Alberto Gonzales knows something about distorting the law. As George W. Bush’s White House Counsel, he called the Geneva Convention’s protections for wartime prisoners “quaint” and played a key role in authorizing the Bush Administration’s torture policies. As Attorney General, he presided over massive efforts to politicize the Justice Department’s hiring process, infamously delegating responsibility for much of DOJ’s hiring to former Republican National Committee opposition researcher Monica Goodling.

And yet, in an interview on Fox News this afternoon, even he couldn’t bring himself to claim that the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional:

QUESTION: Some on the right are now saying they are concerned that Chief Justice Roberts is not going to go along with the way they want to see this case come out. They believe he might go with the liberals in a possible decision to uphold the law. As you say, having been the man to recommend him to the high Court to President Bush, what is your anecdotal thought on it?

GONZALES: This is a very hard decision. I almost laugh when I hear pundits say it’s going to go this way, it’s going to go that way, it’s a fairly easy decision. I think this is a very difficult decision.

Watch it:

For the record, it’s not just “pundits” who say that this is an easy case. It’s also iconic conservative judges. Judge Laurence Silberman, who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Gonzales’ former boss, upheld the law because the case against it “cannot find real support . . . in either the text of the Constitution or Supreme Court precedent.” Judge Jeffrey Sutton, a former law clerk to conservative Justice Antonin Scalia who spent much of his pre-judicial career looking for ways to undermine federal power, nonetheless wrote his own opinion rejecting a challenge to the Affordable Care Act. And Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, one of the finalists for the Supreme Court seat President Bush eventually gave to Chief Justice Roberts, called the case against health reform “a prescription for economic chaos that the framers, in a simpler time, had the good sense to head off.”

So the Affordable Care Act lawsuit is not a hard case — it is one of the easiest cases the Supreme Court has heard in years. The fact that former Bush Administration official who devoted much of his career to placing politics ahead of the law isn’t willing to embrace the case against health reform only lends credence to that fact.

WASHINGTON, DC — The conservative justices justified their decision in Citizens United that corporations and wealthy individuals can spend unlimited money to influence elections because they believe that “independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” They are part of a very small minority who believes this. Only 15 percent of the country believes that unlimited spending does not lead to corruption, less than the 19 percent who believe in “spells or witchcraft.”

In an exclusive interview with ThinkProgress yesterday, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) argued that the five conservatives responsible for Citizens United would never have made such an error in judgment if they had actually had first-hand knowledge of how elections work:

Unfortunately you had the five right-wing judges, none of whom have ever run for any office ever and have zero political experience between the five of them, offering opinions about what money can do in elections . . . . So clearly the finding of fact in Citizens United that unlimited corporate spending cannot either increase the risk of corruption or increase the appearance to the public that there’s corruption is ludicrous. . . . .

The President asked me who I thought, you know, what were the characteristics of somebody that should be appointed to the Court, and I said I think it should be somebody who has some actual political experience out there so that they are not operating in this political arena with absolutely no knowledge. Even if they wanted to come to the result that Citizens United came to, I think those judges would have had a hard time getting there if they’d had actual practical political experience because they would have known what a preposterous finding they were making.

Watch it:

The current Supreme Court includes eight former U.S. Court of Appeals judges and one former law school dean. Four of the five current justices responsible for Citizens United served as political appointees in Republican administrations. The justices who decided Brown v. Board of Education, by contrast, included one former governor, three former U.S. senators, and one former state lawmaker.

The Supreme Court will have the opportunity to correct its error in Citizens United, however, in a pending case challenging Montana’s longstanding ban on corporate influence over elections. Sen. Whitehouse joined Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) in a brief urging the justices to “revisit Citizens United‘s finding that vast independent expenditures do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption” if they agree to hear the Montana case.

Twenty-two states joined an amicus brief that will be filed today in the Supreme Court by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman (D) calling for the Supreme Court to back off its election-buying decision in Citizens United. The brief, which supports the state of Montana’s effort to preserve its ban on corporate money in elections, argues that state elections present an even greater risk than federal elections of being corrupted by corporate money — and thus states should be allowed to restrict such money even if the justice cling to their idiosyncratic belief that federal bans on corporate election spending are unconstitutional.

Sadly, the states’ brief only highlights the partisan impact of Citizens United. Of the 22 states that joined the brief, only three — Idaho, Washington and Utah — have Republican attorneys general. Additionally, top Republican elected officials and lobbying organizations, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, previously filed briefs calling for the justices to redouble their commitment to corporate influence on elections.

