Fourth Circuit Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, one of President George W. Bush’s five finalists for the Supreme Court seat that eventually went to Chief Justice Roberts, has emerged as one of the most outspoken conservative opponents of efforts to toss out the nearly 200 years of precedent establishing that the Affordable Care Act is constitutional. As Wilkinson warned in an op-ed last March, “the prospect of judges’ striking down commercial regulation on ill-defined and subjective bases is a prescription for economic chaos that the framers, in a simpler time, had the good sense to head off.”

At a recent gathering of one of the nation’s leading conservative lawyers’ groups, Judge Wilkinson offered a similar warning — telling the gathered group of conservatives to back off efforts to constitutionalize Tea Party ideology:

And last month, receiving the Federalist Society’s Lifetime Service Award at Georgetown University, Judge Wilkinson hinted that the high court he nearly joined should think twice before striking down the symbol of everything contemporary conservatives revile—the health care overhaul President Barack Obama signed into law over near-unanimous Republican opposition.

“It may of course seem tempting to press the advantage when one seemingly has a judicial majority at hand. But this wheel shall turn,” Judge Wilkinson said. “Lasting credibility on an issue such as judicial restraint requires us to practice it, as the old saying goes, when the shoe pinches as well as when it comforts.” . . .

“It is also one thing to welcome the Tea Party as a political movement, quite another to embrace a Tea Party Constitution. Political disputation and constitutional debate are simply different things, and it does our democracy no favors to confuse one with the other.”

Wilkinson deserves a lot of credit for standing up for democracy at a time when his fellow conservatives have largely abandoned it in favor of what the judge describes as an effort to “press one’s views into our fundamental charter such that our opponents are left with no quarter and are defeated not in the temporary sense of a political ebb and flow, but in the more absolute tones of constitutional condemnation.”

Moreover, there should be no doubt that Tea Party constitutionalists are calling for a sweeping attack on American democracy. As a Center For American Progress report explained last September, a short list of laws that leading Tea Party lawmakers claim are unconstitutional includes Social Security and Medicare, Medicaid, children’s health insurance, and other health care programs, all federal education programs, all federal antipoverty programs, federal disaster relief, federal food safety inspections and other food safety programs, national child labor laws, the minimum wage, overtime, and other federal labor protections and many federal civil rights laws.

The GOP-led House’s version of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) would not only strip away Senate-passed protections for undocumented, LGBT, and Native American victims, it also contains a dangerous provision that violates an undocumented victim’s confidentiality by allowing immigration officials to speak with, and ask for evidence from, his or her abuser.

Visas offered to undocumented victims of domestic violence are called “U Visas” and the Senate version of the bill expanded the number of U Visas offered to victims. The House bill not only strips out the additional visas, it also contains a new provision enabling government officials to inform “the accused” that their victim blew the whistle on their abuse:

During the adjudication of each petition under this paragraph, an investigative officer from a local service center of United States Citizenship and Immigration Services shall conduct an in-person interview of the alien who filed the petition. The investigative officer may also gather other evidence and interview other witnesses, including the accused United States citizen or lawful permanent resident, if they consent to be interviewed.

Undocumented victims already fear calling the police because they risk deportation in doing so. This portion of the bill adds on another level of fear by alerting their abusers that they’ve sought help — under current law, immigrant victims enjoy a right to confidentiality that would be seriously undermined by this bill. Allowing perpetrators of domestic violence to play any role in the deportation or protection of their victims is a cruel fate, but alerting an abuser to a victim’s complaint adds yet another level of emotional abuse on top of the physical abuse that the victim already faces.

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has been under fire lately after the 15 major corporations and organizations pulled their support for the conservative organization, which helps quietly implement corporate-backed legislation in statehouses across the country.

Now, the watchdog advocacy group group Common Cause has released a complete list of corporations on ALEC’s task forces.

Not surprisingly, four of the five major oil companies are members, as are many other energy companies. Some houshold names on the list include Johnson & Johson, State Farm insurance, and AT&T. There are lots of major online businesses, including AOL (the parent company of the Huffington Post), eBay, Amazon.com, Yahoo, and Time Warner.

See the full list here.

A new Super PAC registered with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) yesterday with a name that conveys its unusual mission: America’s Super PAC For The Permanent Elimination of America’s Super PACs (ASPFTPEASP).

Since the 2010 Citizens United and SpeechNow.org ruling created the independent-expenditure-only “Super PAC,” hundreds of such committees have registered. About a quarter of those Super PACs have reported making any independent expenditures, to date — supporting and/or opposing federal candidates.

But ASPFTPEASP appears to be the first committee formed with the mission of self-annihilation. The group’s website lists a two-pronged mission:

America’s Super PACs For the Permanent Elimination of America’s Super PACs will seek to raise awareness of the usage of Super PACs during elections and advise citizens on how to demand (from their respective representatives) that Super PACs be removed from politics.

America’s Super PAC For The Permanent Elimination of America’s Super PACs seeks to call for a constitutional convention where an amendment will be proposed to ensure that corporations are never considered to be people. Why? They’re not. Plain and simple.

