One of the backbones of GOP frontrunner Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign is an authoritarian plan to openly defy the Supreme Court, to wage a campaign of intimidation against judges who disagree with him, or even to eliminate courts entirely as punishment for handing down decisions he disagrees with.

In interviews with Fox News’ Megyn Kelly yesterday, both of George W. Bush’s last two attorneys general disagreed strongly with Gingrich’s proposal. Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, himself a former federal judge, called the plan “ridiculous,” “irresponsible,” “outrageous,” and “dangerous”:

KELLY: He wants to see the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals entirely abolished, your thoughts on that?

MUKASEY: Ridiculous. . . . to say that you’re going to undo and entire court simply because you don’t like some of their decisions, when there are thousands of cases before that court, is totally irresponsible. It’s outrageous because it essentially does away with the notion that when courts decide cases the proper way to have them reviewed is to go to a higher court. It’s dangerous because, even from the standpoint of the people who put it forward, you have no guarantee that you’ll have a permanent majority. . . . It would end with having a Democratic majority that then decides to abolish the Fourth Circuit and the Eleventh Circuit. And you go on and on and on. And I guess they could then reconstitute another court. It would reduce the entire judicial system to a spectacle.

Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had a similar reaction:

GONZALES: The notion or the specter of bringing judges before the Congress, like a schoolchild being brought before the principal is, to me, a little bit troubling . . . . I cannot support and I would not support efforts that appear to be intimidation or retaliation against judges.

Watch it:

Bear in mind that this is the same Alberto Gonzales that helped justify Bush’s torture policies and who presided over a dangerous and embarrassing politicization of the Justice Department. When even that guy thinks you have insufficient respect for the rule of law, it’s a pretty good sign that you’ve gone off the deep end.

A long-serving NBA official with a sterling record says he was fired from the organization in July for sticking up for women who were being sexually harassed:

A former N.B.A. security official says that he repeatedly warned his superiors that women in the office were being sexually harassed or discriminated against, but that his concerns were ignored and that he was ultimately fired for his actions on the women’s behalf. He is suing the league for lost wages and damages.

Warren Glover, 50, was fired as a security director in July, after 10 years with the N.B.A., despite a glowing performance record for most of his tenure, according to a lawsuit filed Thursday morning in New York State Supreme Court. In the suit, Glover accuses senior N.B.A. security officials of creating a “hostile work environment” in which he was “demeaned,” “treated differently from other employees” and denied promotions because of his willingness to speak out.

Glover says he witnessed several disturbing incidents, including a senior security official making sexual advances toward a female colleague, then demeaning her publicly when she rejected him. One secretary quit when her boss forced her to photocopy lude materials for a presentation to NBA players.

But Glover says it was his cooperation with a sexual harassment lawsuit against Bernard Tolbert, who was then the league’s senior vice president for security, that ultimately led to his ouster. The woman reportedly received a large settlement, and Tolbert told him, “It’s all your fault. You testified for your girl.”

Tolbert and Gregory Robinson, the senior director of security, also failed to act when Glover relayed sexual harassment complaints by two women against the same official. According to the suit, Tolbert even “delivered a thinly veiled threat” that Glover would be fired if he told the women that their peers had experienced the same treatment. Glover expressed his concern to Joel Litvin, the NBA’s president for league operations, but they fell on deaf ears.

This is not the first time the NBA has been under fire for enabling a culture of rampant sexual misconduct. In 2007, Anucha Browne Sanders, a former Knicks executive, received a $11.5 million settlement in her suit against Madison Square Garden and coach Isaiah Thomas. She said she was fired from her job for pursuing a sexual harassment case against Thomas.

Glover’s attorny, Randy McLaughlin commented, “I think there’s a culture of misogyny in this association…and it’s tolerated and condoned at the higher levels. Because there’s nothing being done.”

In September the Ohio Civil Rights Commission ruled that a white landlord, Jamie Hein, had violated the state’s Civil Rights Act by posting a sign by the pool of her duplex that read “Public Swimming Pool, White Only.”

A black tenant filed a discrimination complaint with the commission after Hein accused his teenage daughter of using chemicals in her hair that made the water “cloudy.” Days later, she posted the sign on the gate to the pool.

Hein has so far been unapologetic, and is asking the commission to reconsider their ruling. “If I have to stick up for my white rights, I have to stick up for my white rights,” she said. She recently defended her actions to ABC News, giving the curious excuse that the sign was merely “historical”:

An Ohio landlord accused of discriminating against an African-American girl with a “white only” sign at her swimming pool told ABCNews.com that the sign was an antique and a decoration.

“I’m not a bad person,” said Jamie Hein of Cincinnati. “I don’t have any problem with race at all. It’s a historical sign.”

The sign in question reads, “Public Swimming Pool, White Only.” It is dated 1931 and from Alabama.

