In states across the country, conservative lawmakers have made attempts to restrict voting rights through voter identification laws, limits on same-day registration, and other methods. These laws are frequently justified as necessary to fight voter fraud — despite the fact that a person is more likely to be struck by lightning than to commit in-person voter fraud. With efforts to pass such laws failing in some states and getting blocked by the federal government in others, one official has apparently decided to prove that voter fraud exists by allegedly going out and committing it himself.

A trial began in Indiana today for former Secretary of State Charlie White (R), who, as secretary of state, is supposed to oversee the state’s elections and ensure their integrity. Instead, White allegedly committed several acts of voter fraud, leading the state to charge with him with seven felonies, Fox News reports:

White was indicted in March, accused of fraud, perjury, theft, voting in the wrong precinct, submitting a false voter registration change of address and casting a “false, fictitious or fraudulent ballot.”

“Charlie White registered to vote at a place he didn’t live. That was in contravention of the law,” said Karen Celestino-Horseman, a lawyer for the Indiana State Democratic Party, which brought the allegations against White at the Indiana Recount Commission. “It was not his residence.”

According to the state, White allegedly was registered and voted in the wrong district while falsely claiming his ex-wife’s residence as his own, and served on the city council while representing a district in which he did not live. White has maintained his innocence on all charges.

White’s voter fraud likely wouldn’t have been prevented by the state’s voter ID law, and his trial could soon be followed by another in New Hampshire, where activists working for conservative videographer James O’Keefe may have knowingly committed voter fraud, potentially in violation of state law, while attempting to prove how easy it was to obtain a ballot with a false name. Multiple state officials have called on authorities to “arrest and prosecute” the activists.

Former Solicitor General Paul Clement is the high-priced lawyer of choice for conservative lawmakers eager to mangle the law and the Constitution at taxpayers’ expense. Clement will defend Arizona’s unconstitutional SB 1070 law before the Supreme Court, he is spearheading the challenge to the Affordable Care Act, and he is charging the American taxpayer $520 an hour to defend the unconstitutional Defense of Marriage Act on behalf of Speaker John Boehner and his fellow House Republicans.

According to a contract released last week, South Carolina taxpayers will now be on the hook for the same price to pay for Clement’s services defending an illegal voter ID law:

South Carolina taxpayers will be on the hook for a high-powered Washington attorney’s $520-an-hour rate when the state sues the federal government this week to protect its voter ID law.

That litigation could cost more than $1 million, according to two South Carolina attorneys who have practiced before the U.S. Supreme Court.

S.C. Attorney General Alan Wilson has more than five dozen staff attorneys to handle the state’s legal affairs, but Wilson hired a former U.S. solicitor general to litigate the voter ID case at a rate of $520 an hour, a contract obtained last week reveals.

South Carolina’s taxpayers aren’t just paying this unnecessary and unnecessarily high fee, they are paying it to defend illegal voter suppression. Voter ID laws are popular among conservative lawmakers because they disproportionately disenfranchise students, low income and minority voters — all of whom tend to be more likely to cast votes for left-of-center candidates than the electorate as a whole. Accordingly, these laws exist for the purpose of shifting the electorate rightward.

Such manipulation of the electorate isn’t just disturbing, it is also illegal because the federal Voting Rights Act prohibits state laws that which are either passed specifically to target minority voters or which have a greater impact on minority voters than on others. If the courts pay even the barest heed to the law, they will strike South Carolina’s voter ID law down in a heartbeat.

When HB 56, Alabama’s harmful immigration law, went into effect in the fall, the most immediate effect were the immigrant families who fled the state. Businesses lost their workers and customers, farmers watched their crops rot without enough workers to harvest them, and parents pulled their children out of school or kept them home from school out of fear.

But supporters of the law thought they had found a silver lining; after only a month, they claimed the immigration law was already causing the state’s unemployment rate to drop. And as the rate has continued to drop a little each month since portions of the law, officials and right-wing media have perpetuated the myth that HB 56 has caused the declining unemployment rate. After three months of declines, the bill’s sponsor, state Sen. Scott Beason finally chimed in last week to celebrate the specious connection:

“Since the anti-illegal immigration law went into effect, Alabama has seen a tremendous drop in unemployment. A drop that far outpaces the other states in the region,” said Alabama State Senator Scott Beason. ”In three months Alabama has dropped 1.7 points to a level below the national average.” [...]

