Earlier today, the National Review’s mailing list distributed an email (which can also be found here) signed by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), which called for Congress to pass a law effectively rendering a binding Supreme Court decision a nullity:

Working from what the Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade, pro-life lawmakers can pass a Life at Conception Act and end abortion using the Constitution instead of amending it. . . . Signing the Life at Conception Act petition will help break through the opposition clinging to abortion-on-demand and get a vote on this life-saving bill to overturn Roe v. Wade.

A Life at Conception Act declares unborn children “persons” as defined by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, entitled to legal protection.

It’s not entirely clear why Paul believes Congress has this power, and the email he signed does not provide a fully developed legal argument making the case for such an law. Instead, it appears to argue that Congress can simply grant full legal “personhood” status to fetuses under the 14th Amendment because Roe left open “the difficult question of when life begins.” This is not a correct reading of the Roe decision, however. The Roe opinion is unambiguous that “the word ‘person,’ as used in the 14th Amendment, does not include the unborn.”

Whether one agrees with this opinion or not, Congress does not have the power to flout the Supreme Court’s constitutional decisions simply because it does not like them. As ThinkProgress explained when a similar proposal was floated last year by Princeton Professor Robert George, “[i]n City of Boerne v. Flores, the Court held that Congress is not allowed to simply declare that the 14th Amendment means whatever they want it to mean and then use that declaration to pass enforcement legislation — Congress can only pass laws enforcing existing 14th Amendment rights.”

Just as importantly, there is something very bizarre about a conservative stalwart like Rand Paul insisting that obeying the Supreme Court is optional at exactly the same time conservatives are trying to impose much of their policy agenda upon the nation by judicial decree. Presumably, Paul would be outraged if President Obama simply refused to obey a Supreme Court decision striking down part of the Affordable Care Act or if elections officials were to ban corporations from trying to buy elections despite the justices’ decision in Citizens United. Yet, if Roe v. Wade is as optional as Paul appears to think that it is, than there is no reason why Obama should feel obliged to obey conservatives’ pet decisions either.

Over at the New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin has a lengthy and excellent piece recounting the history the Supreme Court’s election-buying decision in Citizens United. Toobin frames the piece at the tale of conservative Chief Justice John Roberts’ strategic triumph over more than a hundred years of regulation limiting big money’s influence on politics. Nevertheless, the most important revelation in Toobin’s piece is the central role the Supreme Court’s so-called moderate swing vote played in dismantling meaningful limits on wealthy interest groups’ influence on elections:

According to the briefs in the case—and Olson’s argument—the main issue was whether the McCain-Feingold law applied to a documentary, presented on video on demand, by a nonprofit corporation. The liberals lost that argument: the vote at the conference was that the law did not apply to Citizens United, which was free to advertise and run its documentary as it saw fit. The liberals expected that Roberts’s opinion would say this much and no more.

At first, Roberts did write an opinion roughly along those lines, and Kennedy wrote a concurrence which said the Court should have gone much further. Kennedy’s opinion said the Court should declare McCain-Feingold’s restrictions unconstitutional, overturn an earlier Supreme Court decision from 1990, and gut long-standing prohibitions on corporate giving. But after the Roberts and Kennedy drafts circulated, the conservative Justices began rallying to Kennedy’s more expansive resolution of the case. In light of this, Roberts withdrew his own opinion and let Kennedy write for the majority. Kennedy then turned his concurrence into an opinion for the Court.

The new majority opinion transformed Citizens United into a vehicle for rewriting decades of constitutional law in a case where the lawyer had not even raised those issues.

As ThinkProgress previously explained, Kennedy is widely viewed as a moderate conservative, but this perception is inaccurate. Although Kennedy does sometimes deviate from conservative orthodoxy on social or on criminal justice issues, he is a hard line conservative on economic justice. Kennedy is a zealous supporter of forced arbitration, a practice that allows corporations to force their workers and consumers into a privatized arbitration system that overwhelmingly favors corporate parties. He cast the key vote against Lilly Ledbetter and against equal pay for many women in the workplace. He cast the key fifth vote empowering corporations to immunize themselves from consumer class actions. And, of course, he also voted to install install George W. Bush as president.

