Last month, the Obama Administration approved important regulations under the Affordable Care Act requiring health plans to cover contraceptive services. Never one to miss an opportunity to falsely claim something related the the ACA violates the Constitution, Speaker John Boehner (R) said today that these regulations are unconstitutional:

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said that the mandate that health insurance plans provide contraceptives at no charge “violates our Constitution,” because it forces Catholics to violate their consciences.

“I think this mandate violates our Constitution,” Boehner said during his weekly news conference Thursday.

Boehner said that there was “a lot of opposition” to the new regulations enacted by the Department of Health and Human Services, because it forces Catholics to provide access to contraceptives despite the fact that the Catholic Church holds that contraception is immoral.

It’s important to note that the regulation exempts churches that provide health insurance to their employees and nothing in the regulations require health providers with religious objections to proscribe contraception. Additionally, it’s not exactly true that “Catholics” believe what Boehner claims they believe. Although the conservative United States Conference of Catholic Bishops does indeed object to these regulations, 98 percent of sexually active Catholic women use contraception.

Boehner’s constitutional analysis, moreover, is completely absurd. There is nothing in the Constitution saying that a person does not have to comply with the law simply because they object to it — if this were actually true, anyone could immunize themselves from paying taxes simply by claiming a moral objection to doing so. Nor does the Constitution allow people to violate the law simply because they have a religious objection to it.

The seminal Supreme Court opinion establishing this point was written by conservative Justice Antonin Scalia — who, coincidentally, is Catholic. Scalia explains that “the right of free exercise does not relieve an individual of the obligation to comply with a ‘valid and neutral law of general applicability on the ground that the law proscribes (or prescribes) conduct that his religion prescribes (or proscribes).’” In other words, so long as a law does not single out Catholics (or any other faith) for inferior treatment, the law applies universally to everyone.

Ultimately, however, it is not surprising that Boehner is once again mouthing off about the Constitution without understanding what it actually says. The Speaker, of course, is a proud supporter of the lawsuits challenging the Affordable Care Act, despite the fact that a leading conservative judge that the case against the ACA has no basis “in either the text of the Constitution or Supreme Court precedent.”

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who drafted Arizona and Alabama’s harmful immigration laws and has ties to a hate group, told ThinkProgress on Tuesday that he has been helping to advise Mitt Romney on immigration policy. He started serving as an unpaid adviser at the beginning of the year before he endorsed the former Massachusetts governor, according to the Associated Press.

And as the Romney campaign swept from South Carolina, where state officials are defending a harmful immigration law, into Florida and onto Nevada, which have larger Latino communities, Kobach insisted in an interview that Romney has not changed his tone on immigration policy:

No, he’s been very clear that he favors attrition through enforcement and is opposed to amnesty. [...] To say that one talks about his position in favor of legal immigration…one can call it a change in tone, but it’s not in any way different with what he said about addressing illegal immigration.

“Enforcement through attrition” has the same result as self-deportation, Kobach said, and is one of the goals of the extreme state laws. And as it turns out, the backbone for Romney’s immigration policy — forcing immigrants to “self-deport” — began as a joke.

The backbone of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s immigration policy is to make life so miserable for the undocumented that they “self-deport” to their country of origin. As it turns out, however, this “self-deportation” proposal doesn’t exactly have the kind of pedigree key prongs of a presidential candidate’s policy agenda normally have. Rather, it began as a joke by Mexican-American comedians Lalo Alcaraz and Esteban Zul. The idea was first proposed in a 1994 press release from Alcaraz and Zul’s satirical organization supporting California’s former Republican Gov. Pete Wilson:

Hispanics for Wilson (HFW) will support their candidate through various efforts, including:

• the creation of “Self Deportation Centers” which will encourage all Hispanics regardless of citizenship status, especially their elderly relatives, to return to their countries of origin. The whole membership of Hispanics For Wilson promises to voluntarily leave the country when Governor Wilson wins the fall election.
• a pledge to retrain white collar workers and middle management in the agricultural, restaurant and hotel maintenance arts, once illegal immigrants are displaced from these highly sought after fields. . . .
• calling for the immediate deportation of singer Linda Rondstadt for attracting Mexicans to this country with her garbled Spanish yodeling.
• a promise to never utter a word of Spanish, except for “Adios, amigo.” In the case that they don’t know how to speak Spanish, they vow to speed-learn it and then quickly forget it, in the interest of racial harmony.

There’s no word yet whether Romney shares Alcaraz and Zul’s bold anti-Rondstadt stance.

Last week, Tea Party Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) threatened to exact revenge for President Obama’s decision to recess appoint four officials by engaging in a scorched earth campaign of obstruction against each of the president’s nominees. In an apparent effort to cede what little remaining credibility he has on this issue, he then followed this threat up yesterday by comparing Obama’s decision to appoint four consumer and worker protection officials to an unprovoked attack that killed 2,402 Americans and thrust America into the final four years of a bitter world war:

Lee’s phrase “a day that will live on in infamy,” is nearly a word for word transcription of the opening line in President Franklin Roosevelt’s speech seeking a declaration of war following the attack on Pearl Harbor. Nearly 420,000 Americans would die in that war, and we were in many ways the lucky ones. Over 2.5% percent of the world’s population died in World War II — totaling more than 60 million lives lost.

It’s common, of course, to express outrage at this point in a blog post highlighting such a bizarre and offensive comparison as Lee’s analogy between Obama’s wholly legal appointments and America’s forced entry into an horrific war. And Lee’s comment is unquestionably outrageous. Nevertheless, the most appropriate emotion is pity. Pity for this angry little man who can’t tell the difference between an constitutional maneuver he disagrees with and a global calamity that ended only after humankind birthed and detonated a weapon that continues to threaten our very existence seven decades later.

Ultimately, however, far more pity should be reserved for the people of Utah who, for at least five more years, must be represented in the Senate by a man who confuses personal disagreements with great human tragedies, who confuses our Constitution with a mandate to destroy Social Security and Medicare, and who openly admits to using sabotage and extortion in order to push his dangerous agenda.