Last year, NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre made the odd claim that President Obama intentionally avoided gun regulation during his entire first term as part of a “massive Obama conspiracy to deceive voters and hide his true intentions to destroy the Second Amendment in our country.” While LaPierre’s claim that Obama is simply waiting for a second term so that he can “get busy dismantling and destroying our firearms’ freedom” is more than a little implausible, it’s also proved to be a bonanza for the gun industry. Thanks to gun owners who share LaPierre’s paranoia, gun manufacturers literally cannot produce guns fast enough to keep up with demand:

Royal Oak-based Target Sports normally sells about 10 guns a day, but that has increased to 30 a day this year, owner Ray Jihad said.

He’d be selling even more, if he could get them.

“I don’t have any Rugers. There are a few models we sell a lot of, but I can’t even get them,” he said. Southport, Conn.-based Sturm, Ruger & Co. Inc., which makes rifles and handguns, has been so swamped with orders that it has stopped taking new requests until the end of May. . . .

Worries about stricter gun laws after the upcoming presidential election are the driving force behind the firearms sales surge, said Lawrence Keane, senior vice president and general counsel at the nonprofit Newtown, Conn-based National Shooting Sports Foundation, the gun industry’s trade association.

“There is significant concern among the consumers that in a second term by the administration they will pivot on the gun issue and pursue policies that will restrict their Second Amendment rights,” Keane said.

Of course, many of the gun companies that benefit from LaPierre driving up anti-Obama paranoia are also many of the biggest funders of the NRA and its lobbying arm.

The first line of Marco Rubio’s biography on his 2010 campaign website claimed that the Florida Republican was “highly regarded for his principled, energetic and idea-driven leadership.” But a newly disclosed settlement with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) over illegal contributions accepted by his campaign committee has reignited long-standing questions about how “principled’ the freshman Senator’s ethics really are.

On March 19, Rubio and the FEC agreed to a negotiated settlement in which his Senate campaign committee agreed to pay an $8,000 fine to settle charges that it accepted over $210,000 in “prohibited, excessive and other impermissible contributions.” This news was not made public until a POLITICO story this weekend. Perhaps most disturbing is that even after an internal campaign audit, the Marco Rubio for Senate committee failed to address more than $83,000 in improper or misreported donations.

Rubio, who has been frequently mentioned as a possible vice presidential pick for Mitt Romney, has been in several previous ethical controversies, including:

Use of a Florida GOP credit card for personal purposes, many of which were reportedly only reimbursed by Rubio after media inquiries. Rubio’s 2010 campaign dismissed these allegations, saying they were reimbursed at the time.

Double-billing of Florida taxpayers for plane travel also billed to the state Republican Party. Rubio’s 2010 campaign claimed these happened without Rubio’s knowledge and were reimbursed.

Failure to disclose a $135,000 home equity loan from a bank controlled by political supporters. Rubio, in 2008, said his failure to disclose the loan was “an oversight” and that there was “nothing unusual about the loan or the application.”

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington included Rubio among its “Crooked Candidates” of 2010. And Romney’s own press secretary Andrea Saul, then a staffer for a rival candidate, blasted Rubio in 2010 as “another typical politician who uses his public office for personal gain and only comes clean once caught.”

Rubio’s office has not yet responded to a ThinkProgress request for comment, nor, according to POLITICO, to their request.

In 2006, under President George W. Bush, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives began the first of a series of misguided operations that allowed illegal guns to be sold to arms traffickers and, eventually, to Mexican drug cartels. At least two of these guns were later used to kill a federal agent. These operations were misguided from the very beginning, and they deserve the kind of thorough investigation the Justice Department’s Inspector General is currently trying to conduct — as well as new procedures to ensure that similar mistakes are not made in the future.

