At this weekend’s Conservative Political Action Conference, Sens. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Marco Rubio (R-FL) suggested that everything that went wrong during the first two years of President Obama’s term must be laid at his feet because Obama “got everything he wanted” from Congress while both houses were controlled by Democrats. As a new ThinkProgress video demonstrates, this exact phrase has clearly become the centerpiece of the GOP’s messaging this election cycle. Watch it:

As the video also reminds these Republicans, however, there’s one giant problem with their talking point — the Senate GOP’s unprecedented abuse of the filibuster. Indeed, the number of votes attempting to break Sen. McConnell’s use of this tactic more than doubled the minute he took over as minority leader:

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, the anti-immigrant official who drafted Arizona and Alabama’s harmful immigration laws, has claimed his extreme laws have had no damaging effects on state economies where they have been implemented. He is an advisor to presidential candidate Mitt Romney, the GOP presidential candidate with the most extreme immigration plan, and Kobach has said he favors an “attrition through enforcement” national immigration plan, also known as self-deportation.

Kobach repeated his support for a self-deportation policy at a CPAC panel about immigration because it would serve as a jobs plan. To back up the claim, he said the immigration measures in Alabama and Arizona have helped the state economies. With 13 million Americans looking for jobs, Kobach said during the panel that deporting undocumented immigrants would open opportunities for those job seekers:

If it becomes our national policy we will accomplish many things, the restoration of the rule of law, and we will also create jobs for Americans all across America. [...] If you really want to create a job and you don’t want to use words like shovel-ready and do it through a gov program, here’s an idea for you: If you want to create a job for a U.S. citizen tomorrow, deport an illegal alien today.

Watch Kobach’s comments (the very last line):

Of course, if Kobach were actually paying attention to the effects of his pet laws, he’d realize this claim simply isn’t true. In Alabama, one report shows that the state could lose as many as 140,000 jobs because of the state’s immigration law. After Latinos fled new, harmful immigration policies in Alabama and Georgia, farmers watched their crops rot in the field because they did not have enough workers to harvest them. Businesses in Arizona eventually turned against SB 1070, the state’s extreme immigration policy, because of the negative impact it had on jobs and the recovering economy.

And economists have reached the consensus that immigrants are good for the economy and help create jobs. And in 2010, the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank released a study that conclusively found that “there is no evidence that these effects take place at the expense of jobs for workers born in the United States.” The study, which did not distinguish between legal and undocumented immigrants, found that immigrants in the workforce have a “significant positive effect in the long run.”

No matter how many times Kobach claims self-deportation will create jobs — or how long Romney embraces extremely anti-immigrant policies — reports have show that his claims are simply wrong.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) has left no doubt that he cannot tell the United States Constitution from a buzzsaw designed to reduce America’s safety net into sawdust. Long before he became a lawmaker, he was on record claiming that Social Security and Medicare are unconstitutional.

Speaking on a panel at the Conservative Political Action Conference yesterday, Lee admitted to the full implications of his backwards view of our founding document. All spending on national programs intended to secure Americans’ retirement or provide for their health are unconstitutional:

QUESTION: What programs that we now call entitlement spending are part of the enumerated powers of Article I, Section 8 [of the Constitution]?

LEE: There are those that will tell you that those are based on the Spending Clause, in, uh, clause one of Article I, Section 8. That was the justification advanced at the time these programs were created. And it rested on an expansive interpretation provided by the Supreme Court saying, in essence, Congress can spend anything it wants, as long as it has tax revenues coming in, or, as it turns out, even if it doesn’t. It can spend it on whatever it wants.

This can’t be reconciled with the original understanding of the clause. If you go back to founding era documents, to discussions around state ratification debates — the Federalist Papers — they understood the Spending Clause as being there to spend money on those powers that were duly enumerated. . . . If these kinds of programs, ah, were to come forward and we were really following the original understanding of the Constitution, we’d say let’s do these at the state level, and the local level. Never at the federal level.

Watch it:

Lee’s odd reading of the Constitution cannot be squared with the text of the document itself. Had Lee actually bothered to read the founding document, he’d know that the United States may “collect taxes . . . to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States.” Medicare, Social Security and other such safety net programs clearly provide for the nation’s “general welfare” and thus are unambiguously constitutional if you take the text of the document seriously.

Moreover, Lee’s description of early constitutional history is misleading at best. The reality is that there were two very distinct camps regarding how the Constitution should be interpreted in the early days of the Republic. James Madison led one camp, which believed that America should read the Constitution much more narrowly than its text suggests — although, to Madison’s great credit, he openly admitted that his preferred reading of the Constitution is inconsistent with its “literal” meaning.

Alexander Hamilton led a different faction which rejected the idea that the Constitution creates restrictions that don’t exist in its text, and the Supreme Court unanimously adopted Hamilton’s view in the very first Supreme Court decision to consider the question. More recently, conservative Justice Antonin Scalia laughed openly at the suggestion that this debate should be reopened, stating that “of course it’s not” the proper role of judges to second guess how Congress decides to spend money.

In other words, Lee’s position doesn’t just place him at the lunatic fringe of constitutional thinkers, it also puts him at the lunatic fringe of conservative constitutional thinkers.