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.