Election law scholar Rick Hasen offers a truly stunning visual representation of the impact of Citizens United on our elections:

As his chart shows, spending by outside groups seeking to change the result of the 2012 presidential election is just under $90 million — or more than double the amount of outside spending by this point in the 2008 election. This is true, moreover, despite the fact that the 2012 cycle still has nearly eight more months to go, and despite the fact that there is only one contested primary in 2012 while both Democrats and Republicans had a hard-fought primary battle in 2008. As a possible sign of just how far Citizens United may go in injecting big money into the race, outside spending in in congressional election years grew nearly nine times between 2006 and 2010.

Lest there be any doubt, it also appears very unlikely that spending benefiting Democrats will simply cancel out spending benefiting Republicans. Rather, as of January, seventeen of the top twenty donors this cycle were conservatives:

Our guest blogger is Sarah Bufkin, a former ThinkProgress intern.

Ignoring the vocal opposition of activists and labor organizers, the state senate passed an anti-protest, anti-union bill on March 7. If passed into law, the proposed measure would both make it more difficult for unions to collect dues and set exorbitant fines against many union protests against anti-worker businesses: up to $1,000 per day for those individuals charged with illegal picketing and up to $10,000 to those organizations involved with the illegal protesting.

Senate Bill 469—which GOP senators pushed onto the House’s agenda with a 34-18 vote—is sponsored by four senators who are also members of the American Legislative Exchange Council, a corporate front group that pushes “model” legislation to state lawmakers intended to push a right-wing agenda in the states. Although it’s not clear whether SB 469 is such a bill, there are reasons to fear that similar bills could make their way to other states through ALEC’s network of corporate-friendly lawmakers.

The four ALEC members behind SB 469 include Sen. Bill Cowsert (R), who works with ALEC’s Criminal Justice Task Force, and Sen. Bill Hamrick (R), who received campaign contributions from the ALEC during the 2010 election cycle even though he ran unopposed. Significantly, there are also striking similarities between sections of SB 469 and ALEC’s model Right to Work Act:

• SB 469: Section III of SB 469 states, “No employer shall deduct from the wages or other earnings of any employee any fee, assessment, or other sum of money whatsoever to be held for or to be paid over to a labor organization except on annual written authorization from the employee which shall not exceed a period greater than one year. Such authorization may be revoked at any time at the request of the employee.”
• ALEC: ALEC’s Right to Work model bill states, “It shall be unlawful to deduct from the wages, earnings, or compensation of an employee any union dues, fees, assessments, or other charges to be held for, transferred to, or paid over to a labor organization, unless the employee has first presented, and the employer has received, a signed written authorization of such deductions, which authorization may be revoked by the employee at any time by giving written notice.”

Although such a requirement may not seem particularly important, it moves more of the onus of dues collecting onto labor unions, thereby diverting more of their resources and time from pushing for greater benefits for their members.

Furthermore, the GA bill includes a section that threatens to charge protestors not only with criminal trespassing but also with conspiracy to commit criminal trespass—a highly irregular revision of the law that would label the conspiracy charge as a “misdemeanor of a high and aggravated nature” and bring harsher legal penalties for those convicted.

The addition of the conspiracy to commit criminal trespass charge follows only eight days after 12 Occupy Atlanta supporters were arrested for criminal trespass after protesting outside AT&T’s Atlanta offices. Given that AT&T is currently one of the 23 corporations serving on ALEC’s Board of Directors, some speculate the timing is no coincidence.

But regardless of where the bill originated, the proposed legislation poses a grave threat to any activists looking to change the status quo through civil disobedience. As Martin Luther King III told a crowd at a March 1 rally, the fines and penalties proposed in SB 469 would have stymied the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. We can only hope that the Georgia House of Representatives will listen to its constituents instead of its corporate backers when deliberating this piece of legislation in the weeks to come.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) announced this afternoon that he will file cloture — the Senate procedure to break a filibuster — on seventeen judicial nominees currently being blocked by Republican obstructionism. Nearly all of these nominees were either unanimously approved in the Senate Judiciary Committee or were approved with Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) as the only objection. Lee, of course, promised to block all of President Obama’s nominees and he also believes that Medicare and Social Security are unconstitutional.

