A Republican congressman wants to impeach Harry Reid, and he might’ve gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for those meddling laws preventing Congress from impeaching senators.

Speaking last week to the Mifflin County Tea Party, Rep. Tom Marino (R-PA) seethed with anger about budget negotiations between the House and the Senate. His preferred solution to the impasse: impeach the Democratic Senate Majority Leader:

MARINO: I’ve made a suggestion that we should at least start talking about impeachment. I had my office staff do it. But we cannot find anything that permits the House to bring impeachment proceedings against Harry Reid. There’s nothing in the legislation we can find at this point to force him to vote or come up with a budget or anything like that. His membership in the Senate can call for a vote of “no confidence,” but we can’t even get a Republican senator to do that.

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The Constitution permits senators to be expelled by a 2/3s vote of the Senate, but this is likely the sole remedy against a member of Congress their fellow lawmakers wish to remove. In 1796, Sen. William Blount joined a conspiracy to assist Great Britain in seizing Spanish territory in Louisiana and Florida, and was eventually impeached for his role in this conspiracy. Although the Senate expelled him, a majority of Blount’s former colleagues voted that they lacked jurisdiction to hear his impeachment. This precedent is often cited as establishing that members of Congress are not subject to impeachment, only expulsion.

This isn’t the first time Marino has floated impeachment as the cudgel for his preferred policies. During his initial congressional campaign in 2010, Marino said he would be willing to use “impeachment if necessary” against President Obama in order to increase border security.

A new report by Mother Jones reveals that James B. Taylor, a prominent conservative movement leader and board member for the Young America’s Foundation, once served as vice president of a white supremacist group.

Taylor’s bio notes that he is “chairman of World Youth Crusade [for Freedom] and former executive director and chief of staff of Young America’s Foundation.” It also includes that he was once public relations director for the anti-labor union National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation. It does not mention, however, that he also served as vice president of the National Policy Institute, a tax-exempt group than aims to be the lobby for “White Americans—our country’s historic majority and founding population—the people that bears the unique heritage of Europe, Christianity, cultural excellence, and the scientific awakening.” During Taylor’s time with the group, the white-nationalist foundation, founded in 2005 by right-wing publisher William Regnery, published a report arguing that “integration and the civil rights movement led directly to the destruction of great cities; and to millions of whites suffering terrible injustices, including assault, robbery, rape and murder, and losing everything they had through the ensuing destruction of their neighborhoods and their property values.”

Taylor did not respond to Mother Jones’ request for comment, but when asked about his connection to the National Policy Institute by a local newspaper last August, defended the mission of the group, saying: “You’ve got the NAACP and B’nai B’rith. Why not something for white people?”

The Young America Foundation, on whose nine-member board of directors Taylor sits, is a powerful force in the conservative movement. The group runs the Ronald Reagan ranch in Santa Barbara, CA, helped create the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), and operates a center aimed at teaching journalists “the values of balanced, responsible, and accurate reporting.” Twice-defeated former Sen. George Allen (R-VA) and former Attorney General Edwin Meese (R) are both affiliated with the organization.

As chairman of the World Youth Crusade for Freedom, which claims to “promote education and research in public policy and understanding by future world leaders,” Taylor received $18,000 in salary in 2010, out of the $23,191 the group took in in total revenue. In 2010, he was paid $22,000 out of the group’s $31,129 raised.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Taylor was a 2012 contributor to Rep. Lou Barletta (R-PA). Barletta has come under fire for racist comments of his own — announcing this week that he will oppose immigration reform because Latinos are uneducated leeches who will never vote Republican anyway. The donation record identifies Taylor’s current occupation as “editor” for Tea Party Express, a key force in the Tea Party movement.

Responding to President Obama’s plan to issue 23 executive orders on gun violence prevention, radical lawmakers in a number of states have re-upped their efforts to exempt their state from federal gun laws through the insidious and unconstitutional practice of nullification. Now, Tea Partiers in Mississippi want to institutionalize the nullification process, with a proposal to create a permanent committee devoted to nullifying all kinds of federal laws. The Dispatch reports:

The committee, composed of 14 state elected officials, would determine what is and isn’t within the federal government’s power when dealing with the state’s constitutional rights. … The bill, which is listed with the state as an “active bill” and will be taken up by the Constitution Committee, provides measures to “prohibit the infringement of the Constitutionally protected rights of the State of Mississippi, or its people, by means of federal statute, mandate, executive order, judicial decision or other action deemed by the State to be unconstitutional.”

“This was a bill that was requested for me to bring up,” Chism said. “It’s to solidify the 10th Amendment to the Constitution.”

Chism said the bill was drafted in response to 23 executive orders issued by President Barack Obama on gun control and weeks before the state is scheduled to begin implementing a national health system commonly known as “Obamacare.”

