A 15-year-old law providing for public financing in the state of Maine may soon be undermined by Republican state lawmakers.

In 1996, Maine voters passed the Clean Elections Act, making it the first state in the country to have public financing for state elections. Since that time, state legislative and gubernatorial candidates have used public financing, as the Maine Public Broadcasting Network writes , to “discourage the use of special interest money out of state and, allow candidates to spend more time running for office instead of fundraising.” The system has been so successful that in 2010, “more than 80 percent of legislators used Clean Election money,” according to the Bangor Daily News.

Here’s how it works. Once candidates collect a certain number of $5 qualifying checks, they receive a set amount of funds – just under $5,500 for contested state representative races – to run their campaign. If their opponent or an outside group spends additional money, the “clean elections candidate” receives matching funds as well.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a similar matching funds provision in Arizona. As a result, Maine legislators agreed to revisit their state’s law and bring it into compliance.

However, Republicans are using the opportunity to try to undermine the state’s entire public financing system. Though a number of ideas have been proposed by the Maine Ethics Commission to bring the state’s program into compliance, Republicans rejected those proposals in a party-line vote yesterday. Instead, GOP lawmakers simply eliminated the matching funds provision without offering any alternatives to fill the void:

In a strict party line vote on Tuesday, Republican members of the Legislature’s Veterans and Legal Affairs Committee narrowly favored stripping the matching funds provision from the Maine Clean Election Act.

Maine lawmakers have been struggling since that court ruling with a way to address the elimination of matching funds and have debated two options put forth by the Maine Ethics Commission.

Under the first option, the state would pay candidates fixed amounts upfront — $7,716 for House candidates and $33,617 for Senate candidates, significantly more than the current allocations. Under the second, clean candidates could get extra payments by collecting additional $5 checks from private donors. In order to qualify for public funding in the first place, candidates need to collect a minimum number of such donations.

Republicans have rejected both.

State Rep. Diane Russell (D), one of the clean election law’s leading proponents, told ThinkProgress that the effort to roll back Maine’s public financing system could have national ramifications. “Maine is the model state,” said Russell. “If they kill public financing here, they put the stake in the heart nationally.”

The full legislature will take up the issue in January.

Law enforcement officials across Alabama were unsure how they would enforce — let alone pay for — HB 56, the state’s draconian immigration law, when it went into effect. Terry Davis, the president of the Alabama Association of Chiefs of Police, warned that officers were stretched too thin by the far-reaching demands of the new law, in addition to their regular duties.

One sheriff in Limestone County told the Athens News-Courier that his department’s resources are being strained to the breaking point by investigations prompted by the immigration law — including people asking police to investigate if their neighbors are undocumented immigrants:

Sheriff Mike Blakely said most of his department’s resources are not being stretched thin because of illegal immigration arrests, but instead because of investigations into the alleged mistreatment of illegal immigrants. [...]

In terms of the arrests of illegal immigrants, the sheriff said there hasn’t been a noticeable increase because he feels many illegal immigrants have left the community. However, he said the department’s call volume is rising because residents want officers to investigate neighbors who they believe are illegal.

“There’s a lot of people confused about the law and people are getting frustrated with us,” he said. “If they suspect someone is illegal, we can’t just go out and check them out. The law prohibits us from doing that. We can contact ICE, but unless they’re committing a crime, we have no authority (to arrest them).”

Alabama’s anti-immigrant law is already a clear disaster for community safety, distracting police from focusing on violent crime and leading immigrant communities to distrust law enforcement officials. Equally disturbing is the evidence that the law is undermining the fabric of communities by sowing suspicion and turning neighbors against each other.

Recently the GOP presidential contenders have been engaged in a bizarre game of one-upsmanship on the issue of immigration, competing to offer the most merciless approach America’s undocumented population. Michele Bachmann recently proposed deporting every single one of the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country — a plan that would cost more than $2.6 trillion.

Now Gov. Rick Perry, who has been trying to fight the perception that his immigration stance is too moderate, is following in Bachmann’s footsteps:

Rick Perry vowed to deport all illegal immigrants detained in the country if elected president as he sought on Tuesday to burnish his conservative credentials on immigration ahead of the 2012 Republican contest.