Unfortunately, however, there is good reason to fear that the Senate’s Republicans will continue to obstruct these nominees, or at least force the Senate to waste days and days debating them. From the minute President Obama took office, obstruction of judicial nominees skyrocketed — the average Obama nominee must wait nearly four times as long for a vote as the average nominee at this point in the Bush presidency:

Earlier this month, the Florida House passed a bill which, although ostensibly targeted at the imaginary problem of Florida courts relying on religious or foreign law in their decisions, is widely viewed as an attack on the even more imaginary problem of courts replacing American law with Islamic law. Although it initially appeared likely to pass the state senate as well, the bill was abruptly pulled from the senate’s calendar after its sponsors eliminated any doubt of their Islamophobic intentions:

[Sen. Alan] Hays’ bill became ensnared in a late-breaking political controversy when proponents distributed fliers and a pamphlet decrying the alleged intrusion of Islamic law into America’s courts. . . . A delegation of Muslim and other religious leaders met with [Senate President Mike] Haridopolos’ chief of staff earlier in the week to demand that Hays’ measure be postponed pending an investigation of the fliers.

Haridopolos, R-Merritt Island, made no public statement about the controversy, but refused to call the bill for a vote in the waning hours of the 2012 session Friday.

Had Haridopolos not pulled the bill, it is almost certain that it would have been struck down in court. It is generally true that laws which apply equally to the faithful and the non-faithful alike do not offend the Constitution’s Free Exercise Clause. Thus, the law was no doubt drafted as a neutral attack on all foreign legal sources — rather than a narrow attack on Islam or Shariah law in particular — in an attempt to bring it within this constitutional rule.

Nevertheless, as the Supreme Court held in Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye v. Hialeah, the Constitution does forbid laws that “regulate[] or prohibit[] conduct because it is undertaken for religious reasons.” Thus, when the Florida bill’s chief sponsor started distributing flyers entitled “Shari’ah Law: Radical Islam’s threat to the U.S. Constitution” in order to drum up support for the bill, he let the cat out of the bag that the sole purpose of the bill was to regulate people’s religious conduct — and doomed the law in an inevitable federal lawsuit.

Ironically, conservative state lawmakers are pushing these anti-Muslim bills at the same time that conservatives in Congress — including Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) — insist that the Constitution bans the Obama Administration’s contraceptive access regulations because some religious groups object to them. They are wrong because there is no evidence that the contraceptive rules have anything to do with singling out a particular faith for ill-treatment. Nevertheless, the fact remains that, if Boehner truly believes that religious leaders should have a veto power over the law, then he should be the first one to condemn laws singling out Islam.

The U.S. Department of Justice blocked Texas’ new voter ID law Monday, noting that the measure would unduly disenfranchise Hispanic voters.

Texas passed an election law overhaul last May which included a requirement that voters present a certain form of government-issued photo ID or be turned away from the polls. Neither Student IDs nor Social Security or Medicaid cards, and no exceptions are allowed for the poor or elderly. Unlike some states which ask for photo ID but have recourse such as a provisional ballot for voters who lack an acceptable ID, the Texas law simply turned away these folks. As a result, thousands of Texans stood to be disenfranchised, including a longtime Texas voter ThinkProgress interviewed named Jessica Cohen who had her personal papers stolen and could not afford the fee to pay Missouri officials for a replacement, all in order to get an acceptable voter ID.

Fortunately, Texas is one of nine states with a history of discrimination that must get any changes to their election law cleared by the Department of Justice under the Voting Rights Act before they can take effect. The burden of proof is one these states to show that any new laws will not have an adverse impact on minorities.