Jonathan Rachowicz, who is listed on the group’s official filings as “High Treasurer,” told ThinkProgress that while his group its taking a comical approach, it intends to be a serious effort:

We’re going to fight fire with fire. If we can create a Super PAC with a ridiculous name that creates ridiculous ads, we can show people just how absurd the idea of a Super PAC really is. Once that happens we can really get some change.

Rachowicz said the group hopes to enlist a “high number of people” to compete with the rich who “have a high number of dollars.” Unlike other Super PACs which principally focus on the election or defeat of federal candidates, he says their top issue is “the way in which federal candidates are supported by unlimited funds, which can lead to corruption.”

With Super PACs already roundly despised — and polling showing more America’s believe in witchcraft than agree with the Citizens United ruling — this may be the one Super PAC with whom the vast majority of Americans can agree.

For decades, attacks on “activist judges” were part of the conservative catechism. As President George W. Bush told the conservative Federalist Society, “such judicial lawlessness is a threat to our democracy, and it needs to stop.” Last month, however, President Obama offered a similar warning against judicial activism after it appeared likely that the Supreme Court would thumb its nose at the text of the Constitution and nearly 200 years of precedent to strike down health reform — and conservatives across the country suddenly found themselves in desperate need of a fainting couch. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) called Obama “stupid” for echoing decades of conservative rhetoric against activist judging. A Republican judge on the Fifth Circuit issued a partisan order trying to force the Justice Department to criticize President Obama. Even the president of the American Bar Association, who has historically not dragged his organization into partisan fights despite his own history as a major Republican donor, could not resist the urge to throw mud at President Obama.

On Fox News this morning, Florida Attorney General and Affordable Care Act nemesis Pam Bondi (R) got into the game, attacking the president for daring to criticize the Supreme Court and then offering a surprising promise of her own:

I mean, they’re our highest Court in the land. And I’m going to respect their decision. I’m never going to criticize the United States Supreme Court, no matter what happens. And, um, we argued our case, and if you heard any of the arguments — I’m sure you did — um, you know, the justices asked some very compelling questions.

Watch it:

Of course, there’s a small problem with Bondi’s pledge that she would never, ever lower herself to speak ill of the nine justices:

So Bondi’s hypocrisy is pretty glaring here, but her statement is also disturbing on a much more important front. There’s something deeply authoritarian about her suggestion that no one should ever criticize nine of the most powerful politicians in the country. The justices of the Supreme Court are not oracles and they are not gods. They are just as fallible as any other human being entrusted with power, and their decisions deserve to be discussed and evaluated just like any other government action should be subject to criticism in a free society.

Indeed, if anything, our present justices are far more fallible than most Americans. Their decision in Citizens United gave billionaires and wealty corporations a license to buy and sell democracy, and there are also more Americans who believe in “spells or witchcraft” than agree with Citizens United‘s reasoning. The Court’s forced arbitration decisions leave countless American workers and consumers powerless against corporations who break the law. And their disregard for workers such as Lilly Ledbetter is a direct blow to America’s promise of equal pay for equal work. Americans deserve the opportunity to criticize these erroneous decisions and to advocate for better judges and justices who will overrule them if given the chance.

Likewise, while Bondi is wrong about what the Constitution has to say about health reform, she has every right to criticize the nearly two centuries of Supreme Court precedent establishing that the Affordable Care Act is constitutional. Health reform’s opponents love to rail about their abiding love for freedom, but one of the first freedoms the framers added into our Constitution is the freedom to criticize our government.

Federal judicial clerkships are among the most coveted jobs young lawyers can obtain — if not the most coveted job. Law clerks spend a year as one of a judge’s closest aides, advising the judge on how to decide cases and often drafting opinions. Elite law firms pay signing bonuses as high as $60,000 to former clerks, even though these clerks are normally recent law school graduates with little legal experience outside of clerkship. One of the best predictors that a new lawyer is destined for a prominent career in their new profession is the fact that the lawyer scored a federal clerkship shortly after graduation.

According to new data by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, however, most judges are not extending this opportunity to minorities:

The decrease for African-American clerks between fiscal years 2006 and 2010 was most pronounced, with a decline from 3.5 percent of appellate level clerks in 2006 to 2.4 percent in 2010, the new report states. The number of Hispanic appellate level clerks dropped from 3.1 percent to 2 percent during the same period.

At the district court level, the percentage of African-American clerks declined from 3.5 percent to 3.2 percent, while Hispanic clerks remained steady at 3.3 percent.

This latest breakdown of law clerks by race shows African-Americans fill fewer of those spots now than they did in 2000.

Federal judges obviously wield enormous power. They have broad discretion to decide how many years a person will spend in prison. They can breathe life into essential protections for workers and consumers — or invent new ways to immunize corporations from the law. And they can shape how our Constitution itself is understood. Among other things, it is very unlikely that the frivolous constitutional argument against the Affordable Care Act would have picked up any steam if two federal district court judges had not handed down opinions legitimizing this view.

Yet a judge’s power to shape the legal profession by hiring law clerks should not be neglected as an exercise of power. When judges hire minority clerks, they welcome these lawyers into the highest eschelons of a profession that remains dominated by white attorneys. Nor is the impact of this power limited to racial diversity. When a federal judiciary that remains dominated by Republican appointees disproportionately doles out elite clerkships to conservative lawyers, it shifts the upper reaches of the legal profession rightward.