Late last year, the Montana Supreme Court refused to follow the Supreme Court’s erroneous Citizens United decision and upheld that state’s longstanding ban on corporate money in politics. Although we criticized that decision shortly thereafter — a lower court must follow the Supreme Court’s decisions even when they are obviously and tragically erroneous — the Montana justices’ overreaching does not excuse the Supreme Court’s far greater sin in handing down Citizens United in the first place. As we said before, “[t]he 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.”

The day has now come for the Supreme Court to fix its most egregious error since Bush v. Gore:

Challengers to Montana’s ban on corporate independent expenditures—recently upheld by the Montana Supreme Court—have asked Justice Anthony Kennedy to put a hold on the state court’s ruling and have urged the full Court to reverse it. . . .

“The Montana Supreme Court held the Ban constitutional despite the holding in Citizens United v. FEC, 130 S.Ct. 876 (2010), that `[n]o sufficient governmental interest justifies limits on the political speech of nonprofit or for-profit corporations.’ Immediate relief is needed to prevent irreparable harm to the Corporations’ First Amendment free-speech right. Montana’s primary elections are on June 5, making it vital that planning begin now for independent expenditures before the election.”

Citizens United was wrong the day it was decided, and it has only succeeded in refuting itself during the two years it’s been in effect. One of the core conclusions in Citizens United was the majority’s statement that so-called “independent expenditures” — as opposed to contributions directly to campaigns — “do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.”

It’s unclear how anyone could have ever believed this was true, but it’s impossible to believe this now. Casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson’s family, for example, gave $11 million to a Super PAC intended to elect Newt Gingrich, and Gingrich met personally with Adelson after this money started flowing. Mitt Rommey has also met with Adelson, and, while it will never be known what the two men said to each other, Romney managed to extract from that meeting an assurance that Adelson “will be behind him 100 percent should he become the nominee.”

Maybe there really were five justices who didn’t understand that this was bound to happen when Citizens United was handed down in 2010, but, in the wake of these backroom meetings between top funders and their candidates, the justices cannot possibly deny the fact that Citizens United leads to corruption or at least the appearance of it. It’s time for the justices to simply admit they were wrong the first time around and overrule Citizens United.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) has left no doubt that he cannot tell the United States Constitution from a buzzsaw designed to reduce America’s safety net into sawdust. Long before he became a lawmaker, he was on record claiming that Social Security and Medicare are unconstitutional.

Speaking on a panel at the Conservative Political Action Conference yesterday, Lee admitted to the full implications of his backwards view of our founding document. All spending on national programs intended to secure Americans’ retirement or provide for their health are unconstitutional:

QUESTION: What programs that we now call entitlement spending are part of the enumerated powers of Article I, Section 8 [of the Constitution]?

LEE: There are those that will tell you that those are based on the Spending Clause, in, uh, clause one of Article I, Section 8. That was the justification advanced at the time these programs were created. And it rested on an expansive interpretation provided by the Supreme Court saying, in essence, Congress can spend anything it wants, as long as it has tax revenues coming in, or, as it turns out, even if it doesn’t. It can spend it on whatever it wants.

This can’t be reconciled with the original understanding of the clause. If you go back to founding era documents, to discussions around state ratification debates — the Federalist Papers — they understood the Spending Clause as being there to spend money on those powers that were duly enumerated. . . . If these kinds of programs, ah, were to come forward and we were really following the original understanding of the Constitution, we’d say let’s do these at the state level, and the local level. Never at the federal level.

Watch it:

Lee’s odd reading of the Constitution cannot be squared with the text of the document itself. Had Lee actually bothered to read the founding document, he’d know that the United States may “collect taxes . . . to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States.” Medicare, Social Security and other such safety net programs clearly provide for the nation’s “general welfare” and thus are unambiguously constitutional if you take the text of the document seriously.

Moreover, Lee’s description of early constitutional history is misleading at best. The reality is that there were two very distinct camps regarding how the Constitution should be interpreted in the early days of the Republic. James Madison led one camp, which believed that America should read the Constitution much more narrowly than its text suggests — although, to Madison’s great credit, he openly admitted that his preferred reading of the Constitution is inconsistent with its “literal” meaning.

