The Supreme Court is presently considering whether to hear a Montana Supreme Court case holding that the Court’s election-buying decision in Citizens United does not prevent Montana from stemming the flow of corporate money into politics. Republican leaders and corporate interest groups like the Chamber of Commerce asked the justices to double down on Citizens United, while twenty-two additional states have asked the Court to close the floodgates unleashing unlimited money into state elections.

It is possible, if extremely unlikely, that the justices will use this opportunity to fix the error they committed in Citizens United. Even if one of the five conservatives responsible for the explosion of money in politics does reconsider his mistake, however, the Supreme Court’s calendar makes it all but certain that Citizens United will remain in effect until after the 2012 election:

The Supreme Court will consider the major sequel to its controversial ruling on campaign finance at the Justices’ private Conference on June 14, the Court’s electronic docket showed Tuesday. The case is American Tradition Partnership, et al., v. Bullock (11-1179). The Court will be considering a request to overturn, without briefing or argument, a Montana Supreme Court ruling that upheld a state law curbing the campaign spending of corporations in that state — a ruling that is said to conflict directly with the Justices’ 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, allowing such spending.

If the Justices choose not to reverse that state decision summarily, they are likely to grant review and put the case over to the new Term starting October 1, with a decision likely after this year’s election. The state court ruling, in the meantime, is on hold, thus allowing corporations to spend freely in Montana in this year’s election cycle.

Republican interest groups plan to spend about $1 billion to buy Mitt Romney a new house at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue between now and the end of this cycle.

It is, of course, possible that the justices will decide that removing the taint of corruption Citizens United imposes on American democracy is so urgent that they should hear the case during a special summer session, but this is a highly irregular procedure that only occurs when the justices believe it is unusually important that the case be decided quickly — such as when the Court’s five conservatives decided to shackle our democracy with Citizens United in the first place.

Abdul Awkal with his attorney David Singleton

Awkal, who was diagnosed with Schizoaffective Disorder, believes that he advises the CIA on “Islamic religion and culture,” and he’s spent more than a decade writing letters to former CIA directors and to President Obama offering advice on the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Although he was sentenced to die for a double murder, Awkal says that he is going to be killed because the “CIA wanted him dead.”. He has a long history of hallucinations and mental breakdowns and was once ruled mentally incompetent to stand trial.

Singleton tells ThinkProgress that he will ask Kasich to reconsider his decision, and that Awkal’s legal team will also seek relief in state and, if necessary, federal court. Awkal could have a strong case. The Supreme Court held in Panetti v. Quarterman that it is unconstitutional to execute a person who is unable to “‘comprehen[d] the reasons’” for his punishment” or who is “unaware of … why [he is] to suffer it.” If Awkal truly believes that he is being executed because the CIA wants him dead, rather than because he committed a serious crime, than he is constitutionally beyond the reach of Ohio’s death chamber.

Ultimately, however, the fact that Awkal’s attorneys need to prove exactly how insane he is in order to save his life highlights the absurdity of America’s rules for state-sponsored killings. The Supreme Court has already recognized that the Constitution forbids executions of juvenile offenders or the mentally retarded because diminished mental capacity makes it harder for an offender “to understand and process information, to learn from experience, to engage in logical reasoning, or to control impulses—that also make it less likely that they can process the information of the possibility of execution as a penalty and, as a result, control their conduct based upon that information.” The same logic also applies to a severely mentally ill man such as Abdul Awkal.

Yesterday, Florida GOP Chair Lenny Curry released a statement defending Gov. Rick Scott’s (R-FL) plan to purge tens of thousands of voters from Florida’s voter roles. The purge is based on an error riddled list of purportedly ineligible voters which includes hundreds of eligible U.S. citizens in just one county. According to Curry, purging voters is just like a DUI checkpoint:

This past Memorial Day weekend, law enforcement put up checkpoints to ensure drunk drivers did not threaten the safety of fellow motorists. Undoubtedly, many of the drivers who were met by police were, in fact, not driving drunk. However, we accept the notion that on such a heavily traveled holiday, a few moments of inconvenience to law-abiding drivers is worth it if we can ensure safe highways.

Similarly, officials in Florida are undertaking a methodical and reasonable effort to maintain the security of Florida’s voter rolls. While some who are citizens, and others who are not deceased, may be asked to simply participate in the verification process, thousands of these records do accurately reflect non-citizens and people who have died.

