Part four of ThinkProgress’ profiles of right-wing groups that are taking advantage of the Citizens United ruling to flood the airways with independent attack ads. See Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

American Action Network is a tax-exempt 501(c)(4) organization.

Founded in 2010, AAN is chaired by former Sen. Norm Coleman (R-MN). Its president is Brian O. Walsh, a former political director of the National Republican Congressional Committee. AAN says it is an “action tank” that aims to “create, encourage and promote center-right policies based on the principles of freedom, limited government, American exceptionalism, and strong national security.”

According to the group’s website, it was founded by Fred Malek — the controversial Republican activist best known for co-chairing Nixon’s notorious Committee for the Re-Election of the President (CREEP). Malek has since become a private equity millionaire.

Others on the board are former Sen. Mel Martinez (a Florida Republican and former RNC chairman who abruptly resigned midway through his sole Senate term to pursue a private sector career), former Rep. Tom Reynolds (R-NY), former Rep. Jim Nussle (R-IA), and former Rep. Vin Weber (R-MN), and former Bush Ambassdor C. Boyden Gray (the man enlisted by Karl Rove to create an organization to push for confirmation of George W. Bush’s judicial nominees).

Sample AAN ad:

Affiliates:

• American Action Forum, a 501(c)(3) public policy institute
• Hispanic Leadership Network, an “initiative” of the American Action Network dedicated to “a sustained effort to engage the Hispanic Community on center-right issues”

YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/AmericanActNet
Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/AAN

Graphics by Adam Peck. Christina Lewis and Ellie Sandmeyer contributed to this report

A California state legislator railed against a proposed $10 “texting and driving” fine increase in an appropriations committee hearing Wednesday, arguing that “policing ourselves” is “what the founders intended.” If passed, the bill would increase the base fine for texting and driving from $20 to $30, with the $10 increase to be used for a public awareness program. Assemblyman Tim Donnelly (R-59), however, warned that such an increase would cause George Washington to roll over in his grave:

DONNELLY: And I think the fact that you might cause a death, someone else’s death or your own, is such a powerful prohibiter of that, that we really don’t need to be increasing the fine. And I don’t think we need to have the cops pulling people over and giving them texting tickets. I see the cops driving down the street texting. So when a cop is driving down the street texting, and then he’s going to give me a ticket for texting, I think it’s wrong. And I think ultimately, there’s a great consequence to that kind of behavior. And as intelligent, rational human beings who live in a free society, is it too much to ask that we just police ourselves? It just seems that’s what the founders intended. And I feel like this is just more of a nanny state government that costs us a lot of money, and ultimately abridges more and more liberties to the point that – is the government going to tell me where I can go next? Or how many miles I can drive?

Watch it:

For the record, drivers distracted by their cellphones killed an estimated 16,000 people from 2001 to 2007. So this law has nothing to do with some kind of “nanny state” effort to protect people from themselves, and everything to do with eliminating a dangerous activity that kills thousands of innocents every year.

Donnelly is right in one respect, however. There can be no doubt that the founders did not foresee liberty-squashing texting and driving laws, for the same reason their vision of American government says nothing about the Internet, space shuttles, automatic dishwashers, the Industrial Revolution, iPads or the short-lived professional baseball career of Michael Jordan.

Assemblyman Donnelly, for his part, has not yet explained how he thinks Thomas Jefferson would have regulated the nuclear power industry.

– Steven Perlberg

Yesterday, Reagan-appointed Judge Alan C. Kay, a federal judge in Hawai’i, handed down a lengthy opinion holding that the Constitution does not provide gay Hawai’i couples with the same marriage rights as straight couples.

