The Supreme Court’s decision to gut campaign finance laws in its 2009 Citizens United decision predictably opened the gates of the American electoral system to an influx of corporate money and influence, first in the 2010 midterm elections and then in numerous statewide and local campaigns. In Ohio, Wisconsin, and other states with contentious campaigns, corporations flooded the system with money — in judicial elections alone, just three corporations spent 13 times as much as the labor movement.

Yet, as much as Citizens United managed to jar the political system with its influx of unlimited corporate money, former House Speaker and leading presidential candidate Newt Gingrich may have set a new record for the most audacious injection of big money donors into politics. Gingrich accepted millions of dollars in donations to an independent political committee and used those funds to travel the country in the lead-up to his presidential run. As McClatchy reported today:

The former House speaker appears to have made unprecedented use of a supposedly independent political committee that collected unlimited donations, financing a coast-to-coast shadow campaign that raised his profile and provided a launch pad for his presidential run.

Gingrich’s American Solutions for Winning the Future, which he shuttered in July, shelled out at least $8 million for the chartered jets in which he hop-scotched the nation for public appearances while weighing whether to enter the 2008 and 2012 presidential races.

The committee’s acceptance of huge cash donations — including $7.65 million from Sheldon Adelson, a pro-Israel, billionaire Las Vegas casino owner, and more than $2 million from five energy companies — has sewn concerns that Gingrich would be beholden to his benefactors if he won the White House.

Massive donations, unfortunately, have become common in the wake of Citizens United. A super PAC supporting former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R), for instance, took in an undisclosed million dollar donation from a company that dissolved immediately after the donation. Former candidate Herman Cain, meanwhile, was linked extensively to Americans for Prosperity, a conservative organization backed by billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch. In the first six months of 2011, just 12 wealthy donors accounted for most of the donations to major super PACs, another example of Citizens United expanding influence of corporations and the wealthy in the American electoral system.

The McClatchy report wasn’t the only big news for Gingrich, however, as Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed a complaint today with the Federal Elections Commission alleging that his campaign unlawfully used campaign funds when it paid Gingrich $42,000 for his “lucrative mailing list” — a transaction that was not disclosed on his financial report.

The Gingrich campaign responded to the McClatchy report, saying only that the donors gave to him because they agree with his political views, but Gingrich declined to comment on the CREW complaint when asked today in Iowa.

In 2008, a conservative judge named Michael Gableman narrowly defeated incumbent Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Louis Butler thanks to nearly $1.3 million in spending from right-wing interest groups and a false ad claiming that Butler unleashed a child molester upon society. This ad later became the subject of an ethics inquiry into Justice Gableman — Wisconsin law forbids judicial candidates from lying about their opponents — although the ethics case was dropped after the six remaining justices split 3-3 along party lines on whether Gableman committed misconduct.

A newly released letter, however, suggests that Gableman managed to violate ethics laws in hiring legal counsel to defend him against these allegations that he violated ethics laws:

State Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman received free legal service worth thousands of dollars from one of Wisconsin’s largest law firms as it defended him against an ethics charge, according to a letter released Thursday by the firm.

The state’s ethics code says state officials cannot receive anything of value for free because of their position. And a separate ethics code specifically for judges says they cannot accept gifts from anyone who is likely to appear before them.

A former state ethics official on Thursday said authorities should thoroughly investigate how the deal between Gableman and attorney Eric McLeod of Michael Best & Friedrich worked because Gableman did not end up paying any attorneys fees. [...]

Michael Best has five cases currently before the Supreme Court. Gableman is participating in all of them. Gableman did not respond Thursday to a request for an interview.

Sadly, this is hardly the only ethical tangle to emerge on the Wisconsin Supreme Court since Gableman’s election allowed conservatives to seize control over it. With Gableman casting the key fourth vote, the court’s conservatives voted to allow corporate lobbyists to write the court’s ethics rule enabling justices to sit on cases involving their major campaign donors.

On Saturday, the Senate closed off what was supposed to be its last day of business for the year (the Senate may need to reconvene, now that Speaker John Boehner has blown up a deal to extend tax cuts to middle class Americans). Yet the Senate closed out the year without confirming any of the 21 judicial nominees currently awaiting a vote on the Senate floor. Worse, according to the Senate’s chief obstructionist, these judicial nominees — along with more than two dozen other nominations — are intentionally being held hostage in order to prevent President Obama from recess appointing anyone to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau:

At the end of a rare Saturday session, the Senate’s last day of official business for the year, McConnell blocked an effort by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to confirm more than 50 executive and judicial branch nominations awaiting Senate action.

And he laid out a condition to releasing his objection: “confirmation from the administration that it will respect practice and precedent on recess appointments.”

McConnell added that he needed from the White House “assurances that have been routinely given at this point with regard to recess appointments.”

