Our guest blogger is Billy Corriher, associate director of research for Legal Progress.

Despite spending nearly half a billion dollars to buy the White House for Mitt Romney, rich conservatives were not able to leverage the Supreme Court’s election-buying decision in Citizens United into a bought-and-paid-for presidency. Yet, in state-level races, where candidates are far less well-known than President Obama, outside spending can do far more to change the results of elections. In state supreme court races across the country, Super-PACs and other outside groups raked in millions in unlimited donations—often anonymously. The 2012 race shattered spending records as $27.8 million was spent on television advertising, according to Justice at Stake, and more than half of this money came in the form of independent spending.

Here are four of the biggest beneficiaries of this spending:

North Carolina – Justice Paul Newby

North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Paul Newby was reelected with the help of more than $2.5 million in independent spending. Both candidates participated in the state’s public financing program, but this system was overwhelmed by money from interest groups like the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity and the state Chamber of Commerce. The RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company chipped in $100,000, after it benefited from a 2009 ruling, authored by Newby, in a dispute with tobacco farmers. The largest donation, by far, was $875,000 from the Republican State Leadership Committee, a group that helped the state’s Republican legislature draft its recent redistricting maps. Civil rights groups have filed a lawsuit alleging that the map disenfranchises minority voters, and the state supreme court will soon review the case.

Mississippi – Justice Josiah Coleman

Josiah Coleman won a seat on the Mississippi Supreme Court election with a million dollars in independent spending, and nearly half of that money coming from a shadowy, Virginia-based organization, the Law Enforcement Alliance of America (LEAA). According to a Legal Progress analysis of Kantar Media’s CMAG data, LEAA spent an estimated $449,160 on television ads in this race, and the Improve Mississippi PAC spent an estimated $626,000, for a total of $1.07 million. LEAA has been active in judicial races around the country, and although it refuses to disclose its donors, it has been associated with the National Rifle Association and U.S. Chamber of Commerce.  The rest of the independent spending came from the Improve Mississippi PAC, which received $200,000 from a physicians’ PAC and donations from PACs representing the insurance, finance, and energy industries.

Michigan – Justices Stephen Markman and Brian Zahra

The Michigan Association of Realtors spent $400,000 on ads supporting the three Republican candidates for Michigan Supreme Court, two of whom kept their seats this month, although that was admittedly small potatoes compared to at least $10 million in spending by the two major parties on this race. Nevertheless, the significant amount of spending from the Realtors raises serious questions about Justices Markman and Zahra’s ability to impartially judge cases where this interest group has an interest.

Film star Christian Slater live-tweeted his nightmarish voting process in Florida on Election Day. Even as a celebrity, Slater had to endure the same hours-long lines as other Florida voters. Once he finally made it to the front of the line, Slater was told his DMV registration was out of date and he had to cast a provisional ballot. Today he received a letter informing him that, after all that trouble, his vote was discarded.

BuzzFeed posted the letter, addressed to “Christina Slater,” and Slater’s tweets though he later deleted them:

The election chaos in Florida can largely be blamed on several reforms undertaken by Gov. Rick Scott (R-FL) to restrict early voting hours and tighten restrictions on eligible voters. A post-election study found that these election law changes led to a huge increase in provisional ballots. Clearly, countless other Floridians besides Slater had their votes wrongly discarded. State GOP members have openly admitted that these laws were geared toward suppressing the minority and Democratic vote, even though they were billed publicly as ways to combat voter fraud. Florida Democrats called for a federal probe of Florida’s election laws earlier this week.

One in every 34 U.S. adults was under some sort of correctional supervision in 2011 – whether it be in prison or jail, or on probation or parole, according to new figures from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. This is the lowest rate since 2000, and the third consecutive year in which the rate has declined. The number of people incarcerated also declined 1.3 percent, but the United States nonetheless remains the number one jailer in the world, with a rate of incarceration that far eclipses that in every other major developed nation.

The consequences of the U.S. system of mass incarceration extend far beyond individuals’ time in prison. Even after they are released, they are subject to supervision by the correction systems, and then to countless laws and policies that limit future opportunities for, or pave the way for discrimination against, those with criminal records in areas ranging from employment to housing. Many of these individuals become entrenched in this system because of nonviolent drug offenses.

This figure does not even include youth, and juvenile detention is an entirely separate and equally alarming system, fueled in part by the school-to-prison pipeline that disproportionately funnels minority students into the criminal justice system for school disciplinary violations. What’s more, many juveniles convicted of crimes are placed in adult prisons.

Senator-elect Ted Cruz (R-TX) is no stranger to fringe ideas. He authored an unconstitutional plan to nullify the Affordable Care Act. His first campaign ad touted his work helping Texas to execute an “illegal alien.” And he published an article last January claiming that the United Nations and billionaire George Soros are engaged in a nefarious global plot to “abolish ‘unsustainable’ environments, including golf courses, grazing pastures, and paved roads.”

If anything, however, Cruz’ new chief of staff suggests that Cruz’ determination to stop imaginary Soros conspiracies to destroy the game of golf is only the first part of an even more ideological agenda:

Senator-elect Ted Cruz today named as his chief of staff Chip Roy, a former Senate aide who helped Gov. Rick Perry write his anti-government tome Fed Up! . . . .

In a review of Fed Up!, Gene Healy – a scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute – credited him as “the guy who did most of the heavy lifting in the book,” though it’s hard to know exactly how much influence his views had. In the book, Perry called Social Security unconstitutional and a “Ponzi scheme.” He called it a mistake to allow direct election of senators, saying it was better to let Legislatures pick. He called for ending life tenure for federal judges and for repeal of the 16th amendment, which authorized a federal income tax. And he denounced as overreach federal efforts to regulate health care, pollution, labor conditions and energy policy.

