Indiana U.S. Senate candidate Richard Mourdock, the Tea Party candidate who proclaimed that “bipartisanship ought to consist of Democrats coming to the Republican point of view” shortly after defeating longtime incumbent Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN), does not think he should be elected to the U.S. Senate. Indeed, he believes that it should be unconstitutional for anyone to run for the Senate. At a campaign event last February, the Tea Party candidate came out against the Seventeenth Amendment, which ensures that senators will be chosen by elections and not by state legislatures:

You know the issue of the 17th amendment is so troubling to me, our founding fathers, again those geniuses, made the point that the House of Representatives was there to represent the people. The Senate was there to represent the states. In other words the government of the states. . . . You know I think most senators if they had to come back every two years and by the way that would solve another problem. It would solve the idea that Senators move out of their state and never return. But it would cause those senators to have much greater contact with their states. You know just think of this. In today’s you see millions and millions of dollars spent on Senate campaigns. Two years ago, in 2010, Sharon Angle out in Nevada spent 31 million dollars, just herself. How much money would be spent in federal senate races if the state legislators were electing those people. You just took the money out of politics. Is that a bad thing?

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Mourdock is certainly right that eliminating U.S. Senate elections would end the practice of corporations and wealthy individuals throwing millions of dollars to change the result of those elections. Indeed, under Mourdock’s logic there’s no reason to stop there. If we simply named someone the hereditary monarch of the United States — King Mitt I — then no one would ever spend money to influence an American election again!

Mourdock is dead wrong, however, to suggest that ending Senate elections would eliminate corruption. Rather, one of the primary forces driving the Seventeenth Amendment’s ratification was the fact that the old system led to a kind of Citizens United on steroids:

[T]he system led to rampant and blatant corruption, letting corporations and other moneyed interests effectively buy U.S. Senators, and tied state legislatures up in numerous, lengthy deadlocks over whom to send to Washington, leaving those bodies with far less time to devote to the job of enacting the laws their states needed for the welfare of the people.

Sadly, Mourdock is not the first major Republican to say that the American people should not be allowed to elect their own senators. Texas Gov. Rick Perry believes this, as does Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Justice Antonin Scalia.

Even before President Obama took office, the Affordable Care Act’s opponents touted tort reform as a central prong of their health care policy. Texas Gov. Rick Perry even claims that Texas added 23,000 new doctors thanks to a tort reform law he signed in 2003. A new academic study shows that the data simply does not back up this claim, however. According to the study, there is no evidence that tort reform attracted more doctors to Texas:

The bottom line: Our original findings remain correct. There is no evidence that the number of physicians per capita practicing in Texas is larger than it would have been without tort reform. Any effect of tort reform is too small for us to measure, against the background of other, larger forces affecting physician supply, both in Texas and nationally. This ‘non-result’ is broadly consistent with other studies, most of which find that state-level tort reform has a modest impact on physician supply. It also offers a counterpoint to these studies, by demonstrating that the small average effects found in other studies will not reliably appear in any given state, even one which undergoes especially dramatic reform.

Indeed, the paper finds that Texans’ access to primary care physicians actually declined slightly after Rick Perry’s tort reform became law, and that the number of primary care physicians per capita in Texas is significantly lower than in the United States as a whole:

Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Justice blocked a new Texas state law that would institute strict photo identification requirements for all citizens trying to vote. The DOJ refused to grant the law pre-clearance under the Voting Rights Act, noting that the bill would unfairly disenfranchise Hispanic voters.

Supporters of the bill say the law is needed to prevent voter impersonation. Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) argued:

Texas has a responsibility to ensure elections are fair, beyond reproach and accurately reflect the will of voters. The DOJ has no valid reason for rejecting this important law, which requires nothing more extensive than the type of photo identification necessary to receive a library card or board an airplane. Their denial is yet another example of the Obama administration’s continuing and pervasive federal overreach.

How big has the problem been? According to the San Antonio Express-News:

Fewer than five “illegal voting” complaints involving voter impersonations were filed with the Texas Attorney General’s Office from the 2008 and 2010 general elections in which more than 13 million voters participated.

The Texas attorney general’s office did not give the outcome of the four illegal voting complaints that were filed. Only one remains pending, according to agency records.

And as ThinkProgress Justice previously reported, more people than that have been denied their right to vote due to these sorts of strict voter ID laws.

Though Perry has claimed Texas has endured “multiple cases” of voter fraud, even of the paltry 20 election law violation allegations the state’s attorney general handled in the 2008 and 2010 elections, most related to mail-in ballot or campaign finance violations, electioneering too close to a polling place, and a voter blocked by an election worker.

It is unclear how many Texans attempt to illegally check out library books while impersonating neighbors or dead people, each year. But in a state of more than 25 million people, the odds of being even accused of voter impersonation in the Lone Star State are less than one in 6,250,000.

On Friday, federal Medicaid officials informed Texas that it could no longer receive federal funding for women’s health programs under Medicaid because Texas defied federal Medicaid law by refusing to allow clinics that provide abortion services access to the funds. Texas’ tenther Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) immediately fell back to his go to position whenever he doesn’t like anything the Obama Administration does — claiming that the administration’s action must violate the Tenth Amendment:

We don’t think that — whether it’s Planned Parenthood or one of their affiliates — that they should be getting our dollars to be used in their programs. And we see, whether it’s Planned Parenthood directly or whether it is one of their affiliates that is involved directly in the abortion business, ah, our legislature is pro-life, overwhelmingly voted to not allow Planned Parenthood to be receiving any of these dollars, and yet this administration, in clear violation of the Tenth Amendment of the United States — ah, they’re just playing politics.

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Perry, of course, also believes that Social Security and Medicare are unconstitutional, so his views on the Constitution aren’t exactly credible. Nevertheless, Perry’s claim that Texas has a right to openly defy federal law and still expect to receive all the federal funds he wants is particularly unfortunate.

As ThinkProgress previously explained, Medicaid is one of many federal programs where the federal government offers money up to the states in return for their agreement to comply with certain conditions. States may take the money and accept the conditions, or they may refuse the money outright. But they cannot take the money and then refuse to use it as the federal government instructs them to use it for the same reason that someone cannot take a job, refuse to comply with their own job description and then expect to continue to draw a salary.

One condition that Medicaid law places on the states is that the states must allow patients to freely choose their own health provider — even if that provider is affiliated with an organization the state doesn’t like. Texas doesn’t want its Medicaid beneficiaries to have this choice, which is Texas’ right, but Texas does not have the right to openly defy federal law and expect the federal government to pay for it.

Indeed, it should be obvious why Texas cannot have this right. If Texas can defy one part of Medicaid law, it can defy any part of Medicaid law. Under Rick Perry’s reading of the Tenth Amendment, there’s nothing preventing Texas from taking billions in Medicaid funds and then using them to build a luxurious new wing onto the governor’s mansion.