The Texas governor has faced criticism from Republican rivals like Mitt Romney for being “soft” on illegal immigrants, because those who live in Texas can attend state universities at the same cost as other Texas residents. [...]

“My policy will be to detain and deport every illegal alien who is apprehended in this country,” Perry said. “And we’ll do it with an expedited hearing process so that millions of illegal aliens are not released into the general population with some hearing date down the road.”

Perry made the remarks while campaigning in New Hampshire with notorious Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, who is a hero to many conservatives for his degrading and illegal treatment of detained immigrants in his charge. The Perry campaign has embraced Arpaio’s endorsement to try to bolster his “tough on immigration” credentials. Perry contrasted his policy of deporting every immigrant with the Obama administration’s “horrific policy” of releasing non-violent immigrants.

As ThinkProgress noted Monday, it costs $23,148 for each undocumented immigrant to be apprehended, detained, legally processed, and transported out of the country. And the price tag may be even higher for the expedited process Perry calls for. A deportation-only policy would amount to $922 in new taxes for “every man, woman, and child in this country,” and the cost of deporting undocumented immigrants already in the country would total $285 billion over five years.

Perry’s fellow candidates pounced on him at an earlier debate for once supporting in-state tuition for undocumented students and opposing a border fence with Mexico. Plagued by allegations that he is insufficiently cruel to immigrants, Perry has taken a sharp rightward turn to placate the conservative base. Among other things, he’s attacked health care and education for poor immigrants to deflect from his past positions.

Welcome to Justiceline, ThinkProgress Justice’s morning round-up of the latest legal news and developments. Remember to follow us on Twitter at @TPJustice.

• A group of right-wing Christian groups are staging a “live nativity scene” in front of the Supreme Court, complete with animals. The display is an act of protest against what they perceive as increasing “hostility toward public expressions of faith especially during the Christmas Season.”
• GOP contender Gov. Rick Perry is desperately trying to counter the perception that he’s merciful to immigrants by embracing the endorsement of Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, who is notorious for his degrading and often illegal treatment of detained undocumented immigrants.
• Did the Supreme Court send a grandmother back to prison just to teach the Ninth Circuit a lesson? Emily Bazelon reports that in their largely unnoticed but “most vindictive [decision] of the term,” the justices sent a women back to prison for a crime she probably did not commit — apparently to keep the lower court in line.
• Despite persistent under-reporting, hate crimes in Mississippi are on the rise. More than two-thirds of Mississippi’s counties failed to file a report with the Justice Department, and activists say the actual numbers may be twice as high as what’s reported.
• Thirty years after he attempted to assassinate then President Ronald Reagan, John Hinckley Jr. is seeking release from the mental hospital where he’s been since 1982. A jury found Hinckley not guilty by reason of insanity.
• Yesterday the Senate struck down an amendment that would’ve eased the country’s tough policy on detainees. The amendment to the Defense Department spending bill would have removed a section that authorizes the president to use “all necessary and appropriate force” to detain people suspected of terrorism, which many say is a threat to constitutional liberties.

At the last GOP presidential debate, Newt Gingrich asserted his support for an immigration plan that would accord an undocumented immigrant “red card” status — that is, give them a legal right to be here without providing a path to citizenship. Mitt Romney then seized a political opportunity to engage in a false attack against Gingrich, slamming the former Speaker for embracing “amnesty.”

Earlier this week, Bloomberg news reported that, in 2006, Romney “took a nearly identical position” as Gingrich, arguing undocumented immigrants living in the United States should not be “rounded up and box-carred out,” and that they should “get in line” to apply for citizenship.

During his interview with Fox News tonight, Bret Baier asked Romney about this hypocritical stand. Romney affirmed that he does believe undocumented immigrants should indeed be given a pathway to citizenship by being placed “in the back of the line.” Baier astutely noted, “Isn’t that what Gingrich is saying?” Romney incorrectly responded that Gingrich’s plan allows them to “become citizens” and provides “amnesty.”