The GOP’s loyalty to Citizens United is disappointing, but it is not surprising. As ThinkProgress previously explained, Citizens United succeeded in transforming a moderate election spending advantage for Democrats into a massive advantage for Republicans:

Yet, while Citizens United enjoys strong support among Republican officials (and among the five Republican justices responsible for it), few Americans share this view. According to a recent Brennan Center poll, only 15 percent of respondents agree with the core of Citizens United‘s reasoning, that allowing wealthy corporations and individuals to spend unlimited money trying to influence elections will not lead to corruption — four percent fewer than believe in “spells or witchcraft” according to a different poll.

Earlier today, the National Review’s mailing list distributed an email (which can also be found here) signed by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), which called for Congress to pass a law effectively rendering a binding Supreme Court decision a nullity:

Working from what the Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade, pro-life lawmakers can pass a Life at Conception Act and end abortion using the Constitution instead of amending it. . . . Signing the Life at Conception Act petition will help break through the opposition clinging to abortion-on-demand and get a vote on this life-saving bill to overturn Roe v. Wade.

A Life at Conception Act declares unborn children “persons” as defined by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, entitled to legal protection.

It’s not entirely clear why Paul believes Congress has this power, and the email he signed does not provide a fully developed legal argument making the case for such an law. Instead, it appears to argue that Congress can simply grant full legal “personhood” status to fetuses under the 14th Amendment because Roe left open “the difficult question of when life begins.” This is not a correct reading of the Roe decision, however. The Roe opinion is unambiguous that “the word ‘person,’ as used in the 14th Amendment, does not include the unborn.”

Whether one agrees with this opinion or not, Congress does not have the power to flout the Supreme Court’s constitutional decisions simply because it does not like them. As ThinkProgress explained when a similar proposal was floated last year by Princeton Professor Robert George, “[i]n City of Boerne v. Flores, the Court held that Congress is not allowed to simply declare that the 14th Amendment means whatever they want it to mean and then use that declaration to pass enforcement legislation — Congress can only pass laws enforcing existing 14th Amendment rights.”

Just as importantly, there is something very bizarre about a conservative stalwart like Rand Paul insisting that obeying the Supreme Court is optional at exactly the same time conservatives are trying to impose much of their policy agenda upon the nation by judicial decree. Presumably, Paul would be outraged if President Obama simply refused to obey a Supreme Court decision striking down part of the Affordable Care Act or if elections officials were to ban corporations from trying to buy elections despite the justices’ decision in Citizens United. Yet, if Roe v. Wade is as optional as Paul appears to think that it is, than there is no reason why Obama should feel obliged to obey conservatives’ pet decisions either.

Over at the New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin has a lengthy and excellent piece recounting the history the Supreme Court’s election-buying decision in Citizens United. Toobin frames the piece at the tale of conservative Chief Justice John Roberts’ strategic triumph over more than a hundred years of regulation limiting big money’s influence on politics. Nevertheless, the most important revelation in Toobin’s piece is the central role the Supreme Court’s so-called moderate swing vote played in dismantling meaningful limits on wealthy interest groups’ influence on elections:

According to the briefs in the case—and Olson’s argument—the main issue was whether the McCain-Feingold law applied to a documentary, presented on video on demand, by a nonprofit corporation. The liberals lost that argument: the vote at the conference was that the law did not apply to Citizens United, which was free to advertise and run its documentary as it saw fit. The liberals expected that Roberts’s opinion would say this much and no more.

At first, Roberts did write an opinion roughly along those lines, and Kennedy wrote a concurrence which said the Court should have gone much further. Kennedy’s opinion said the Court should declare McCain-Feingold’s restrictions unconstitutional, overturn an earlier Supreme Court decision from 1990, and gut long-standing prohibitions on corporate giving. But after the Roberts and Kennedy drafts circulated, the conservative Justices began rallying to Kennedy’s more expansive resolution of the case. In light of this, Roberts withdrew his own opinion and let Kennedy write for the majority. Kennedy then turned his concurrence into an opinion for the Court.

The new majority opinion transformed Citizens United into a vehicle for rewriting decades of constitutional law in a case where the lawyer had not even raised those issues.

