Tomorrow, Pennsylvania Republicans will vote in a primary to select their challenger to Sen. Bob Casey Jr. (D). The five GOP candidates on the ballot include former coal mining CEO Tom Smith, biotechnology CEO Steve Welch, and former state Rep. Sam Rorher. While these candidates have been campaigning for months, a new Super PAC (seemingly aligned with Welch) has stormed onto the scene — and is taking advantage of its last-minute formation to circumvent disclosure rules.

On March 19, Washington, DC-based campaign finance compliance specialist David Satterfield filed a statement of organization for a new Super PAC named “Freedom Fund for America’s Future Inc.” The form did not name anyone else associated with the committee and included the URL for the group’s virtually-empty website.

On April 13, the group filed a quarterly disclosure statement listing no expenses or contributions through March 31, 2012. Three days later, it filed an amendment, revealing a $5,000 in-kind contribution of legal services from a Harrisburg, PA political consulting firm.

After the quarterly filing period was over, the group sprung into action. Last Thursday, it reported to the Federal Election Committee that it had spent $145,000 on a media buy aimed at opposing candidate Tom Smith. Friday, it reported another $30,145. Both payments went to a political ad firm which also is working for the Welch campaign. The firm’s managing partner claims there is a firewall between its work for Welch and its super PAC work for the anti-Smith Super PAC.

Watch the Freedom Fund for America’s Future Inc. attack ad against Smith:

Though the ad ends with a disclaimer that “Freedom Fund for America’s Future is responsible for the content” of the spot, Pennsylvania voters have no way of knowing that that means. The group has not disclosed a single contributor to the $175,000-plus ad buy. The group has not identified a board of directors or a chairman — only the little-known Satterfield. The group did not respond to multiple requests by ThinkProgress to identify the sources of its funding.

Because the group is a Super PAC, it will have to disclose its donations eventually (unlike 501(c)(4) groups like Crossroads GPS). But on a quarterly filing schedule, voters may not know the source of these contributions for months. And, with the primary tomorrow, that will be of little value to the citizens hoping to evaluate the credibility of people behind the ad before they case their ballots.

In his controversial 5-4 majority opinion in the Citizens United case, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote “Disclosure is the less-restrictive alternative to more comprehensive speech regulations.” But with a Federal Election Commission not enforcing existing disclosure laws and Congressional Republican opposition to any legislative remedies, Freedom Fund for America’s Future’s example is clear evidence that voters no longer even have that.

Last January, a study found that seventeen of the top twenty political donors are Republicans or conservatives. Last night, USA Today published a similar roundup of Super PAC donors in the 2012 cycle, and they found exactly the same pattern. Eight of the top ten Super PAC donors are Republicans or corporations who donate exclusively to Republicans. One is the Cooperative of American Physicians, a group of physicians focused on mitigating the cost of malpractice liability that supports a single Democrat. The other non-Republican group is a teachers union.

Notably, the top three Super PAC donors are all Republicans, and their more than $45 million in contributions adds up to more than four times the total spending by the remainder of the top ten:

These totals may also understate the total amount of spending by these wealthy right-wing benefactors because donors can keep their identities secret by funneling their money into non-profit arms of political organizations. Sixty-two percent of the $123 million raised by Karl Rove’s “Crossroads” political empire in 2010 and 2011, for example, came from secret donors.

Joining a dozen other major corporations, Procter & Gamble decided not to rejoin the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) this year, according to a statement from Color Of Change, which launched a campaign against the shadowy right-wing front group behind state laws restricting access to the ballot and “stand your ground” gun laws. The statement:

On Friday afternoon, we learned that P&G began reviewing its membership in January and recently decided not to rejoin ALEC in 2012. External Relations Manager Elizabeth Ratchford told us via email that, ‘Decisions about which memberships we retain are guided by budgetary considerations, value to the business and engagement on issues core to our ability to compete in the marketplace.’ The multinational corporation made the determination that ALEC does not help P&G compete for consumers’ loyalty and support.

