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On CNN’s website today, legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin laments out how small a role the Supreme Court has played in the presidential election so far. He writes:

With a little more than a month to go, it's not too late to ask the candidates to take a stand on their plans for the court. The president has already had two appointments, and he named Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. But what does Obama, a former law professor, think about the court? Does he believe in a "living" Constitution, whose meaning evolves over time? Or does he believe, like Justices Scalia and Thomas, that the meaning of the document was fixed when it was ratified, in the 18th century.

By the same token, what kind of justices would Romney appoint? Who are his judicial role models? Romney has praised Chief Justice John Roberts, but is the candidate still a fan even after the chief voted to uphold the ACA?

No one is asking these questions. But there are few more important things to know about our current and future presidents.

Toobin is absolutely right that the candidates’ plans for the Supreme Court deserve a lot more air time than they’re getting. But he’s wrong to suggest that we know nothing about what President Obama and Governor Romney have in mind for the Court.

President Obama has already picked two Supreme Court justices. Both, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, have been strong moderates, balancing out the retro extremism of Justices Scalia and Thomas. When female Wal-Mart employees wanted to band together to sue their employer for pay discrimination, Sotomayor and Kagan stood on the side of the women’s rights, while Scalia and Thomas twisted the law to side with the corporation. When Justices Thomas and Scalia ruled that a woman harmed by a generic drug couldn’t sue the drug’s manufacturer in state court, Justices Sotomayor and Kagan stood up for the rights of the consumer.

Mitt Romney obviously hasn’t had a chance to pick a Supreme Court justice yet, but he’s given us a pretty good idea of who he would choose if given the opportunity. On his website, Romney promises to “nominate judges in the mold of Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito.” After the Supreme Court’s ruling in the health care reform case, Romney announced he had changed his mind about Roberts, who declined to destroy the law while still writing a stunningly retrogressive opinion redefining the Commerce Clause.

And, of course, Romney sent a clear signal to his conservative base when he tapped Robert Bork to advise him on legal and judicial issues. Bork’s record, and what he signals about Romney’s position on the Supreme Court, is chilling:

Romney’s indicated that he would want the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade. He’s even attacked the premise of Griswold v. Connecticut, the decision that prohibited states from outlawing birth control by establishing a right to privacy.

Yes, the candidates should be made to answer more questions about their plans for the Supreme Court and the lower federal courts. But there’s a lot that we already know.

(For more, check out PFAW’s website RomneyCourt.com.)

Mitt Romney took the stage at NBC's Education Nation to double down on his ridiculous past remarks that class size is "irrelevant" and "didn't make a difference." In light of Romney's remarks, American Bridge 21st Century launched ClassSizeMatters.com, featuring a great video and research revealing Romney's disastrous record on education.

From ClassSizeMatters.com:

Mitt Romney has said that "the effort to reduce classroom size may actually hurt education more than it helps." As governor, he proposed cutting $18 million in funding for class size reduction in Massachusetts. Yet when it came time to choose a school for his children, the Romneys chose an elite private school with an average class size of eleven students.

Mitt Romney wants small class sizes for his family -- but not for yours.

Learn more at http://classsizematters.com/learn-more/

Stumping in Iowa last year, Mitt Romney famously defended the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, declaring, “Corporations are people, my friend.”

But it turns out there’s one group that Romney thinks should be prohibited from spending money to influence elections: teachers’ unions. Speaking at a forum in New York, Romney expressed his wish for one specific campaign finance restriction:

The bigger problem, Romney said, is that "the person sitting across the table from them should not have received the largest campaign contribution from the teachers union themselves ... [It's] an extraordinary conflict of interest and something that should be addressed."

He later added that "we simply can't have" elected officials who have received large contributions from teachers sitting across from them at the bargaining table "supposedly" to represent the interests of children. "I think it's a mistake," Romney said. "I think we have to get the money out of the teachers unions going into campaigns. It's the wrong way for us to go. We've got to separate that."

Romney’s absolutely right that large campaign contributions and expenditures can improperly influence elected officials. But if he’s going to apply that standard to teachers, he needs to apply it to corporations as well.

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In March, Pennsylvania’s governor signed one of the most restrictive voter ID laws in the country. One study estimated that the law could impose extra burdens on 700,000 Pennsylvania voters, disproportionately affecting the poor, minorities, students and the elderly.

Andrew Cohen at The Atlantic writes today about one Pennsylvanian in her 80s who is struggling to keep her right to vote, sixty years after casting her first vote for Adlai Stevenson. Cohen quotes a letter that Robin Kane wrote to the voter ID law’s sponsor about her efforts to help her elderly mother, Jaqueline, register to vote in Pennsylvania:

For the past two weeks, my sister and I have been trying to help my mother gather the appropriate documents to get the newly required photo ID. The education campaign had inaccurate information and the rules keep shifting, making it difficult for me to understand and it would have been impossible for my elderly mother to do this without assistance.

First, VotesPA and PennDOT websites said she would need to get a non-driver's photo license. To do so, she would need her social security card; an original birth certificate with a raised seal; two proofs of residency; an application; and an oath that she had no other form of ID. My sister and mother spent two days looking for her birth certificate from 1930. They found my dead grandmother's birth certificate, plus ration cards from World War II, and lots of documents of my father's service during that war. But not her birth certificate.

I returned to the websites to learn that even without a birth certificate, she might be able to get the photo ID if the state Department of Health could confirm her birth. However, my mother was born in NY, not Pennsylvania. So, it turned out, this solution didn't apply to her. Instead, I was directed to seek a new birth certificate from the state of New York. Just when I thought we couldn't possibly get this done in time for her to vote, I learned that there is a new option for people exactly like my mom: the new, Department of State photo id for voting.