In recent years, three of the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s four conservatives were charged with ethics violations by the Wisconsin Judicial Commission — Justice Annette Ziegler for presiding over cases involving a bank where her husband was a director, Justice Michael Gableman for running a misleading campaign ad, and Justice David Prosser for allegedly grabbing a fellow justice by the neck. In the wake of these charges, all four of the court’s conservatives voted in a party-line vote not to reappoint the chair of this commission:

 

The Wisconsin Supreme Court’s conservative majority has decided not to reappoint the leader of a commission working to discipline Justice David Prosser.

Wisconsin Judicial Commission Chairman John Dawson’s term ends Aug. 1. Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson, Justice Ann Walsh Bradley and Justice Patrick Crooks [Editor's Note: Abrahamson, Bradley and Crooks make up the dissenting bloc on the conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court] sent Dawson a letter Friday saying the court had decided it didn’t want him back.

The decision was made in a closed vote. The three justices didn’t reveal the tally, but it takes four votes to make a decision and all three of them said they supported Dawson. That means the four-justice conservative majority, which includes Prosser, did not.

Currently, the only pending ethics charge against a member of the state’s highest court is the charge against Prosser. Ziegler received a public reprimand for her ethical lapse and the charges against Gableman were eventually dropped after the remaining justices split 3-3 along party lines on whether Gableman committed misconduct.

The case against Prosser may get shut down before it even begins, however, thanks to a quirk in Wisconsin state law. Normally, when the judicial commission brings an ethics charge of this kind, a three judge panel is appointed to determine whether that charge has merits. As a technical matter, however, that panel must be approved by the state supreme court itself. Prosser is now trying to prevent such approval from even being given by asking his colleagues to recuse themselves from the case — something one of his fellow conservatives has already agreed to do. If two or more of his remaining colleagues follow along, that will mean that the court lacks a quorum to approve a panel, and the case against Prosser will be blocked by this technicality.

Last March, police received a report that a taco truck in Pasadena, California had just been robbed. According to a recently released autopsy report, the two officers who arrived to investigate this report ran down and eventually shot a young black suspect seven times:

Nineteen-year-old Kendrec McDade was shot at point-blank range by one Pasadena police officer and handcuffed after being struck by a total of seven bullets, according to the autopsy report released Friday by the Los Angeles County coroner’s office. . . . Three of the wounds — two in his abdomen and one in his right arm — are considered potentially fatal because they lacerated arteries, according to Pasadena police. One bullet entered through the back of the right arm and another the back of the right forearm.

McDade, of Azusa, was killed when Pasadena officers Jeff Newlen and Mathew Griffin responded to a report of an armed robbery at a taco truck in northwest Pasadena. One of the officers pursued him on foot and the other from his police cruiser.

The first officer who fired did so while seated in the patrol car as McDade approached with his hand at his waistband. McDade and the officer were “within a foot” of each other, according to the autopsy report.

It is not yet clear whether McDade was actually involved in the taco truck robbery or if he was merely a bystander. It is clear, however, that the police who shot McDade did so under a cloud of false information. McDade was not armed, and the alleged theft victim later admitted that he lied about his assailants having weapons in order to provoke a faster response by police.

McDade also does not fit the profile of the kind of person who would normally commit armed robbery. He has no gang ties or prior arrests, was a star football player in high school, and was a student at Citrus College at the time of his death.

Last month, the conservative National Review fired its longtime contributor John Derbyshire after Derbyshire published a column in another publication instructing parents on how to train their children to be racists. Although the National Review did the right thing in eventually firing Derbyshire, it published the author for years despite a long history of racist and sexist views. Derbyshire argued in 2009 that women should not vote, and he proclaimed as far back as 2003 that he is a proud “racist.”

Derbyshire, however, appears to have learned nothing from his high-profile firing. In a column for the white nationalist site VDARE.com, Derbyshire offers unqualified praise for white supremacy:

The enemies of conservatism are eager to supply their own nomenclature. “White Supremacist” seems to be their current favorite. It is meant maliciously, of course, to bring up images of fire-hoses, attack dogs, pick handles, and segregated lunch counters—to imply that conservatives, especially non-mainstream conservatives, are cruel people with dark thoughts.

Leaving aside the intended malice, I actually think “White Supremacist” is not bad semantically. White supremacy, in the sense of a society in which key decisions are made by white Europeans, is one of the better arrangements History has come up with. There have of course been some blots on the record, but I don’t see how it can be denied that net-net, white Europeans have made a better job of running fair and stable societies than has any other group.

As a reminder, this man who now openly praises a racial caste system wrote for one of the nation’s top conservative publications for nearly 12 years.