Procter & Gamble, a Fortune 100 company that is the largest maker of consumer packaged goods in the world and the largest advertiser in the United States, joins other blue chip companies like Coca-Cola and Kraft Foods in disassociating themselves from ALEC. P&G’s main competitor, Johnson & Johnson, has not come to the same decision, Color Of Change notes.

The good government group Common Cause filed a complaint with the IRS today contesting ALEC’s charitable tax status, arguing it is actually a lobby group getting preferential tax treatment.

After the high-profile defections, ALEC shuttered its unit that works on gun and voting legislation to focus on taxes and regulatory issues.

Most Republicans are smart enough not to openly admit that they think America’s social safety net is unconstitutional, even if they do misunderstand our founding document to prohibit Medicare or Medicaid or Social Security. Instead, the Republican leadership normally placates the most radical parts of their base with vague rhetoric about respecting the Tenth Amendment, without explaining that much of this rhetoric would undercut three generations of progress if it were ever taken seriously.

This weekend, however, delegates to the Utah GOP convention voted to force a primary that will determine whether Republicans in one of the nation’s reddest states are still satisfied with vague generalities — or whether they would prefer a senator who openly and proudly proclaims that it is unconstitutional for the United States to provide health care to children. On Saturday, tenther state lawmaker Dan Lijenquist (R-UT) earned enough support from convention delegates to force a primary against incumbent Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT). Lijenquist joins at least four other Republican senate candidates who believe the Constitution requires America to drown most of its protections for workers, consumers and the elderly in a bathtub:

• Dan Lijenquist: Lijenquist himself called the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) unconstitutional in at attempt to draw contrast between himself and Hatch, who once supported the program. It’s not clear what false theory of the Constitution Lijenquist bases this claim on, but a court decision striking down SCHIP would almost certainly have to take out Medicaid, and could endanger Medicare as well.
• Ted Cruz: Texas U.S. Senate candidate Ted Cruz co-authored a white paper suggesting that Medicaid and most federal education funding is unconstitutional. He also coauthored a complex but nonetheless unconstitutional plan to nullify the Affordable Care Act.
• John Raese: West Virginia U.S. Senate candidate John Raese, who is best known for declaring that “we need 1,000 laser systems put in the sky and we need it right now” when he also ran for the same job in 2010, also called the minimum wage unconstitutional during his failed 2010 race.
• Wendy Long: Long, a U.S. Senate candidate in New York, is a former law clerk to tenther Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. She also penned a book review praising an opinion by her former boss which would lead to everything from national child labor laws to the federal ban on whites-only lunch counters being declared unconstitutional.
• Sam Rohrer: Pennsylvania U.S. Senate candidate Sam Rohrer gave a speech claiming that “such things as education, or health care, or for that matter even highways and roads” are limited to the states, a position that would lead to Medicare, all federal education funds & student loans and the entire federal highway system being invalidated.

Although these candidates’ views are increasingly common among Republican elected officials, it is somewhat baffling that Republicans are willing to repeat this strategy of running tenther extremists in their bid to take control of the Senate. In 2010 — a year that otherwise benefited Republicans — four of the six outspoken tenther Senate candidates went down in defeat.

A day after a front-page New York Times investigation highlighted the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) as a “conservative nonprofit” that “acts as a stealth business lobbyist,” a good-government group announced it has filed an IRS complaint against the corporate front group.

ALEC, the “association for conservative state lawmakers who shared a common belief in limited government, free markets, federalism, and individual liberty,” has pushed an extreme legislative agenda in states across the country, pushing shoot-first” “stand your ground” laws and voter suppression efforts. In recent weeks, at least a dozen companies announced they would no longer fund ALEC — following pressure from a Color of Change national campaign — and ALEC announced it would refocus its efforts away from “non-economic issues.” Last week, the group’s Louisiana state chairman resigned from the group.

Now, Common Cause is asking the Internal Revenue Service to take action; the group is requesting the agency audit ALEC’s work, impose penalties, and compel payment of back taxes. Common Cause President Bob Edgar (a former Democratic U.S. Rep. from Pennsylvania) said the group is masquerading as a public charity.

