Yesterday, Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney announced the endorsement of former California Gov. Pete Wilson (R) and named Wilson honorary California chair of his campaign.  In a statement touting the endorsement, Romney said “I’m honored to have Governor Pete Wilson’s support, because he’s one of California’s most accomplished leaders.”

Mitt Romney seen with former California Gov. Pete Wilson during Meg Whitman's failed 2010 gubernatorial campaign.

Arturo Vargas, executive director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, called the announcement “baffling,” citing the widespread perception that Wilson’s involvement in Meg Whitman’s 2010 California gubernatorial campaign contributed to her loss — including a stunning 86 percent to 13 percent landslide in favor of Gov. Jerry Brown among Latinos.

Others had sharper words, citing the long list of anti-immigrant politicians already signed up for Romney’s campaign, including Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, the author of the Arizona and Alabama anti-immigrant laws.  ”Romney can’t seem to stop himself from digging deeper and deeper into his hole with Latino voters,” said Eliseo Medina of the Service Employees International Union in a statement reported by the Los Angeles Times. “Here is what Pete Wilson accomplished: He turned Latino voters against the GOP brand.”

It turns out that Romney’s history with Pete Wilson is longer than some likely realize.  Archival news reports accessed on Lexis-Nexis indicate that Mitt Romney attended at least one high-dollar fundraiser to help retire debt from Wilson’s 1994 gubernatorial campaign, one of the most bitterly anti-immigrant campaigns in recent memory.  From a March 29, 1995 article in the Boston Herald:

Wilson later arrived in Boston, where an early evening fund-raiser sponsored by Gov. William F. Weld netted about $110,000 to help pay off the California governor’s 1994 re-election debt.[...]

About a dozen big-dollar contributors, including 1994 GOP Senate nominee Mitt Romney, gathered in the Four Seasons apartment of Weld supporter Thomas Shields to dine on a buffet supper and meet the man Weld said “may very well be” the next president.

While Wilson was at the time preparing for what would be an abortive 1996 presidential run, the fundraiser Romney attended was to retire debt from Wilson’s 1994 campaign, one which Wilson waged based on an outright demonization of illegal immigrants in an effort to boost his previously floundering re-election bid and ensure the passage of Proposition 187, an extreme anti-immigrant ballot measure.

Watch a collection of anti-immigrant/pro-Proposition 187 ads, including the infamous “They Keep Coming” ad, from Wilson’s 1994 campaign:

Proposition 187, which ultimately passed by an overwhelming 59 percent to 41 percent margin, was in many ways a precursor to today’s extreme anti-immigrant laws, including those in Alabama and Arizona authored by Romney adviser Kris Kobach.  Its major provisions are very similar to or even more extreme than those Republicans have passed in recent years:

• Barred undocumented immigrants from the state’s education system: K-12 through higher education.  Schools would also be forced to verify the legal status of not only students, but also their parents.
• Barred undocumented immigrants from receiving care at any publicly-funded health care facility.
• Barred undocumented immigrants from receiving cash assistance and other public social services in the state.
• Required all service providers to report suspected undocumented immigrants to the California Attorney General’s office and Immigration and Naturalization Service (now called Immigration and Customs Enforcement).
• Required police officers to determine the legal status of all persons who were arrested and report those suspected of being undocumented to federal authorities.
• Made the production, distribution and use of false documents felony offenses.
• Made reports on an individual’s status to the attorney general available to any other government entity.
• Prohibited local governments from limiting or failing to implement its provisions in any way.

After a lengthy court battle, Proposition 187 was ultimately declared unconstitutional in 1997 and finally killed by the administration of Governor Gray Davis (D) in 1999.

It’s unclear if Romney ever took a public position on Proposition 187 in 1994; however, any objections he may have had to the virulently anti-immigrant campaign run by Wilson did not stop him from helping to retire the campaign’s debt in early 1995 or from appointing Wilson to a prominent position in his 2012 campaign.

Later today, the Virginia Senate is expected to pass a bill repealing the state’s 18 year-old law limiting firearm purchases to one gun per month. The one-gun-per-month law, which was enacted to eliminate Virginia’s role at the “gun-running center of the East Coast,” is opposed by Gov. Bob McDonnell (R-VA) and is almost certain to cease to exist once the repeal clears the state senate.

It’s important to note that this repeal has absolutely nothing to do with protecting the Second Amendment. Although the Supreme Court held in D.C. v. Heller that individuals enjoy a Second Amendment right to “self-defense” — at least within the confines of their own home — it’s not clear why anyone needs to own an arsenal to protect themselves. At the very least, the Second Amendment allows lawmakers to ask Virginians to wait a month before they can dual-wield pistols against a home intruder, and to wait another month before than can do so with an assault rifle strapped across their back.

