The Supreme Court’s egregious Citizens United decision was not just, as Justice Stevens wrote in dissent, “a rejection of the common sense of the American people,” it is also easily one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in American history. Its holding that corporations can spend unlimited funds to buy and sell elections belongs in the same dustbin as separate but equal and the entire corporations before people doctrine of the misguided Lochner Era in the early 20th Century.

As has now been widely reported, the Montana Supreme Court recently tried to consign Citizens United to its well deserved fate by essentially holding that the U.S. Supreme Court’s folly does not apply in Montana. I have genuinely struggled about what to say about this 5-2 decision — which is why ThinkProgress has not reported on it prior to this post. On the one hand, the Montana justices defied an obviously wrong decision that threatens to turn American democracy into an auction that sells essential government jobs to whichever special interest group happens to be the highest bidder. On the other hand, ThinkProgress has been unequivocal in condemning conservative officials who believe that they have the power to defy Supreme Court decisions they disagree with, or who think that states can simply ignore federal law or the Constitution.

We will not abandon this commitment to the rule of law today. It is wrong when Newt Gingrich plots a campaign of massive resistance against judges he disagrees with, and Montana’s justices act no less illegitimately when they fail to follow a binding Supreme Court precedent. There is no reason to doubt that every word of the Montana Supreme Court’s decision — which explains in great detail how corporate money corrupts a state’s politics — is accurate, except for the part when they say that Citizens United does not force them to allow corporations to corrupt Montana.

Yet, while the Montana justices erred, they erred far less than the five U.S. Supreme Court justices who ignored the Constitution and decades of precedent to strike down a 63 year old ban on corporate money in politics. The U.S. Supremes will doubtless decide they need to review the Montana decision. They should do so, and they should reverse their error in Citizens United as soon as possible to minimize its impact on the upcoming election.

Additionally, every judge in the country should read Montana Justice James Nelson’s dissent from the decision rejecting Citizens United. He devotes most of the last eight pages of this decision to explaining why, despite the fact that he is bound by Supreme Court precedent, the one that binds him today is disastrously wrong:

While, as a member of this Court, I am bound to follow Citizens United, I do not have to agree with the Supreme Court’s decision. And, to be absolutely clear, I do not agree with it. For starters, the notion that corporations are disadvantaged in the political realm is unbelievable. Indeed, it has astounded most Americans. The truth is that corporations wield inordinate power in Congress and in state legislatures. It is hard to tell where government ends and corporate America begins; the transition is seamless and overlapping. In my view, Citizens United has turned the First Amendment’s “open marketplace” of ideas into an auction house for Friedmanian corporatists. Freedom of speech is now synonymous with freedom to spend. Speech equals money; money equals democracy. This decidedly was not the view of the constitutional founders, who favored the preeminence of individual interests over those of big business. [...]

Lastly, I am compelled to say something about corporate “personhood.” While I recognize that this doctrine is firmly entrenched in the law, I find the entire concept offensive. Corporations are artificial creatures of law. As such, they should enjoy only those powers—not constitutional rights, but legislatively-conferred powers—that are concomitant with their legitimate function, that being limited-liability investment vehicles for business. Corporations are not persons. Human beings are persons, and it is an affront to the inviolable dignity of our species that courts have created a legal fiction which forces people—human beings—to share fundamental, natural rights with soulless creations of government. Worse still, while corporations and human beings share many of the same rights under the law, they clearly are not bound equally to the same codes of good conduct, decency, and morality, and they are not held equally accountable for their sins. Indeed, it is truly ironic that the death penalty and hell are reserved only to natural persons.

Even in an era when corporate interest groups dominate the U.S. Supreme Court, judges lack the authority to defy the high Court’s commands. What they can never lose, however, is their right to speak out in published opinions about how deeply misguided the nation’s highest Court has become. Justice Nelson’s opinion should be the model for every judge who fears the Supreme Court has forgotten to follow the very Constitution it is sworn to uphold.

In 2004, presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) voted against a resolution praising the 1964 law banning whites-only lunch counters and employment discrimination because he claimed that “the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not improve race relations or enhance freedom. Instead, the forced integration dictated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 increased racial tensions while diminishing individual liberty.” Ron Paul’s views were recently echoed by his son, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), who claimed that opposing the ban on whites-only lunch counters is the “hard part about believing in freedom.”

In an interview this morning on CNN, the younger Paul was asked to defend his father’s disregard for one of the most important legislative accomplishments in American history. His answer? Allowing private businesses to maintain a culture of virulent racism is the price we must pay in order to have cigar bars:

RAND PAUL: There are things that people were concerned about that were unintended consequences [of the Civil Rights Act], for example, people who believe very fervently in people having equal protection under the law, and are against segregation and all that, still worried about the loss of property rights…for example, I can’t have a cigar bar any more, and you say, “well, that has nothing to do with race” — the idea of whether or not you control your property, it also tells you, come in here I want to know the calorie count on that, and the calorie Nazis come in here and tell me. [...] The point is that its not all about that. It’s not all about race relations, it’s about controlling property, ultimately.

