Earlier this week, Alaska GOP Senate candidate Joe Miller — aka “Mr. Noun, Verb and Unconstitutional” — filed a lawsuit seeking to disenfranchise write-in candidate Lisa Murkowski’s voters who misspelled Murkowski’s name.  In an amusing twist, Miller’s lawsuit was originally assigned to one of his former supervisors, a federal judge with a pretty low opinion of Joe Miller:

The federal judge originally assigned to hear Joe Miller’s lawsuit to challenge how write-in ballots are counted took himself off the case Wednesday because of the “negative opinion” he held of Miller. . . .

“The process for filling a part-time magistrate judge position is lengthy, a fact well known to Mr. Miller because he had gone through that process,” [Judge John] Sedwick wrote in an order from his chambers. “Mr. Miller’s failure to give reasonable notice of his resignation left the court with no judicial officer resident in Fairbanks, and no ability to fill the vacancy for many months. This incident caused me to form a negative opinion of Mr. Miller.”

At the time, Sedwick was the chief federal judge in Alaska and Miller’s supervisor.

Judge Sedwick is only the most recent in a long string of Miller’s former supervisors who were turned off by his poor conduct in the workplace.  Former Fairbanks North Star Borough Mayor Jim Whitaker, who supervised Miller when he worked as a part-time attorney for the borough, was forced to discipline Miller for engaging in unethical activity.  Likewise, Miller’s former supervisor at a law firm he worked at for three years explained that “we at this firm were not eager to have him stay, and so when he announced he was leaving, we were relieved.”

Last night on her MSNBC show, host Rachel Maddow was live from Alaska, where she interviewed all three candidates running for the state’s U.S. Senate seat — including Tea Party favorite Joe Miller. Maddow stressed throughout the program that trying to interview Miller was difficult. After weeks of pushing, Maddow said, “Today, I was finally allowed to ask Joe Miller a couple of questions while we moved from a roof, through a lobby, down an escalator, through another lobby, out a door, into an SUV and then it was over.”

During that short and “strange” interview, Maddow noted that one of Miller’s staffers runs a website proclaiming to cure gays of their homosexuality and asked if Miller thinks being gay is a choice. Without answering the question directly, Miller simply said that “it really is a state issue.” After Maddow asked him to clarify, Miller said, “I think that’s up to the individual,” after returning back to his original claim that “it’s a state issue.”

Yet, later in the interview, Miller said he supports the Defense of Marriage Act, the federal law stating that marriage is between a man and a women. After Maddow noted this obvious contradiction on whether the government should be involved in these personal issues, Miller tried to weasel his way out, but ultimately said he would vote for a federal constitutional marriage banning gay marriage:

MADDOW: But you do want a federal role in restricting a state’s ability to legalize gay marriage but at the state level –

MILLER: That’s not what I said. I said that there is a federal role. There are obviously federal decisions that are made based on the status of marriage.

MADDOW: Do you think there should be a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage?

MILLER: That’s up to the people. You’ve got a three-quarters vote, ratified, I’d vote for it.

MADDOW: You would vote for it?

MILLER: Yeah, I would. But it would require an amendment to the Constitution.

Watch the interview:

Maddow also asked Miller about his belief that the 17th Amendment — which allows for public election of U.S. senators, rather than state legislatures — should be repealed. But again, Miller dodged. “That wasn’t the discussion,” he said, adding that “the discussion was about the kind of theory behind the 17th Amendment,” right before he got away in his SUV.

Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart recently observed the key component behind the conservative orthodoxy Miller espoused in his position on gay rights. Republicans “always hit the old platitudes of ‘we trust you the people,’ ‘it’s about freedom and liberty,’ ‘it’s about small government,’ and then you get in there, and you expand government,” he said, adding, that it’s a “fallacy that limited government is the principled stand of conservatives. It’s only limited to the shit they want to do.”

Transcript: Read more

A private security force hired by Joe Miller (R-AK) detains a blogger that asked Miller a critical question

Private security guards hired by Alaska GOP Senate candidate Joe Miller handcuffed a progressive blogger and claimed that the blogger was “under arrest” after the blogger asked Miller a question about why he was disciplined in a previous job:

The editor of the Alaska Dispatch website was arrested by U.S. Senate candidate Joe Miller’s private security guards Sunday as the editor attempted to interview Miller at the end of a public event in an Anchorage school.