When Baier asked whether Romney was going to send undocumented immigrants home as they apply for legal status, Romney uncomfortably stammered for a few seconds. He then circled around the issue: “Whether they apply here, whether they apply by going home — I think I’ve said in the past I think it makes more sense for them to go home, if we set up a system for them to apply here…” Baier cut him off and asked again what Romney planned to do immediately with undocumented immigrants who are already here. Again, Romney had no response. Watch it:

In 2008, Romney took the view that every undocumented immigrant had to leave. “Under the ideal setting, at least in my view, you say to those who have just come in recently, we’re going to send you back home immediately, we’re not going to let you stay here,” Romney explained. “You just go back home. For those that have been here, let’s say, five years, and have kids in school, you allow kids to complete the school year, you allow people to make their arrangements, and allow them to return back home. Those that have been here a long time, with kids that have responsibilities here and so forth, you let stay enough time to organize their affairs and go home.”

In a recent interview, one Romney adviser explained that his boss’s current position is essentially to make an undocumented immigrant’s life so unbearable here in the United States that the individual decides to pick up and leave voluntarily.

For an understanding of all the GOP presidential candidates’ views on immigration, check out our compilation here.

Our guest blogger is Sarah Bufkin, a former intern for ThinkProgress

Acceding to the demands of state prosecutors, the North Carolina Senate passed a bill yesterday by a 27-14 vote that will effectively repeal the Racial Justice Act, jeopardizing what had been heralded as a step forward for the criminal justice system. The act, which a coalition effort passed in a Democrat-controlled legislature back in 2009, allows death row inmates to appeal on the grounds that racism played an operative role in their sentencing. The first defendant to make a case under the act, Marcus Robinson, will present his evidence in January.

For Professor James Coleman, Jr., who runs the Duke Law Center for Criminal Justice and Professional Responsibility, yesterday’s repeal effort is just the latest attempt by state prosecutors to overturn a law that they think poses a threat to their offices:

“This week, after their failed attempt to prevent a senior black Superior Court judge from hearing the Racial Justice Act claims filed by inmate Marcus Robinson, all but one of the state’s district attorneys signed a letter asking the General Assembly to repeal the law, immediately. They want to avoid responding to the mountain of evidence indicating they have used peremptory challenges to deny qualified black jurors their constitutional right to serve on capital juries. Rather than defend their conduct in court, they seek to put it beyond the reach of the law.

The district attorneys opposed the Racial Justice Act in the legislature and lost. The district attorneys tried to obstruct the Racial Justice Act in the courts and lost. The district attorneys tried to recuse a judge they viewed as unfavorable and lost. At every turn, the district attorneys delayed implementation of the act.”

In their letter to the North Carolina General Assembly, the 43 district attorneys expressed their opposition to the measure, arguing that it could release more than 25 criminals back onto the streets and that it will clog up the court system with unnecessary and expensive cases.

But it’s tough to see where these criticisms are coming from. The statute clearly states that inmates can only have their sentences commuted from death to life without the possibility of parole, and only two cases have even been granted hearings. All in all, the total cost of the Racial Justice Act so far has cost much less than the amount the state would spend on another execution, estimates Coleman.

The act itself, which allows inmates to make their case through the use of statistical evidence, promised a new approach to dealing with institutionalized racism by avoiding the issue of the prosecutor’s intent.

Darryl Hunt, a black man who served 19 years in prison for a crime he did not commit, spoke about his experience with the criminal justice system at the NC Senate hearing on the bill yesterday.

“I was one vote away from the death penalty,” he told lawmakers. “One. And I had eleven whites and one black on my jury. If you do not think that race played a factor in my case, in me being arrested, charged, and convicted, then you’re not living here in North Carolina.”

The bill’s fate is now up to Gov. Bev Perdue (D-NC), who praised the Racial Justice Act’s passage back in 2009. She has not given any indication, however, whether or not she plans to veto the legislation. Ken Rose, one of the attorneys representing Marcus Robinson, believes that Perdue’s past support for the law will continue but cautions that the House vote to override the veto will be highly contested.

Given that a defendant in a case with a white victim is more than 2.5 times as likely to receive the death penalty in North Carolina, a veto appears the only just decision.