As a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt “charitable” organization, donations to the group are tax-deductible. But IRS rules state that (c)(3)s must “not be organized or operated for the benefit of private interests” and “may not attempt to influence legislation as a substantial part of its activities.”

ALEC claims its work is not lobbying. But, Edgar argues, ALEC’s mission “is to bring together corporations and state legislators to draft profit-driven, anti-public-interest legislation, and then help those elected officials pass the bills in statehouses from coast to coast. If that’s not lobbying, what is?”

Sarah Bufkin, a former intern for ThinkProgress, filed this report from Fayetteville, North Carolina

Three years ago, North Carolina enacted the the Racial Justice Act, which enables death row inmates to challenge their death sentence if race played a substantive factor in “decisions to seek or impose the sentence of death in the county, the prosecutorial district, the judicial division, or the State at the time the death sentence was sought or imposed.” Thus, an inmate will receive life in prison — as opposed to execution — if there is a pattern of race discrimination in the area where they were convicted, even if they cannot show that they were personally sentenced to die because of their race.

On Friday, Judge Greg Weeks became the first judge to apply this law — commuting the sentence of death-row inmate Marcus Robinson to life without parole after finding that race unfairly tainted the state’s jury selection processes over a 20-year period and in Robinson’s own case. “Race was a materially, practically and statistically significant factor in the decision to exercise preemptory challenges during jury selection,” Judge Weeks told a packed courtroom in Fayetteville, NC after two months of deliberation (“preemptory challenges” refer to a prosecutor or defense attorney’s ability to remove jurors from a jury).

Week’s 167-page decision sets a new precedent for approaching race in criminal justice system by allowing defendants to rely on statistical evidence in making their claims. Prosecutors have indicated they will appeal the ruling within the prescribed 60-day time window.

In arguing his case, Robinson relied primarily on a study done by researchers at Michigan State University in order to demonstrate that race had acted as a statistically significant factor in state prosecutors’ exercise of peremptory strikes in capital cases around the time of his sentencing. Looking at the unadjusted data from strike decisions made in 173 capital cases, the MSU researchers found that nonwhite potential jurors were more than twice as likely to be stricken than their white counterparts in North Carolina. The chance of such a racial disparity occurring in a race-neutral environment is less than one in ten trillion, a figure that Weeks described as “staggering.”

Prosecutors attempted to rebut Robinson’s case by attacking the validity of relying on statistical modeling in the jury selection process, given its complexity. “Number and statistics are not enough,” argued Assistant District Attorney Cal Colyer in his Feb. 15 closing argument. “They are just not enough…Defense attorneys take folks off of juries who are pro-death penalty, and that’s not based upon race. The state takes folks off of juries who are against the death penalty, and that’s not based upon race. It’s based upon answers to questions, attitudes, opinions and beliefs.”

But the MSU study, which Weeks found to be a “valid, highly reliable, statistical study,” also adjusted the raw data to account for explanatory factors such as death-penalty prohibitions. The salient racial disparities remained.

In fact, Weeks concluded that the state’s case was not only insufficient to rebut Robinson’s evidence, but that “in many instances it advanced and strengthened that evidence.” Prosecutors in many instances intentionally discriminated against black venire members, the court found.

Weeks also stressed that Friday’s decision was not about Robinson’s actions or even the composition of the jury that sentenced him to death; instead, it and the Racial Justice Act more widely aim to uphold the integrity of the criminal justice system. That mandate is now under review at the NC General Assembly, however, where legislators are holding committee meetings to debate potential revisions to the statute after failing to repeal it over Gov. Bev Perdue’s veto last December. Regardless, Robinson’s case marks an important turn in the national conversation over race and the death penalty—and “should serve as a clear signal of the need for reform in criminal proceedings,” according to Weeks.

“It is the hope of this Court,” he said, “that we now are at the beginning of the end of the struggle to end racial discrimination in our justice system.”