Richard Lee Pollard was a federal inmate when he slipped, fell and broke both his elbows. Prison officials then allegedly forced him into a jumpsuit and wrist restraints, despite the fact that these restraints caused him excruciating pain, and they also allegedly refused to allow him to wear a split his doctors ordered him to wear. For weeks, due to the prison’s alleged neglect, Pollard was unable to feed or bathe himself.

This treatment violates the Constitution. As the Supreme Court held 35 years ago, the Eighth Amendment’s guarantee against cruel and unusual punishment requires prisons to provide adequate medical care to inmates. Yet, if the Supreme Court agrees with a lower court decision immunizing many prisons from the Constitution, Pollard may find himself in a Constitution-free zone simply because his prison happens to be run by a private corporation:

A Supreme Court case could determine whether thousands of inmates in privately run prisons have the same rights to sue in federal court as prisoners in facilities run by the U.S. government.

The case, Minneci v. Pollard, involves a federal inmate who wants to sue his jailers for damages over alleged violations of the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. The prisoner claims he was painfully mistreated after an accident at a for-profit prison, operating under contract for the U.S. Bureau of Prisons.

Lower federal courts have split on whether federal private-prison inmates can bring such damage claims for alleged constitutional violations.

Shockingly, the Supreme Court already held, in its 5-4 decision in Correctional Services Corp. v. Malesko, that private prison corporations who run federal prisons are immune from constitutional lawsuits. The only issue in Pollard’s case is whether the corporation’s employees also enjoy the same immunity.

In other words, the corporate prisons industry has largely won its battle to ignore the Constitution in deciding how to treat federal inmates. Although people like Pollard might still be able to convince a state judge to hold these corporations accountable, he can forget about the Constitution.

As campaign reporters react to Politico’s bombshell allegation that GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain sexually harassed two former employees, Daniel Bice reveals potentially groundbreaking financial records suggesting the the Cain campaign received illegal corporate donations shortly after it launched. In essence, the records show that a corporation run by two senior Cain campaign staffers — including the now infamous Cigarette Smoking Man Mark Block — fronted nearly $40,000 to the Cain campaign. Cain campaign records, however, show no evidence that this debt was ever paid back:

Herman Cain’s two top campaign aides ran a private Wisconsin-based corporation that helped the GOP presidential candidate get his fledgling campaign off the ground by originally footing the bill for tens of thousands of dollars in expenses for such items as iPads, chartered flights and travel to Iowa and Las Vegas – something that might breach federal tax and campaign law, according to sources and documents.

Internal financial records obtained by No Quarter show that Prosperity USA said it was owed about $40,000 by the Cain campaign for a variety of items in February and March. Cain began taking donations for his presidential bid on Jan. 1. [...]

It is not known if Cain’s election fund eventually paid back Prosperity USA, which now appears defunct. The candidate’s federal election filings make no mention of the debt, and the figures in the documents don’t match payments made by the candidate’s campaign.

Although the Supreme Court’s egregious Citizens United decision gave corporations an almost unchecked license to attempt to buy elections, the decision deals with so-called “independent expenditures” where a corporation funds a third party that supports or opposes a candidate for office. Direct contributions from a corporation to a candidate’s campaign are one of the few things that still remain illegal after Citizens United. Accordingly, if Prosperity USA effectively donated money to the Cain campaign by fronting money to them and agreeing not to be paid back, that is a violation of federal election law.

Indeed, the alleged Cain/Prosperity USA arrangement violates the law even if Team Cain does eventually pay the money back. Federal law defines a campaign contribution as “any gift, subscription, loan, advance, or deposit of money or anything of value made by any person for the purpose of influencing any election for Federal office.” Although there are exceptions to this rule for banks and other businesses that ordinary provide loans, those exceptions do not apply here.

This is not the first time that Cain’s cancerman Mark Block found himself caught in a campaign finance scandal. Block — who previously led the Wisconsin chapter of the Koch-funded Tea Party group Americans For Prosperity — paid a $15,000 fine and agreed to remain out of Wisconsin politics for three years after he was accused of election law violations during his 1997 stint as a state supreme court justice’s campaign manager.

To be fair, the Prosperity USA records are consistent with illegal activity but they may not themselves be sufficient to prove the Cain campaign acted illegally. Nevertheless, two election lawyers quoted by Bice found them deeply troubling. In the words of one GOP attorney, “if the records accurately reflect what occurred, this is way out of bounds.”

Earlier this month, Senate Republicans cobbled together many of their longstanding objectives, and called it a “jobs” bill to try to draw attention away from President Obama’s popular American Jobs Act. Yet this plan backfired on the Senate GOP leadership when Tea Party lawmakers began lining up to denounce a key provision of their makeshift “jobs” bill as unconstitutional. This provision — a proposal to impose damage caps on medical malpractice suits in both state and federal court — has now attracted the ire of yet another Tea Party heartthrob, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli:

With Senate Bill 197 — legislation that would have the federal government dictate how state judges are to try medical malpractice cases and cap what state courts may award — several Republican senators have reminded us that federal impositions on states that run contrary to the U.S. Constitution and to the spirit of federalism have never been the sole prerogative of just Democrats. . . . This legislation expands federal power, tramples the states and violates the Constitution. And if it were ever signed into law — by a Republican or Democratic president — I would file suit against it just as fast as I filed suit when the federal health-care bill was signed into law in March 2010 (15 minutes later).

In reality, the constitutional case against federal tort reform is very weak. Congress enjoys broad authority to regulation national economic markets, such as the market for health care, and that includes the power to regulate those markets badly. If people don’t like the laws their elected officials put in place, our democratic Constitution empowers them to vote those officials out of office — it does not empower the law’s opponents to simply declare anything they want unconstitutional.

Nevertheless, Cuccinelli’s strident opposition to this law — and that of others such as tenther Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) — should stand as a warning to Republicans who raced to embrace a crackpot theory of the Constitution the minute President Obama signed a health care law they disapproved of. Federally imposed tort reform has been a centerpiece of GOP health care policy for many years, and now this longstanding Republican goal many be unachievable because too many Republican lawmakers were conned into embracing Cuccinelli and Lee’s tenther vision of the Constitution.

Those that live by crackpot distortions of our Constitution, die by crackpot distortions of our Constitution.