Arizona Senate President Russell Pearce, the sponsor of Arizona’s draconian anti-immigrant law SB 1070, faces a recall election on Nov. 8 after nearly 17,000 Arizona voters signed a petition supporting this recall. Pearce, of course, believes this is terribly unfair — so unfair that Arizona’s taxpayers should pay for his campaign:

A little-known provision in the Arizona Constitution requires the Legislature to enact the laws necessary to run an election seeking the ouster of an elected official. And that includes “provision for payment by the public treasury of the reasonable special election campaign expenses of such officer.” [...]

[T]he Senate president said that, in general, he is opposed to using public funds for elections.

He said, though, his particular case should be an exception. [...] “In my case, simply, they don’t like what I’ve accomplished,” he said. Pearce said if that is the case, voters will have a chance next year, at the regular election, to choose someone else.

“I suspect why it’s there (in the Constitution) is it’s overturning a valid election, a minority in most cases overturning the voters’ will,” he said. It takes the signatures of 25 percent of those who voted in the last regular election to force a recall.

“It is tough,’’ he said. “You’ve got to raise money.”

It’s not entirely clear that Pearce can force the state to fund his campaign. The entire provision of the Arizona Constitution he relies on says that “[l]aws necessary to facilitate the operation of the provisions of this article shall be enacted, including provision for payment by the public treasury of the reasonable special election campaign expenses of such officer,” and the state’s Elections Director reads this provision to “require an actual vote by lawmakers.”

Should Pearce try to force the issue, however, it will be interesting to see how he explains to the state’s voters that he is absolutely, positively opposed to public financing of political campaigns — but he’ll make an exception for himself.

Last month ThinkProgress reported that a Missouri high school had banned Kurt Vonnegut’s classic novel Slaughterhouse Five because religious residents complained that it taught principles contrary to the Bible. Now the American Library Association reports that this year alone, U.S. schools have banned more than 20 books and faced more than 50 other challenges, with many more expected this fall as school starts.

The library association says the number of reported challenges in the past 30 years has hovered between about 400 or 500, but there are many bans they never learn about. While parents have traditionally launched the lion’s share of challenges, Deborah Caldwell-Stone, an attorney with the association, says she has noticed “an uptick in organized efforts” to remove books from public and school libraries.

The top reasons for challenges are sexually explicit content, offensive language and violence. “That’s not what our kids should be reading and learning,” Roberta Combs, president of the Christian Coalition of America, told USA Today.

A review of the books banned by various schools in the past six months illustrates that eliminating this “objectionable material” actually deprives students of the chance to think and form their own opinions about difficult questions. The banned books include Push by Sapphire, the acclaimed novel about an illiterate 16-year-old girl that was made into the Academy Award-winning movie Precious. Also on the list is a “laugh-out-loud” picture book about a happy rat, and a book by a Pulitzer-Prize winning author that puts a human face on legendary human rights leader Mahatma Gandhi.

The complete list is below.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) is one of the most radical constitutional thinkers in the country. He believes that Social Security and Medicare are unconstitutional. He thinks federal child labor laws, overtime laws and the minimum wage all violate the Constitution. And he doesn’t think that Americans should be able to elect their own senators — among other things.

So it probably shouldn’t come as any surprise that Perry supports one of the most destructive misinterpretations of the Constitution in American history — nullification.

In 2007, President George W. Bush signed a law that would gradually phase out older light bulbs that are both more inefficient and more expensive in the long run that bulbs based on modern technology. Once President Obama moved into the White House, however, conservatives suddenly decided that it was their fundamental right as an American to waste their money on expensive and outdated bulbs. Accordingly, Texas lawmakers passed a bill claiming that many Texas light bulb manufacturers can simply ignore this law, and Perry signed that bill into law last June.

The idea that states can invalidate federal laws that they don’t like — an idea known as nullification — is wildly unconstitutional. The U.S. Constitution expressly states that Acts of Congress “shall be the supreme law of the land…anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding,” thus expressly establishing that states do not have a veto power over federal laws. As James Madison wrote in 1830, allowing states to simply ignore the laws they don’t want to follow would “speedily put an end to the Union itself.”

Nevertheless, this constitutionally indefensible idea has seen somewhat of a resurgence among the American far right since the publication of a 2010 book by right-wing pseudo-historian Thomas Woods. Before writing this book, Woods published an article declaring the Confederacy to be “Christendom’s Last Stand,” where he endorses the view that the Civil War was a battle between “atheists, socialists, communists, red republicans, jacobins on the one side and the friends of order and regulated freedom on the other,” and he concludes that “[t]he real watershed from which we can trace many of the destructive trends that continue to ravage our civilization today, was the defeat of the Confederate States of America in 1865.” (Woods also writes delightfully unhinged rants whenever someone points out his pro-Confederate past. Hi, Tom. Can’t wait to see what you write this time!)

So Perry is in some pretty terrible company with his claim that Texas can thumb its nose at the law. Unfortunately, Perry’s embrace of nullification is just one more sign that he has canvassed American constitutional history to find the worst ideas from America’s past and systemically embraced all of them.