A poll taken after the Supreme Court’s highly partisan oral arguments in the Affordable Care Act case but before the Court heard arguments on Arizona’s harsh immigration law finds that public opinion of the Supreme Court has fallen to the lowest point in more than a quarter century:

This poll aligns with numerous other polls showing declining public faith in our increasingly partisan Supreme Court. Indeed, the Roberts Court’s most significant opinion to date — it’s election-buying decision in Citizens United — is so unpopular that more Americans believe in “spells or witchcraft” than agree with the Court’s reasoning in that case.

And, of course, Citizens United is just once of many cases where the Roberts Court’s conservatives placed ideology over the law. The Court effectively immunized corporate America from countless lawsuits in its forced arbitration decisions. It gave them similar immunity to class actions nearly a year ago. And it thumbed its nose at precedent to undermine women’s right to equal work for equal pay and older workers’ right to be free from age discrimination.

A father/son duo in the Florida state legislature is working hard to bring gender politics into the debate about Stand Your Ground laws. In a letter to the editor that ran in the News Herald, Sen. Don Gaetz (R-FL) and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) argued that calling for the repeal is anti-woman.

The letter was also distributed by the National Rifle Association, and specifically by Marion Hammer, former NRA president and current Florida NRA lobbyist, to push back on calls for repeal of Stand Your Ground.

The letter’s strange claim is rendered all the more unbelievable because Florida’s Stand Your Ground law actually exempts the overwhelming majority of female victims from its so-called protections — the law does not apply to domestic violence cases. Instead of acknowledging this fact, the two lay out an emotionally manipulative argument for why stand your ground helps women feel safe:

Consider an elderly woman in a dimly lit parking lot or a college girl walking to her dorm at night. If either was attacked, her duty was to turn her back and try to flee, probably be overcome and raped or killed. Prior to “Stand Your Ground,” that victim didn’t have the choice to defend herself, to meet force with force.

Calls to repeal “Stand Your Ground” are anti-woman. Imposing a duty-to-flee places the safety of the rapist above a woman’s own life. In fact, until “Stand Your Ground” was passed, criminals were suing victims because victims, in protecting themselves, were allegedly using excessive force against the criminals.

“Stand Your Ground” simply says, if you have a right to be somewhere and if you’re not breaking the law, you may defend yourself to prevent imminent death or bodily harm. You don’t have an obligation to do so. You have the right.

Unfortunately for the Gaetzes, Stand Your Ground addresses very few of such cases. Domestic violence victims are exempt from using Stand Your Ground as protection– and in 76 percent of rape or assault cases, an intimate partner committed the crime. On top of that, nearly one out of every three women killed dies at the hands of an intimate partner. These women wouldn’t be saved by Stand Your Ground — even if Stand Your Ground were an effective way of protecting victims of crime — and they aren’t who the law was ever intended to protect.

Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice David Prosser allegedly grabbed fellow Justice Ann Walsh Bradley around the neck during argument in her chambers last June. Even Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) called the allegations against Prosser a “serious matter of grave concern,” and the Wisconsin Judicial Commission sought an investigation into whether Prosser’s actions violated his ethical obligations as a judge.

Prosser, however, has a very different take on the situation, suggesting that his alleged assault on a fellow justice is nothing more than a breach of “etiquette”:

Prosser, the subject of an ethics complaint filed in March with the Supreme Court, said in his response to the complaint Monday that the commission “may not investigate or prosecute protected speech, advocacy and etiquette of Wisconsin Supreme Court justices when they are deliberating in confidential closed conferences.”

The three alleged ethics violations stem from a June 13 incident in which Prosser acknowledges putting his hands around the neck of Justice Ann Walsh Bradley “to protect himself” and a February 2010 incident in which he admits calling Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson “a total bitch.”

For the record, a violation of “etiquette” occurs when someone uses the dessert spoon to eat the soup course. Placing your hands around a colleague’s neck is quite a bit more serious.

Last month, Republican Fifth Circuit Judge Jerry Smith pitched a tantrum in open court, demanding that the Department of Justice respond to some imprecise political rhetoric by President Obama in an attempt to embarrass the president. Today, the staunch Republican judge raised further doubt about his ability to separate politics from the law by suspending a decision benefiting Planned Parenthood just hours after it was handed down by another judge.

Yesterday afternoon, a federal trial court in Texas granted a preliminary injunction preventing the state from cutting off women’s health funds to Planned Parenthood. The trial court’s opinion was written by Judge Lee Yeakel — a George W. Bush appointee — and it is 24 pages long, including substantial analysis of difficult constitutional doctrines such as the scope of the First Amendment right to free speech and the “unconstitutional conditions” doctrine. Significantly, the Bush-appointed trial judge was concerned that Texas stripped funds from Planned Parenthood because it disapproved of the organization’s advocacy in favor of women’s health — a direct attack on Planned Parenthood’s First Amendment rights if Yeakel is correct.

This morning, less than 24 hours after Yeakel handed down his decision, Judge Smith handed down a two sentence decision of his own:

IT IS ORDERED that appellant’s motion for stay pending appeal is GRANTED pending further order of this court. This order is entered by a single judge pursuant to FED. R. APP. P. 8(a)(2)(D).

Several things are significant about this very brief order. First, Judge Smith is a court of appeals judge, and it is very rare for an appeals judge to act alone in this way. Federal appeals courts almost always act as three judge panels, and for very good reason. Judge Yeakel is no less a federal judge than Judge Smith, and he is no less competent that Smith to interpret the Constitution. A court of appeals’ legitimacy generally flows from the fact that it brings more minds to a legal question than a trial court — but this cannot happen when a single judge acts alone.