As ThinkProgress previously explained, Kennedy is widely viewed as a moderate conservative, but this perception is inaccurate. Although Kennedy does sometimes deviate from conservative orthodoxy on social or on criminal justice issues, he is a hard line conservative on economic justice. Kennedy is a zealous supporter of forced arbitration, a practice that allows corporations to force their workers and consumers into a privatized arbitration system that overwhelmingly favors corporate parties. He cast the key vote against Lilly Ledbetter and against equal pay for many women in the workplace. He cast the key fifth vote empowering corporations to immunize themselves from consumer class actions. And, of course, he also voted to install install George W. Bush as president.

In 2009, when President Obama was close to the height of his popularity and political capital, only nine Republican senators voted to confirm Justice Sotomayor: Lamar Alexander, Kit Bond, Susan Collins, Lindsay Graham, Judd Gregg, Dick Lugar, Mel Martinez, Olympia Snowe, and George Voinovich. Of these four (Bond, Gregg, Martinez and Voinovich) are now retired. One (Snowe) recently announced her voluntary retirement. And one, Dick Lugar of Indiana, was just involuntarily retired by Tea Party challenger Richard Mourdock.

Lugar is an Indiana institution. He ran virtually unopposed during his last reelection race, and won by more than 30 points the last time a major party candidate tried to challenge him. Had he won yesterday’s primary, he would have been the prohibitive favorite in November (Mourdock, by contrast, could lose in November as easily as he could win). Nor was Lugar particularly moderate. Among other things, Lugar voted for Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) infamous plan to phase out Medicare.

In the age of the Tea Party, however, even the most occasional departures from conservative orthodoxy are enough for the GOP electorate to declare a public official an apostate. Mourdock made Lugar’s votes for Justices Sotomayor and Kagan, in addition to a handful of other breaks with America’s far right, the focus of his campaign — and that was enough to defeat a 36 year Senate veteran. In light of this incident, it is unlikely that any of the few remaining Republicans who backed an Obama Supreme Court appointee will be willing to risk their careers by doing the same again.

Lest there be any doubt, there is probably no one President Obama could nominate for the high Court who would satisfy the newly radicalized Republican Party. Mourdock, for his part, recently promised to oppose any nominee who did not fit his personal constitutional philosophy — and he twice cited failed Supreme Court nominee and Romney legal advisor Robert Bork as his model nominee. As recently as last October, Bork mocked the very idea that women sometimes face discrimination as “silly,” and he infamously described the federal ban on whites-only lunch counters as “unsurpassed ugliness” early in his career. Obama would never, ever nominate such a man to the Supreme Court.

In other words, if President Obama has the opportunity to nominate a new justice during a second presidential term, it is tough to imagine any set of circumstances that allows that nominee to receive the 60 votes necessary to break a filibuster. The parties are too far apart. The Republicans are too eager to obstruct, and the handful of GOPers with a history of bipartisanship will be too spooked to reach across the aisle. America could go years with one or more Supreme Court seats vacant.

There could be, however, a way out of this trap. In his most recent State of the Union Address, President Obama called on the Senate to “pass a simple rule that all judicial and public servant nominations receive an up or down vote within 90 days” — effectively eliminating the filibuster for Senate-confirmed jobs. Moreover, when the newly-elected Senate reconvenes next January, it opens a very brief window where Obama’s proposed rule could be implemented with just 51 votes.

Should the Democrats manage to hold the Senate next year, an outcome that is much more likely than appeared possible just one year ago, they no longer have the option to maintain the status quo. Keeping the current rules means stripping Obama of his power to nominate Supreme Court justices, and potentially turning the Court over to Mourdock’s fellow ideologues for years to come.

About one year ago, the Supreme Court handed down its most significant pro-corporate decision since Citizens United — a decision which empowered corporations to force their workers and consumers to completely sign away their ability to hold the corporation accountable in a class action lawsuit. As the New York Times reports, this case, AT&T v. Concepcion, has now been invoked at least 76 times to stop a class action from moving forward.

As ThinkProgress explained a year ago when Concepcion was handed down, the practical impact of this decision is that corporations have almost free reign to illegally nickel and dime their workers and consumers out of a few dollars at a time:

Imagine that your cell phone company cheated you out of just $30. Would you sue? Bear in mind that filing a lawsuit will require you to spend hour upon hour filing out forms and drafting complaints and dealing with legal codes that you probably know little about. Of course you can always hire a lawyer, but your lawyer’s hourly fee will eat up all of the $30 you stand to win in just a few minutes. In other words, you, like just about everyone else in the world who is scammed out of just a few dollars, you will probably give the lawsuit a pass.