Having failed in their court challenges to the Affordable Care Act, state lawmakers started introducing nullification bills to purportedly eliminate that law.

The problem with the practice of nullification, once used to defend Jim Crow segregation, is that it rejects both the constitutional tenets that validly enacted federal laws are supreme over state laws, and that it is judges, and not state legislators, who determine whether those laws are valid or not in our system of checks and balances. Right-wing lawmakers revived the discredited tactic as a last-ditch means of fighting federal legislation they could not defeat in court. But a law that authorizes state legislators to review all federal legislation as a matter of course would open the door to a much broader swath of radical and defiant action, which is why James Madison warned that nullification would “speedily put an end to the Union itself” because it would allow the states to simply ignore any law they want.

Fortunately, the Mississippi bill was immediately greeted with hostility, and even Chism himself admitted the bill likely would not make it out of committee.  But bills pending in several other states by “tenthers” go so far as to propose that enforcing federal gun law would be penalized as a felony.

At the opening of the last Congress, House and Senate Republicans lined up behind a Tea Party “balanced budget amendment” that would have made it functionally impossible to raise taxes while simultaneously forcing spending cuts so severe that they would “throw about 15 million more people out of work, double the unemployment rate from 9 percent to approximately 18 percent, and cause the economy to shrink by about 17 percent instead of growing by an expected 2 percent.” Every single Republican in the senate co-sponsored this depression-inducing constitutional amendment.

Two years and one election later, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) reintroduced a version of the Tea Party amendment in the new Congress — but Lee is now a lone voice crying in the wilderness. According to Thomas, the Library of Congress’ searchable database of federal legislation, Lee’s proposed amendment has zero co-sponsors.

It’s worth noting that Lee has, at times, called national child labor laws, FEMA, food stamps, the FDA, Medicaid, income assistance for the poor, and even Medicare and Social Security unconstitutional. Meaning that every senator who does not believe that preventing children from working in coal mines is a violation of our founding document appears to have abandoned the quest to also turn that document into a blueprint for the Great Depression.

A freshman Republican congressman is arguing that the 2nd Amendment could be interpreted broadly enough to allow ordinary citizens access to the same equipment that the military uses.

Rep. Ted Yoho (R-FL), who unseated longtime Rep. Cliff Stearns last year thanks in large part to Tea Party support, sat down with Florida political blog The Shark Tank over the weekend to discuss gun violence. The freshman GOPer said he’d spoken with a number of constituents recently and approvingly relayed their sentiment: “when you read the Second Amendment,” Yoho said, “the militia had the same equipment as the military to protect them against the tyrannical government.” Preserving those protections, he argued, is “more important today than ever”:

YOHO: On guns, [my constituents] were saying that the sentiment, when you read the Second Amendment, is that the militia had the same equipment as the military to protect them against the tyrannical government. I think it’s more important today than ever, that we uphold our Second Amendment.

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Military weapon technology is considerably more advanced today than when the Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791, and so is U.S. military structure. Back then, the pinnacle of firearm technology was cannons and muskets, and citizens joining the military were expected to supply their own weapons. Nowadays, hydrogen bombs and tanks exist. The Supreme Court, in an opinion authored by originalist Justice Antonin Scalia, sensibly ruled that Congress may prohibit citizens from carrying “dangerous and unusual weapons.” After all, we all know at least a few people who we’d prefer not to possess nuclear arms.

This is why Yoho’s declaration is a dangerous one. When single-shot guns that took a long time to reload were the most advanced gun available, there was less to fear in citizens having the same access to weapons as soldiers. To hold that same standard in the nuclear age is naive and alarming.

A Republican congressman brushed off the nationwide push for stronger gun laws yesterday by drawing a corollary to matchsticks and lighters. In an appearance on a local news show in northeastern Pennsylvania on Sunday, Rep. Lou Barletta (R-PA) explained his opposition to any new gun safety measures:

BARLETTA: I support the 2nd Amendment rights. Sam, to make the argument that the gun is the problem would then lead you to believe that if we banned matches and lighters, that we would stop arson. That’s not the problem. The problem is much deeper. It’s a problem with society.

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Of course, the number of murder victims who died from arson is a minuscule fraction of the number killed by guns. According to the FBI, 74 people died from arson in 2010; 8,775 died from firearms.

Barletta is also setting up a strawman argument to impede any progress on modernizing our nation’s gun laws. Nobody on Capitol Hill is talking about “banning” guns and nobody is saying any law would completely eradicate gun deaths. What is being discussed is strengthening gun laws in order to reduce the number of people killed by guns every year. Over 30,000 people were killed by guns in 2010 alone.