It still requires her to have her a social security card or number (which we found); proof of residency; an application; and an oath. And it still requires that my 82-year-old mother will travel by bus to a PennDOT office and hope that she has the stamina to wait in multiple lines to complete the process to get a photo ID that she needs for only this one purpose, ever. But she is determined to do so, if she is able. And she will vote against anyone who sided with you in this effort to suppress legitimate votes.

Cohen writes:

What this really means is that Jacqueline Kane is one of the lucky ones. She has a family that has the means to be able to help her in this fashion. But think of all the other elderly people out there, who won't have a health aid with them, or who don't have access to a bus, or who don't live in elder-care facilities where such opportunities exist. Those people aren't lazy, either. And yet they clearly face disenfranchisement if this law is permitted to stay in effect.

While Kane and countless others in Pennsylvania struggle to meet the voter ID requirement before election day, it’s still unclear whether the law will take effect in November. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court recently returned a challenge to the law to a lower court, ordering the lower court to halt the law if it’s not convinced the voter ID requirements won’t disenfranchise anybody.

During the last presidential election year, Senate Democrats and Republicans cooperated to confirm 10 district court nominees in one day, all by unanimous consent, and all just one day after they were approved by the Judiciary Committee. This year, since the president is Barack Obama rather than George W. Bush, Senate Republicans are sabotaging efforts to confirm 17 district court nominees before leaving town until after the election.

Almost all of the 17 had overwhelming bipartisan support in the Judiciary Committee and are strongly supported by both home-state senators, Democratic and Republicans alike. And all have been waiting somewhat more than a single day to get a yes-or-no vote: None has been delayed for less than seven weeks; seven have been waiting since June or earlier; and three have even been waiting since April.  Earlier this afternoon, when Majority Leader Reid sought unanimous consent to confirm the 17 nominees, Minority Leader McConnell refused.

This morning, the Administrative Office of U.S. Courts announced that the vacancy crisis in two of the nominees' districts has unexpectedly gotten even worse. In the Northern District of Illinois, a fourth vacancy has opened up, making the need to immediately confirm nominee Thomas Durkin even greater. The ABA has given Durkin its highest rating of “well qualified,” he is supported by both Sens. Durbin and Kirk, and the workload in that court has gotten so overwhelming that the vacancy has been formally designated a judicial emergency.

In California, one of the judges in the Southern District announced that she will be taking senior status early next year. This is the same district where Latino nominee Gonzalo Curiel would fill an emergency vacancy, if only Republicans would allow a vote. Like Durkin in Illinois, Curiel received overwhelming bipartisan support from the Judiciary Committee, and his qualifications are not in doubt. Yet his nomination has been languishing on the Senate floor since April, simply because Republicans want to obstruct President Obama's nominees.

To fully exercise our rights as Americans, we deserve a fully functioning federal court system. Perhaps Senate Republicans consider that mooching off government, echoing the worldview of their presidential nominee Mitt Romney, and want to put a stop to it. They're certainly acting like it.

This piece originally appeared at The Huffington Post.

Mitt Romney got some unwanted attention early this year when he flatly stated, "I'm not concerned about the very poor." When challenged on this remark he assured Americans that the safety net for the very poor was a given, safe from any budget and tax code tinkering in Washington. This was a sinister explanation since Romney's tax and spending plan -- or as much of it as can be deciphered -- calls for further tax cuts for the wealthy at the expense of social services that he claimed were safe.

Now, we see that it's not just the "very poor" who don't merit Romney's "concern." At the now-infamous $50,000-a-plate fundraiser in Florida, Romney wrote off the concerns of the 47 percent of Americans who don't owe federal income taxes, saying that half of Americans are "dependent on government," "believe that they are the victims," and have the gall to "believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it."

That 47 percent includes families and individuals with low incomes -- about 23 percent of taxpayers, according to the Tax Policy Center. It also includes those for whom tax credits for children and working families have eliminated tax burdens -- about 7 percent. It also includes seniors who have left the workforce -- about 10 percent. Over half of the 47 percent pay federal payroll taxes. All are subject to state and local taxes, many of which, like sales taxes, are more regressive than federal taxes. (And if we ever see more Romney tax returns, we may find some years when the Romney's were in that entitled 47 percent.)

As conservative writer Reihan Salam points out in the National Review, policies like the Child Tax Credit and the Earned Income Tax Credit -- responsible for much of this tax relief for working families -- were conservative ideas meant to reduce the "dependency" that Romney so reviles, by "encourag[ing] people get on the first rungs of the jobs ladder, and to become less dependent over time."

Romney was telling the well-heeled guests at this fundraising dinner that these people -- middle-class parents, low-income workers, the unemployed, the elderly -- aren't interested in working hard despite the fact that most of them report to the IRS each year that they work quite a lot. This isn't just tin-eared politics. Like Romney's comments on the "very poor," it represents a profound misunderstanding of how Americans' lives work and how his policies would affect those lives.

But even talking about the "47 percent versus the 53 percent" belies the fact that nobody in America is free from at least some government "dependency." We all rely on roads, hospitals, schools, firefighters, police officers, and our military -- even Mitt Romney and his $50,000-a-plate friends. Romney himself has relied on the government's safety net for businesses, securing a federal bailout for Bain & Company. Nobody succeeds without some help from a stable, functional government. That's what President Obama was saying when his "you didn't build that" comments were taken out of context.

Romney was clearly telling his funders a fantasy story that they love to hear. But that story is a lie, and we shouldn't accept it from someone who could become a president representing 100 percent of the American people.