Fortunately, there is a solution to this problem — the class action lawsuit. If your cell phone company cheated you and you alone, you’re out of luck. But if they systematically scammed thousands of their customers out of the same $30 — nickel and diming their way to huge profits — the law allows all of you to join together into a class action lawsuit and make sure that the company is held accountable.

That is, of course, until [now].

The significant number of suits dismissed thanks to Concepcion confirms that corporate America is already taking advantage of the gift the Court’s conservative justices gave them last year. In one of those cases, for example, a group of U.S. servicemembers who allegedly were illegally required to pay a few hundred dollars each by the Nissan car company were denied their ability to join together in a class action.

For decades, attacks on “activist judges” were part of the conservative catechism. As President George W. Bush told the conservative Federalist Society, “such judicial lawlessness is a threat to our democracy, and it needs to stop.” Last month, however, President Obama offered a similar warning against judicial activism after it appeared likely that the Supreme Court would thumb its nose at the text of the Constitution and nearly 200 years of precedent to strike down health reform — and conservatives across the country suddenly found themselves in desperate need of a fainting couch. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) called Obama “stupid” for echoing decades of conservative rhetoric against activist judging. A Republican judge on the Fifth Circuit issued a partisan order trying to force the Justice Department to criticize President Obama. Even the president of the American Bar Association, who has historically not dragged his organization into partisan fights despite his own history as a major Republican donor, could not resist the urge to throw mud at President Obama.

On Fox News this morning, Florida Attorney General and Affordable Care Act nemesis Pam Bondi (R) got into the game, attacking the president for daring to criticize the Supreme Court and then offering a surprising promise of her own:

I mean, they’re our highest Court in the land. And I’m going to respect their decision. I’m never going to criticize the United States Supreme Court, no matter what happens. And, um, we argued our case, and if you heard any of the arguments — I’m sure you did — um, you know, the justices asked some very compelling questions.

Watch it:

Of course, there’s a small problem with Bondi’s pledge that she would never, ever lower herself to speak ill of the nine justices:

So Bondi’s hypocrisy is pretty glaring here, but her statement is also disturbing on a much more important front. There’s something deeply authoritarian about her suggestion that no one should ever criticize nine of the most powerful politicians in the country. The justices of the Supreme Court are not oracles and they are not gods. They are just as fallible as any other human being entrusted with power, and their decisions deserve to be discussed and evaluated just like any other government action should be subject to criticism in a free society.

Indeed, if anything, our present justices are far more fallible than most Americans. Their decision in Citizens United gave billionaires and wealty corporations a license to buy and sell democracy, and there are also more Americans who believe in “spells or witchcraft” than agree with Citizens United‘s reasoning. The Court’s forced arbitration decisions leave countless American workers and consumers powerless against corporations who break the law. And their disregard for workers such as Lilly Ledbetter is a direct blow to America’s promise of equal pay for equal work. Americans deserve the opportunity to criticize these erroneous decisions and to advocate for better judges and justices who will overrule them if given the chance.

Likewise, while Bondi is wrong about what the Constitution has to say about health reform, she has every right to criticize the nearly two centuries of Supreme Court precedent establishing that the Affordable Care Act is constitutional. Health reform’s opponents love to rail about their abiding love for freedom, but one of the first freedoms the framers added into our Constitution is the freedom to criticize our government.

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.

A poll taken after the Supreme Court’s highly partisan oral arguments in the Affordable Care Act case but before the Court heard arguments on Arizona’s harsh immigration law finds that public opinion of the Supreme Court has fallen to the lowest point in more than a quarter century:

This poll aligns with numerous other polls showing declining public faith in our increasingly partisan Supreme Court. Indeed, the Roberts Court’s most significant opinion to date — it’s election-buying decision in Citizens United — is so unpopular that more Americans believe in “spells or witchcraft” than agree with the Court’s reasoning in that case.

And, of course, Citizens United is just once of many cases where the Roberts Court’s conservatives placed ideology over the law. The Court effectively immunized corporate America from countless lawsuits in its forced arbitration decisions. It gave them similar immunity to class actions nearly a year ago. And it thumbed its nose at precedent to undermine women’s right to equal work for equal pay and older workers’ right to be free from age discrimination.