Nor are Virginia lawmakers content simply to allow real people to pretend like they are characters from a video game. As the Virginian-Pilot reports, a long list of strange NRA fantasies wait behind the bill repealing the one-gun-per-month rule. A short list includes:

• No Permits for Concealed Carry: Del. Mark Cole (R) introduced a bill eliminating the need to obtain a permit before carrying a concealed firearm.
• No Fingerprints: Sen. William Stanley (R) would prohibit localities from requiring a person to submit their fingerprints when they apply for a concealed-carry permit.
• Vigilante College Professors: The infamous Del. Bob Marshall (R) introduced a bill that would enable college professors to carry a concealed firearm on campus.
• Guns In Airports: Del. Richard Anderson’s (R) bill would repeal the prohibition on guns in airport terminals.

None of these bills have anything to do with the Second Amendment either, which allows concealed carry regulation and allows guns to be banned from “sensitive places.”

Newsday reports that Wendy Long, a former law clerk to tenther Justice Clarence Thomas who is best known for spearheading several inaccurate race baiting attacks against Justice Sonia Sotomayor during Sotomayor’s confirmation process, is considering running for Senate against Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) this year. Long, however, is not simply significant for her racially-questionable attacks on Sotomayor. She would also be the latest GOP Senate candidate to bring both genuine legal credentials and a deeply radical tenther vision of the Constitution to the race.

In 2008, Long penned a book review which not only slams the late Justice Thurgood Marshall’s rather banal statement that the original Constitution was a flawed document because it allowed slavery and discrimination, it also embraces one of her former boss’ most radical views — praising an opinion by Justice Thomas which would lead to everything from national child labor laws to the federal ban on whites-only lunch counters being declared unconstitutional. Sadly, such bizarre distortions of the Constitution has become increasingly common on the campaign trial in the post-Tea Party era:

• Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), a former law clerk to Justice Samuel Alito, shares Long and Thomas’ radical belief that national child labor laws violate the Constitution. He’s also claimed that Medicare and Social Security — among many other things — are unconstitutional.
• Ted Cruz, a former Texas solicitor general and law clerk to Chief Justice William Rehnquist, proposed using an unconstitutional backdoor method to get states to nullify the Affordable Care Act and he co-authored a white paper advocating a reading of the Constitution that would eliminate Medicaid and most federal education funding.
• Joe Miller, a Yale law grad and former federal magistrate judge, ran for Senate in 2010 on the platform that pretty much everything is unconstitutional — including Social Security, Medicare, the federal minimum wage, and unemployment benefits.

There is hardly an outpouring of support for this kind of candidate. Long is far from the favorite to win in a solid blue state like New York, especially after Gillibrand so recently spanked her GOP opponent during a cycle that otherwise favored Republicans. Likewise, the six outspoken tenther candidates who ran for Senate in 2010 massively underperformed the remainder of the GOP. Miller lost to a candidate whose name wasn’t even on the ballot. And Lee won in large part because he was able to manipulate the Utah’ GOP’s undemocratic method of choosing Senate candidates in order to get his name on the ballot in this blood red state.

Nevertheless, the emergence of multiple candidates who combine genuine legal credentials with a desire to declare nearly the entire Twentieth Century unconstitutional is a troubling trend, and one that could have long term consequences for American policy. Few Democratic officials have the same comfort discussing constitutional matters as a Mike Lee or a Wendy Long, even if Lee and Long are consistently wrong about how they read the Constitution. If this trend continues, it will mean that voters will receive a continuous diet of constitutional garbage with little constitutional reality presented to them as an alternative. And if only one side makes its case to the electorate, it won’t be long before the inmates take over the asylum.

Though Republicans enjoy full control over Maine’s lawmaking process, they’ve dropped a push to require certain photo identification in order to vote.

Though Maine Republicans were considering voter ID legislation at the beginning of the year, Democrats vociferously objected because the bill could prevent thousands of Mainers from voting, particularly elderly individuals. On Friday, Republicans acceded to those objections, striking the voter ID language from an election law bill. This is the second time voter ID has failed to pass the GOP-controlled Maine legislature. Last year, a voter ID bill failed in the Senate after first being passed by the House.

In 2011, half a dozen states passed similar voter ID measures, from Texas to Wisconsin to South Carolina. As a result, millions of poor, rural or minority voters could be barred from voting in the 2012 election, a level of disenfranchisement not seen since the Jim Crow era.

Maine Republicans were chastened during the 2011 session after they passed a bill to eliminate the state’s 38 year-old law allowing for Election Day registration, only to see their move overturned by a citizens veto in November. More than 60 percent of Mainers rebuked the legislature and voted to restore Election Day registration.

