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.

The Roberts Court does not much care for America’s obligations to other nations. Five years ago, in a case argued by future Tea Party Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), the Court held that Texas could simply ignore an international treaty ensuring that foreign nationals arrested in the United States are informed of their right “to request assistance from the consul of [their own state.] Even North Korea honored this treaty when two American journalists were held captive by that country for five months in 2009.

On Friday, the Supreme Court announced it would hear a case that could further undermine whether other nations can trust America’s word when we agree to certain obligations under a treaty.

On its surface, Bond v. United States is a case about a petty criminal who tried to poison her husband’s mistress. When Carol Anne Bond learned her neighbor was pregnant with Bond’s husband’s baby, she obtained several highly toxic chemicals from her job with a chemical manufacturing company, and then applied those chemicals to the neighbor’s mailbox, car door handles, and house doorknob. The mistress next door suffered chemical burns as a result.

As Bond soon discovered, however, the United States is a party to the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on their Destruction. In order to ensure that America meets its obligations under this treaty, Congress passed a law that makes it a criminal act “to develop, produce, otherwise acquire, transfer directly or indirectly, receive, stockpile, retain, own, possess, or use, or threaten to use, any chemical weapon” for a non-peaceful purpose. So Bond’s petty act of revenge quickly became a federal case.

As a general rule, the Constitution does not permit Congress to criminalize murder or assault or other non-economic crimes of violence, except in certain limited circumstances. But that does not mean that the chemical weapons law Bond ran afoul of is unconstitutional. Article II of the Constitution provides that the President “shall have power, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to make treaties;” and Article I of the Constitution permits Congress “[t]o make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the government of the United States, or in any department or officer thereof.” So the president signed onto a valid treaty, the Chemical Weapons Convention, which was then ratified by the Senate. Congress passed a law “carrying into execution” this valid treaty. As a textual matter, the constitutionality of Bond’s conviction is not a difficult case.

But, of course, it is now in front of the same Court that recently imposed implausible new limits on Congress’ power to carry into execution the federal government’s lawful authority in the challenge to the Affordable Care Act — ignoring a recent opinion by none other that conservative Justice Antonin Scalia in order to do so. The justices that brought us that decision, not to mention the Court’s election-buying decision in Citizens United and numerous other decisions ignoring the Constitution’s text and longstanding precedent, cannot exactly be trusted to follow the law in Bond either.

It’s worth noting that Bond is represented by Republican superlawyer Paul Clement, the same attorney behind the challenge to health care and the same lawyer that’s now charged the American taxpayer as much as $3 million to defend the unconstitutional Defense of Marriage Act. It is highly doubtful that Ms. Bond can afford Clement’s legal fees on her own, suggesting that she has a wealthy benefactor with a deep ideological interest in undermining America’s ability to keep its treaty obligations — or in continuing the project Clement began in the health care case of dismantling America’s ability to solve national problems.

Texas State Rep. Steve Toth (R-TX), with the apparent support of at least one of Texas’ most powerful politicians, will introduce unconstitutional legislation subjecting federal law enforcement officers to arrest and prosecution if they enforce new gun safety laws in the Lone Star State:

A Texas lawmaker says he plans to file the Firearms Protection Act, which would make any federal laws that may be passed by Congress or imposed by Presidential order which would ban or restrict ownership of semi-automatic firearms or limit the size of gun magazines illegal in the state, 1200 WOAI news reports.

Republican Rep. Steve Toth says his measure also calls for felony criminal charges to be filed against any federal official who tries to enforce the rule in the state.

“If a federal official comes into the state of Texas to enforce the federal executive order, that person is subject to criminal prosecution,” Toth told 1200 WOAI’s Joe Pags Tuesday. He says his bill would make attempting to enforce a federal gun ban in Texas punishable by a $50,000 fine and up to five years in prison.

Toth’s bill is wildly unconstitutional. The Constitution provides that duly enacted federal laws “shall be the supreme law of the land” — a provision known as the “Supremacy Clause” — and thus states are powerless to nullify laws their lawmakers don’t feel like complying with or to arrest federal officials for carrying out their lawful duties. This Clause applies both to valid Acts of Congress themselves and to properly authorized executive orders, as the President’s power to issue an executive order generally flows from an Act of Congress.

Strangely, Toth does not appear to question that his bill is unconstitutional. Rather, he told The Chad Hasty Show on Monday that his goal is to undermine the Constitution itself. In Toth’s words, “we want to do everything we can, especially as pertains to the Supremacy Clause. The Supremacy Clause gives the federal government — it basically trumps state law — which is wrong. And we want to do everything we can to undermine that.”

A Kentucky sheriff whose views track those of a fringe militia group announced this weekend that he would not enforce any gun law he deemed “unconstitutional,” which, apparently includes any gun law at all, including a ban on AK-47s. Jackson County Sheriff Denny Peyman said during a press conference Saturday:

You’ll understand me very well when you leave here today, and why we’re all still gonna have our guns here in Jackson.

The job of a sheriff, I’m responsible for the people inside this county. … I couldn’t justify, if Obama passes this, it doesn’t matter what he passes. The sheriff has more power than the federal people. They need to go back and they study that. We’re a commonwealth. I can ask the federal people to leave. They have to leave. I can ask state people to leave. They have to leave. What I’m saying is this is our home. I’m an elected official. The highest elected official, from this point on.