Kay’s opinion is 117 pages long, and its length is not surprising. Kay walks meticulously through the Supreme Court’s and other relevant gay rights precedents, identifies ambiguities — often in places where recent opinions have not found any ambiguity at all — and resolving every single uncertainty he finds in existing law in the light least favorable to gay couples. Kay cites a one sentence Supreme Court decision dismissing a gay rights case because the Court did not want to hear it as definitive proof that the justices reject equality. He reads the Ninth Circuit’s Prop 8 decision establishing that a state cannot withdraw equal marriage rights that it previously granted as narrowly as possible to diminish the significance of a 1993 Hawai’i Supreme Court decision holding that marriage discrimination is subject to the most skeptical constitutional review. And he cites favorably to an anti-gay dissenting opinion by Justice Scalia.

He also uses the word “homosexual” 50 different times.

The most important decision Kay makes, however, is that laws which discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation are only subject to “regular rational basis review,” an exceedingly low standard of constitutional scrutiny which virtually ensures that the law under consideration will be upheld. The Supreme Court’s landmark gay rights decisions in Romer v. Evans and Lawrence v. Texas suggest that a more skeptical inquiry is required — a suggestion that convinced a Republican-dominated panel of the First Circuit to strike down the Defense of Marriage Act. Neither Lawrence nor Romer, however, explicitly state that judges should treat anti-gay laws with increased skepticism, so Kay once again resolves this ambiguity against equality.

The upshot of this decision is that Kay can then uphold marriage discrimination based on flimsy arguments and studies from anti-gay organizations:

[I]t is not beyond rational speculation to conclude that fundamentally altering the definition of marriage to include same-sex unions might result in undermining the societal understanding of the link between marriage, procreation, and family structure. See HFF’s Mot. Ex. 33, Witherspoon Institute, Marriage and the Public Good: Ten Principles, 18-19 (2008) (concluding that changing the meaning of marriage “would further undercut the idea that procreation is intrinsically connected to marriage. It would further undermine the idea that children need both a mother and father, further weakening the societal norm that men should take responsibility for the children they beget.”); HFF’s Mot. Ex. 34, Andrew J. Cherlin, The Deinstitutionalization of American Marriage, 66 Journal of Marriage & Family 848, 848-50 (November 2004) (explaining that the movement to legalize same-sex marriage is the most recent development in the deinstitutionalization of marriage, i.e., the “weakening of the social norms that define people’s behavior” in the social institution of marriage).

Under rational basis review, the state is not required to show that allowing same-sex couples to marry will discourage, through changing societal norms, opposite-sex couples from marrying. Rather, the standard is whether the legislature could rationally speculate that it might.

So this is not a good opinion for equality, but it is also not clear that it will matter much in the long run. Kay’s decision will appeal to the Ninth Circuit, which has recently shown far more acceptance for gay rights than Kay. When higher courts weigh in on this case — and the plaintiffs are guaranteed at least one appeal to the Ninth Circuit as a matter of right — Kay’s opinion is likely to be forgotten. Moreover, it is worth noting that Kay is careful to distinguish his opinion from previous precedents striking down Prop 8 and DOMA. Thus, even if Kay’s reasoning stands the test of time, these particularly egregious anti-gay laws could still be on the way out.

Nevertheless, Kay’s opinion reads much like an opinion by conservative Justice Samuel Alito would read if he takes the opportunity to weigh in on marriage equality. It hunts for every single leverage point anti-gay groups can work to preserve discrimination, and struggles to pry each one open.

Earlier this week, Missouri’s Amendment 2 ballot measure — dubbed the “right to pray” amendment — passed the state legislature with 83 percent of the vote. The amendment’s backers claim it puts important protections in place for Missouri’s Christians, who they say are often “public targets” despite the fact that Christians currently represent 80 percent of the state’s population.

The ballot language said the amendment will ensure religious liberty by allowing Missouri school children to express their beliefs openly in school and permitting state-funded schools to publicly display the Bill of Rights, both expressions that are already protected. In advance of the vote, the American Civil Liberties Union called the summary on the ballot “misleading because all people in Missouri currently enjoy very robust protections of their religious liberties” under both the state constitution and the U.S. Constitution.