Unfortunately, House Oversight Chair Darrell Issa (R-CA) sees things differently. For more than a year, he has compounded the tragedy of these botched operations by treating them as little more than an opportunity to embarrass Attorney General Eric Holder and the Obama Administration. Issa’s held half a dozen hearings on “Fast and Furious,” one of the botched operations, but refused to call Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who was in charge of the Justice Department when these operations were conceived. He’s led a months-long witchhunt for proof that Holder was somehow responsible for the operations, grasping at increasingly thin straws throughout this effort. And he’s touted the ridiculous conspiracy theory that the Obama Administration somehow wants to harness these botched efforts to “take away or limit people’s second amendment rights.”

And now, Issa’s going to escalate his inquisition even further:

Republican House leaders have drafted a proposed contempt of Congress citation against Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. in which they charge that he and his Justice Department have repeatedly “obstructed and slowed” the Capitol Hill investigation into the ATF’s flawed Fast and Furious gun-tracking operation.

The 48-page draft citation is being drawn up by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Top committee officials recently met for most of a day in the House speaker’s office and were given the green light to proceed toward a contempt citation, according to sources who declined to be identified.

If adopted by the GOP-led House, the contempt resolution would be sent to the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington or perhaps an independent counsel in an attempt to force the Justice Department to provide tens of thousands of internal documents to the committee.

Notably, Issa did nothing to inform the committee’s minority members of this pending citation — Ranking Member Elijah Cummings (D-MD) learned about it from the press. A tactic which, in Cummings’ words, “suggests that [Issa is] more interested in perpetuating [his] partisan political feud in the press than in obtaining any specific substantive information relating to the Committee’s investigation.”

More importantly, there is a very good reason why DOJ has not turned over every single document Issa seeks — those documents could undermine countless ongoing criminal investigations. Many of the documents Issa seeks are confidential materials concerning open investigations. Such documents are not subject to congressional subpoena because revealing them would also reveal “strategies and procedures that could be used by individuals seeking to evade [DOJ's] law enforcement efforts.”

Moreover, as President Reagan’s Justice Department warned in the 1980s, the Constitution’s separation of powers prevents such documents from being revealed to Congress because of the risk that the legislature could “exert pressure or attempt to influence the prosecution of criminal cases.” The Constitution separates lawmaking from enforcement because the framers feared that combining the two would be “the very definition of tyranny,” yet Issa seeks to erode this understanding as well.

America deserves a thoughtful and objective investigation into the ill-conceived operations that armed drug cartels and killed at least one federal official. Instead, they are getting partisan grandstanding that does nothing but undermine the Justice Department’s ability to do its job.

Earlier this year, Texas U.S. Senate candidate Ted Cruz touted a bizarre conspiracy theory claiming that George Soros secretly partnered with the United Nations to eliminate the game of golf. Seriously, we aren’t making this up.

Unfortunately, this fantasy isn’t limited to just one unusually radical candidate for elected office. Rather, the Arizona House is expected to vote today on a bill motivated entirely by the same imaginary conspiracy, and the same bill already passed the state senate:

Arizona lawmakers appear close to sending to Gov. Jan Brewer a tea party-backed bill that proponents say would stop a United Nations takeover conspiracy but that critics claim could end state and cities’ pollution-fighting efforts and even dismantle the state unemployment office.

A final legislative vote is expected Monday on a bill that would outlaw government support of any of the 27 principles contained in the 1992 United Nations Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, also sometimes referred to as Agenda 21.

Senate Bill 1507 was passed by the state Senate last month and received an initial House affirmation Wednesday. It is sponsored by state Sen. Judy Burges, R-Sun City West, who also sponsored a state birther bill that Brewer vetoed last year.

Lest there be any doubt, Agenda 21 is not a Soros plot to destroy the game of golf. It is not, as Cruz claims, a “globalist plan that tries to subvert the U.S. Constitution and the liberties we all cherish as Americans.” And it is not, as Burges claims, “social engineering of our citizens” in “every aspect” of their lives. Agenda 21 is a twenty year-old non-binding resolution endorsed by 178 world leaders, including then-U.S. President George H. W. Bush.

