Pharmaceutical giant Johnson and Johnson announced today that they are dropping their membership from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

Johnson and Johnson has been facing mounting pressure following a push from Color of Change and other progressive groups to leave the conservative agenda-setting group.

ALEC is responsible for crafting voter suppression legislation that has been used in state houses across the country, and the “Stand Your Ground” law that originally protected Trayvon Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman. Johnson and Johnson is the latest in a huge wave of groups leaving ALEC.

Other groups that have dropped ALEC include: Walmart, Amazon.com, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Kraft, Wendy’s, Mars, Inc., Arizona Public Service, the National Board for Professional Teaching StandardsScantron, The National Association of Charter School Authorizers, Kaplan, Procter & Gamble, Yum! Brands, five Pennsylvania legislators, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Reed Elsevier, American Traffic Solutions, Intuit, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The framers of our Constitution met in 1787 because the weak national governance adopted by the Articles of Confederation utterly failed. Their goal, in their own words, was to ensure that the federal government had the power to “legislate in all cases for the general interests of the Union, and also in those to which the States are separately incompetent.” National leaders must have the ability to address national problems, and this is especially true with respect to the national economy. As the Supreme Court explained very early in American history, there is “no sort of trade” that our national leaders cannot regulate, and the the power to regulate something “implies in its nature full power over the thing to be regulated,” so long as Congress does not trample the individual protected elsewhere in the Constitution.

Few living Americans have done more to undermine this vision than Randy Barnett, a Georgetown law professor and one of the leading architects of the lawsuits challenging the Affordable Care Act. In an interview with NPR yesterday, Barnett admitted just how far he’d like to go in reimagining the Constitution if his attack on health reform succeeds:

Now comes the Obama health care overhaul, known as the ACA, the Affordable Care Act, a law under full assault by the modern conservative movement. Some, like Georgetown Law Center professor Randy Barnett, the architect of the challenge, say openly that they believe many of the New Deal cases were wrongly decided.

“They are well-settled precedents and are not likely to be revisited in my lifetime,” Barnett says. “But I do think that according to the original meaning of the Constitution, they were wrongly decided.“

To translate this a bit, in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries the Supreme Court abandoned the framers’ objective of ensuring that national problems can be addressed by our national democracy to impose unprecedented new limits on Congress’ authority. The “New Deal cases” Barnett objects to rejected the fake constitution that dominated the pre-New Deal era. If Barnett succeeds in restoring this fake constitution, he would usher in a far meaner and less prosperous America:

• Child Labor: One of the seminal cases from this discredited era is Hammer v. Dagenhardt, which struck down a national child labor law. If the New Deal cases Barnett despises were overruled, the longstanding federal protections against exploiting child workers would cease to exist.
• No Minimum Wage: A key New Deal case, United States v. Darby, upheld a national minimum wage and overtime laws. If Darby were overruled, these and other basic labor protections would also cease to exist.
• Whites-Only Lunch Counters: The Court also relied on cases like Darby in upholding basic civil rights protections, including the ban on whites-only lunch counters. Barnett’s fake constitution would almost certainly eliminate most of the legislative progress of the Civil Rights Era.
• The Right to Organize: The pre-New Deal justices also struck down laws ensuring workers’ right to organize into labor unions. Restoring their fake constitution would bring this decision back to life.

In other words, the fake constitution espoused by the anti-health reform case’s chief architect would roll back nearly one hundred years of progress — leaving poor children, minorities, workers and women out in the cold. If he wins in the Supreme Court next month, any of the great legislative victories of the New Deal and Civil Rights Eras could be next on the chopping block.

A Tea Party group is suing states to try to purge their voter rolls before November’s election. True the Vote, an arm of the King Street Patriots, has filed a suit against the state of Indiana, alleging that the state has poor “list maintenance” of its voters.

This suit kicks off a series of state-focused attempts by True the Vote, serving as a co-plaintiff with the conservative “watchdog” group Judicial Watch, to limit voter turnout this election season. Voter purges may be presented under the guise of fairer elections, but the idea of “cleaning” a list usually results in legal voters — overwhelmingly voters of color — being kicked off the rolls.

True the Vote’s agenda is clearly political, as can be evidenced from their website that lists Wisconsin’s recall election as a ‘victory’ (despite day-of claims of voter fraud) and Florida as an upcoming target. Other states on the list for lawsuits include more than half are swing states in play this election season:

According to a Judicial Watch investigation voter rolls in the following states appear to contain the names of individuals who are ineligible to vote: Mississippi, Iowa, Indiana, Missouri, Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Florida, Alabama, and California. As part of its 2012 Election Integrity Project, Judicial Watch has put these states on notice that they must clean up their voter registration lists or face Judicial Watch lawsuits.

The Obama Justice Department has failed to enforce Section 8 the NVRA in court, having last filed a lawsuit to enforce voter list maintenance requirements of the NVRA in 2007. The current DOJ it is now opposing Florida’s Section 8 efforts to remove non-citizens from the voting rolls.

“This lawsuit is a historic step in restoring integrity to the American system of electing its leaders,” stated True the Vote President Catherine Engelbrecht. “Dirty election rolls can lead to election fraud and stolen elections.”