State Rep. Diane Russell (D) pointed to this episode to explain why Republicans opted against pursuing voter ID again this year. “Last November, 60% of Maine voters overwhelmingly rejected the Republican election suppression agenda,” Russell, who sits on the committee that removed the voter ID language, told ThinkProgress. “It is a real testament to Maine voters that Republicans decided against pursuing another failed election suppression policy by killing voter ID.”

Former state Sen. David Trahan (R), who served until December 2011, agreed with this take. “I do think that the referendum question–Question 1–changed that dynamic,” Trahan told the Maine Public Broadcasting Network. “And I think you’re going to see some gun-shy folks revisiting something to do with voting.”

Friday’s move likely puts voter ID to rest in Maine for 2012.

In an excellent piece highlighting the impact a second Obama term could have on the federal judiciary, the AP’s Mark Sherman provides an important reminder of what is at stake in this election:

The next president, whether it’s Obama or a Republican, also has a reasonable shot at transforming the majority on the Supreme Court, because three justices representing the closely divided court’s liberal and conservative wings, as well as its center, will turn 80 before the next presidential term ends.

The three justices are Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the leader of the court’s liberal wing, conservative Antonin Scalia, and Anthony Kennedy, who leans conservative but on some issues provides a decisive vote for the liberals.

Kennedy, of course, does a whole lot more than simply “lean” conservative. Although his moderate views on issues such as gay rights and detainee treatment are welcome, Kennedy consistently places the interests of wealth individuals and corporations ahead of the more than 99 percent of Americans who cannot afford to buy and sell elections. Kennedy authored the egregious Citizens United decision that unleashed unlimited corporate efforts to buy elections and which led to the creation of Super PACs that empower billionaires to buy off candidates. He’s also consistently voted to allow corporations to force consumers and workers into a privatized, corporate-owned court system that overwhelmingly favors corporations.

If Obama is reelected, however, he could have the opportunity to replace Scalia or Kennedy and transform a Court that has bent over backwards for the one percent into a Court interested in enforcing laws enacted to benefit all Americans. Perhaps this is why super-wealthy donors taking advantage of Kennedy’s error in Citizens United are overwhelming using their vast fortunes to try to defeat Obama.

Last month, an administrative law judge in Georgia issued a widely-mocked decision rejecting President Obama’s attorneys’ argument that the president should not be forced to testify in a case brought by several birther activists who claim that he is ineligible to be president. On Friday, however, the judge finally decided to end this charade, holding that President Obama is indeed eligible to hold his current office:

In 2009, the Indiana Court of Appeals (“Indiana Court”) addressed facts and issues similar to those before this Court. In Arkeny, the plaintiffs sought to prevent certification of Mr. Obama as an eligible candidate for president because his is not a natural born citizen. The plaintiffs argued, as the Plaintiffs argue before this Court, that “there is a very clear distinction between a ‘citizen of the United States’ and a ‘natural born Citizens,’ and the difference involves having [two] parent of U.S. citizenship, owning no foreign allegiance.” The Indiana Court rejected the argument that Mr. Obama was ineligible, stating that children born within the United States are natural born citizens regardless of the citizenship of their parents. The Court finds the decision and analysis of Arkeny persuasive.

Even if this Georgia administrative law judge had traveled even further down the rabbit hole and held that President Obama cannot be president, it is exceedingly unlikely that his decision would not have been rejected by a higher authority. Nevertheless, it is important that this judge decided to back away from his earlier decision.

Two years ago, conservative activists uncovered two judges who were willing to ignore nearly 200 years of precedent and the text of the Constitution itself in order to hold the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional. One of these judges was a longtime Republican activist who was best known for producing “a miasma of misplaced morality and prudishness masquerading as social science” when he lead the Reagan administration’s anti-pornography commission. The other produced an opinion containing nearly four dozen errors of fact or law and which also included an explicit shout out to the Tea Party.

Nevertheless, these two deeply erroneous opinions were enough to confuse reporters who lack a background in constitutional law into believing that the utterly frivolous case against health reform might have merit. Worse, it emboldened conservative lawyers who knew better into pretending that the two judges were right. It remains very unlikely that the Supreme Court will strike the law down, but it is at least as likely that the case would have died more than a year ago if these two judges hadn’t so emboldened the law’s opponents.

Birtherism is no less absurd than tentherism, so there is no good reason that one outlier judge should breathe new life into an attack on Obama’s presidency that is widely viewed as frivolous. Nevertheless, the fact that the case against the Affordable Care Act is viewed today as anything other than a joke is proof of the power outlier judges have to transform the ridiculous into the possible.