Tony Hopfinger was handcuffed by the guards and detained in a hallway at Central Middle School until Anchorage police came and told the guards to release Hopfinger. [...]

One of the guards grabbed Hopfinger’s video camera. Later, Hopfinger said that when he got the camera back, the segment covering the span of the arrest was missing. An Anchorage police officer offered to take the camera into custody and have it examined in the crime lab to investigate whether evidence had been destroyed, but Hopfinger declined. He said he needed the camera and the remaining video for his work.

The guard who grabbed the camera said Hopfinger had dropped it in the scuffle and denied erasing anything. The guard wouldn’t give his name.

While Hopfinger was still in handcuffs, the guards attempted to prevent other reporters from talking to him and threatened them too with arrest for trespass. A Daily News reporter interviewed Hopfinger anyway. No other reporters were arrested, though a few shoving matches and chest bumps ensued as the guards attempted to cordon off Hopfinger and block photographs and videos from being taken of the bizarre school scene.

Miller’s belief that he can hire a goon squad to falsely arrest people who disagree with him is, sadly, part of a much larger pattern. “This behavior is particularly disturbing, especially for someone who claims to be a ‘constitutional conservative,’” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), who is waging a write-in campaign against Miller, said.

Miller — aka “Mr. Noun, Verb and Unconstitutional” — is best known for decreeing that laws he disagrees with must be unconstitutional. Miller has previously claimed that the federal minimum wage, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment benefits, and even federal child labor laws violate the Constitution — although his opposition to these programs hasn’t prevented him from tapping into them whenever his family qualified for benefits.

In other words, Miller really only follows one rule: “whatever Joe Miller wants; that’s the rule.”

A significant number of Republicans are beginning to rally around the idea of shutting down the government if they control Congress next year. Reps. Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA) and Steve King (R-IA) have openly called for a shutdown, while Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) and RNC Chairman Michael Steele have given their tacit endorsements. The last time Republicans shut down the government, right after taking power in 1995, the government lost $800 million and millions of Americans were denied or delayed access to Medicare, Social Security, national parks, and other federally-funded programs.

Undaunted, Tea Party darling Joe Miller is pitching his tent in the government-shutdown camp. Miller, currently locked in a three-way Alaska Senate race, has already generated significant controversy after it was revealed that his wife received unemployment benefits that he believes are unconstitutional and he personally received Medicaid benefits that he believes are unconstitutional. Now, Miller is not only endorsing a government shutdown if he is elected, but also told National Review Online’s Robert Costa that Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has put the option “on the table”:

“I think there’s an understanding that the mood of the nation has changed in such a way that there is not going to be toleration of business as usual. If that means shutting down the government, so be it. I mean, we’ll do what it takes,” [Miller] says. “I think that we will have enough like-minded people coming into D.C. that we’re actually going to be able to accomplish something.”

But is Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Senate GOP leader, open to the possibility of shutting down the federal government? “There was a comment made at breakfast this morning about shutting down the government, and he reacted in a positive way,” Miller says. “I’m not going to quote him, but I think that he recognizes that that’s on the table.”

McConnell’s office has since responded that the Republican Leader “has not called for shutting down the government.” However, McConnell’s spokesman was silent on whether or not the option is on the table, as Miller asserted.

In his interview, Miller also called for war with Iran if they did not cease their nuclear ambitions, saying “we will do what we can militarily to take care of that.” However, moments later, Mr. “Noun, Verb, and Unconstitutional” hedged on actually toppling the Iranian government because that would not be “constitutionally authorized.” For those keeping score, Miller has now added nation-building to his growing list of things he views as unconstitutional, including Social Security, Medicare, unemployment benefits, Medicaid, and the minimum wage.

