For two years, House Oversight Chair Darrell Issa (R-CA) has persued a quixotic witchhunt against Attorney General Eric Holder, claiming that a series of botched gun stings that began during the Bush Administration somehow are now the subject of a giant cover up by Holder. Issa’s witchhunt, however, has not been well received by the House Republican leadership, some of whom have even called for Issa to abandon his baseless case against the Attorney General. Nevertheless, Issa enjoys the support of House Republican freshman and other members of his caucus’ right flank, and he’s wielded this support to ignore his leadership’s wishes. Last week, Issa even held a committee vote to hold Holder in contempt of Congress for failing to turn over various documents that are shielded either by executive privilege or longstanding Justice Department polices.

In a sign that the Republican leadership still believes Issa’s witchhunt is not a winner for the GOP, however, they scheduled the full House vote on this contempt resolution for Thursday. Thursday is also the day the Supreme Court will hand down its decision in the Affordable Care Act case, almost certainly displacing all other stories from the news cycle.

The Department of Homeland Security’s Secure Communities program is supposed to help prioritize the deportation of undocumented immigrants who commit serious crimes. It formed agreements with state and local police departments to check the fingerprints of every person booked at jails against an immigration database to identify who is undocumented. But the program failed to focus on serious criminals — most people identified through the program were charged with traffic-related offenses in some jurisdiction — and thousands of U.S. citizens have been detained through the program.

Following Monday’s Supreme Court ruling that invalidated three sections of Arizona’s immigration law, the Department of Homeland Security rescinded Secure Communities agreements with seven Arizona law enforcement agencies. They were the last agencies in Arizona with street-level task force agreements under the controversial program to check the immigration status of suspected undocumented immigrants. After the ruling let the “show me your papers” provision stand in SB 1070, a DHS official said the Obama administration determined that the agreements are “not useful” now in states that have Arizona-style laws.

Along with ending the partnerships, DHS officials said officials would not respond to calls from Arizona officials who want immigration agents to take undocumented immigrants into custody unless the suspects meet the criteria for enforcement priorities, such as convicted criminals or deportees who have returned to the U.S. While the task forces have been suspended, several Arizona departments still check immigration status in jails.

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) accused President Obama of not thinking that Arizona is “part of the country anymore” if officials are pulling back on Secure Communities in the state. But a task force advising the president last year found that Secure Communities had a “negative impact” on public safety. It had “eroded the public trust” because even immigrants who had not committed serious crimes were being detained.

A Minnesota mother is suing the correctional facility where her son, Xavier Scullark-Johnson, died after being denied emergency care by his prison nurses. The 27-year-old St. Paul native was less than three months away from his prison release when he passed away in June 2010.

According to new documents obtained by the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Scullark-Johnson had already suffered numerous seizures the night that prison nurse Denise L. Garin turned away an ambulance team that a doctor had ordered to be sent for the inmate.

Garin overrode the on-call doctor and demanded that Scullark-Johnson not be transported to the hospital because “protocol” stated that ambulance transports were to be “strictly monitored” in an effort to “cut costs.” The nurse likely was worried about the cost incurred from the prison’s for-profit medical contractor, Corizon. She described the man as “alert, his vital signs were stable, and he responded appropriately,” but the ambulance crew’s report indicated otherwise:

“They say the patient has had three seizures through the night,” a crew member wrote in her June 29, 2010, report. “They believe that he has a seizure [history] but do not know because health services is closed at night. They did not want patient transported.

“They have protocols to deal with the patient,” her notes continue, “and say this is because patient has recently gotten his Dilantin cut in half.”

Dilantin is a drug used to control seizures. An autopsy later showed that Johnson’s Dilantin was “below therapeutic level,” but there is no mention in Garin’s charting why she refused to let the ambulance crew take him to the hospital to have his Dilantin level checked immediately.

Garin’s own report makes no mention of protocols or drug dosages.

Johnson was pronounced dead less than two hours after the ambulance was ordered to leave without him. All accounts indicated that he was found soaked in urine on the floor of his cell, coiled in a fetal position after seizures had caused irreversible brain damage. Garin continues to work for the Rush City prison.

This tragedy marks the glaring problem of using for-profit contractors for medical care in government-run prisons: Private contractors put money before the care of their patients. Other cost-cutting measures have included eliminating doctors from Minnesota prisons after 4 p.m. and on weekends. Nurses continue to remain on staff, but end their shifts at 10:30 p.m., leaving inmates with no immediate access to medical care after hours.

