On Saturday, Justice Clarence Thomas spoke at the opening of a local history museum in the small Georgia town where he grew up. Normally, this kind of return of a town’s most famous native son would be unremarkable, but this particular museum plays a supporting role in the ongoing saga of Justice Thomas’ ethical scandals:

The publicity-shy friend turned out to be Harlan Crow, a Dallas real estate magnate and a major contributor to conservative causes. Mr. Crow stepped in to finance the multimillion-dollar purchase and restoration of the cannery, featuring a museum about the culture and history of Pin Point that has become a pet project of Justice Thomas’s.

The project throws a spotlight on an unusual, and ethically sensitive, friendship that appears to be markedly different from those of other justices on the nation’s highest court.

The two men met in the mid-1990s, a few years after Justice Thomas joined the court. Since then, Mr. Crow has done many favors for the justice and his wife, Virginia, helping finance a Savannah library project dedicated to Justice Thomas, presenting him with a Bible that belonged to Frederick Douglass and reportedly providing $500,000 for Ms. Thomas to start a Tea Party-related group. They have also spent time together at gatherings of prominent Republicans and businesspeople at Mr. Crow’s Adirondacks estate and his camp in East Texas.

In the annals of Thomas’s loose relationship with judicial ethics, Thomas and Crow’s involvement with this museum is a fairly minor incident. The many personal gifts Thomas accepted from wealthy benefactors, including Crow, are much more disturbing. Beyond the Bible Crow gave Thomas — which is valued at $19,000 — and the half-million in start-up funds Crow provided Thomas’s wife, Thomas also accepted a $15,000 gift from a corporate-aligned think tank that occasionally files briefs in Thomas’s very Court.

This kind of gift-taking is obviously quite rare on the Supreme Court, but it is not exactly unprecedented. Forty years ago, Justice Abe Fortas accepted $15,000 to teach a series of seminars — funded by the leaders of frequent corporate litigants including the vice president of Phillip Morris — and he accepted a $20,000 retainer from a stock speculator who was eventually convicted of numerous securities violations. This gifting scandal, which is remarkably similar to the scandal Thomas is currently embroiled in, forced Fortas to resign from the bench in disgrace.

Significantly, Fortas’s gift-taking scandal was met by outrage across the ideological divide. Fortas was a liberal justice, but many of the clearest calls for his resignation came from progressives such as Sen. (and future Vice President) Walter Mondale (D-MN) and Brown v. Board of Education author Chief Justice Earl Warren.

Today, however, Thomas’s many ethical tangles earn, in the words of Rep. Chris Murphy (D-CT), “deafening silence from Republicans.” As it turns out, congressional Republicans are too busy dreaming up fake ethical scandals to try to rig important Supreme Court decisions to pay attention to the very real ethical scandals facing their judicial ally.

Earlier this month, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) strongarmed the state legislature into impeaching and removing the chair of that state’s bipartisan redistricting commission. According to Brewer, by drawing many congressional districts where there would be competitive races between Democratic and Republican candidates, the election official, Colleen Mathis, somehow engaged in “neglect of duty and gross misconduct.” Just over two weeks later, the state supreme court struck down this impeachment, holding that Brewer failed to show the “substantial neglect of duty, gross misconduct in office or inability to discharge the duties of office” required to justify an impeachment. Apparently, not drawing maps that maximize GOP victories isn’t actually gross misconduct.

Never one to let a small thing like the Arizona Constitution get in the way of a good power grab, however, Brewer is now preparing for a second round:

Gov. Jan Brewer may make another attempt as early as this coming week to fire the chairwoman of the Independent Redistricting Commission.

The governor said Friday her attorneys are studying the brief order issued late Thursday by the Arizona Supreme Court voiding the governor’s Nov. 1 decision to fire Colleen Mathis. She said all options are on the table – including recrafting the letter she sent to Mathis firing her in a way that might pass court muster. [...] In their brief order, the justices said that Brewer’s Nov. 1 letter to Mathis, “does not demonstrate substantial neglect of duty, gross misconduct in office, or inability to discharge the duties of office.” Those are the only reasons in the constitution that a governor can fire a commissioner.

Brewer noted, though, the justices did not say what would be legal and how she could fire Mathis in a way to satisfy the court.

People who actually care about the rule of law can only hope that the state legislature would balk at such a transparent and obvious power grab, but they probably shouldn’t hold their breath. Every single one of the state senate’s 21 GOP senators voted with Brewer to illegally remove Mathis from the commission the first time around.

Alabama’s economy is suffering because of HB 56, the state’s draconian immigration law, as workers flee out of fear. State Sen. Scott Beason (R), who sponsored the anti-immigrant bill in the Alabama legislature, once called it a “jobs bill,” but the state’s immigration law is leaving entire industries without enough workers instead.

And the extreme law, which legislators are now reconsidering, could seriously damage the state’s reputation as well after police arrested a German Mercedes-Benz executive last week under the immigration law. Mercedes opened its first American manufacturing plant in Vance, Alabama in 1993, spurring a trend of foreign car makers and suppliers opening factories in the state. They may be rethinking that decision, however, after one of their German executives was arrested for simply not having his passport with him:

Tuscaloosa Police Chief Steven Anderson told The Associated Press an officer stopped a rental vehicle for not having a tag Wednesday night and asked the driver for his license. The man only had a German identification card, so he was arrested and taken to police headquarters, Anderson said.

The 46-year-old executive was charged with violating the immigration law for not having proper identification, but he was released after an associate retrieved his passport, visa and German driver’s license from the hotel where he was staying, Anderson said.

The length of his detainment and the status of his court case weren’t immediately known.

Bentley…called the state’s homeland security director, Spencer Collier, after hearing of the arrest to get details about what had happened, Collier said in an interview.