Alaska GOP Senate candidate Joe Miller has repeatedly claimed that federal health care benefits violate the Constitution. It turns out, however, that “Mr. Noun, Verb, and Unconstitutional” doesn’t actually think that the Constitution applies to himself. Yesterday, Miller acknowledged that the received the very same kind of federally funded health care benefits that he believes to be unconstitutional:

U.S. Senate candidate Joe Miller acknowledged Thursday that in the past his family received assistance from federal Medicaid and Denali KidCare, the state low income health care program. His opponents in the race responded that he’s a hypocrite for taking assistance while now saying federal entitlement programs are unconstitutional.

Miller’s campaign didn’t provide an answer for for the past week-and-a-half did not answer when asked what low-income assistance he has received. But Miller addressed it Thursday when asked by reporters after a debate in Anchorage, saying people are entitled to know about his past benefits but “it’s a bit of a distraction from where we’re at today.”

Miller attempts to distract from his own hypocrisy by pointing out that he only objects to federally-funded health care benefits, claiming that it is “ultimately a state decision” whether or not to provide a basic safety net to the nation’s least fortunate. But this claim does nothing to change the fact that the Medicaid benefits Miller accepted are paid in part by the federal government — a violation of Miller’s bizarre view of the Constitution.

And Miller isn’t just a hypocrite, he also has no idea what he is talking about. Had Miller actually bothered to read the Constitution, he would know that Congress has the power to “to lay and collect taxes” and to “provide for the . . . general welfare of the United States.” Federal health care programs such as Medicare and Medicaid clearly fit within this power to raise revenue and spend it to benefit the nation at large. Additionally, Miller’s proposal for a state takeover of federal entitlement programs is economically impossible unless America forbids its citizens from retiring in a different state than the one that they paid taxes in while working.

There is one thing that’s clear from Miller’s actions, however. He is perfectly happy to leave millions of other people helpless against the twin dragons of poverty and disease, but there is no way that he is going to follow his own draconian rules.

At a town hall promoting his Senate campaign last night, GOP senatorial candidate Joe Miller — aka “Mr. Noun, Verb, and Unconstitutional” — proposed making his own race for the Senate unconstitutional:

There’s only three things Joe Miller likes in a sentence: a noun, a verb, and “unconstitutional.” After previously claiming that Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment benefits violate the Constitution, the Alaska GOP Senate candidate has added a new item to the long list of uncontroversial laws he thinks are unconstitutional — the federal minimum wage:

We asked him, for example, if there should be a federally mandated minimum wage, something that has existed since Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938.

So there should not be a federal minimum wage?

“There should not be,” Miller answered. “That is not within the scope of the powers that are given to the federal government.”

Watch it:

Joe Miller would do well to actually read the Constitution before he pretends to know what it says. The Constitution gives Congress the power “[t]o regulate commerce…among the several states,” a power which even ultraconservative Justice Antonin Scalia agrees gives Congress broad authority to regulate “economic activity.” Moreover, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the first federal minimum wage law in a 1941 decision called United States v. Darby.

That decision did not just uphold the minimum wage, it also expressly overruled an egregious 1918 decision striking down federal child labor laws. Darby therefore provides a frightening window into just what America would look like if it were ever ruled by Joe Miller’s twisted constitution. If Congress lacks the power to enact the basic employment laws like the minimum wage, then it also lacks the power to enact other fundamental labor protections such as regulating child labor.

Indeed, as a recent Center for American Progress report explains, Joe Miller’s “tenther” vision of the Constitution was briefly imposed on the country during the late 19th and early 20th Century.  As a result, monopolies were left unchecked. Child labor was routinely exploited.  Workers were left with no bargaining power against their employers — yet, somehow, laws protecting management were typically upheld.

Sadly, Mr. Noun, Verb and Unconstitutional doesn’t seem to care about this history. He’s so wrapped up in his mythical vision of what the Constitution should mean, he forgot to ask whether that mythology would cause grave harm to the country.

Sarah Palin-backed Republican Senate candidate Joe Miller (R-AK), who defeated incumbent Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) in the primary in August, skyrocketed to power partially by demanding more transparency and ethics in Washington. In his 12-point campaign promise, Miller says he will “end czar layer of government” that “clouds transparency in government.” Miller’s campaign endorsement page features Alaskans praising him for having higher ethics and a greater commitment to transparency.