But, of course, police do not throw sober drivers in jail or take away their license. Curry’s metaphor would only make sense if Florida police randomly pulled over and jailed thousands of citizens, with little evidence they had been drinking, and then required them to show proof of their soberness before letting them out of jail. Officials in Florida are carrying out the purge by sending an ominous and legalistic letter to voters targeted as non-citizens that requires them to request “an administrative hearing to present evidence” in order to dispute the State of Florida’s determination or be removed from the voter rolls.

Moreover, the Florida voter purge disproportionately affects Hispanics and Democrats. Fifty-eight percent of the list of more than 2,600 potential non-citizens are Hispanic while Hispanics make up only 13% of Florida’s population, a fact that places Florida in likely violation of federal law. The Voting Rights Act not only forbids laws that are passed specifically to target minority voters, it also strikes down state voter procedures that have a greater impact on minority voters than on others.

–Alex Brown

Too inexperienced to be president

“I was speaking with one of these business owners who owns a couple of restaurants in town,” Romney said. “And he said ‘You know I’d like to change the Constitution, I’m not sure I can do it,’ he said. ‘I’d like to have a provision in the Constitution that in addition to the age of the president and the citizenship of the president and the birthplace of the president being set by the Constitution, I’d like it also to say that the president has to spend at least three years working in business before he could become president of the United States.‘”

Romney continued: “You see then he or she would understand that the policies they’re putting in place have to encourage small business, make it easier for business to grow.

Watch it:

Romney’s amendment would come as quite a shock to the last person to earn the Republican Party’s presidential nomination. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) graduated from the Naval Academy in 1958 and served more than two decades in the United States Navy, including more than five years as an prisoner of war. After retiring from the Navy at the rank of captain, McCain turned to politics and was elected to the House in 1983 and to the Senate in 1987. Because McCain devoted his life to serving his country, rather than to working in business, the Romney amendment would disqualify him from the White House.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower would likely suffer a similar fate. Like McCain, Eisenhower was a career officer before entering politics, graduating from West Point in 1915 and eventually commanding the Allied victory over Nazi Germany. It’s not clear whether Romney’s amendment would count the time Eisenhower spent as President of Columbia University as “working in business,” and Eisenhower did work two years supervising the night shift at a creamery before entering college. Unless Romney would allow Eisenhower to count his time in academia as business experience, however, Eisenhower lacked the three years required to become president under the Romney amendment. Saving human civilization from Adolf Hitler is not a sufficient qualification.
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The massive voter purge order by Governor Rick Scott in Florida has been plagued with errors, resulting in election officials notifying hundreds of eligible U.S. citizens that they are ineligible to vote.

In response, the Scott administration has vowed to intensify its efforts to remove registered voters from the rolls.

Initially, the state created a list of over 180,000 purported “non-citizens” by comparing their list of registered voters to the state motor vehicle database. The state forwarded about 2700 names from that list to local officials to remove from the rolls. Yesterday, in the face of mounting problems with the limited effort, Scott administration officials made it clear they were just getting started:

Chris Cate, a spokesman for the state Division of Elections, defended the state’s actions. “It’s very important we make sure ineligible voters can’t cast a ballot,” he said in an email to the Herald on Tuesday.

He said the state continues to identify ineligible voters, saying the state Division of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles has agreed to update information using a federal database that the elections division couldn’t access directly.

“We won’t be sending any new names to supervisors until the information we have is updated, because we always want to make sure we are using the best information available,” Cate wrote. “I don’t have a timetable on when the next list of names will be sent to supervisors, but there will be more names.”

It’s unclear how the new procedures alluded to by Cate will solve the systemic problems with the voter purge list. There have been several individuals targeted by the list that have been citizens their entire lives. Therefore, there seems to be a major problems beyond outdated citizenship information.

Moreover, the entire process of database matching to remove voters is problematic. The Fair Elections Legal Network, which is challenging the purge, noted that database matching is “notoriously unreliable” and “data entry errors, similar-sounding names, and changing information can all produce false matches.”

The first list was also created with information accessible to the state motor vehicle administration, which the former Secretary of State Kurt Browning considered so unreliable he refused to release. Browning resigned in February.