Alexander Hamilton led a different faction which rejected the idea that the Constitution creates restrictions that don’t exist in its text, and the Supreme Court unanimously adopted Hamilton’s view in the very first Supreme Court decision to consider the question. More recently, conservative Justice Antonin Scalia laughed openly at the suggestion that this debate should be reopened, stating that “of course it’s not” the proper role of judges to second guess how Congress decides to spend money.

In other words, Lee’s position doesn’t just place him at the lunatic fringe of constitutional thinkers, it also puts him at the lunatic fringe of conservative constitutional thinkers.

Last year, Gov. John Kasich and other Ohio Republicans enacted a sweeping “elections reform” law to allowing poll workers to refuse to tell voters where they can vote, shortens the state’s early voting period, ban in-person early voting on Sundays, and prohibit boards of election from mailing absentee ballot requests to voters. Ohio voters responded by successfully collecting hundreds of thousands of signatures and forcing a repeal referendum. Though the law would otherwise have gone into effect for this year’s presidential election, the successful petition drive put the reforms on hold for this year –and it will die unless voters back in in the November elections.

Perhaps chastened by last year’s overwhelming voter rejection of Kasich’s signature anti-labor law, it appears the Ohio GOP is already sensing defeat. Last month, the state’s Republican secretary of state proposed repealing the anti-voter law and yesterday, the state senate’s Republican leadership set in motion a plan to do just that, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports.

But some Republicans, including Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, are talking about not just repealing the bill but also passing a replacement bill with new “reforms.” By doing this, they could enact a new bill with similar anti-voter restrictions that would go into effect for the 2012 elections unless its opponents waged another time-consuming and expensive petition drive. Ohio has historically been a must-win swing state for Republican presidential hopefuls and suppressing voter turnout could aid the GOP nominee.

Despite the cost and extra work, Ohio progressives have vowed that they would again petition to repeal any replacement legislation and President Obama’s re-election campaign has pledged to back the signature-collection efforts, if necessary.

The gambit is not a sure thing, as Ohio House Speaker William G. Batchelder (R) says the repeal effort is likely unconstitutional. “As I have previously made clear, there is no precedent for repeal of legislation that has not taken effect due to potential voter referendum.”

WASHINGTON, DC — Those on the left have long bemoaned the influence of corporate money in elections. And they do so with good reason, according to the former chair of Michigan’s Republican Party.

Saul Anuzis, who chaired the Wolverine State GOP from 2005 to 2009, told ThinkProgress yesterday at CPAC that the rise of super PACs and the Citizens United Supreme Court case, which legalized unlimited corporate money in American elections, would “absolutely” help defeat President Obama in the fall. “There’s no doubt about it,” said Anuzis.

KEYES: Citizens United and the rise of super PACs, do you think that’s going to help defeat President Obama in the fall?

ANUZIS: Absolutely, there’s no doubt about it. Without those financial resources to compete against an incumbent president who has all the resources to raise money, you could never win.

Anuzis’s prediction about the power of Citizens United and super PACs may prove prophetic. Already this election cycle, super PAC spending on behalf of Republicans has lapped that of Democrats’ by 7.5-to-1:

Many of these Republican super PACs are almost entirely bankrolled by a single billionaire, as is the case with Sheldon Adelson and the pro-Gingrich super PAC Winning Our Future. Adelson contributed $11 million in the month of January alone.

Super PACs have also turned into an outlet for wealthy donors to evade contribution limits. In fact, a ThinkProgress investigation found that of the 147 individuals who had donated to the pro-Romney super PAC Restore Our Future, “more than 85 percent of them also contributed the legal maximum to Romney’s presidential campaign committee.” Their contributions are joined by $1.2 million in contributions and counting from big oil, coal and gas companies.

This year will be the first presidential election in a post-Citizens United world. Though President Obama recently announced that he would not “unilaterally disarm” — he remains opposed to the Citizens United ruling — Democrats already have an uphill battle if they want to stave off a looming death-by-super-PAC.