Hein, 31, was unapologetic about the racist origins of the sign that she displayed at the entrance to her pool. She said she collects antiques and was given the sign as a gift. She also said that even though the sign seems to indicate that the pool is public, the pool is on her private property and “everybody has to ask before getting in my pool.”

Landlords and business owners are subject to the Civil Rights Act of 1968 and Fair Housing Act, which prohibits them from discriminating against customers and tenants on the basis of race, sex, religion, color, handicap, familial status or national origin.

A last night’s GOP presidential debate, Fox News’ Megyn Kelly asked each of the seven candidates to name their favorite Supreme Court Justice. Six of the seven candidates named some combination of Roberts, Scalia, Thomas and Alito — all of whom voted in Citizens United v. FEC that corporations should be able to spend unlimited money to buy and sell American elections. The candidates’ picks were:

• Rep. Michele Bachmann: Scalia is “at the top of the list.” Roberts, Thomas and Alito are “marvelous.”
• Fmr. Speaker Newt Gingrich: Roberts, Scalia, Thomas and Alito are “a pretty darn good list.”
• Fmr. Gov. Jon Huntsman: Roberts and Alito “fit the bit very, very nicely.”
• Gov. Rick Perry: “Alito, Roberts or Thomas, pick one.”
• Fmr. Gov. Mitt Romney: “Roberts, Thomas, Alito and Scalia.”
• Fmr. Sen. Rick Santorum: “Thomas.”
• Rep. Ron Paul: “All of them are good and all of them are bad.”

Watch it:

Although Paul refused to name a favorite justice, there should be no doubt that he shares his fellow candidates’ support for corporate-owned democracy. In a 2010 interview with radio host Thom Hartmann, Paul said that he agreed with the Citizens United decision’s result because he thought that not allowing corporations to spend unlimited money influencing elections is somehow discriminatory in favor of newspaper companies.

Moreover, Citizens United is one small part of the favoritism Roberts, Scalia, Thomas and Alito have shown to wealthy corporations at the expense of ordinary Americans. As ThinkProgress previously explained, all four of these justices also endorse the following gifts for corporations:

• Judges For Sale: All four voted in Caperton v. Massey to allow a wealthy coal CEO to pay $3 million to elect a sympathetic justice to a state supreme court in order to stack that court with jurists who would overturn a $50 million verdict against his company.
• Corporate-Owned Courts: All four voted to give corporations a nearly unlimited power to force workers and consumers into a privatized, corporate-run arbitration system that overwhelming favors corporations. Under their vision, real courts run by neutral judges are off limits to anyone a clever corporation does business with.
• Dividing And Conquering Ordinary Americans: All four voted in AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion to allow corporations to strip their workers and consumers of their ability to bring class action lawsuits. Because of this decision, corporations now have a nearly unlimited power to cheat the people who do business with them — so long as they only do it a few dollars at a time.
• Corporate Immunity To The Law: All four voted to give generic drug makers immunity to key state laws after one of their drugs caused a condition called an horrific neurological condition that causes sometimes crippling, uncontrollable bodily movements in many of the people who took it.

In other words, if the GOP’s preferred justices get their way, there may no longer be any need for corporations to buy elections — because they’ll be largely immune from the law anyway.

In October, GOP presidential frontrunner Newt Gingrich announced that, if elected president, he would openly defy Supreme Court decisions he disagrees with. Now, former Gov. Mike Huckabee (R-AR) has teamed up with the Constitution-destroying group Citizens United to narrate a film promoting this lawless tactic as a means to impose anti-choice “personhood” laws upon the entire nation:

Citizens United, the conservative advocacy group whose 2008 anti-Hillary Clinton film led to the 2010 Supreme Court decision permitting unlimited corporate spending in political campaigns on First Amendment grounds, is now promoting fetal personhood laws through a new film narrated by Mike Huckabee. . . .

The [film] also promotes the strategy of pursuing federal legislation that would enshrine civil rights for fetuses on the grounds that their equal protection rights are protected by the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. This argument, recently endorsed by Newt Gingrich, was injected into the campaign by Princeton professor and conservative Catholic activist Robert George during a candidate forum in South Carolina in September. By arguing that fetuses are people, and therefore entitled to the protections of the Fourteenth Amendment, they hope to bypass the more onerous process of amending the Constitution with a long-sought human life amendment.

Gingrich, Huckabee and others can argue that the Fourteenth Amendment says whatever they want, but nothing they say will change the fact that Congress simply does not have the power to defy a Supreme Court decision interpreting the Constitution — and the Supreme Court is crystal clear that abortion and contraception bans are illegal.

Nevertheless, the fact that a former governor and top contender for the GOP presidential nomination in 2008 is participating in this film is disturbing because it shows that two deeply radical ideas are now being mainstreamed within the Republican Party. The first is Gingrich’s deeply authoritarian belief that the Supreme Court can simply be ignored, the other is the personhood proposal itself — which threatens many forms of birth control along with all forms of abortion.