Amendment 2 isn’t simply a superfluous reinforcement of existing protections, however. Although the ballot summary did not explicitly mention the section of the amendment that far oversteps the precedent of the separation between church and state, the “right to pray” amendment will also allow students to refuse to participate in any school assignments they believe violate their religious beliefs.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that advocacy and legal groups are already gearing up to fight against the new amendment:

“This was misleading in its presentation and possibly unconstitutional in its application, so now we’re headed for the courts,” said Karen Aroesty of the Anti-Defamation League of Missouri and Southern Illinois. “We’ll let the next branch of the democratic process do its part, and I suspect a case will be on file pretty soon.”

Critics have warned the amendment will indeed open the door to taxpayer-funded lawsuits.

“This is going to be a nightmare for school districts, which will end up getting sued by individuals on both sides of church-state debate,” said Alex Luchenitser, associate legal director for Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. “This is the most far-out constitutional amendment we’ve seen in the church-state area.”

The ACLU warns that giving students the power to reject any part of their academic assignments represents a “truly profound change in educational law” that will “adversely affect the quality of education in Missouri.” However, it is filing suit over yet another problematic aspect of the far-reaching law: while the amendment strengthens religious protections for students in state-funded schools and legislators on government property, it actually lessens the religious freedom of the state’s inmates, stripping prisoners of their state constitutional protections for religious expression.

States like Tennessee, Indiana, Oklahoma, New Hampshire, and Missouri have also moved toward allowing students to pursue religiously-based education in public schools, such as creationism or intelligent design in science classes. Louisiana’s Department of Education is currently under fire for funneling state funds into religious schools with Bible-based curricula.

The Affordable Care Act’s opponents invested more than two years into convincing the judiciary that the Constitution and nearly 200 years of precedent does not apply to President Obama’s signature accomplishment. They peppered cable news shows with elected officials, riddled the nation’s op-ed pages with articles touting their false view of the Constitution, and they hired as their general a man who, despite a long list of reprehensible clients, is arguably the best lawyer in the United States. And after investing every single resource the conservative movement had at its fingertips, they still lost their case in the Supreme Court.

Nevertheless, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) thinks that the brightest conservative minds in the country, after spending more than two years searching for something — anything — that they could use to undermine health reform, somehow managed to miss a fatal flaw. And he recently introduced a resolution seeking to declare the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional based on this novel new theory:

Whereas article I, section 7, clause 1 of the United States Constitution provides that, ‘All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives’;

Whereas, on June 28, 2012, a majority of the United States Supreme Court held that the individual mandate provision of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2009 ‘cannot be upheld as an exercise of Congress’s power under the Commerce Clause’ but ‘was within Congress’s power to tax’;

Whereas the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2009 was originally introduced in the United States Congress by its sponsor as the ‘Senate health care bill’ in the form of a Senate Amendment to H.R. 3590, which had passed the House of Representatives by a vote of 416-0 as the ‘Service Members Home Ownership Tax Act of 2009’ . . . .

Resolved, That it is the sense of the House of Representatives that–

(1) the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2009 was a ‘Bill for raising Revenue’ as those words were intended to be understood in article I, section 7, clause 1 of the United States Constitution; and

(2) the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2009 did not originate in the House of Representatives.

In essence Gohmert claims that the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional because it first passed the Senate, and bills that contain new taxes or other revenue raising measures must originate in the House. Gohmert’s resolution, however, only quotes half the relevant constitutional text, which provides that “[a]ll bills for raising revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with amendments as on other Bills.” As Gohmert admits, the bill that eventually became the Affordable Care Act was an “Senate Amendment to H.R. 3590, which had passed the House of Representatives by a vote of 416-0.” Had Gohmert actually bothered to read the entire sentence that he quotes from the Constitution, he would know that our founding document places no limit on the kinds of amendments the Senate can attach to a House bill that already concerns revenues.

Ultimately, however, these kinds of attacks on health reform have never had much to do with actually following the Constitution, and much more to do with throwing as much mud on Obamacare as possible to see if something sticks. The Supreme Court has spoken on these issues. It’s time for Gohmert to give it up.