However, ThinkProgress contacted the Senate Ethics Committee and the Senate Office of Public Records yesterday and discovered that Miller has not filed a personal finance disclosure as a candidate for the U.S. Senate, as required by law. According to Title I of the Ethics in Government Act of 1978 and Senate Rule 41.1, candidates for U.S. Senate must file a disclosure form within 30 days of raising or spending $5,000. According to the Federal Elections Committee, Miller raised well over $5,000 as early as April of this year. Asked again today by ThinkProgress if Miller has filed his personal finance disclosure, or has contacted the Senate Office of Public Records with any request for an extension to file, a staffer with the Office responded:

“We haven’t received anything from him. He hasn’t sent us anything.”

According to law, “failure to file or report information required to be reported by section 102 of the Act may subject” Miller — a Yale Law School graduate — to a “civil penalty of not more than $50,000 and to disciplinary action by the Select Committee on Ethics and/or any other appropriate authority.” As of today, Miller is at least five months late with his disclosures.

It’s not the first time Miller has faced ethical issues. As the Associated Press reported yesterday, Miller received a special low-income hunting and fishing license shortly after joining a law firm making about $70,000 a year. Although he claims he received the license lawfully, his opponent blasted him for “gaming the system.”

ThinkProgress reached out to several members of the Miller campaign team for comment. They have not yet provided a response, but we will post an update if they do.

Earlier today, Alaska GOP Senate candidate Joe Miller was a guest on KWHL’s Bob and Mark show. ThinkProgress called in to ask him to clarify his previous suggestions that Social Security is unconstitutional. In his initial response, Miller repeated an earlier, economically impossible proposal for a state takeover of Social Security:

[Social Security] is a role that, if government is to do, it’s something that’s best reserved to the states. It’s kinda, it is a paradox, you’re exactly right, and so how to we deal with that as a nation?  You know, when I look at the Constitution, and I look at what it provides for, certain powers are listed.  The Tenth Amendment says that the powers aren’t listed [sic], that those powers are reserved then to the states.  So it is a quandary.

Listen:

In response to a follow up question from ThinkProgress, Miller clarified that he does think that Social Security is unconstitutional, but that it should continue to pay benefits to some Americans anyway:

MILLER: When you start to receive some sort of commitment from government in exchange for a payment that you’ve made, there are reciprocal responsibilities; there is an expectation of payment on the part of the person that’s paid into it.  And it’s gotten us into this quandary, where government is into something that it shouldn’t have gotten into.  Now we’ve got a whole generation of people that are dependent on it, plus we have others that are getting ready to enter into the Social Security payment system, and they are, they simply don’t have time to transition out of it . [...]

QUESTION: What about for me?  I’m 32 years old.  Is Social Security constitutional for me?

MILLER: Social Security should be transitioned into a program, there’s no question about it, that will allow either the states, or the private entities — whatever the dialogue, I think, results in — to provide payments to you.  It is ultimately the government’s responsibility to follow the mandates of the Constitution.

Listen:

It’s difficult to count the errors in Miller’s statement. For starters, if Social Security is unconstitutional, than it would be unconstitutional to continue to pay benefits to current beneficiaries. There is certainly nothing in the Constitution which requires the kind of generational warfare Miller embraces, and the idea that the Constitution applies differently to older Americans than it does to younger Americans is utterly incoherent.

More importantly, his suggestion that Social Security violates the “mandates of the Constitution” is flat out wrong. Had Miller actually bothered to read the Constitution, he would know that Congress has the power to “to lay and collect taxes” and to “provide for the…general welfare of the United States.” That’s exactly what Social Security does.

Finally, his two alternatives to Social Security would both be a disaster. Miller’s proposal to turn Social Security over to state governments is economically impossible unless America forbids its citizens from retiring in a different state than the one that they paid taxes in while working.  Likewise, privatization would impose significant new risks on seniors, while creating new administrative costs and forcing benefit reductions. Yet despite being a riskier, less beneficial program for seniors, it also will cost more money than the present system.

Whatever Miller may think, there is nothing in the Constitution that requires America to have an inferior retirement system.