So the Arizona bill addresses entirely imaginary concerns. Unfortunately, however, it will have very real consequences if enacted. The bill provides that every arm of the Arizona government “shall not adopt or implement the creed, doctrine, principles or any tenet of” Agenda 21. But Agenda 21 expressly lists among its “principles” essential functions such as “combating poverty,” “protecting and promoting human health conditions,” “protection of the atmosphere,” and “safe and environmentally sound management of radioactive wastes.”

In other words, if this bill becomes law, Arizona’s government agencies would instantly be forbidden from doing anything to reduce poverty. Or to combat air pollution. Or to ensure that radioactive waste does not contaminate the environment. Or potentially to do anything at all to promote human health. Under this bill, Medicaid, state unemployment and welfare programs and nearly any environmental programs would need to cease, immediately.

Simply put, this is what happens when you place irresponsible Tea Partiers who lash out at paranoid fantasies in charge of government. The proposed response to Agenda 21 would be comic if it were not so potentially tragic. In response to a non-threat presented by an entirely non-binding resolution, the Arizona legislature is set to dismantle their entire system of government — and they probably don’t even understand that this is what they are about to do.

In 1987, the Senate rejected Judge Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court in light of Bork’s long record of extremism. Bork once described the federal ban on whites-only lunch counters as “unsurpassed ugliness.” He claimed that it is “utterly specious” to suggest that women have a constitutional right to use contraception. And he believes that the Constitution does not protect women from gender discrimination. Nor has Bork moderated his views in the twenty-five years since he was denied a seat on the Court. Bork said it was “silly” to say that women are discriminated against as recently as last October.

Mitt Romney, however, apparently finds this kind of outlook quite appealing, because he selected Bork to co-chair his “Justice Advisory Committee.” At a recent campaign event, Vice President Biden went after Romney for his poor judgment in selecting Bork for this role:

[Biden] addressed specifically the issue of contraception, saying that he “noticed today” that Judge Robert Bork, “a fine man, and a man who I disagree with a lot,” had been named as the Romney campaign’s “justice coordinator.” (He appeared to have read an editorial in today’s New York Times which addressed this fact. Bork was actually named as a chair of Romney’s “Justice Advisory Committee” last August, a Romney spokesperson confirmed.)

He discussed the Bork confirmation hearings, which he oversaw as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the discussion of Griswold vs. Connecticut.

“So we’re kind of returning to the past. You know that movie, ‘Back To the Future?’ It feels like to me that we’re going Back to the Future,” he said.

Not too long ago, of course, the Romney campaign spent days pretending to believe that President Obama’s own view of motherhood was somehow in question because someone who has no association with his campaign said something dumb on CNN. Meanwhile, Romney continues to trust Bork as one of his top legal policy advisors — even after Bork claimed that there’s no such thing as discrimination against women and that women who think there is are “silly.”

The John Birch Society is best known for touting conspiracy theories about how the United Nations is plotting to eliminate everything from paved roads to the game of golf, so all of their claims need to be taken with quite a few grains of salt. Nevertheless, their official magazine contains a very plausible report about Tea Party U.S. Senate candidate Dan Liljenquist (R-UT) that raises serious questions about his judgement if it is true. According to this report, Liljenquist told them they he will work to repeal the Constitution’s guarantee that voters — and not state lawmakers — get to elect United States senators:

[I]n a surprising answer to a question, Liljenquist informed The New American that he supports the repeal of the 17th Amendment. Regarding , [sic] Liljenquist explained his opposition to tthe [sic] popular election of the U.S. Senate that was effected by the ratification of the 17th Amendment to the Constitution:

“There is a disconnect between the state legislatures and the state delegations in Washington, D.C.” “I commit that if I ever lose the support of the Utah State Legislature, I will come home and not return to Washington,” he continued.

If this report is accurate, it is disturbing not just because of its content, but because Liljenquist decided to talk to this extremist group in the first place. Moreover, Liljenquist, has a well documented history of attacking the Seventeenth Amendment’s promise of democracy, so it is reasonably likely that the Birchers are telling the truth here.