It is true, as Judge Smith notes, that the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure permit a single judge to stay a lower court’s decision, but that rule only permits the judge to do so in “an exceptional case in which time requirements make that procedure impracticable.” It’s not at all clear what kind of exceptional time constraints justified allowing Judge Smith to act alone here rather than first consulting with two of his colleagues before issuing this unusual order.

More importantly, it’s unlikely that Smith gave his order much thought at all before handing it down. Judge Yeakel handed down his order weeks after this case was filed, and he produced a 24 page explanation of why it was justified. Smith spent, at most, a few hours — and he offered no explanation whatsoever.

If nothing else, today’s order highlights the foolishness of Smith’s partisan tantrum several weeks ago. Unusual orders — even unusual orders handed down by single judges — are sometimes justified even if the legal reasoning behind such an order is not immediately apparent. Nevertheless, the legitimacy of such orders flows from the public’s trust that they are motivated by obedience to the law and not by partisanship, ideology or personal grievances. Judge Smith thumbed his nose at that trust when he lashed out at Obama last month, and undermined the legitimacy of the entire judiciary in the process.

Next week, hard right U.S. Senate candidate Richard Mourdock is likely to defeat the merely very conservative incumbent Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN) in the Republican primary. On MSNBC this morning, Mourdock showcased part of his appeal to Tea Party conservatives. If elected, Mourdock promised to obstruct judges who do not resemble one of the most ill-considered nominees in recent American history:

Personally, I would be looking for those people who, as Judge Bork used to say, originalists or strict constructionists. . . . I certainly think the standard ought to be, and it’s one that I make no, ah, message about trying to hide. I think people ought to be looking for those who would serve on the courts who are going to strictly interpret the United States Constitution. . . .

I mean, what the Democrats did in obstructing appointments like Judge Bork back in the 1980s, I didn’t like that, but they certainly had the right to do it. Because they felt their elections had consequences. Well, as one member of the United States Senate, I certainly carry, or will carry that same ideology.

Watch it:

Mourdock’s position is so extreme that even conservative Justice Antonin Scalia rejects it. “Strict constructionism” refers to the philosophy that the Constitution’s words must be interpreted as narrowly as possible, regardless of whether that is the most natural reading of the text. In a seminal essay on the proper role of judges in a society, Scalia quite correctly called Mourdock’s method of reading the Constitution a “degraded form of textualism.” As Scalia warned, “[a] text should not be construed strictly, and it should not be construed leniently; it should be construed reasonably, to contain all that it fairly means.”

To get a sense of what America would look like under Mourdock’s degraded constitution, one need not look any further than Robert Bork, the man Mourdock twice held up a as a model nominee. Bork once described the federal ban on employment discrimination and whites-only lunch counters as “unsurpassed ugliness.” He called it “utterly specious” to suggest that women have a constitutional right to use contraception. He believes that the Constitution does not protect women from gender discrimination — and he reiterated this view as recently as last October, when he said it was “silly” to think that women are discriminated against.

So Mourdock’s model judge would transform the Constitution into a miserly document that strips women and millions of other Americans of their most basic rights to receive equal work for equal pay and to make their own decisions about birth control and their own bodies, and Mourdock is, sadly, not alone. Likely GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney shares Mourdock’s affinity for Robert Bork. Indeed, Romney even named Bork as the co-chair of his “Judicial Advisory Committee.”

Daniel Ray Carter and Robert McCoy were deputies in the Hampton, Virginia sheriff’s office. Were, that is, until they made the mistake of “liking” their boss’ opponent’s Facebook page during a contested sheriff election. They were both fired shortly after their boss won reelection.

As government employees, Carter and McCoy are protected by the First Amendment. Nevertheless, a federal judge in Virginia denied their claim that they were unconstitutionally fired for expressing their political view on the unusual theory that “liking” a Facebook page does not constitute a form of expression protected by the First Amendment:

It is the Court’s conclusion that merely “liking” a Facebook page is insufficient to merit constitutional protection. In cases where courts have found that constitutional speech protections extended to Facebook posts, actual statements existed within the record. . . . These illustrative cases differ markedly from the case at hand in one crucial way: Both [precedents] involved actual statements. No such statements exist in this case. Simply liking a Facebook page is insufficient. It is not the kind of substantive statement that has previously warranted constitutional protection. The Court will not attempt to infer the actual content of Carter’s posts from one click of a button on Adams’ Facebook page. For the Court to assume that the Plaintiffs made some specific statement without evidence of such statements is improper. Facebook posts can be considered matters of public concern; however, the Court does not believe Plaintiffs Carter and McCoy have alleged sufficient speech to garner First Amendment protection.

As Eugene Volokh points out, this is not correct. The First Amendment does not simply shield “actual statements,” it shields a long list of expressive activity, including “saluting a flag (and refusing to do so), wearing an armband to protest a war, displaying a red flag, and even ‘[m]arching, walking or parading’ in uniforms displaying the swastika.” If passively wearing a black armband speaks clearly enough to convey a First Amendment protected message, than surely clicking a button that indicates approval of a political candidate or his message speaks just as clearly.

Indeed, it’s difficult to find any meaningful distinction between Carter and McCoy’s actions here and any number of activities protected by the First Amendment beyond the fact that they used a new method of communication to convey their message. But this cannot be a constitutionally relevant distinction. The First Amendment didn’t stop functioning with the invention of the telephone, the instant message, the text message or the email. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t apply to social media.

Additionally, there is always something perverse about court decisions which prevent career employees from speaking out about how their boss is doing their job. Few people are better suited to judge the current sheriff than his deputies, and they should not be discouraged from sharing their views with the public.