–Angela Guo

In 2003, Texas voters approved Proposition 12, tort reform which capped medical malpractice payouts and made it more difficult for patients to sue hospitals. Republican politicians, led by Gov. Rick Perry (R), claimed that doctors were providing less services to patients because they feared getting sued. Republicans, joined by a “Yes on 12” campaign funded by the health insurance industry, promised that the amendment would lower health care costs and bring an influx of doctors to the state. Since 2003, Republicans nationwide have touted Texas as a model for tort reform.

Now, a group of researchers studying Texas Medicare spending have found no decrease in doctors’ fees for senior citizens between 2002 and 2009. Medicare payments to doctors rose 1 to 2 percent faster than the rest of the country, Northwestern professor Bernard Black, a researcher on the study, said.

In urban and high population counties, the study’s authors expected to see lower health care costs stemming from a reduction in medical tests doctors previously used to protect themselves from lawsuits. However, the researchers found no decrease in costs and a slight increase in medical tests performed. “This is not a result we expected,” said Bernard Black, a co-author and a professor at Northwestern University’s Law School and Kellogg School of Management.

During his short-lived presidential run, Rick Perry claimed that Prop 12 brought 21,000 doctors to Texas; that claim was ranked “False” by PolitiFact. Other advocates, like the industry-funded Texas Alliance for Patient Access behind the “Yes on 12” campaign, have claimed that tort reform brought 5,000 doctors to Texas. An unpublished study by the same group of researchers rejects that claim, which they say ignores “doctors who left the state or retired, creating vacancies for their jobs; physicians who don’t treat patients but do research or administrative work; and physician growth compared with other states.” When these factors are taken into account, the study found, doctor growth has actually declined slightly since 2003.

– Ben Sherman

Coal Baron Don Blankenship

In 2004, West Virginia coal mogul Don Blankenship spend $3 million to elect a West Virginia supreme court justice — more money that all the candidates combined. The newly elected justice then cast the deciding vote to overturn a $50 million verdict against his Blankenship’s company, although a 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court later required the state justices to rehear the case with Blankenship’s bought judge recused.

In response to this judge-for-sale incident, West Virginia enacted a pilot program to publicly finance judicial elections. Thanks to a a U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down a similar program in Arizona, however, West Virginia’s effort to fight corruption in judicial elections may never get off the ground:

West Virginia Supreme Court candidate Allen Loughry accused Secretary of State Natalie Tennant of not following the law when it comes to the state’s election public financing pilot project. . . .

Loughry is the only candidate who is part of the funding option. Part of the state law would allow him to receive several hundred thousand dollars for his campaign if other candidates in the race for state Supreme Court spend a certain amount.

But the provision has been called into question by the state Attorney General after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a similar provision in an Arizona public financing law. A previous report said Tennant planned to follow the state Attorney General’s advice.

In enacting this law, West Virginia followed the lead of North Carolina, the only state that offers public financing specifically for judicial candidates. Yet, one month ago, a federal judge ruled North Carolina’s matching funds provision unconstitutional, citing the Supreme Court’s decision in the Arizona case.

As Justice Stevens warned in his Citizens United dissent, the conservative justices “unleashe[d] the floodgates” of unlimited corporate spend at exactly the same time that “concerns about the conduct of judicial elections have reached a fever pitch.” Yet Citizens United is hardly these conservatives only effort to give an upper hand to the wealthy in American elections. The Arizona case, and its likely impact on public financing in states like West Virginia and North Carolina, are a direct assault on America’s ability to fight public corruption.

As ThinkProgress reported yesterday, conservative Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissenting opinion claiming that Arizona’s entire harsh immigration law should be upheld sacrifices both factual and mathematical accuracy in order to attack one of the Obama Administrations recently announced policies. Perhaps the oddest part of Scalia’s dissent, however, is the fact that he actually relied on pro-slavery laws excluding free persons of African descent from much of the south to justify allowing Arizona to target undocumented immigrants:

Notwithstanding “[t]he myth of an era of unrestricted immigration” in the first 100 years of the Republic, the States enacted numerous laws restricting the immigration of certain classes of aliens, including convicted crimi­nals, indigents, persons with contagious diseases, and (in Southern States) freed blacks. State laws not only provided for the removal of unwanted immigrants but also imposed penalties on unlawfully present aliens and those who aided their immigration

This kind of thing is, sadly, common in Scalia’s opinions. He’s defended torture and finds little wrong with executing the innocent.  When a majority of his colleagues reached the radical conclusion that people have a right to choose their own sex partners, Scalia railed against them for embracing the “homosexual agenda.” During oral arguments over the Affordable Care Act, Scalia seemed unable to distinguish legal arguments from partisan talking points.

Nevertheless, looking to slaveholding states for guidance is beyond the pale, even for Scalia.

[HT: Matt Yglesias]