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Memo to Justices Scalia, Alito, Roberts, Thomas and Kennedy: Your Citizens United chickens are coming home to roost in 22 major markets, starting tomorrow.

Los Angeles Times:

A conservative advocacy group Monday will kick off a huge ad campaign in 11 states and two dozen of the most competitive congressional races, slamming "wasteful federal spending."

The $4.1-million ad buy from the Americans for Prosperity Foundation does not mention individual candidates in the November election. The script attacks Washington policies, describing the economic stimulus program as a failure and declaring that "wasteful spending must stop."

Well, of course it doesn't mention individual candidates. That would mean they'd have to report independent expenditures to the FEC, but since it's an issues campaign that simply happens to dovetail with the teabaggers' lament, they can hide behind the curtain and never let the public know whose message this really is.

Americans for Prosperity. Such a misleading name. Rich Americans for Prosperity might be more apt. Americans for Prosperity is, of course, the Koch mouthpiece that funded last summer's town hall protests, the Sarah Palin bus tour, partners with every teabag operation out there, and lays astroturf in every town with a sidewalk.

And lest we forget, AFPs Tim Phillips got his start with Century Strategies, Ralph Reed's lobbying firm and close ally of Jack Abramoff. Rachel Maddow peeled that onion last year during health care reform.

So they're going to saturate key markets with claims of pork and waste in the stimulus bill, eh? Here's a suggestion for the DCCC and other groups getting ready to put ads up: Start with this list of Republicans who denounced the stimulus bill with righteous outrage while skulking back with their hands out for a second bite at the apple. Rapid-fire it at the viewer with a few key names. That ought to be an appropriate beginning.

I hope the Billionaire Boys' Club at Americans for Prosperity spends lots of money on their ads and stimulates the economy even more while their agenda goes down in flames.

I would very much like to school Ben Nelson on what his responsibility is with regard to Supreme Court nominations. Whether he likes it or not, Elena Kagan has no disqualifying factor that should cause him to oppose her. But in Upside-Down Contrarian SenatorLand, Senator Nelson is doing exactly that. From his official statement:

July 30, 2010 – Today, Nebraska’s Senator Ben Nelson issued this statement on the president’s nomination of Elena Kagan for the U.S. Supreme Court to fill the seat of retired Justice John Paul Stevens:

“As a member of the bipartisan ‘Gang of 14,’ I will follow our agreement that judicial nominees should be filibustered only under extraordinary circumstances. If a cloture vote is held on the nomination of Elena Kagan to the U.S. Supreme Court, I am prepared to vote for cloture and oppose a filibuster because, in my view, this nominee deserves an up or down vote in the Senate.

“However, I have heard concerns from Nebraskans regarding Ms. Kagan, and her lack of a judicial record makes it difficult for me to discount the concerns raised by Nebraskans, or to reach a level of comfort that these concerns are unfounded. Therefore, I will not vote to confirm Ms. Kagan’s nomination.”

Supreme Court nominations are not a question of "Nebraskans' concerns". They are not a popularity contest. This is why, by the way, Alito and Roberts slithered onto the court. Despite their politics, they had nothing in their history to disqualify them.

As far as judicial experience goes, once again Nelson labors under the false impression that a Supreme Court Justice must be disgorged from our Federal Court system -- an impression which is false, harmful, and gave us Alito and Roberts.

It's pretty pathetic when Arlen Specter, Republican-turned-Democrat, has a stronger record of supporting judicial nominees than Ben Nelson. Or unemployment insurance extensions. Or just about any other initiative that isn't Republican.

And hey, Nebraska? I don't really give two whits about your 'concerns'. You and your conservative pals gave us ... Roberts and Alito.

It seems that, in the wake of the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United, which allowed uncontrolled corporate money into elections, that (surprise!) Republicans have a huge warchest from outside actors like the Chamber of Commerce:

On the left hand side of the chart is a list of ten Republican aligned institutions, ranging from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to the Family Research Council. Next to it is a column listing the amount of money each group has pledged to spend by Election Day. A third column on the right details what those groups actually spent in 2008 on federal elections.

The number at the bottom delivers the key message. If their pledges are fulfilled, these ten groups will unleash more than $200 million in election-focused spending -- roughly $37 million more than every single independent group spent on the 2008 presidential campaign combined. This time around, almost every single penny will be going to Republican candidates or causes.

So, how did this happen?

First, Democrats didn't make an all out effort to torpedo either Roberts, or more reasonably, Alito. With both on the Supreme Court, decisions like Citizens United were inevitable.

Second, when given a historic opportunity to break the power of the rich and corporations by not bailing them out, Democrats bailed them out. They did not make shareholders get wiped out (as they deserved, they took the profits from housing bubble fraud, after all) and they did not let the bondholders take their losses. Be very clear, this was never about saving the economy, the trillions of dollars used to bail out these corporations could have been loaned directly to consumers and businesses which needed loans. In fact, at this point, it is entirely likely that bailouts made things worse, not better.

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I remember arguing with Democratic strategists about the Alito and Roberts nominations to the Supreme Court. I said instead of focusing on abortion rights, a divisive issue, we should sound the alarm about their strongly pro-corporatist rulings. But hey, what do I know?