“I promised that the anti-illegal immigration law would open up thousands of jobs for Alabamians, and it has done that. People are going back to work.

“The critics may whine, but many of our neighbors have jobs again. I know those folks are thankful for the opportunity to work and support their families, and that opportunity was opened up by HB-56.”

Beason ignores the fact that even Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley (R), who signed the immigration bill into law, has admitted there is no data to back up the connection. And instead of opening up jobs, businesses have seen jobs lost because of HB 56. At least one jobs recruiter in the state has said the state may actually be driving away foreign companies looking to build new plants because of the immigration law.

Taking a closer look at the numbers shows that, as the unemployment rate dropped from 9.8 percent in September down to 8.1 percent in December, the workforce has also shrunk, rather than adding more jobs. For example, in October 3,578 Alabamians gained jobs, while 6,258 either died, left the state, or stopped looking for employment. And between December 2011 and November 2011, the civilian workforce in Alabama dropped from 2,145,259 people in November to 2,131,994 in December.

Beason and others who raise up Alabama’s immigration law as a job-creating measure are relying on a sleight of hand to hide the true harm behind the measure.

One of the oddest arguments made by the plaintiffs now challenging the Affordable Care Act before the Supreme Court is a claim that, if just one small part of the law is declared unconstitutional, the whole law must fall with it. The overwhelming majority of judges who have heard ACA cases rejected the ridiculous claim that any part of the law is unconstitutional. And, of the handful of judges to strike part of the law down, only one — the guy who included an explicit shout-out to the Tea Party in his opinion — accepted the legally indefensible position that the whole law must fall.

In their attempt to see the entire Affordable Care Act fall, however, several of the plaintiffs challenging the law committed what should be a fatal blunder — they effectively admit that their entire constitutional challenge to the law is garbage.

The primary attack on the ACA targets its provision requiring most Americans to either carry health insurance or pay slightly more income taxes — the so-called “individual mandate.” This insurance coverage provision exists because without it, the law’s other provisions ensuring that people with preexisting conditions can obtain insurance cannot be implemented. If patients can wait until they get sick to buy insurance, they will drain all the money out of an insurance plan that they have not previously paid into, massively driving up costs for the rest of the plan’s consumers.

This problem doesn’t just make the insurance coverage requirement good policy, it also makes it constitutional. The Constitution doesn’t just give Congress sweeping authority to regulate the national economy, it also authorizes it “[t]o make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution” regulations of interstate commerce. As conservative Justice Antonin Scalia explains, this means that, “where Congress has the authority to enact a regulation of interstate commerce, it possesses every power needed to make that regulation effective.”

So, with this background in mind, consider the following passage from the private plaintiffs’ brief arguing that the entire law must fall if the insurance coverage rule goes down:

The mandate was intended to be a direct subsidy to insurance companies, as compensation for requiring them (in the guaranteed-issue provision) to insure against “risks” that have already come to pass and forbidding them (in the community-rating provision) from using actuarially sound insurance premiums. The mandate thus works to counteract the powerful inflationary impacts of these other provisions, which would otherwise make premiums in the individual insurance market prohibitively expensive, thereby frustrating Congress’ goal of affordable health insurance. And Congress further viewed the mandate as necessary to prevent “adverse selection” to “game” the new insurance rules, which proponents warned would spark a “death spiral” in insurance.

The guaranteed-issue and community-rating requirements thus cannot operate without the mandate in the manner intended by Congress. Rather, “their associated force—not one or the other but both combined—was deemed by Congress to be necessary to achieve the end sought.” To strike the mandate alone would impermissibly eliminate a central quid pro quo of the Act. If the mandate falls, the guaranteed-issue and community-rating regulations must therefore fall with it, as the Government itself has conceded.

So the plaintiffs admit that, without the insurance coverage requirement, premiums will become “prohibitively expensive” and that the ACA’s provisions protecting people with preexisting conditions or who otherwise are highly likely to need health care (what are known as “guaranteed-issue” and “community-rating” laws in the jargon of health policy) “cannot operate without the mandate in the manner intended by Congress.” This is a flat out admission that the Scalia Rule applies in this case. Guaranteed issue and community rating are regulations of interstate commerce, and thus Congress has “every power needed” to make them effective — including the power to enact the insurance coverage requirement.

