ThinkProgress filed this report from the Western Republican Leadership Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada.

At a conference for Western Republicans in Las Vegas this week, GOP governors had varied reactions to Alabama’s radical anti-immigration law. Gov. Jan Brewer (R-AZ), who signed Arizona’s infamous SB17070 law, told ThinkProgress that she would like to implement the Alabama model, which goes further than her state by targeting school children and even making it illegal for undocumented immigrants to get water in their homes.

Gov. Brian Sandoval (R-NV), however, said Alabama’s law would not be right for his state:

KEYES: What about Alabama’s immigration law?

SANDOVAL: That’s in litigation right now, so–

KEYES: Is that something you see as a model that Nevada might be able to use?

SANDOVAL: I don’t. I don’t.

KEYES: You don’t think it’d be appropriate?

SANDOVAL: I don’t see it as being a model.

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Nevada and Arizona are both states with a large immigrant population. The two divergent policy positions between Brewer and Sandoval highlights the larger schism in the Republican Party in terms of immigration and the Hispanic population.

Despite a federal court blocking parts of the Alabama law for now, including the schools provision, hundreds of Hispanic children have refused to show up at school and many families are fleeing the state.

The NRA threw its full weight behind a bill called the National Right-to-Carry Reciprocity Act, and members of Congress leaped to do their bidding. In all, 246 lawmakers signed onto the bill in the House, all but ensuring that it will pass that chamber, and more than half of the Senate Republican caucus co-sponsored an even more radical form of the bill during the last Congress. If the bill becomes law, it would allow nearly anyone to shop around for the one state that is willing to issue them a license to carry a concealed firearm, and then force other states to honor that license.

Notwithstanding any provision of the law of any State or political subdivision thereof, related to the carrying or transportation of firearms, a person who is not prohibited by Federal law from possessing, transporting, shipping, or receiving a firearm, and who is carrying a government-issued photographic identification document and a valid license or permit which is issued pursuant to the law of a State and which permits the person to carry a concealed firearm, may carry a concealed handgun (other than a machinegun or destructive device) that has been shipped or transported in interstate or foreign commerce, in any State, other than the State of residence of the person, that–

‘(1) has a statute that allows residents of the State to obtain licenses or permits to carry concealed firearms; or

‘(2) does not prohibit the carrying of concealed firearms by residents of the State for lawful purposes.

Many states’ licensing rules for concealed carry are shockingly lax. Florida, for example, issued 1,700 concealed carry permits to people with “criminal histories, arrest warrants, domestic violence injunctions and misdemeanor convictions for gun-related crimes.” Because Illinois is the only state that does not have a concealed carry law, the NRA’s bill would render out-of-state visitors immune to every state but Illinois’ licensing laws — so long as they obtained a license from a state that practically gives them away.

Lest there be any doubt, this law has nothing whatsoever to do with the Second Amendment. As Justice Scalia suggested in District of Columbia v. Heller, there is no constitutional right to secretly conceal a firearm from the people around you. In Scalia’s words, “[f]rom Blackstone through the 19th-century cases, commentators and courts routinely explained that the right was not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose. For example, the majority of the 19th-century courts to consider the question held that prohibitions on carrying concealed weapons were lawful under the Second Amendment or state analogues.”

Yet, while forcing New York to honor Florida’s poorly vetted carry licenses has nothing to do with the Second Amendment, it flies directly in the face of the right’s professed views on the 10th Amendment’s guarantee of states rights. The NRA’s bill is a direct attack on each state’s ability to determine on its own how best to protect the public’s safety.

Ultimately, however, this kind of fair weather tentherism is nothing new. Conservatives hate federal regulation of health care, until they want to invalidate state tort law or immunize the insurance industry from state consumer protection law. They label Medicare, Social Security and even child labor laws violations of states rights, then cheer Supreme Court justices who would give banks, drug and tobacco companies sweeping immunity from state law.

In other words, the right’s lockstep embrace of the NRA’s concealed carry bill is just one more example of conservatives’ willingness to claim that the Constitution means whatever they want it to mean.

Last week, the Senate GOP cobbled together a list of longstanding Republican priorities — such as repealing the Affordable Care Act and amending the Constitution to lock Tea Party fiscal policy in place permanently — called it a “jobs” bill and hoped that this hodgepodge of old ideas would distract from President Obama’s popular jobs plan. Interestingly, this grab bag of old right-wing ideas includes a tort reform bill called the “Medical Care Access Protection Act,” which imposes Texas-style damages caps on medical malpractice suits. A handful of tenther lawmakers opposed this bill because it violates their overarching principle that nearly everything the federal government does violates the 10th Amendment. By including this proposal in its high profile attempt to take attention from Obama’s jobs plan, the Senate GOP sends a pretty clear message that they don’t actually care about tentherism — they only pretend to care in order to use the 10th Amendment as a weapon against President Obama.

It’s hardly shocking to discover that Senate Republicans view the Constitution as nothing more than a ball of clay that can be molded into whatever shape they want it to take, but it’s worth noting just how expansively these GOP lawmakers view their own constitutional authority. Far from accepting the tenther view that nearly everything is unconstitutional, the Medical Care Access Protection Act endorses a theory of federal power that is more expansive than that taken by any the Supreme Court:

(2) EFFECT ON INTERSTATE COMMERCE- Congress finds that the health care and insurance industries are industries affecting interstate commerce and the health care liability litigation systems existing throughout the United States are activities that affect interstate commerce by contributing to the high costs of health care and premiums for health care liability insurance purchased by health care system providers.

The reason for this segment of the bill is to invoke Congress’ power to “regulate commerce…among the several states” in order to justify the bill under the Constitution. The problem with this justification, however, is that the Supreme Court unanimously rejected the view that Congress may regulate any matter that simply “affects” commerce. In United States v. Lopez the majority said Congress can regulate matters that have a “substantial” effect on interstate commerce, and the dissenters said that Congress can regulate matters that have a “significant” effect on interstate commerce. The Senate GOP, by contrast, seems to believe it can do anything at all so long its actions have some miniscule impact on the nation’s economy.

This view is obviously not compatible with the view Senate Republicans took in the amicus brief they filed in the Affordable Care Act litigation, where the overwhelming majority of the GOP caucus endorsed the view that a comprehensive regulation of the entire national health care market is somehow not a constitutional regulation of interstate commerce. Indeed, the Senate GOP’s own lawyer — the author of their brief attacking health reform — has a lengthy post at the National Review slamming their decision to prefer tort reform to tentherism.

Ultimately, however, expecting these lawmakers to take a principled stance on the Constitution is a fool’s errand. When they want to legislate, they believe the Constitution gives them all the power they need. But when President Obama wants to pass new laws, they’re happy to embrace a fringe reading of the Constitution in order to sabotage the president’s agenda.