Watch it:

Later in the same interview, Paul attacks the interviewers for “dwelling on an obscure issue” by questioning his father’s opposition to desegregation. Simply put, there are not very many victims of the apartheid state that the Civil Rights Act helped end who would describe desegregation as an “obscure issue.”

Lakhdar Boumediene, the named plaintiff in a seminal Supreme Court case preserving Guantanamo Bay detainees’ right to challenge the legality of their detention, recounts his experience as a man falsely accused of terrorism and imprisoned at Gitmo for seven years in an op-ed in the New York Times. The whole thing is worth reading, but one sentence in particular stands out:

I left Algeria in 1990 to work abroad. In 1997 my family and I moved to Bosnia and Herzegovina at the request of my employer, the Red Crescent Society of the United Arab Emirates. I served in the Sarajevo office as director of humanitarian aid for children who had lost relatives to violence during the Balkan conflicts. In 1998, I became a Bosnian citizen. We had a good life, but all of that changed after 9/11.

When I arrived at work on the morning of Oct. 19, 2001, an intelligence officer was waiting for me. He asked me to accompany him to answer questions. I did so, voluntarily — but afterward I was told that I could not go home. The United States had demanded that local authorities arrest me and five other men. News reports at the time said the United States believed that I was plotting to blow up its embassy in Sarajevo. I had never — for a second — considered this.

Boumediene was not simply arrested and imprisoned for years despite no evidence that he was a terrorist, he was arrested while he was working as a humanitarian aide worker. For children. The man devoted his life to helping the youngest and most vulnerable victims of a terrible conflict, and we locked him up and tortured him.

Sadly, America still has not learned the lesson Justice Louis Brandeis tried to teach us 85 years ago: “Men feared witches and burnt women.”

In a very brief, single sentence order this morning, the Supreme Court unanimously affirmed a lower court decision upholding a ban on non-permanent residents of the United States using their wealth to try to influence American elections. This was unquestionably the correct decision. Indeed, as your humble Justice Editor explained recently in the New York Times, a decision to the contrary would have opened the floodgates to foreign corporations buying and selling American elections:

[L]ongstanding constitutional law protects U.S. citizens’ right to speak out on political matters or even run ads supporting or opposing a candidate. Moreover, the Supreme Court’s egregious Citizens United decision forced America to treat corporations as if they had exactly the same First Amendment rights as people. To date, however, the court has not said that foreign nationals or foreign corporations enjoy the same rights as Americans.

Bluman asks the justices to punch a giant hole in this distinction between citizens and foreigners. But if foreigners must be treated the same as Americans, and if corporations also must be treated the same as people, then it follows that foreign corporations must enjoy the same right that American citizens enjoy: the right to spend money to influence U.S. elections, at least as long as they spend the money themselves rather than contribute it to a candidate.

The Court deserves some small degree of credit for today’s opinion, although only a very small amount since the result they reached today is clearly and obviously correct. Because the justices did not release an opinion explaining their decision, however, the rest of the nation will simply have to guess why five justices believe that allowing foreign corporations to corrupt our elections is a bridge too far, but enabling domestic corporations to buy elections is required by the Constitution.

Last week, GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum claimed that a pair of Supreme Court decisions establishing the constitutional right to use contraception were wrongly decided. In Saturday’s GOP presidential candidates debate, moderator George Stephanopoulos asked former Gov. Mitt Romney (R-MA) whether he agrees with Santorum. During the awkward three minutes that followed, Romney managed to give three completely different answers:

• He Doesn’t Know: Romney initially pleaded ignorance, claiming “I don’t whether a state has a right to ban contraception” and even asking Stephanopoulous whether the Supreme Court has weighed in on this issue. As Stephanopoulous pointed out, however, it’s likely that Romney was merely feigning ignorance to avoid answering the question because he is a graduate of Harvard Law School and would have almost certainly read the Supreme Court’s contraception decisions while he was studying law.
• Banning Contraception Would Require An Amendment: After Stephanopoulous reminded Romney of the Supreme Court’s decisions, Romney took an fairly absolutist view of support for past Supreme Court precedents, stating that the only way to overrule them is through a constitutional amendment: “I believe that the law of the land is as spoken by the Supreme Court, and that if we disagree with the Supreme Court…then we have a process under the Constitution to change that decision, and it’s known as the amendments process.”
• The Court Did Not Decide The Contraception Cases Correctly: Finally, Stephanopoulous asked whether the Supreme Court correctly decided there is a right to privacy under the Constitution — this right to privacy was the basis of the Court’s initial decision protecting contraception. Romney replied that “I don’t believe that they decided that correctly,” and explained that the kind of justices he supports “might well decide to return this issue to states instead of saying it is in the federal Constitution.”

Watch it:

To be fair, Romney also indicated that he would not personally support banning contraception, and complained several times that the question is academic because “I can’t imagine a state banning contraception.” Unfortunately, however, this simply reflects a failure of imagination on Romney’s part. Several states have considered so-called “Personhood” legislation or ballot initiatives which are intended to outlaw many forms of birth control. Under Romney’s third of three positions, such laws would be perfectly constitutional.