It’s unclear just what “practice or precedent” McConnell is referring to, but there is no one who has less standing to complain about unprecedented action than McConnell himself — the lead architect of the Senate GOP’s nihilistic campaign to make it impossible for President Obama to govern. Without an agency head in place, the CFPB cannot perform many of its core functions. Yet, Senate Republicans are filibustering CFPB director-in-waiting Richard Cordray in order to sabotage this newly created consumer protection agency. If McConnell really cares one bit about respecting “practice and precedent,” he can show it by ending this blockade and recognizing that the Senate minority does not have the legitimate authority to effectively repeal an entire agency.

McConnell could also show that he respects practice and precedent by returning the Senate to the way it operated before he became minority leader. Simply put, no one in recent American history has done more to abuse the filibuster than Mitch McConnell — as demonstrated by the massive spike in votes attempting to break filibusters once McConnell took over the minority caucus:

President Obama is not powerless, however, against McConnell’s effort to sabotage the CFPB. If McConnell will not end his blockade, Obama can invoke the Roosevelt Precedent, which allows him to appoint Cordray the second the Senate adjourns for the year.

No one has benefited more from wealthy donors seeking to influence the 2012 presidential race than Mitt Romney. As of last August, Romney received more lobbyist contributions than the rest of the GOP field combined. His largest single source of campaign revenue is Wall Street bankers, and a massive 10 percent of all American billionaires donated to Romney’s campaign. So it should come as little surprise that Romney is a big supporter of allowing the rich and the powerful to buy and sell democracy — Romney recently pledged to appoint more justices like the ones who joined the egregious Citizens United decision.

As with so many of Romney’s positions, however, he didn’t always feel the same way. Back in 1994, Romney delivered a speech — to a group of business leaders nonetheless — calling for much stricter campaign finance laws:

I am personally of the belief that money plays a much more important role in what is done in Washington than we believe. I personally believe that when campaigns spend the kind of money they’re now spending — this race, I understand, Ted Kennedy will spend about ten million dollars to be reelected. He’s been in 32 years. 10 million dollars — I think that’s wrong. And that’s not his own money, that’s all from other people, and to get that kind of money, as an incumbent you’ve got to cozy up to other people — all of the special interest groups that can go out there and raise money for you from their members — and that kind of relationship has an influence on the way that you’re going to vote. [...]

These kinds of associations between money and politics, in my view, are wrong. And, for that reason, I would like to have campaign spending limits. [...] I also would abolish PACs.

Watch it:

The Mitt Romney of 17 years ago was exactly right. When a candidate accepts millions of dollars from wealthy individuals and special interest groups, that kind of relationship does influence how they will govern when they are elected. Indeed, that’s exactly why Wall Street and one in 10 billionaires are planning to get exactly what they paid for if Mitt Romney is elected president.

(HT: Andrew Kaczynski)

Last June, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit held, wrongly, that the Second Amendment does not apply to undocumented immigrants. Last week, in a single paragraph order, the Eighth Circuit agreed. As ThinkProgress explained when the Fifth Circuit opinion was handed down, this decision isn’t just wrong, it is disastrously so. Indeed, if allowed to stand, it could strip all undocumented immigrants of their constitutional right to be free from unlawful searches and seizures.

Several constitutional provisions refer to rights that belong to “the people.” The Second Amendment refers to “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms.” And the Fourth Amendment provides that “[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.” According to the Fifth Circuit’s reasoning, which was embraced last week by the Eighth Circuit, undocumented immigrants enjoy neither right because they are not part of “the people”:

[T]he Court noted that “in all six other provisions of the Constitution that mention ‘the people,’ the term unambiguously refers to all members of the political community, not an unspecified subset.” [...] Illegal aliens are not “law-abiding citizens” or “members of the political community,” and aliens who enter or remain in this country illegally and without authorization are not Americans as that word is commonly understood.

Prior to its decision in Heller, the Supreme Court interpreted the meaning of the phrase “the people” in the context of the Fourth Amendment and indicated that the same analysis would extend to the text of the Second Amendment…but neither this court nor the Supreme Court has held that the Fourth Amendment extends to a native and citizen of another nation who entered and remained in the United States illegally.

This reasoning isn’t just wrong, it is obviously wrong. Even if undocumented people don’t count as part of “the people,” the Supreme Court held in Mapp v. Ohio that the Constitution’s guarantee that no “person” may be denied liberty without due process of law includes the right to be free from illegal searches and seizures. More recently, in McDonald v. Chicago, the Supreme Court held that the same guarantee of due process to all “person[s]” also includes the right to bear arms. Last time we checked, undocumented immigrants are people.

It’s deeply disturbing that two federal appeals courts have now embraced this clearly erroneous legal argument. Under this interpretation of the law, it’s not clear that anything prevents police from breaking into an undocumented persons’ home at any time, or from simply arresting them despite no evidence that the person committed a crime.