At a campaign event in Morgan County, Utah, Liljenquist lamented the fact that, as a state lawmaker, the Seventeenth Amendment prevented him from imposing his will on his primary opponent Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT):

Liljenquist also talked about Senator Hatch. He said, “As a state legislator it has been very disappointing. We have almost no working relationship with our Senior Senator…It was supposed to be that the senate would represent the state and work with the legislature to make sure state’s rights were protected. Last year we passed a bill and we said, ‘Hey, we know that the seventeenth amendment is in place, we can’t tell you what to do, but come and consult with us, come and speak with us.’ Mike Lee said I understand that’s my role and Orrin Hatch said I don’t report to you.

Earlier this month, Liljenquist also claimed that there need to be term limits on Senators to help counteract the effect of the Seventeenth Amendment. And Liljenquist’s past digs on the Seventeenth Amendment are also part of a larger record of hostility to the Constitution. Indeed, a centerpiece of Liljenquist’s campaign against Hatch is Liljenquist’s belief that Hatch should not have voted to provide health care to children because Liljenquist believes a national program to heal children is unconstitutional. Indeed, his proposal for senatorial term limits is also unconstitutional.

Liljenquist also would not be the first prominent conservative to embrace the ludicrous idea that Americans should not be able to elect their own senators. Justice Scalia once slammed the Seventeenth Amendment, as has Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX).

Liljenquist’s campaign did not return a request to confirm or deny the John Birch Society’s claim that he wants to make his own senate election unconstitutional. Nevertheless, in light of Liljenquist’s long pattern of hostility towards the Constitution, and his record of strange statements expressing suspicion about the Seventeenth Amendment itself, it seems reasonably likely that the Birchers’ reporting is accurate.

Casino billionaire and right-wing activist Sheldon Adelson has already given at least $10 million to Republican-Allied Super PACs so far this cycle… and he plans to make at least one more Super PAC donation. But, he told Las Vegas Sun political reporter Jon Ralston, after that he plans to keep his massive political spending secret.

Ralston writes:

“I’m going to give one more small donation – you might not think it’s that small – to a SuperPAC and then if I give it will be to a c4,” a reference to 501c4 nonprofits, which are tax-exempt and also exempt from disclosures. I opined that surely meant Crossroads, which would allow him to indirectly help Mitt Romney and Sen. Dean Heller [R-NV], who is running against Rep. Shelley Berkley [D-NV]. Berkley used to work for Adelson, but they had a falling out in the mid-1990s and he surely would love to see her lose.

“Do you know how many c4s there are?” Adelson retorted, as if to try to indicate he had more choices than Crossroads. Indeed. But I can’t think of too many that will influence who controls the White House and the U.S. Senate. And did he telegraph where his money is going with the Rove comments? I think so.

Adelson also declined to tell Ralston which Super PAC he intended to support with that final “small donation.”

The casino mogul seemingly conceded that he didn’t want his future political “speech” to be transparent because voters might take that information into consideration when evaluating his message.

Adelson said he believed the media’s inevitable use of the phrase “casino mogul” whenever his donations became public “is not helpful to the person .”

So, thanks to the Supreme Court’s stream of rulings against political spending limits and the unwillingness of the Republicans in Congress and on the Federal Election Commission to even mandate disclosure of independent political ad funders, billionaires like Adelson can simply hide their massive donations through (c)(4)s when they get tired of the media and public scrutiny. And rather than letting the voters decide how much credibility to give an ad bankrolled entirely by an anti-union gambling magnate — he can just choose to keep them in the dark.

While Ralston seems convinced Adelson’s support will go to Karl Rove’s secretive Crossroads GPS, the most famous right-wing (c)(4), the truth is he and we have no idea. Adelson could give the money to former Sen. Norm Coleman’s (R-MN) American Action Network. Or to the Koch Brother’s Americans for Prosperity. Or some totally unknown 501(c)(4)s that could be collecting hundreds of millions of dollars without any footprint, waiting to pounce with a barrage of shady attack ads. Or, given his billions, all of those.

