The Supreme Court’s election-buying decision in Citizens United v. FEC enabled wealthy corporations to spend unlimited money to change the course of American elections, and a subsequent lower court decision gave the green light to super PACs funded by unlimited donations from millionaires, billionaires and corporations. Today, the Supreme Court announced it would hear another case — brought by none other than the Republican National Committee — that would go even further towards transforming American democracy into the Wild West.

Despite recent election-buying decisions permitting unlimited donations to super PACs and other groups that exist independently of campaigns and political parties, federal law still limits individual donations to candidates and to the parties themselves. In the next election cycle, these limits include a $2,600 cap on individual donations to a single candidate, and an overall limit of $123,200 in contributions to candidates, political party committees and similar organizations. The Republican Party’s lawsuit seeks to eliminate most of these limits on election-buying — most importantly, by removing the $123,200 cap on total contributions.

As the unanimous lower court decision upholding this cap explained, removing it would corrupt our election system even more by allowing billionaires to launder as much money as they want through political party committees to individual candidates:

Eliminating the aggregate limits means an individual might, for example, give half-a-million dollars in a single check to a joint fundraising committee comprising a party’s presidential candidate, the party’s national party committee, and most of the party’s state party committees. After the fundraiser, the committees are required to divvy the contributions to ensure that no committee receives more than its permitted share, but because party committees may transfer unlimited amounts of money to other party committees of the same party, the half-a-million-dollar contribution might nevertheless find its way to a single committee’s coffers. That committee, in turn, might use the money for coordinated expenditures, which have no “significant functional difference” from the party’s direct candidate contributions. The candidate who knows the coordinated expenditure funding derives from that single large check at the joint fundraising event will know precisely where to lay the wreath of gratitude.

Significantly, this opinion was written by Judge Janice Rogers Brown, who is one of the most conservative judges in the country. Brown previously authored an opinion suggesting that all labor, business or Wall Street regulation is constitutionally suspect, and she once compared liberalism to “slavery” and Social Security to a “socialist revolution.”

As a lower court judge, however, Brown was also required to follow Supreme Court precedents. The five conservative justices who gave us Citizens United, by contrast, are not.

According to an official complaint filed by the Georgia Commission on Judicial Qualifications, state trial Judge J. William Bass, Sr. is a disaster of a judge. The eleven count complaint accuses Judge Bass of routinely singling out Hispanic defendants for private conversations “without a court reporter or the prosecutor present.” Judge Bass allegedly appointed his own son to serve as a county judge in his absence. He is accused of telling “the audience that [he] had been falsely accused of having a sexual relationship with a member of [his] staff” during open court. He allegedly once made an “inappropriate reference based upon [his] perceived sexual orientation” of a male defendant during a sentencing proceeding. And then, there is this accusation:

In court, you were verbally hostile to an attorney after he made a financial contribution to your opponent in the election. You made a loud and threatening statement in court to the attorney: “l know you gave money to my opponent. Don’t come back[.]“

The fact that Judge Bass is the subject of an official complaint suggests that he may actually suffer consequences if the allegations against him prove true. Nevertheless, judges who engage in inappropriate conduct regarding their donors often suffer few, if any, consequences. Former Texas Supreme Court Justice Priscilla Owen took thousands of dollars worth of campaign contributions from Enron and then wrote a key opinion reducing Enron’s taxes by $15 million. Several years later, President George W. Bush gave her a lifetime appointment to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Similarly, when a West Virginia coal baron spent $3 million to place a sympathetic justice on the state supreme court, and that justice then went on to overturn a $50 million verdict against the coal baron’s company, four of the current Supreme Court justices joined a dissent finding no constitutional problem with this judge-for-sale arrangement.

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

Spending on television ads for this year’s state supreme court races reached a record high of nearly $28 million, according to Justice at Stake. The race for the Ohio Supreme Court was one of the most expensive, with candidates reporting more than $2 million in campaign contributions and undisclosed millions in independent spending. One candidate in that race, however, refused to accept campaign cash and ran on a platform of cleaning up the state’s judicial elections. Judge Bill O’Neill won a seat on the high court with the campaign slogan, “Money and Judges Don’t Mix.”

This message, which criticized incumbent justices for accepting campaign cash from parties and attorneys before the court, did not sit well with the Ohio State Bar Association. The bar association called on O’Neill to refrain from making “statements that impugn the court’s integrity and imply that justice is for sale.” The legal industry has traditionally been the largest source of campaign contributions for high court candidates.

In an interview with ThinkProgress, O’Neill responded, “I am not implying that justice is for sale. I am stating it as a matter of fact.” As an example, O’Neill points to campaign cash from power company First Energy, which recently contributed to two justices while it had a case before the court. “If that’s not an attempt to buy the court, I don’t know what is,” he said.

The Center for American Progress issued a report in August on corporate interest groups influencing the law through campaign contributions. The report found that the high courts which have seen the most campaign cash, including the Ohio Supreme Court, are more likely to favor corporate defendants over individual plaintiffs. A 2006 New York Times article studied the correlation between campaign donations and the Ohio Supreme Court’s rulings, and it found that the justices voted for their contributors in 70% of the cases studied.

