hate against Islam, Cain claimed that local communities have a right to ban mosques. The Constitution disagrees. It forbids laws restricting the “free exercise” of a person’s faith.
• No More Medicare or Medicaid: During his time as a talk radio host, Cain claimed that absolutely every single line of the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional. One problem with this radical view is that if Congress cannot subsidize health care — one of the key functions of the ACA — then Medicare and Medicaid are also unconstitutional.
• Unrepealable Laws: Cain doesn’t just support a radical tax plan that would create the largest deficits since World War II, slash taxes on the wealthy and jack up taxes on the poor, he proposed effectively locking that plan in place permanently. The Constitution forbids lawmakers from preventing their successors from repealing new laws.
• Letting Arizona Start A War: Cain also wants to give each state the power to set its own immigration policy. The Constitution, however, leaves immigration almost entirely up to the national government because immigration policy is so closely tied to foreign policy. Nations have gone to war over another nation’s treatment of their citizens, so no one state should have the ability to force the entire United States into this kind of conflict.

Simply put, Cain epitomizes the Republican Party’s overarching attitude towards the Constitution. There’s no need to actually read the thing, just pretend it already does whatever you want it to do.

Earlier this month, the Senate GOP cobbled together a hodgepodge of longstanding Republican objectives and called it a “jobs” bill in an attempt to neutralize President Obama’s popular jobs plan. One provision of this makeshift “jobs” plan would impose damage caps on medical malpractice suits in both state and federal court — a tort reform proposal that has been a centerpiece of GOP health care policy for many years.

Yet, in an interview with ThinkProgress’ Scott Keyes, Republican Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) said he has very serious doubts about whether this longstanding GOP plan to restrict state courts is even constitutional. According to Lee, the federal government has full constitutional authority to tell federal courts how to operate, but only state legislatures have the same power to tell state courts how to operate:

LEE: Congress needs to be very careful when it enters into a uniquely state law area like tort. So tort reform needs to be undertaken very carefully insofar as it’s done at the federal level. There are some tort suits that proceed in federal court and, um, but if we venture much outside of that, particularly if we get into telling state courts how to interpret state law, that can be constitutionally problematic.

KEYES: [State tort reform] might not be justified as far as the enumerated powers go?

LEE: Correct, correct. . . . [tort reform] is something that can be addressed in some way at the federal level, but most of it needs to be done at the state level.

Watch it:

Lee is a notoriously bad judge of what is and is not constitutional, and he is probably wrong to suggest that the GOP’s tort reform bill is unconstitutional. Congress’ power to “regulate Commerce…among the several states,” gives it broad authority over the national health care market (although there are two Supreme Court cases that at least raise the possibility that a court could find the GOP’s plan unconstitutional).

Ultimately, however, it may not matter whether the GOP’s bill is constitutional or not. What does matter is that Lee promised last March to filibuster any bill that does not have “a clear and obvious basis connected to one of the enumerated powers” of the Constitution. Lee clearly doesn’t think that the GOP tort reform plan has this clear and obvious basis, so he is obligated by his own word to filibuster the GOP’s “jobs” bill.

More importantly, Lee’s objections to the GOP tort plan should be deeply embarrassing to the armies of GOP operatives who declared themselves the keepers of the Constitution the minute the Affordable Care Act appeared likely to become law. For nearly two years, Republicans have engaged in an unceasing lecture on how the ACA’s supporters were wrong to pass a bill that doesn’t comply with some entirely fabricated constitutional limit that no one had ever heard of before it was invented to attack the ACA. Now we learn that the GOP cannot even satisfy their own senators that a centerpiece of their health care plan is constitutional. Those who live in glass houses should not practice constitutional law.