The Supreme Court’s egregious Citizens United decision was not just, as Justice Stevens wrote in dissent, “a rejection of the common sense of the American people,” it is also easily one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in American history. Its holding that corporations can spend unlimited funds to buy and sell elections belongs in the same dustbin as separate but equal and the entire corporations before people doctrine of the misguided Lochner Era in the early 20th Century.

As has now been widely reported, the Montana Supreme Court recently tried to consign Citizens United to its well deserved fate by essentially holding that the U.S. Supreme Court’s folly does not apply in Montana. I have genuinely struggled about what to say about this 5-2 decision — which is why ThinkProgress has not reported on it prior to this post. On the one hand, the Montana justices defied an obviously wrong decision that threatens to turn American democracy into an auction that sells essential government jobs to whichever special interest group happens to be the highest bidder. On the other hand, ThinkProgress has been unequivocal in condemning conservative officials who believe that they have the power to defy Supreme Court decisions they disagree with, or who think that states can simply ignore federal law or the Constitution.

We will not abandon this commitment to the rule of law today. It is wrong when Newt Gingrich plots a campaign of massive resistance against judges he disagrees with, and Montana’s justices act no less illegitimately when they fail to follow a binding Supreme Court precedent. There is no reason to doubt that every word of the Montana Supreme Court’s decision — which explains in great detail how corporate money corrupts a state’s politics — is accurate, except for the part when they say that Citizens United does not force them to allow corporations to corrupt Montana.

Yet, while the Montana justices erred, they erred far less than the five U.S. Supreme Court justices who ignored the Constitution and decades of precedent to strike down a 63 year old ban on corporate money in politics. The U.S. Supremes will doubtless decide they need to review the Montana decision. They should do so, and they should reverse their error in Citizens United as soon as possible to minimize its impact on the upcoming election.

Additionally, every judge in the country should read Montana Justice James Nelson’s dissent from the decision rejecting Citizens United. He devotes most of the last eight pages of this decision to explaining why, despite the fact that he is bound by Supreme Court precedent, the one that binds him today is disastrously wrong:

While, as a member of this Court, I am bound to follow Citizens United, I do not have to agree with the Supreme Court’s decision. And, to be absolutely clear, I do not agree with it. For starters, the notion that corporations are disadvantaged in the political realm is unbelievable. Indeed, it has astounded most Americans. The truth is that corporations wield inordinate power in Congress and in state legislatures. It is hard to tell where government ends and corporate America begins; the transition is seamless and overlapping. In my view, Citizens United has turned the First Amendment’s “open marketplace” of ideas into an auction house for Friedmanian corporatists. Freedom of speech is now synonymous with freedom to spend. Speech equals money; money equals democracy. This decidedly was not the view of the constitutional founders, who favored the preeminence of individual interests over those of big business. [...]

Lastly, I am compelled to say something about corporate “personhood.” While I recognize that this doctrine is firmly entrenched in the law, I find the entire concept offensive. Corporations are artificial creatures of law. As such, they should enjoy only those powers—not constitutional rights, but legislatively-conferred powers—that are concomitant with their legitimate function, that being limited-liability investment vehicles for business. Corporations are not persons. Human beings are persons, and it is an affront to the inviolable dignity of our species that courts have created a legal fiction which forces people—human beings—to share fundamental, natural rights with soulless creations of government. Worse still, while corporations and human beings share many of the same rights under the law, they clearly are not bound equally to the same codes of good conduct, decency, and morality, and they are not held equally accountable for their sins. Indeed, it is truly ironic that the death penalty and hell are reserved only to natural persons.

Even in an era when corporate interest groups dominate the U.S. Supreme Court, judges lack the authority to defy the high Court’s commands. What they can never lose, however, is their right to speak out in published opinions about how deeply misguided the nation’s highest Court has become. Justice Nelson’s opinion should be the model for every judge who fears the Supreme Court has forgotten to follow the very Constitution it is sworn to uphold.

In the latest blow to a line of state laws attempting to discourage women from having an abortion, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit struck down much of a South Dakota law requiring doctors to provide women seeking an abortion with a series of scientifically questionable claims about abortion, and the court defanged another provision that appears designed to conscript doctors as anti-abortion propagandists. Under the law as written:

The written advisories required by § 7(1) are to inform the patient

(b) That the abortion will terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being . . . .

(c) That [the patient] has an existing relationship with that unborn human being and that the relationship enjoys protection under the United States Constitution and under the laws of South Dakota;

(d) That by having an abortion, her existing relationship and her existing constitutional rights with regards to that relationship will be terminated . . . .

The advisory must further contain “[a] description of all known medical risks of the procedure” (the risk advisory). That description must include “[i]ncreased risk of suicide ideation and suicide” as a known risk of abortion.

The court struck down the suicide instruction after a lengthy discussion of how it has little if any basis in science. “By compelling untruthful and misleading speech,” the court explained, “the advisory also violates doctors’ First Amendment right to be free from compelled speech that is untruthful, misleading, or irrelevant.” For this reason, the Eighth Circuit decision closely maps a decision earlier this week which struck down a similar Texas law forcing doctors to engage in anti-abortion advocacy.

The most intriguing portion of the opinion, however, is how the court handled the bizarre requirement that doctors tell their patients that abortion will terminate her “existing constitutional rights” with regards to her relationship with the fetus. At oral argument, the state argued that this provision “can be taken to mean that the Constitution protects a woman from being forced to have an abortion,” so the court held them to that word. Under the Eighth Circuit’s decision, the Court held that the law merely “requires a statement that the woman seeking abortion is legally and constitutionally protected against being forced to have an abortion.”

Because a previous Eighth Circuit decision upheld the even more bizarre language about “the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being,” that provision of the law is still in effect.