I discuss this rather breathtaking admission at greater length in an amicus brief I filed Friday on behalf of several health provider organizations, which also includes some more details about why the plaintiffs’ attempt to take out the entire ACA has no basis in law. Ultimately, however, there is no need whatsoever for the justices to consider how much of the law stands or falls without the coverage requirement. The private plaintiffs already gave away the farm when they admitted that their entire legal challenge rests on a crumbling foundation.

MIAMI, Florida — Florida Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam (R), who previously served in Congress, condemned the harsh anti-immigration laws passed over the past two years in Georgia, Alabama, Arizona, and elsewhere, calling them “devastating” and “wrong” Friday. At a panel discussion of the Hispanic Leadership Network conference here, Putnam said the laws have “been very harmful to their economy” of the states that passed them, and said it was fortunate Florida didn’t follow in their wake.

Responding to a question about whether states should be able to enforce those laws, Putnam replied:

PUTNAM: Florida flirted with it last year, but thank goodness didn’t do it, because it would have been devastating to our state, to our reputation, to our economy. The issue is that under the Constitution, there’s a really narrow bandwidth of options for states to deal with immigration. … [T]hey’re focusing on the enforcement piece, and have had really devastating effects on their economy. Georgia’s got a labor report out, Alabama’s got a labor report out, that has been very harmful to their economy. Because in swinging wildly out of frustration that Washington hasn’t done something, they’ve passed bills that are causing their businesses and their economies great harm. They’ve seen an evacuation of workers. … It has give us a real world, real time example of what happens when you get these state-based polices wrong.

Watch it:

Last week, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) announced he would take revenge for President Obama’s decision to make four recess appointments by engaging in a scorched earth campaign of obstruction against the president’s nominees. In his weekly address this weekend, Obama punched back:

Just two days ago, a senator from Utah promised to obstruct every single American I appoint to a judgeship or public service position – unless I fire the consumer watchdog I put in place to protect the American people from financial schemes or malpractice.

For the most part, it’s not that this senator thinks these nominees are unqualified. In fact, all of the judicial nominees being blocked have bipartisan support. And almost 90 percent have unanimous support from the Judiciary Committee.

Instead, one of his aides told reporters that the senator plans to, and I’m quoting here, “Delay and slow the process in order to get the President’s attention.”

Watch it:

Lee is, in many ways, the perfect foil to the president. While Obama wants nothing more than for the Senate to consider his nominees in a timely manner and give them an up or down vote, Lee’s short political career is marred by escalating displays of extremism and embarrassing overreach. A sample of Lee’s beliefs include:

• Child Labor Laws Are Unconstitutional: In 2010, Lee delivered a lengthy lecture on the Constitution where he praised a discarded 1918 Supreme Court decision holding that federal child labor laws violate the Constitution. In Lee’s words “This may sound harsh, but [the Constitution] was designed to be that way. It was designed to be a little bit harsh.”
• And So Is Social Security and Medicare: In the same lecture, Lee claimed that any federal program that provides health care or a retirement plan also violates the Constitution.
• And So Is Nearly Everything Else: Other things Mike Lee believes are unconstitutional include FEMA, food stamps, the FDA, and income assistance for the poor.
• The Constitution Needs A Depression Amendment: Lee is the lead sponsor of a radical constitutional amendment that would force such swift and draconian spending cuts that it would “throw about 15 million more people out of work, double the unemployment rate from 9 percent to approximately 18 percent, and cause the economy to shrink by about 17 percent instead of growing by an expected 2 percent.”
• Extorting The American People: In an interview with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, Lee admitted that he was engaged in a campaign of extortion to force Congress to enact his radical constitutional amendment during last year’s default crisis. Lee agreed that he wants the Senate “by a two-thirds vote, to pass a constitutional amendment or he want[s] the house to come down.”
• Corporate Slush Funds For Politicians: Lee also attempted to take Citizens United to an unheard of level by creating his own slush fund, bankrolled by unlimited corporate and other donations, which Lee could then dole out to other politicians who support his radical agenda.
• Sabotage: And, of course, let’s not forget that the entire reason why President Obama needed to make his recent recess appointments is because senators like Mike Lee were filibustering Obama’s nominees to sabotage entire agencies. In Lee’s words, “I feel it is my duty to oppose [CFPB Director Richard Cordray's] confirmation as part of my opposition to the creation of CFPB itself.”