You’ve got to feel a little bad for onetime GOP front runner Gov. Rick Perry — his frequent gaffes and embarrassing ignorance of basic facts have driven him to the bottom of primary polls. Perry has consistently demonstrated his complete lack of understanding of a document he claims to revere, the Constitution, with bogus claims that programs like Medicare, Social Security, and, well, everything else are somehow unconstitutional.

Today, Perry made another pretty stunning constitutional mistake in New Hampshire, telling a group of college students that the voting age is 21. The 26th Amendment made 18 the legal voting age across the country.

At Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire, Perry told the crowd, “Those who are going to be over 21 on November 12th, I ask for your support” — eliciting a few chuckles from the crowd. Watch it:

Perry also got the date of the election wrong — the general will be held Nov. 6, 2012, while the New Hampshire Republican primary, which brought Perry to the state, will take place on Jan. 10.

GOP presidential candidate and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich recently sat down for an interview with Yahoo! News’s The Ticket.

At one point, the interviewer, Chris Moody, asked Gingrich if he still supports a bill he introduced in the ’90s that would’ve given capital punishment to drug smugglers. Gingrich responded that he does support this policy for cartel leaders and that he wants to see a new drug strategy overall. He then went on to praise Singapore for its “very draconian” approach to the drug war:

MOODY: In 1996, you introduced a bill that would have given the death penalty to drug smugglers. Do you still stand by that?

GINGRICH: I think if you are, for example, the leader of a cartel, sure. Look at the level of violence they’ve done to society. You can either be in the Ron Paul tradition and say there’s nothing wrong with heroin and cocaine or you can be in the tradition that says, ‘These kind of addictive drugs are terrible, they deprive you of full citizenship and they lead you to a dependency which is antithetical to being an American.’ If you’re serious about the latter view, then we need to think through a strategy that makes it radically less likely that we’re going to have drugs in this country. Places like Singapore have been the most successful at doing that. They’ve been very draconian. And they have communicated with great intention that they intend to stop drugs from coming into their country.

Gingrich’s endorsement of Singapore’s drug war is stunning. The country’s “drug laws are among the world’s harshest. Anyone aged 18 or over convicted of carrying more than 15 grams of heroin faces mandatory execution by hanging.” In 2005, Singapore infamously executed an Australian citizen for possession of .4 kilograms of heroin.

Gingrich’s praise of a Singapore-style drug policy is also yet another example of the GOP frontrunner’s contempt for the Constitution. In Kennedy v. Louisiana, the Supreme Court held that “[a]s it relates to crimes against individuals . . . the death penalty should not be expanded to instances where the victim’s life was not taken.” Although Kennedy left open to possibility of execution for “treason, espionage, terrorism, and drug kingpin activity, which are offenses against the State,” Singapore-style drug policy is clearly unconstitutional.

Then again, it probably doesn’t matter to Gingrich whether his proposal is constitutional or not. After all, he recently pledged to simply ignore court decisions he disagrees with.

Few candidates in modern American history have shown deeper contempt for the Constitution than GOP presidential frontrunner Newt Gingrich. He began his campaign with an appeal to tentherism — the radical belief that most of the last 100 years violates the Constitution. Gingrich believes that he can simply ignore court decisions that he disagrees with, and he promised a campaign of intimidation against judges who don’t share his views. More recently, Gingrich proposed an unconstitutional plan to require all recipients of federal aid to submit to drug tests.

So it should come as little surprise that Gingrich has stumbled onto yet another policy proposal — this one on immigration — that completely ignores a potential president’s obligation to respect the Constitution:

Gingrich also said he will push to withhold federal funds from “sanctuary cities,” or places that openly don’t monitor residents for undocumented workers.

“We should have every state enforcing the law and, in fact, I would propose cutting off all federal funds to any city that declares itself a ‘sanctuary city,’ ” he said.

Cutting off all federal funds to a city for refusing to implement a particular immigration policy is not constitutional. Although the federal government has broad authority to offer money to state or local governments if those states agree to comply with certain conditions, this power is not limitless.

