The Supreme Court is currently considering whether to hear a case that will enable it to correct its error in Citizens United and overrule its indefensible decision to allow unlimited corporate and other wealthy donor money to influence elections. Neither the corporate lobby nor the Senate’s top Republican are eager to see this occur, however. Both of them filed briefs in the Supreme Court yesterday urging the justices to not only reaffirm Citizens United, but to do so without even hearing argument in the case.

Neither one of these briefs are surprising. The Chamber is one of the nation’s biggest spenders on elections, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has long been an opponent of campaign finance regulation. Before President Bush appointed Justice Alito, who became the fifth vote to tear down much of America’s checks on big money in politics, the seminal case upholding America’s ability to defend against such money was McConnell v. FEC. In that case, Sen. McConnell was the lead plaintiff who sued — mostly unsuccessfully — to toss out the McCain/Feingold campaign finance law.

Yet while the briefs are unsurprising, they demonstrate both the corporate lobby and the Republican Party’s commitment to keeping wealthy interest groups’ ability to buy and sell elections intact.

Last year, Senate Republicans tried to effectively repeal the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau by refusing to confirm anyone President Obama nominated to lead that agency. In response to this attempt to sabotage the new agency, Obama recess appointed Richard Cordray over the Senate GOP’s objections, and he also recess appointed several people to the National Labor Relations Bureau to prevent a likely filibuster of those officials from shutting down that agency as well.

Needless to say, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is not happy that President Obama thwarted his power grab, so he’s once again trying to get judges to roll back decisions made by the people the American people elected to govern:

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Tuesday that his conference has hired conservative attorney Miguel A. Estrada to file a brief in a case brought by Noel Canning, a Washington state businessman who operates a bottling company. Canning plans to challenge an NLRB ruling that said his company must establish a collective bargaining agreement with a labor union.

McConnell once again called Obama’s appointments an “unconstitutional action” and said his colleagues had been seeking a strong legal challenge to the appointments to support.

McConnell’s legal arguments are not strong. Although the Senate minority claimed that it could thwart recess appointments by having a single senator hold a pretend Senate session every three days, the Senate simply does not have the power to block appointments simply by hosting a meeting in the Neighborhood of Make Believe. As two of President George W. Bush’s top constitutional advisors explained in 2010, the Senate is in recess when it is “not capable of acting on the president’s nominations.” Because no nominees can actually be confirmed in a make believe session, these fake sessions do not defeat Obama’s recess appointment’s power.

Moreover, even if they did count as real sessions, it’s not at all clear that the Senate was not in recess during the three days between the pretend meetings. As the highest federal court to consider the question explained in Evans v. Stephens, “[t]he Constitution, on its face, does not establish a minimum time that an authorized break in the Senate must last to give legal force to the President’s appointment power under the Recess Appointments Clause. And we do not set the limit today.”

Ultimately, however, this case is likely to turn less upon what the Constitution actually permits than on the outcome of the high-profile challenge to the Affordable Care Act. The case against health reform is significantly weaker than the case against Obama’s recess appointments. Nearly 200 years of Supreme Court precedent conclusively establish that the Affordable Care Act is constitutional, not to mention the text of the Constitution itself. In the words of Judge Laurence Silberman, a leading conservative who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from George W. Bush, the case against the ACA has no basis “in either the text of the Constitution or Supreme Court precedent.”

Yet despite the fact that the health care challenge is so weak that it borders on frivolous, several of the Supreme Court’s conservatives appeared more interested in doing the Republican Party’s bidding than they did in actually following the law when the health care case was argued last month. If the justices ultimately strike down the Affordable Care Act, they will send a clear signal to every judge in the country that the Constitution does not apply any more when there is an opportunity to embarrass Barack Obama.

So Mitch McConnell might have a chance of winning his case after all — at least if the judiciary decides to put partisan politics ahead of the law.

The Hill reports that, in return for a promise that President Obama will not make any recess appointments in the upcoming Senate break, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) agreed to stop obstructing several of the president’s nominees:

“As the result of a successful discussion among the minority leader, the White House and myself there will be no recess appointments during the coming adjournment,” said [Majority Leader Harry] Reid, speaking from the Senate floor.

In return, Republicans allowed passage by unanimous consent of several of President Obama’s noncontroversial nominees and allowed Reid to set up a vote on the confirmation of Stephanie Thacker to be a circuit judge for the Fourth Circuit for April 16, the day the Senate returns from its break.

It is, of course, unfortunate that Reid needs to strike a deal at all before the caucus that controls less than half the seats in the Senate will deign to allow completely noncontroversial nominees to move forward. Nevertheless, this incident proves the wisdom of Obama’s decision to make several recess appointments earlier this year despite McConnell’s objections. Prior to Obama’s actions, he and Reid had few bargaining chips they could use to prevent McConnell’s obstructionism in a Senate ruled by the filibuster. Now, Obama and Reid can use the threat of future recess appointments to ensure that the party that voters did not want to control the Senate does not have a total veto power over the president’s nominees.