Attempts at “list management” aren’t quite as clear-cut as the press release makes it out to be. Florida’s recent tussles over voter rolls have resulted in voter suppression efforts — though it was technically aimed at non-citizens, those kicked off the rolls included two 90-plus world war two veterans. But while those voters were purged under the banner of protecting elections, fraud in the state is still less likely than getting hit by lighting.

The Obama administration announced a new process in August 2011 to review deportations on a case-by-case basis. That way, immigration officials could focus their resources on higher priority targets — people who pose a threat to public safety or repeat immigration law violators — instead of low priority cases, like bi-national same-sex couples, children who were brought to America at a young age, pregnant women, and military veterans.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said in August that the policy was first outlined in March 2010. And a senior administration official explained at the time that the process is designed to “keep folks who are low priority cases out of the deportation process to begin with.” But of the roughly 300,000 cases reviewed, only 4,400 deportations of undocumented immigrants had been halted so far. Stopping fewer than 2 percent of deportations is not good enough, one official told the New York Times:

“I do believe the administration has the right intention, prioritizing deportations,” Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, a leading Democrat on immigration issues, said after seeing the low figures from the deportations review. “But these abysmal numbers raise serious questions about whether the Department of Homeland Security is making that vision a reality.”

Menendez suggested that immigrants who have close relatives in the U.S. should be included in the reviews, and Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) said prosecutors should grant work permits to immigrants who stay in the U.S. until their deportation case is reviewed.

Under President Obama, roughly 400,000 undocumented immigrants have been deported each year. About 46,000 parents were deported in the first half of 2011, before officials began reviewing deportation case-by-case. But if only 4,400 deportations have been stopped under the review policy, then the administration should use it more widely, like for students who risk being deported.

With four executions so far and two more scheduled for June, Mississippi is poised to execute more people this year than it has since 1956. In fact, the last time Mississippi executed more than four inmates in a single year was 1961. In that bygone era, inmates could be executed for armed robbery. Now, capital murder is the only crime punishable by death in Mississippi, yet the state is on pace to see more executions this year as national numbers continue to move in the opposite direction.

While some are calling the flurry of Mississippi’s executions a predictable overlap in the appeals process, one local attorney who has worked on behalf of death row inmates disagrees. Jim Craig says that the Mississippi Office of Capital Post-Conviction Counsel lacks manpower and funding, filing appeals solely on court transcripts and failing to re-interview witnesses. According to Mr. Craig:

“This is more than just the usual things moving at the usual speed. This is a breakdown in the system of providing lawyers to poor people when the state is trying to execute them. [...] A pace of one or two executions a year is about what Mississippi has averaged. The reason why we have had 11 since 2008, I think it has to do with the failures of the post-conviction office in those years.”

The death penalty is hardly a cheaper option for a state than providing substantial post-conviction legal counsel. One comprehensive study of North Carolina’s death penalty found that sentencing a defendant to die costs the state $2.16 million more per execution over the costs of sentencing inmates to life imprisonment without parole.

–Steven Perlberg

The legal case against the Affordable Care Act is constitutional gobbledygook. It relies on a misreading of the Constitution the Supreme Court foreclosed nearly 200 years ago, and it is completely at odds with what many of the most Court’s most conservative justices wrote in past opinions. Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Kennedy and even Justice Scalia all wrote or joined opinions that clearly establish Obamacare’s constitutionality.

There is, however, a partisan argument against the Affordable Care Act. When Congress voted on health reform, every single Republican voted to maintain the status quo. When the justices announce their decision in the health care case this month, these same lawmakers hope that every single Republican justice will join them in voting against reform. Things weren’t always this way, however. In the words of Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Republicans used to oppose “those who can’t get their policy views enacted through the legislature” who then “turn to the courts.”

Indeed, quotes from Republican senators arguing against exactly the same kind of judicial activism Republican senators now insist the Supreme Court must engage in is so common, we found dozens of examples. Here are a few of our favorites:

ThinkProgress intern Alex Brown contributed to this post.

Even if Gov. Rick Scott’s (R-FL) administration prevails in its new lawsuit against the Obama administration, his efforts to purge voters before November’s election still faces a major obstacle — the county elections supervisors, including 30 Republicans, who have the ultimate authority over the voting rolls.

Republican Ann McFall, county supervisor of elections for Volusia County, told ThinkProgress that the lawsuit does not have her support and she will not resume purging voters before the elections, regardless of the suit’s outcome:

No I do not support the lawsuit. It is [about] helping the Governor and Secretary of State improve their image. I am not doing any further voter purge until after Nov 2012.

After every one of Flordia’s 67 Democratic, Republican, and Independent county elections supervisors joined together last week to stop Gov. Rick Scott’s (R) error-riddled and likely illegal attempt to remove what his administration said were non-citizen voters from the voter rolls, Scott is pursuing a new tactic in his voter suppression campaign. Yesterday, he announced he will sue the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in an attempt to get more accurate immigration data than the wildly-inaccurate earlier list his administration had originally claimed contained “sure-fire” non-citizens. A DHS representative told the Orlando Sentinel last week that even their list would not provide Florida with an accurate picture of who is and is not a U.S. citizen.

McFall’s fellow Republican Jerry Holland, supervisor of elections for Duval County, told ThinkProgress that he does support the Scott administration’s lawsuit. But even he did not commit to resuming the purge, saying he would do “what ever the law requires and permits.”