Voter ID laws disproportionately disenfranchise low income, minority and student voters, all of which tend to vote for Democrats. So it is no surprise they’ve become the darling of Republican state lawmakers interested in making it easier to keep their jobs and elect other Republicans to office. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R), however, will not benefit from the voter suppressing law he signed — at least during his own upcoming recall election — thanks to a pair of decisions handed down by two state appeals courts:

A pair of appeals court rulings this week make clear the state’s new voter ID law will remain suspended through the May and June recall elections.

One of the opinions, released Thursday, said there was “no realistic possibility” the case would be decided before the June 5 recall election against Gov. Scott Walker and some of his fellow Republicans.

Walker and Republicans in the Legislature last year approved a new law requiring voters to show photo ID at the polls, but Dane County Circuit Judge David Flanagan issued an order temporarily blocking the requirement in a case brought by the Milwaukee branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the immigrant rights group Voces de la Frontera.

A week later, Dane County Circuit Judge Richard Niess permanently blocked the photo ID law because he said it violates the state constitution. That case was brought by the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin.

These decisions are good news for democracy in Wisconsin. Scott Walker has every right to remain governor if he faces the entire Wisconsin electorate and wins fair and square, but trying to rig the game by disenfranchising your opponent’s likely voters is beneath contempt.

It is also possible that Walker’s voter suppression law could even remain suspended through the November election. According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Wisconsin appeals courts typically take nine months or more to decide cases. Moreover, it is likely that the lower courts’ decisions striking down voter ID will be upheld by the courts of appeal. The text of the Wisconsin Constitution provides unusually strong protections against voter disenfranchisement, and Walker’s voter suppression law conflicts with at least 132 years of state supreme court precedent.

There is, of course, some risk that the increasingly partisan Wisconsin Supreme Court will ignore the state constitution, but even that is unlikely to happen until after the November election takes place. Earlier this month, the state justices turned down a request to fast-track the challenges to voter ID.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) is obsessed with drugs. Since coming into office, he signed a law requiring welfare recipients to undergo drug tests — a law that was subsequently halted by a federal court — and he issued an executive order mandating random drug tests for state employees. This executive order has now been declared unconstitutional by a George H.W. Bush-appointed judge:

Miami U.S. District Judge Ursula Ungaro Thursday morning ruling that random, suspicionless testing of some 85,000 workers violates the Fourth Amendment ban on unreasonable searches and seizures also raises doubts about a new state law quietly signed by Scott this spring allowing the governor’s agency heads to require urine tests of new and existing workers.

“To be reasonable under the Fourth Amendment, a search ordinarily must be based on individualized suspicion of wrongdoing,” Ungaro wrote in her order issued this morning, citing previous U.S. Supreme Court orders which decided that urine tests are considered government searches.

Judge Ungaro’s decision should not be controversial. As she correctly notes, “suspicionless” searches of people who are not individually suspected of committed a crime are rarely acceptable under the Constitution. Nevertheless, these kinds of unconstitutional bills have become the darling of many conservative lawmakers. Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA) proposed forcing the unemployed to undergo drug tests in order to receive benefits, and Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels (R) signed a similar drug testing law in his state.

It’s important to note that these drug testing laws are not just unconstitutional, they are also completely unnecessary. Only one percent of Florida workers who took drug tests tested positive, and only two percent of state welfare recipients subject to Scott’s other drug testing law failed their drug tests.

Yet, while these tests are both unconstitutional and a solution in search of a problem, there is still some risk that they could be upheld by an increasingly partisan Supreme Court. Current law is clear that these drug laws are unconstitutional, but the Constitution even more conclusively favors the Affordable Care Act. If the justices are willing to put partisan politics ahead of the law and strike down President Obama’s signature accomplishment, there is good reason to fear they will again put politics before the law if Rick Scott’s drug tests come before them.