At a forum on education policy on Tuesday morning, GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney launched into an unexpected explanation of why big money should be kept out of our political system:

I just think that the most important aspect in being able to have a productive relationship between the teachers’ unions and the districts in the states that they are dealing with is that the person sitting across the table from them should not have received the largest campaign contributions from the teachers’ union itself. . . . The largest contributors to the Democratic Party are the teachers’ unions, the federal teachers unions, and so, if [the unions] can elect someone that person is supposed to be representing the public vis a vis the teachers’ union, but actually most of their money came from the teachers’ union. It’s an extraordinary conflict of interest. That’s something I think is a problem and should be addressed.

Watch it:

Romney is right! When a wealthy individual or organization that has a stake in public policy is able to spend their vast fortunes influencing elections, that inevitably leads to corruption. No one should have any illusions that politicians who enjoy massive support from teachers’ unions are any less corruptible than those who enjoy the support of Republican casino billionaires.

Yet this problem cannot “be addressed,” as Romney suggests, because the Supreme Court declared in Citizens United v. FEC that wealthy corporations and unions have a right to spend unlimited sums of money to buy and sell elections. The core holding of Citizens United was that massive outside spending seeking to change the result of an election “do[es] not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” Apparently, even Mitt Romney understands that this holding makes no sense.

If Romney is worried about the impact union donations can have on lawmakers’ behavior, than he should be absolutely outraged by corporate, millionaire and billionaire donations. Federal law permits workers to opt-out of union dues spent to influence elections, which means that union election spending comes from pooling small contributions from workers who did not exercise this legal right. Corporations, by contrast, are under no obligation to seek approval from their investors or other stakeholders before trying to buy an election.

Likewise, the relatively small contributions from workers that participate in their union’s political effort add up to only a small fraction of what wealthy GOP benefactors are able to spend to change the results of elections. The AFL-CIO is the nation’s largest coalition of unions, for example, and its total assets at the end of 2008 were just over $91 million. GOP donor Sheldon Adelson, by contrast, is worth just under $25 billion. So if the AFL-CIO chose to sell its building, liquidate its assets and dump every single dollar into the 2012 elections, it could still only muster less than 0.004 percent of the money just one right-wing billionaire brings to the table.

But, of course, Romney has made it very clear that he is not concerned by the impact of corporate or wealthy individuals’ donations on politicians. Romney promised to appoint more justices in the mold of the four most conservative justices on the Supreme Court — all of whom were in the majority in Citizens United. Similarly, Romney endorsed eliminating all limits on campaign donations so that Wall Street billionaires can write million-dollar checks directly to his campaign and not just to super PACs and other outside groups.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) has been guarded, to say the least, about a corruption investigation going on in Wisconsin of which he may or may not be a part. He has transferred money from his campaign into his legal defense fund, but simultaneously insists that he has no need — as of yet– for that fund.

But in court last week, one of Walker’s closest confidants contradicted the Governor’s claim that he’s been fully cooperative with the investigation, which has already claimed three of Walker’s former staffers and associates. The probe is aimed at locating government officials who engaged in a range of criminal activities while employed by Walker when he was Milwaukee County executive.

Tim Russell, an old Walker adviser who has himself been charged with felony embezzlement, told a local reporter that Walker has not been cooperative with the corruption probe. In fact, Russell’s information shows that Walker has been ‘stonewalling’ investigators. Esquire offers more detail:

The most significant turn of events came last week, on May 31, just as Walker and Barrett were preparing to debate that night, when Daniel Bice, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter who’s been an absolute bulldog on this investigation, published a damaging piece in which Bice said that, contrary to Walker’s repeated insistence that he had called for the John Doe investigation himself, the investigators on the case opened the investigation themselves after two years of stonewalling by Walker and his administration. Bice’s story was based on a document filed with the court in the Russell case. [...]

Tim Russell’s lawyer — and, therefore, Tim Russell — had made public damaging information about Scott Walker and undermined the whole ethical basis of the governor’s response to charges that he had misused his public office for private gain. It is not unreasonable to assume that this either was a warning shot — take care of me or you’re going down, too — or evidence that Russell already has rolled.

Russell’s might have “rolled,” as Esquire phrases it, because he knows it will lead to a significantly less harsh sentence for himself. But in light of the fact that tomorrow is Wisconsin’s recall election, the potential consequences are only growing for Scott Walker.

The Supreme Court today announced it will not hear an appeal by former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman (D) challenging his 2006 bribery conviction. His lawyers at attempted to get the Court to rule that campaign donations could only be deemed bribes in the case of an explicit agreement between the candidate and the donor. No justices dissented from nor commented on the decision.

Siegelman, who served as Governor of Alabama from 1999 to 2003, was convicted in 2006 of taking $500,000 in campaign contributions to a pro-state lottery ballot campaign in exchange for a seat on a regulatory board. Siegelman has claimed that he was the victim of political persecution by former Bush official Karl Rove, and his case has been plagued by improper conduct by the prosecution.

In 2010, the Supreme Court ordered the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals to review his conviction in light of new interpretations of the “honest services” laws. That court threw out the convictions on two of the seven counts against Siegleman, but upheld the rest. His re-sentencing in Alabama had been on hold, pending the Supreme Court’s decision on whether to grant certiorari.

While the Supreme Court’s recent rulings in the Skilling and Citizens United cases have significantly de-fanged political corruption laws, this was a rare case where the Justices opted against wading further into those waters.