“Initially I didn’t have them, so I called Chief Anderson to find out what happened,” Collier said. “It sounds like the officer followed the statute correctly.”

Before Gov. Robert Bentley (R) signed HB 56, drivers who did not have a license were given a ticket and court summons, Collier said. “If it were not for the immigration law, a person without a license in their possession wouldn’t be arrested like this,” he told the AP.

In October, the New York Times speculated in an editorial that despite best efforts to recruit foreign automakers to Alabama, the state was now “infamous as a regional capital of xenophobia.” And if the immigration law scared away a manufacturer like Mercedes, which employs about 2,800 Alabamians, or Hyundai, which announced an expansion at its Montgomery, Alabama plant in May, would only compound the state’s economic woes. The unfortunate arrest of a visiting Mercedes executive only underscores the damage Alabama’s harmful anti-immigrant law will continue to do to the state’s economy — and its reputation.

Last week, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) became the latest GOP lawmaker to fabricate a reason why he thinks Justice Elena Kagan must recuse from the Affordable Care Act litigation. On Friday, Senate Republicans escalated these frivolous assaults on Kagan’s ethical integrity even further — sending a letter signed by Sens. Mitch McConnell (KY), John Kyl (AZ), and Chuck Grassley (IA), the #1 and #2 Republicans in the Senate and the Senate GOP’s top lawmaker on the Judiciary Committee, to Attorney General Eric Holder laying out the exceptionally weak case for Kagan’s recusal:

Federal law requires recusal from a case if a judicial officer of the United States “has served in governmental employment and in such capacity participated as counsel, adviser or material witness concerning the proceeding or expressed an opinion concerning the merits of the particular case or controversy.” 28 U.S.C. § 455(b)(3). In addition, a federal judge must disqualify herself from participating in a matter if her “impartiality might reasonably be questioned.” Id. at § 455(a). It appears that former Solicitor General Kagan’s participation in the Obama Administration’s defense of the PPACA may satisfy both requirements for recusal.

Then-Solicitor General Kagan acknowledged to the Senate Judiciary Committee last year that, in fact, she played a “role” in the Obama Administration’s defense of the PPACA, including attending “at least one meeting” that discussed the litigation. But she minimized her degree of involvement in the litigation, characterizing it as not “substantial.” Federal law, however, requires recusal if a government official participated in a matter that is the subject of litigation; it does not require the government official’s past participation in that same matter to be “substantial” (as determined by the self-same government official).

Unsurprisingly, the letter from McConnell and his colleagues misrepresents Kagan’s actions. Although Kagan did testify at her confirmation hearing that she was once present in a meeting where the existence of the Affordable Care Act litigation was brought up, she also testified under oath that she did no work whatsoever as an attorney on this litigation. Being in a meeting where a particular lawsuit is mentioned does not constitute participation “as counsel, adviser or material witness” on a case any more than attending a football game makes you a coach.

Moreover, even though a far-right group filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking evidence that Kagan must recuse from the Affordable Care Act litigation, this request proved so fruitless that even the National Review’s Carrie Severino — a former clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas — was forced to conclude that the documents uncovered by this request contain no evidence requiring Justice Kagan’s recusal.

Yet, while McConnell’s letter is clearly just the latest chapter in a witchhunt seeking to discredit Kagan, it is nonetheless significant simply because McConnell’s name is on it. Previously, only a few senators such as Sessions and Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) — both of whom represent the Senate’s far right fringe — had jumped onboard the anti-Kagan witchhunt. The fact that McConnell, Kyl, and Grassley are now lighting up torches and demanding that Kagan be burnt at the stake indicates that this witchhunt is the official position of the Senate GOP caucus.

Last month, emerging GOP presidential frontrunner Newt Gingrich gave one of the most authoritarian speeches in recent American history. In it, Gingrich promised to openly defy Supreme Court decisions that he disagrees with, and to wage a campaign of intimidation against judges who decide cases in ways Gingrich does not like.

At a forum sponsored by three leading anti-gay groups this weekend, former GOP presidential frontrunner Herman Cain leaped onto this bandwagon, promising to defy a future Supreme Court decision striking down the unconstitutional Defense of Marriage Act:

QUESTION: If the Perry case or a DOMA case gets to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court were to overturn DOMA or to find a quote-unquote U.S. constitutional right to same-sex marriage, if you were president, what would you do?

CAIN: I would lead the charge to overturn the Supreme Court if they overturned DOMA, whether that was new legislation coming out of the Congress like Rep. Bachmann said — the United States Congress is supposed to pass a law, so if they did overturn DOMA, that charge I would lead to reverse that.

Watch it:

The sole reason why the Supreme Court would strike down DOMA is because the anti-gay law is unconstitutional. The Constitution guarantees that no person will be denied “the equal protection of the laws,” and the last time we checked, gay people are people. More importantly, the Supreme Court has long held that groups which share an unchangeable trait and are “subjected to such a history of purposeful unequal treatment, or relegated to such a position of political powerlessness as to command extraordinary protection from the majoritarian political process” are entitled to heightened constitutional protection under the Constitution. Gay men and lesbians unquestionably qualify.

So when Herman Cain promises to push legislation reinstating DOMA, he is pledging to openly defy the Constitution. Congress has no power to ignore the Constitution itself, and it is as bound by the Supreme Court’s constitutional decisions as is any other institution in the United States.

Not to be outdone, Gingrich followed up Cain’s radical statement by doubling down on his own authoritarianism. Immediately after Cain promised to defy a Supreme Court decision striking down DOMA, Gingrich said he would probably “educate the judiciary” by unconstitutionally removing any judges or justices who voted that the Constitution’s guarantee of equality actually applies to gay and lesbian Americans.