In its landmark decision in South Dakota v. Dole, the Supreme Court explained that “conditions on federal grants might be illegitimate if they are unrelated ‘to the federal interest in particular national projects or programs.’” In other words, the government cannot threaten to take away funding because a local government refuses to comply with some requirement that has nothing to do with the purpose of the funding itself. If Congress wants to take away Medicaid funding from states that don’t maintain safe hospitals, that is acceptable because hospital safety is directly related to providing adequate health care under Medicaid. But if Congress tried to take away Medicaid funds unless a state required children to wear school uniforms, that would be unconstitutional because Medicaid has nothing to do with what children wear to school.

While there are likely some federal grants that are sufficiently related to immigration that Congress could pass a law stripping those funds from localities that refuse to step up immigration enforcement, a blanket removal of all federal funds almost certainly violates the Constitution. Indeed, if Gingrich has even a passing familiarity with the law governing federal grants, he probably recognized this fact immediately.

It is deeply ironic that the man who began his campaign by professing his undying love for states rights would happily run roughshod over that position to score cheap points against immigrants. Tenthers have long complained that states should be completely free to defy conditions on federal grants and keep the funding anyway — indeed, this is one of the very claims that dozens of Republican officials are pushing in their Supreme Court challenge to the Affordable Care Act. Ultimately, however, Gingrich has made it perfectly clear that he doesn’t really care if his proposal is constitutional or not. If the courts strike it down, he thinks he can just ignore them.

Yesterday, Gov. Sam Brownback (R-KS) lost a week long political standoff with an eighteen year-old high school student. ThinkProgress has had a lot of fun mocking Brownback for this incident, and the truth is he deserves to be mocked. The teenager — Kansas student Emma Sullivan — did nothing more than exercise her First Amendment right to criticize public officials, and the Brownback Administration’s decision to intimidate Sullivan for engaging in protected speech was both cowardly and disrespectful to the Constitution.

But the truth is that Sullivan was also very, very lucky. Shortly after Sullivan tweeted out her now famous “#heblowsalot” tweet, the governor’s office complained to her high school administration and Sullivan was called into the principal’s office and ordered to write a demeaning apology letter. At this point, it was one high school senior versus the might and prestige of the Governor of Kansas and a school leader capable of undermining much of Sullivan’s academic future. Had this balance of power remained in place, it’s all but certain that Sullivan would have silently sacrificed her constitutional rights.

Thankfully, Sullivan’s story soon became a national news story, and the governor’s might soon had to contend with a national backlash. This ending, however, is exceedingly rare. On the day that Gov. Brownback apologized to Sullivan, thousands of women worked jobs that pay them a fraction of what their male colleagues earn for the same work. Many more workers will illegally be forced to work overtime for reduced or no pay. A person was probably fired because they are gay.

Few, if any, of these people will garner headlines. Left alone, many of them will be virtually powerless against the full might of a major corporation.

Which is why the judicial vacancy crisis — a crisis born in large part from the Senate GOP’s unprecedented campaign of obstruction against President Obama’s nominees –
is a direct attack on the millions of Americans who could never hope to win this kind of standoff. On the day President Obama took office, 55 federal judgeships were vacant. Today, the number is 83 according to the Administrative Office of the US Courts. Each one of those vacancies means countless Americans waiting months or years for the only thing that can empower them to fight back against mighty corporations or an overreaching official — a court order enforcing their rights.

Yet, while curing the vacancy crisis is an essential step, more judges alone will not be enough. We also need better judges than the corporate-aligned group that currently dominate the federal bench. When the courts abdicate their own duties in favor of corporate-run arbitration, when they enable corporations to divide and conquer powerless consumers by eviscerating class actions, when they place oil interests above the law, allow corporations to buy and sell elections, or tell Lilly Ledbetter to go suck eggs, they force millions of Americans into the same position of utter powerless Emma Sullivan faced while she was being berated by her principal for exercising her constitutional rights.

Sullivan got lucky. Her story became a national outrage, and this spotlight shifted the balance of power in her favor. Most Americans will not be so fortunate. Their rights will rise or fall based on whether judges are willing to treat every American with the same regard they pay the most powerful corporations — and whether a judge will even be present to hear their case.