Today amicus briefs supporting the Affordable Care Act’s minimum coverage provision are due in the Supreme Court. It is likely that as many as thirty briefs will be filed by the time today is over, and the Center for American Progress has released a synopsis of 22 of these briefs.

One thing that is clear from the list is that organizations that actually know something about health care support this law. In the lower courts, real experts in health care — doctors, nurses, patient groups and hospitals — all lined up in support of the law. That pattern has now repeated itself before the Supreme Court. Groups supporting the law include:

• Doctors and Nurses: Six health providers groups, including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Nurses Association, joined a brief authored by an attorney who will be very familiar to the readers of this blog.
• Patient Groups: A long list of patient and disability groups, including the American Cancer Society, American Diabetes Association, American Heart Association, the March of Dimes and the American Association of People with Disabilities joined two briefs supporting the ACA.
• Hospitals: The American Hospital Association, the Association of American Medical Colleges, the Catholic Health Association of the United States, Federation of American Hospitals, National Association of Public Hospitals and Health Systems and the National Association of Children’s Hospitals submitted another brief.
• Insurers: Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Massachusetts also filed a brief explaining the success of the Massachusetts health plan, which was the model for the Affordable Care Act.

Other amici include the AARP, the attorneys general of eleven states, four Nobel Prize winning economists, small business groups, nearly 500 state lawmakers, groups representing women, young people and numerous advocacy groups and academics.

It, of course, remains to be seen what the law’s opponents will produce when it come their time to file amicus briefs, but their past efforts have not been impressive. In the lower courts, briefs opposing the law were filed mostly by conservative think tanks, GOP elected officials and Republican-aligned lobbying groups. Virtually no health care groups — beyond a right-wing doctors’ advocacy group which likens the Affordable Care Act to “Hitler” — stood against the ACA.

South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson (R) turned heads this week when he initiated an investigation into whether 900 dead people voted in recent Palmetto State elections.

The Republican AG called for an investigation when “evidence was uncovered by Kevin Shwedo, the director of the Department of Motor Vehicles, during an extensive review of data related to the state’s new voter ID law,” according to WSOC TV.

Wilson is hardly the first person to claim that “dead voters” marred his state’s election. However, while salacious accusations like Wilson’s grab headlines, the subsequent investigations that find no voter fraud rarely get as much attention. Indeed, no election would be complete without allegations of dead voters; yet each time, officials perform the same Scooby Doo-routine, investigating wild accusations before discovering a much simpler explanation for the discrepancies.

Consider the following examples of supposedly “dead voters,” courtesy of the Brennan Center for Justice:

Georgia: In 1998, Georgia investigators pointed to a vote cast by Alan J. Mandel, despite his death the year prior. When officials looked into the matter, according to the Washington Post, they realized that the votes had been cast by Alan J. Mandell (with two L’s), a man still very much alive, and poll workers had simply marked off the wrong name.

California: When Michael Huffington lost to Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) in the 1994 Senate race, he contested his defeat by alleging voter fraud, including supposed votes cast by dead people. According to Seattle Post-Intelligencer columnist Lou Cannon, “A check by voting registrars in two populous counties (Alameda and Fresno) found that this claim was based on clerical errors in which voters signed their names on the wrong lines.”

Maryland: An investigation into a claim that 89 dead Marylanders had voted in the 1994 election proved spurious when FBI officials were unable to find any such cases. According to Timothy P. McNally, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Maryland-Delaware field office, the closest evidence they came to finding fraud was when they “found one person who had voted then died a week after the election.”

New Hampshire: Following allegations that dead people had voted in New Hampshire’s 2004 general election, a subsequent investigation turned up little evidence. When officials sent postcards to the homes of possible “dead voters,” only one was returned as undeliverable; the woman in question died after Election Day but before she received the postcard.

It’s easy to allege that dead voters are undermining the integrity of our electoral process. Producing any evidence that voter fraud by dead people actually exists is far more difficult.

Indeed, behind nearly every dead voter accusation is a far more innocent explanation. Whether it’s a spelling error, a check-in error, or simply a death shortly after Election Day, minor discrepancies do pop up during elections; zombie voters, less so.

Officials like Wilson would do well to apply Occam’s Razor in matters like these before spinning wild accusations.

Yesterday, wealthy heir John Raese (R-WV), who suffered a crushing election defeat against Sen. John Manchin (D-WV) in 2010, filed papers seeking a rematch later this year. Raese, who campaigned on a series of increasingly bizarre policy proposals in 2010 — “we need 1,000 laser systems put in the sky and we need it right now” was a key prong of Raese’s national security program — distinguished himself as one of the many tenther candidates in the last election cycle who believed that pretty much everything is unconstitutional.

As ThinkProgress reported during Raese’s last Senate race, he directed particular ire towards the minimum wage:

Mr. Raese, chief executive officer of Morgantown-based Greer Industries, which runs interests as diverse as mining and broadcasting, has taken fire for saying he would abolish the minimum wage. But he has refused to back down, saying it’s not only bad policy, but it’s not constitutional.

“I don’t think it is. And the reason I don’t think it is, is the same reason the [National Recovery Administration] was not constitutional in 1936,” he said. “It was declared unconstitutional because it was government micromanaging an intervention into the private sector. Well, what are price controls, or what are wage controls? They’re the same thing.”

As we explained when Raese originally said this, it’s not at all clear what Constitution Raese is talking about here — but it’s not the U.S. Constitution. Our Constitution gives Congress the power “[t]o regulate commerce…among the several states,” a power which even ultraconservative Justice Antonin Scalia agrees gives Congress broad authority to regulate “economic activity.” And the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the first federal minimum wage law in a 1941 decision called United States v. Darby.