It is likely that no book by any politician in recent history misunderstands the Constitution as badly as Fed Up!. Among other things, Rick Perry’s book attacks Supreme Court cases permitting “federal laws regulating the environment, regulating guns, protecting civil rights, establishing the massive programs and Medicare and Medicaid, creating national minimum wage laws, [and] establishing national labor laws.” It also claims that we have Social Security “at the expense of respect for the Constitution and limited government.”

And an incoming United States Senator chose “the guy who did most of the heavy lifting” in this anti-Constitution screed as his closest and most influential adviser.

In their first effort to tackle immigration reform since President Obama’s re-election, House Republicans on Friday advanced a bill that would add visas for highly skilled workers while reducing legal immigration overall. The measure, which passed by a vote of 245-139, had failed just two months ago, before Republicans lost Hispanic support in record numbers.

The STEM Act expands the number of visas available to international students who earn masters and doctorates in science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM) fields at U.S. universities, while also cutting the Diversity Visa program and reducing the number of total visas available. Under the measure, unused STEM visas are not re-allocated to other immigrants and simply disappear.

While 27 Democrats supported STEM, party leaders have proposed alternatives that would add visas for STEM graduates and entrepreneurs without taking away another category of visas. “Everyone agrees on STEM visas, so why aren’t we just voting on STEM visas?” Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) asked during Friday’s debate. The Obama administration, meanwhile, announced its opposition to the measure earlier this week, emphasizing its commitment to an immigration reform plan that creates a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants in the U.S.

“The Administration does not support narrowly tailored proposals that do not meet the President’s long-term objectives with respect to comprehensive immigration reform,” according to a statement.

Yesterday, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) released a statement threatening retaliation against Senate Democrats if they move forward with plans to reform the filibuster:

Senate Democrats’ attempt to break Senate rules in order to change Senate rules is clearly designed to marginalize Senate Republicans and their constituents while greasing the skids for controversial partisan measures. I question the wisdom of this maneuver, especially at a time when cooperation on Capitol Hill is critical, and fully support Leader McConnell’s efforts to protect minority rights, which are an essential part of our constitutional tradition. Any bill that reaches a Republican-led House based on Senate Democrats’ heavy-handed power play would be dead on arrival.

This sounds tough, but the reality is that Boehner’s threat is completely meaningless. Any bill that does not enjoy Senate Republicans’ support will already be voted down by those Republicans’ counterparts in the House, so Boehner is doing nothing more than promising to block bills that he was already going to block in the first place.

The one thing Boehner cannot stop, however, is confirmations, which belong to the Senate and the Senate alone. This is why the most important thing the Senate can do to reform the filibuster is to adopt President Obama’s proposal to ensure all nominees enjoy an swift up or down vote regardless of whether the minority wants to obstruct them.

An openly straight politician publicly flaunts his sexuality

Yesterday, George W. Bush-appointed Judge Robert Jones upheld Nevada’s practice of denying marriage equality to gay couples. Like a similar decision by a Reagan-appointed judge in Hawai’i, Judge Jones goes out of his way to resolve any uncertainties in the law in the light most unfavorable to equality — although, in fairness to Jones, his hands were at least somewhat tied by a 22 year old anti-gay precedent.

Precedent aside, however, Jones’ opinion will be very difficult to defend on appeal. He attacks gay rights in ways that undermine basic protections for racial minorities and women; and he displays an almost quaint naïveté about how politicians present their sexuality to the public. By the end of the opinion, the reader is not simply left with the impression that Judge Jones has never actually met an openly gay person, but that Jones does not spend much time observing heterosexual relationships either.

The most dangerous part of Jones’ reasoning is a section where he claims that, because gay people made significant cultural and political progress in recent years, this somehow deprives them of their ability to seek the full protection of the Constitution:

Today, unlike in 1990, the public media are flooded with editorial, commercial, and artistic messages urging the acceptance of homosexuals. Anti-homosexual messages are rare in the national informational and entertainment media, except that anti-homosexual characters are occasionally used as foils for pro-homosexual viewpoints in entertainment media. Homosexuals serve openly in federal and state political offices. The President of the United States has announced his personal acceptance of the concept of same-sex marriage, and the announcement was widely applauded in the national media. Not only has the President expressed his moral support, he has directed the Attorney General not to defend against legal challenges to the Defense of Marriage Act (“DOMA”), a federal law denying recognition to same-sex marriages at the federal level. It is exceedingly rare that a president refuses in his official capacity to defend a democratically enacted federal law in court based upon his personal political disagreements. That the homosexual-rights lobby has achieved this indicates that the group has great political power. The State of Nevada has itself outlawed sexual-orientation based discrimination as a general matter. Congress has not included the category under Title VII’s protections, however. In 2012 America, anti-homosexual viewpoints are widely regarded as uncouth.

Though it is true that Supreme Court precedents accord greater constitutional protection to groups “relegated to such a position of political powerlessness as to command extraordinary protection from the majoritarian political process,” it simply cannot be the case that a group loses its power to invoke the Constitution’s guarantee of “equal protection of the laws” once they start to gain rights and recognition through the ordinary political process. If this were true, neither African-Americans nor women could seek shelter under the Constitution, as both race and gender equality enjoys far greater protection under federal law that the rights of LGBT Americans.
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