And now, the predictable results. I can't tell you how depressed I am about this:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court has ruled that corporations may spend freely to support or oppose candidates for president and Congress, easing decades-old limits on their participation in federal campaigns.

By a 5-4 vote, the court on Thursday overturned a 20-year-old ruling that said corporations can be prohibited from using money from their general treasuries to pay for their own campaign ads. The decision, which almost certainly will also allow labor unions to participate more freely in campaigns, threatens similar limits imposed by 24 states.

It leaves in place a prohibition on direct contributions to candidates from corporations and unions.

Critics of the stricter limits have argued that they amount to an unconstitutional restraint of free speech, and the court majority apparently agreed.

"The censorship we now confront is vast in its reach," Justice Anthony Kennedy said in his majority opinion, joined by his four more conservative colleagues.

However, Justice John Paul Stevens, dissenting from the main holding, said, "The court's ruling threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions around the nation."

Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor joined Stevens' dissent, parts of which he read aloud in the courtroom.

The justices also struck down part of the landmark McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill that barred union- and corporate-paid issue ads in the closing days of election campaigns.

Advocates of strong campaign finance regulations have predicted that a court ruling against the limits would lead to a flood of corporate and union money in federal campaigns as early as this year's midterm congressional elections.

Prairie Weather: How much faith do you have in your judicial system?

AfterDowningStreet: Cheney's top torture lawyers now work for Obama

SCOTUSblog: What Ricci says about the Supreme Court's views of Judge Sotomayor... and about Alito

Bitter Lawyer: Michael Jackson's Top Ten Legal Representations

Welcome Back to Pottersville: What have we learned from Stonewall?

Hill's Country: Rushpublicans and their excuses

South Florida Lawyers: Did you know that if you graduated summa from Princeton and were EIC of the Yale Law Review, that makes you "intellectually mediocre"?  On race, SCOTUSblog examines the record and says it's "absurd to say that Judge Sotomayor allows race to infect her decisionmaking."

Liberal Values: Top "no sh*t" story:  Cheney lied about torture saving lives

The Agonist: Pakistani Ambassador Haqqani is telling the BBC that The Pakistani government is going all in against the Taliban

rubber hose: That Obama isn't backing down on the Israeli settlement issue is surprising, but what's really surprising is that key pro-Israel allies in Congress have been largely reinforcing the Obama team's message to Netanyahu.

onegoodmove: Some great links...

Booman and Papamoka could both use a little help...

Aside from a few high-profile issues, most Supreme Court decisions are read into the casebooks without public notice. We've gone almost four full years since Bush restaffed the court with Alito and Roberts, yet there has been little examination of their impact on jurisprudence.

That's changing. As the fight over Obama's first appointment picks up and attention turns to the future of the Court, we can expect examination of the Court's present. Jeff Toobin gets the ball rolling, noting that its Chief Justice is a wingnut:

The kind of humility that Roberts favors reflects a view that the Court should almost always defer to the existing power relationships in society. In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party.

The article is a great foundation for understanding the stakes with this nomination.

John mentioned the Alito confirmation in his post earlier about the SCOTUS decision, I looked for a more big picture consideration of this court. Certainly, it is one of the most divisive courts in memory, with a huge percentage of the decisions handed down with a 5-4 majority and the dissenting justices all vociferously objecting to the majority opinion. The American Consititution Society held a conference today to discuss the Roberts Court:

[T]his term we saw the Court announce the first amendment applies to corporations, in the Wisconsin Right to Life case, but not to students, in the Bong Hits 4 Jesus case.  We saw the court announce that we should be deferential to state trial judges in criminal cases but not to democratically-elected local school boards in the schools cases.  So if this is the birth of a new constitutional era, all I say is what an ugly baby. 

As Tom Goldstein points out, in the eight years that Earl Warren presided as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, beginning in 1961, the Warren Court was responsible for the birth of the right to reproductive privacy, the beginning of meaningful school integration, the end of bans on interracial marriages, fundamental voting protections like "one person, one vote," and almost all of the rights which criminal defendants enjoy today.

If Earl Warren's Court could do so much in just eight years, the next decade could bring some very interesting times.

Womenstake:

As we've previously discussed, on May 29, 2007, the Supreme Court issued a decision that severely weakens remedies for employees who have faced pay discrimination. The case, Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co., was decided 5-4, with Justice Alito writing the decision. Justice Ginsburg took the unusual step of announcing her strong dissent in the courtroom.[..]

The good news is that the Supreme Court's decision was based on its interpretation of Title VII-meaning that Congress can tell the Court that it got it wrong.

People For the American Way has a petition for you to sign to urge Congress to support legislation to correct the decision.

Pam's House Blend: 'Homosexual agenda'= Nazi agenda. Anyone confused about what constitues fascism should take this this quiz.

Tristram Shandy: Why are the warfloggers so upset? G-Dub outlined the program in 2001.

Carbon Paper: A letter conservative newspapers refused to print

Liberal Country Fan: Reba pulls a Bill O'Reilly while trying to explain her beef with the Chicks

Lawyers, Guns and Money: Alito v Civil rights: A foreshadowing

The Sideshow: Avedon Carol has an excellent roundup every day...as does the 'all-roundup-all-the-time' Progressive Blog Digest.