It will be interesting to see if Raese’s strange mix of futuristic weapons systems and constitutional ignorance plays any better in 2012 than it did in 2010. Raese, however, probably shouldn’t hold his breath. Even though Republicans generally did well in 2010, tenthers such as Raese, Joe Miller (R-AK), Sharon Angle (R-NV) and Ken Buck (R-CO) got beat back by voters who had little interest in electing a Senate determined to tear up the Constitution.

For the sixth time, Democratic lawmakers are reviving a bill that would allow undocumented immigrants to pay in-state tuition rates at Colorado universities as senators introduced the bill, state-version of the DREAM Act, Wednesday. Last year, the Colorado Senate passed the bill, but it died in the House on a 7-6 party line vote in the education committee.

Democrats have continually tweaked the bill to try to garner Republican support. Last year, the bill stipulated that students who were undocumented immigrants and spent at least three years in a Colorado high school could pay in-state tuition but would be “ineligible for a Colorado stipend granted to legal in-state tuition residents.” Sen. Angela Giron (D) said she hopes Republicans support the bill with the additional changes, explaining that the state can’t wait to enact it:

“None of us want to create an underclass of people,” Giron said. “The state can’t afford that, and this country can’t afford a permanent underclass. They’re here. Let’s make the most of it.”

The new bill differs from last year’s because it includes an option for colleges to refuse to participate. Giron said the caveat was added to appeal to Republicans who opposed the plan last year. [...] She hopes Republicans who viewed the proposal last year as a reward and an incentive for illegal immigration will rethink their positions.

“The census show people that this is an issue that they at least have to pay attention to and take more seriously,” Giron said. “We need to look at the population in our state and across this country. It affects who we elect in what they support.”

Republicans have argued that allowing undocumented immigrants to pay in-state tuition would incentivize illegal immigration. “Are we teaching a new generation that it’s OK not to follow the laws of our country?” state Rep. Robert Ramírez (R) said in 2011. He voted no in 2011 on the tuition bill.

So far, about a dozen states allow undocumented immigrants to pay in-state tuition at colleges. In Georgia, state Rep. Alisha Thomas Morgan (D) said she plans to introduce similar legislation during the Georgia legislature’s 2012 session.

ThinkProgress reported last week that Kansas House Speaker Mike O’Neal (R) was forced to apologize to First Lady Michelle Obama after forwarding an email to fellow lawmakers that called her “Mrs. YoMama” and compared her to the Grinch.

Earlier that same week, the Lawrence Journal-World was sent another email that O’Neal had forwarded to House Republicans that referred to President Obama and a Bible verse that says “Let his days be few” and calls for his children to be without a father and his wife to be widowed.

Nick Sementelli at Faith in Public Life notes that Psalm 109, which is a prayer for the death of a leader, became a popular conservative meme after Obama’s election. The “tongue-in-cheek” prayer for the president was seen on bumper stickers. The relevant part of the psalm reads:

Let his days be few; and let another take his office

May his children be fatherless and his wife a widow.

May his children be wandering beggars; may they be driven from their ruined homes.

May a creditor seize all he has; may strangers plunder the fruits of his labor.

May no one extend kindness to him or take pity on his fatherless children.

O’Neal forwarded the prayer with his own message: “At last — I can honestly voice a Biblical prayer for our president! Look it up — it is word for word! Let us all bow our heads and pray. Brothers and Sisters, can I get an AMEN? AMEN!!!!!!”

O’Neal’s office refuses to apologize for the email, insisting that the message was only referring to Obama’s days in office. Sementelli notes the response of a Rockford Register Star columnist who explains why this excuse won’t do.

Speaking to a reader he writes, “You say that verse 8 of Psalm 109, as applied to President Obama, does not suggest a wish for his death. But the first five words of verse 8 are: ‘Let his days be few.’ And verse 9 says: ‘Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.’…You suggest yourself that scripture should not be ‘taken out of context.’ Well, the context of Psalm 109 is a wish for someone’s death.”

Almost immediately after President Obama’s recess appointment of Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Richard Cordray ended the Senate GOP’s lawless effort to shut down that agency by filibustering anyone appointed to lead it, those same senators started spouting false claims that the president’s actions were unconstitutional. Earlier this week, however, Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley suggested that he may go even further, retaliating against Obama by escalating the Senate GOP’s already unprecedentedly aggressive campaign of obstruction against the president’s nominees:

Grassley, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said today he prefers first seeking some Senate Democrats to join in a public pushback to Obama’s four recess appointments Jan. 4, including the installation of Richard Cordray as the new director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Short of that, Grassley said, Republicans may have to go it alone with tough actions that could include holding up pending nominations from a Senate confirmation vote.

“We have got to stand our ground,” Grassley said in an interview. “You can’t let a president who takes an oath to uphold the Constitution go around the Constitution. That’s what the checks and balances are.”

Let’s be absolutely clear about what is going on here. Grassley is mad at President Obama, but his retaliation will not really hurt President Obama. Obama lives in a very nice house and enjoys a fine life regardless of whether the Treasury Department has an Undersecretary for Domestic Finance or whether the federal courts have an adequate slate of judges. The people who will be hurt by Grassley’s tantrum are the millions of consumers who depend on functioning federal agencies to safeguard their rights, the workers who depend on workplace safety and fair wage laws in order to provide for them families, and the thousands of litigants who wait months or years for justice in a judiciary burdened by far too many vacancies.

Grassley is wrong on the facts when he claims that Obama’s actions are the least bit unconstitutional, but everyone makes factually mistakes and such errors can be forgiven. What is unforgivable is Grassley’s willingness to punish millions of innocent bystanders simply to exact some kind of revenge against President Obama.