West Virginia industrial magnate and perennial GOP candidate John Raese has been campaigning on fiercely anti-government message for the Senate seat vacated by the late Sen. Robert Byrd. Raese is adamantly opposed to any form of government intervention into private sector, telling ABC News that he “absolutely” thinks the minimum wage should be abolished. He’s also claimed a New Deal program was declared unconstitutional because it involved the “government micromanaging an intervention into the private sector.”

And earlier this month, he told the AP that “America is in ‘an industrial coma‘ because of the adversarial relationship between corporations and a bloated federal government,” calling the government a “restrictor plate” on capitalism, especially for the manufacturing and mining industries. And Raese is proud of his own independence from the government, saying he “can’t think of very many times when a government agency has helped me.”

But apparently Raese’s memory is mistaken and his own business empire is immune to the coma-inducing power of the government “restrictor plate.” As the Charleston Gazettte reports today, Raese’s Greer Industries — which is incidentally involved in manufacturing and mining — has “made millions from taxpayer-funded contracts over the past decade”:

According to reports from the state auditor’s office, Greer Industries has made West Virginia’s list of the top 200 state government vendors every year between 2000 and 2009. Records show the state has paid Greer Industries about $31.7 million in that time.

Greer Lime and Greer Limestone also received a combined $709,000 in state work during those years.

Greer Industries has been awarded about $2.4 million in contracts from the federal government between 2000 and 2009. That’s according to the website FedSpending.org, a database run by the nonprofit government watchdog group OMB Watch.

Raese has infamously said that he “made my money the old-fashioned way — I inherited it.” But apparently he’s also made his money from the taxpayer largess that he’s now claiming to oppose.

Of course, Raese is not the only ant-government spending candidate to profit from government spending. For example, Alaska GOP Senate nominee Joe Miller took Medicaid benefits that he thinks are unconstitutional, while Kentucky GOP Senate nominee Rand Paul has called for reducing nearly every bit of federal spending except for Medicare payments because “physicians” — like Paul — “should be allowed to make a comfortable living.” (HT: Jesse Zwick)

In an interview last week with the right-wing Washington Times, West Virginia GOP Senate candidate John Raese doubled-down on his previously expressed opposition to the minimum wage, falsely claiming that the law is unconstitutional:

Mr. Raese, chief executive officer of Morgantown-based Greer Industries, which runs interests as diverse as mining and broadcasting, has taken fire for saying he would abolish the minimum wage. But he has refused to back down, saying it’s not only bad policy, but it’s not constitutional.

“I don’t think it is. And the reason I don’t think it is, is the same reason the [National Recovery Administration] was not constitutional in 1936,” he said. “It was declared unconstitutional because it was government micromanaging an intervention into the private sector. Well, what are price controls, or what are wage controls? They’re the same thing.”

It’s difficult to count the errors in Raese’s reading of the Constitution. 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.” And the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the first federal minimum wage law in a 1941 decision called United States v. Darby.

Moreover, the decision striking down the National Recovery Administration (NRA), A. L. A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, did not ban laws that “micromanage” the private sector, as Raese suggests. The principal reason why the law authorizing the NRA was struck down is because it gave the President nearly limitless power to approve “codes of fair competition” governing businesses without first seeking congressional approval. A.L.A. Schechter stands for the very banal proposition that Congress cannot delegate its entire legislative power to one man.

Additionally, A.L.A. Schechter was also the last gasp of a narrow “tenther” view of congressional power that would not only eliminate the federal minmum wage, but which would also lead to child labor laws and the federal ban on whites-only lunch counters being declared unconstitutional. So when Raese claims that the minimum wage is unconstitutional, or when Rand Paul suggests that Congress lacks the authority to ban whites-only lunch counters, or when Joe “A Noun, A Verb and Unconstitutional” Miller claims that federal child labor laws violate the Constitution, they are all really calling for the same thing — a return to a discredited era where the most basic laws protecting workers, consumers and other ordinary Americans were completely forbidden.

In an interview touting his plan to repeal the minimum wage, West Virginia GOP Senate candidate John Raese also slipped up by calling the man he wants to replace, Senator Carte Goodwin, by the wrong first name.  And, as the Charleston Daily Mail reports, this does not appear to be an isolated incident:

Last month, he struggled over U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s name.

“Was it Sarah Manor, Sarah Manorgan, Sarah Morgan?” he was quoted as saying by a monthly publication based in Shepherdstown.

In an appearance several weeks ago in St. Mary’s, Raese called U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu by at least two different Asian-sounding last names.

Raese’s failure to remember a name that even vaguely resembles that of a recently confirmed Supreme Court justice calls into question whether Raese has paid attention to the kind of issues he would face as a senator.  If he joins the Senate, Raese will be required to at least take the confirmation process seriously enough that he can tell the difference between “Sonia Sotomayor” and “Sarah Manorgan.”

Millionaire businessman John Raese, running as the GOP Senate nominee to fill Robert Byrd’s West Virginia seat, wants to take the state back to the 19th century. Not only does he want to return capitalism to the era before child labor laws, Social Security, and civil rights laws, he also promotes a pre-industrial vision of science. In an interview with Real Clear Politics, Raese said he has “zero” trust that “human activity is contributing to climate change”:

The oceans that surround the world produce 185 billion tons of CO2 per annum. Man per annum only produces six billion tons, so what could possibly be the concern? One volcano puts out more toxic gases-one volcano-than man makes in a whole year. And when you look at this “climate change,” and when you look at the regular climate change that we all have in the world, we have warm and we have cooling spells.

Although Raese is well-versed in conspiracy-theory talking points, they’re as nonsensical as his desire to abolish the Departments of Energy and Education. Human activity puts about 29 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year, well over 100 times as much as all the volcanoes in the world. The oceans actually vent about 332 billion tons of CO2 per year, but also absorb that much. Human emissions have disrupted the balance of the carbon cycle, leading to rising concentrations of greenhouse pollution in the atmosphere. Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen by 40 percent, and global temperatures are on an inexorable rise, overwhelming any natural cycles.

Far from protecting West Virginia’s coal industry, Raese’s desire to abolish the Department of Energy, kill the Recovery Act, and deny global warming would end federal policy to support advanced coal technology, the only hope for this 19th-century fuel in the 21st century.

Cross-posted from The Wonk Room.