While most of the coverage of skyrocketing spending by SuperPACs and tax-exempt 501(c)(4) organizations has focused on the tens of millions going to presidential campaign attack ads, one statewide candidate has been the beneficiary of $1.1 million in spending by right-wing groups already this cycle — a radical attorney named Ted Cruz.

Cruz, a former Texas state solicitor general, is seeking the Republican nomination for Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison’s (R-TX) open senate seat. Although his two primary opponents have raised much more in campaign cash to date, every “independent expenditure” reported for the race, to date, has been aimed at helping Cruz’s candidacy or hurting his opponents.

Yesterday, Sen. Jim DeMint’s (R-SC) Senate Conservatives Fund reported spending $500,000 on a pro-Cruz independent expenditure. Likewise, the conservative Club for Growth, Club for Growth Action, and former Rep. Dick Armey’s (R-TX) FreedomWorks have spent more than $634,000 on pro-Cruz ads and over $468,000 on ads bashing primary opponent Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst for being a “moderate.”

So what’s so exciting about Cruz that far right groups are willing to pay top dollar to put him in the Senate? Cruz excited anti-government groups with his unconstitutional proposal for a backdoor method of state nullification of federal laws and the Affordable Care Act. He co-authored a white paper advocating a radical reading of the Constitution that would lead to Medicaid and most federal education programs being declared unconstitutional, and he supports an equally radical plan to privatize much of Social Security.

Moreover, if Cruz is elected, he would quickly find several new friends who share his inability to distinguish the Constitution from the Tea Party’s policy preferences. Sens. Mike Lee (R-UT), Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Rand Paul (R-KY) have all pushed even more radical efforts to declare much of the Twentieth Century unconstitutional.

Newt Gingrich launched a now-infamous tirade against moderator Juan Williams during Monday night’s GOP debate after Williams dared to ask him if he could understand why some African-Americans were offended by Gingrich’s obsession with food stamps and child labor. “No, I don’t see that,” Gingrich sneered back.

Williams later insisted he wasn’t offended by Gingrich’s pointed defense, but did say his food stamps rhetoric is “very racial and…unless I missed it, black people haven’t been out there demanding food stamps, or marching for food stamps.”

Today, during a campaign stop in South Carolina, Gingrich recalled his exchange with Williams and used the same kind of suggestive language that Williams had objected to — this time directed at Williams himself:

GINGRICH: I had a very interesting dialogue Monday night in Myrtle Beach with Juan Williams about the idea of work, which seemed to Juan Williams to be a strange, distant concept.

Watch it:

Many pundits have seen racial undertones in Gingrich’s belittling of Williams during the debate. “That’s the way I like to spend my Martin Luther King, Jr. Day: watching Newt Gingrich sneer at Juan Williams, a black man, for having the temerity to ask him” a tough question, New York Times columnist Charles Blow wrote.

Gingrich’s equally insulting assessment of the debate exchange likely won’t help.

Despite the Obama administration’s new policy of suspending deportation proceedings against undocumented immigrants who pose no threat to national security or public safety, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials are set to deport a 59-year-old grandmother of four with family members who are U.S. citizens.

A routine traffic stop last June landed Josefina Rodriguez-Vega in the cross hairs of federal immigration enforcement. She was arrested for driving without a license, but released under house arrest and given until January 5 to “voluntarily” leave the country. When Rodriguez-Vega tried to stay in the country after that date by removing her GPS-monitoring ankle bracelet, officials took her to an immigration detention facility.

Maryland faith and community leaders have rallied around Rodriguez-Vega. Dozens of Hagerstown residents protested her pending deportation outside of ICE offices in Baltimore on Wednesday:

“She’s not a criminal,” said her son, David. “She never did anything wrong to be in the process of deportation. She came here from Mexico because her family is here and there’s only poverty there.”

“The question, ‘Why Josefina?’ is critical because she is a Grandmother, she has no criminal record, she does have U.S. citizens in her family, and she has deep ties to her community,” said Elizabeth Alex with Casa de Maryland.What makes this case unique is that it directly contradicts a new policy by the Department of Homeland Security. The policy puts a priority on deporting criminals, not 59-year-old grandmothers.”

But a spokeswoman for ICE says Rodriguez-Vega became a fugitive with criminal misdemeanor convictions when she removed her GPS-monitoring ankle bracelet.

In short, Rodriguez-Vega was caught in a catch-22: she had no criminal record before being snared by ICE, but the act of resisting deportation made her a criminal eligible to be sent back to Mexico.

Officials have not given a date for Rordriguez-Vega’s deportation, but Elizabeth Alex argues that she is a classic example of someone who does not deserve to be deported after living in the U.S. for six years.

A New York Times report in November showed that the policy of prioritizing the deportation of criminals over nonviolent immigrants with deep family ties in the U.S. has been implemented unevenly. A recent test run of the policy in Denver granted reprieve to just 1,600 immigrants out of 7,900 cases, and they were not given legal immigration status.

As ThinkProgress previously explained, the state of Texas currently does not have any legally valid congressional maps. Because it gained four new congressional seats, it could not use its existing maps even if the Constitution would permit it to do so. The map drawn by the state legislature has not been “pre-cleared” as is required under the Voting Rights Act because of concerns that it discriminates on the basis of race, and an interim map drawn by federal judges in Texas was blocked by the Supreme Court late last year pending a more complete review of that interim map by the justices.

Many voting rights advocates feared that the conservative Supreme Court would use this case to make sweeping changes to the laws protecting voters, either by eliminating the judiciary’s authority to draw interim maps such as the ones at issue here or potentially even by striking down key parts of the Voting Rights Act. Fortunately, those fears proved unfounded this time around. The crux of their holding is that the lower court erred in drawing these particular maps because they did not treat the state legislature’s preferred maps as a baseline and depart from that baseline only when necessary to rescue the map from illegality:

In [the challenger's] view, this Court’s precedents require district courts to ignore any state plan that has not received §5 preclearance. But the cases upon which appellees rely hold only that a district court may not adopt an unprecleared plan as its own. They say nothing about whether a district court may take guidance from the lawful policies incorporated insuch a plan for aid in drawing an interim map. Indeed, in Upham this Court ordered a District Court to defer to the unobjectionable aspects of a State’s plan even though that plan had already been denied preclearance.

In this case, the District Court stated that it had “giv[en] effect to as much of the policy judgments in the Legislature’s enacted map as possible.” At the same time, however, the court said that it was required to draw an “independent map” following “neutral principles that advance the interest of the collective public good.” In the court’s view, it “was not required to give any deference to the Legislature’s enacted plan,” and it instead applied principles that it determined “place the interests of the citizens of Texas first.” To the extent the District Court exceeded its mission to draw interim maps that do not violate the Constitution or the Voting Rights Act, and substituted its own concept of “the collective public good” for the Texas Legislature’s determination of which policies serve “the interests of the citizens of Texas,” the court erred.

The partisan upshot of this decision is that it is probably good news for Republicans. In an earlier case called Vieth v. Jubelirer, the Supreme Court largely abdicated oversight over politically motivated gerrymanders, thus enabling political parties to be as aggressive as they want in drawing maps that achieve their partisan goals. Because the Texas legislature is overwhelming dominated by Republicans, today’s decision requiring the lower court to use their map as the baseline in drawing an interim map will increase the likelihood that partisan gerrymandering intended to favor the GOP will remain present in the interim map the lower court eventually produces.