That preclearance was denied today in a letter from Assistant U.S. Attorney General Thomas E. Perez because the law would have unduly discriminated against Hispanic voters. For instance, nearly one-third of counties in Texas lack driver’s license offices, and in these counties, 10 percent of Hispanics lack a license, double the rate of non-Hispanics. Across the state, Perez notes, “Hispanic voters represent only 21.8 percent of the registered voters in the state, Hispanic voters represent fully 29.0 percent of the registered voters without such identification.”

He sums up:

Thus, we conclude that the total number of registered voters who lack a driver’s license or personal identification card issued by DPS could range from 603,892 to 795,955. The disparity between the percentages of Hispanics and non-Hispanics who lack these forms of identification ranges from 46.5 to 120.0 percent. That is, according to the state’s own data, a Hispanic registered voter is at least 46.5 percent, and potentially 120.0 percent, more likely than a non-Hispanic registered voter to lack this identification. Even using the data most favorable to the state, Hispanics disproportionately lack either a driver’s license or a personal identification card issued by DPS, and that disparity is statistically significant.

The Department of Justice has shown an admirable amount of courage in protecting the voting rights of minorities against the recent onslaught of regressive state voting laws. Last year, they denied preclearance to South Carolina for a similar voter ID law that would have had a discriminatory effect on black voters.

More than 90 percent of criminal trials never see a jury; they end in plea bargains and guilty pleas. Moreover, thanks to a series of Supreme Court decisions enabling prosecutors to threaten defendants with harsh sentences unless they take a plea, defendants are often pressured to plead guilty for fear that asserting their innocence could cost them many, many more years in prison. In the face of this reality, civil rights attorney Michelle Alexander proposes a provocative tactic — shut down the criminal justice system with an unmanageable wave of jury trials:

The system of mass incarceration depends almost entirely on the cooperation of those it seeks to control. If everyone charged with crimes suddenly exercised his constitutional rights, there would not be enough judges, lawyers or prison cells to deal with the ensuing tsunami of litigation. Not everyone would have to join for the revolt to have an impact; as the legal scholar Angela J. Davis noted, “if the number of people exercising their trial rights suddenly doubled or tripled in some jurisdictions, it would create chaos.”

Such chaos would force mass incarceration to the top of the agenda for politicians and policy makers, leaving them only two viable options: sharply scale back the number of criminal cases filed (for drug possession, for example) or amend the Constitution (or eviscerate it by judicial “emergency” fiat). Either action would create a crisis and the system would crash — it could no longer function as it had before. Mass protest would force a public conversation that, to date, we have been content to avoid.

Alexander’s proposal is intended to highlight the unfairness of a system where prosecutors can strongarm criminal defendants — even innocent defendants — into prison time and felony convictions. Many of these defendants, Alexander explains, are mothers forced to choose between a guilty plea and leaving their children without a parent for years.

Yet her proposal also highlights another, equally disturbing problem facing out judicial system — the fact that there simply are not enough judges to swiftly and fairly apply the law. Indeed, several jurisdictions already live under the nightmare Alexander described despite no revolt from defendants pleading not guilty. In Arizona, federal felony case filings grew nearly doubled between 2008 and 2010, even though the number of judges decreased in that time. In Texas, one federal judge warned that his docket was so overloaded he could give felony defendants facing “years and years in a federal prison” about as much time as a “traffic judge” who handles $100 or $200 fines could give to his cases.

And, unlike the problem Alexander hones in on, which arises as much from excessive penalties for minor drug crimes as it does from prosecutors wielding too much power, the federal vacancy crisis could be fixed without significant legislation or even much debate by lawmakers. Seventeen of President Obama’s judicial nominees have cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee — all but two of them unanimously or with Tea Party Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) as the only objector. Lee, who also believes that Social Security and Medicare are unconstitutional, recently announced that he would oppose every single Obama nominee, so his vote is hardly a sign that any of these nominees are the least bit controversial.

America needs judges for the law to function effectively. The Senate needs to confirm each of these seventeen nominees. Right now.