Peyman’s assertion that sheriffs are the highest law enforcement authorities – above federal authorities — mirrors the philosophy of an extremist group of current and former police officers known as the Oath Keepers, who vow to defy any law or order that violates their radical view of the Constitution and fear that government officials will “disarm the American people,” “confiscate the property of the American people, including food and other essential supplies,” and “blockade American cities, thus turning them into giant concentration camps.” Peyman did not return a call to ask whether he was part of the group. Describing his view of the Constitution, Peyman defended even those who carry guns in violation of existing laws:

When we come into a group, I look at people and I know who packs and who doesn’t pack, some of them legally and some of them illegally, but that’s their right. The Second Amendment makes that very clear. And our forefathers made that very clear.

He told Fox’s Greta Van Susteren Monday night that the Constitution is like the Bible, in that both are subject to one rigid interpretation:

Well, it’s just like, if you take out part, it’s kind of like the Bible, either you believe it or you don’t believe it. The Constitution, either you believe it or you don’t. You either live by it or you don’t.

Unfortunately, Peyman appears to have appointed himself the sole arbiter of what that document means.

Two years ago, when Senate Republicans needed to fill a vacant seat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, they tapped Tea Party Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) — a senator who believes that federal child labor laws, FEMA, food stamps, the FDA, Medicaid, income assistance for the poor, and even Medicare and Social Security violate the Constitution. This year, they needed to fill two seats on the Senate body responsible for overseeing the Constitution. Once again, Senate Republicans chose to fill these seats with senators who believe the Constitution in nothing more than a block of clay that can be formed into whatever the Tea Party wants it to say.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is no stranger to conspiracy theories; he published an article last year claiming that the United Nations and George Soros are at the head of a global conspiracy to eliminate the game of golf. (Seriously. We aren’t making this up.) So his understanding of the Constitution is similarly idiosyncratic. As head of a conservative think tank’s Tenth Amendment project, Cruz co-authored an unconstitutional plan to nullify the Affordable Care Act — claiming that two states can ignore the Constitution and federal law simply by joining together in such lawlessness.

Cruz is among the most skilled attorneys in the country, but he devoted his outsized talents to reshaping the Constitution into his own far right image. His first campaign ad touted his successful work to help Texas kill a Mexican national in violation of America’s treaty obligations, and he believed in using lawsuits to tear down the health care safety net long before the Affordable Care Act’s opponents brought a completely meritless legal theory to the Supreme Court and nearly convinced the entire conservative bloc to sign onto it in its entirety. Cruz’s campaign touted his attempt to “to strike down portions of the Medicare Prescription Drug program as an unconstitutional intrusion in the sovereign authority of the States.” Although Cruz is more careful in his rhetoric than Sen. Lee, perhaps the most damning aspect of Cruz’s record is the staunch opponent of national child labor laws and Medicare’s endorsement of Cruz’s constitutional vision. In Lee’s words, “Ted is one of our nation’s leading defenders of the Tenth Amendment. He is a champion for limiting the power, size, and spending of the federal government.”

Cruz is joined on the Judiciary Committee by Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ), who actually thinks his own election to the Senate should be unconstitutional. Flake endorsed repealing the Seventeenth Amendment, which replaced a system that led to “rampant and blatant corruption, letting corporations and other moneyed interests effectively buy U.S. Senators,” with our current system — electing senators.

Like Cruz, Flake also embraced rethinking the Tenth Amendment as a tool to impose Tea Party values on the country long before the Tea Party even existed. In 2000, Flake signed a position statement claiming that the Departments of Commerce and Housing and Urban Development, in addition to the National Endowments for the Arts and for the Humanities, “should be abolished, per the tenth amendment of the US Constitution.” For the record, nothing in the Tenth Amendment renders any of these things unconstitutional.

According to newly released emails, six members of the Wisconsin legislature told a tea party group that they backed an unconstitutional plan to arrest federal officials charged with implementing the Affordable Care Act:

Lawmakers who backed the idea of arresting federal officials who try to implement Obamacare received both praise and condemnation from their constituents, as well as a round of media inquiries, newly released emails show.

In responding, the six lawmakers generally downplayed their support for the idea even though they told the tea party-aligned Campaign for Liberty they approved of the notion.

The emails, released under the state’s open records law, also show an aide to Sen. Mary Lazich (R-New Berlin) advised her to turn down an offer to talk about Obamacare on Greta Van Susteren’s program on Fox News because of the Campaign for Liberty survey. . . . Lazich and five other lawmakers — along with three others who will be sworn in in January — told the Campaign for Liberty they backed passing a law to “nullify” the Affordable Care Act and arrest federal officials who tried to implement it. The idea, disputed by legal scholars, is based on the belief that under the 10th Amendment states can choose to ignore federal laws.

As ThinkProgress has repeatedly explained, state laws purporting to nullify federal laws — much less state laws that would subject federal officials to arrest for carrying out their official duties — are a world of unconstitutional. The Constitution expressly states that duly enacted federal laws “shall be the supreme law of the land,” regardless of whether state lawmakers disagree with those laws.

Virginia’s Republican Party appears poised to nominate state Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli to be its candidate for governor in 2013 — embracing a man whose extreme political views bear striking resemblance to those of unsuccessful 2012 Senate candidate Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO).

With his fervent anti-science, anti-choice, and anti-LGBT, anti-federal government activism, Akin’s extreme positions were well known long before his infamous August pronouncement that victims of “legitimate rape” are unlikely to become pregnant helped derail his 2012 U.S. Senate campaign. Cuccinelli’s views closely mirror Akin’s in all of those areas.

Over seven-and-a-half years as a Virginia state senator and three years as the commonwealth’s attorney general, Republican Ken Cuccinelli II has been, in the words of the Washington Post’s editorial board, “the most overtly partisan attorney general in Virginia’s history.” Though he claims he is “best known for his efforts to preserve liberty and defend the US Constitution,” it is his opposition to liberty for women and LGBT Americans and his frequent court losses based on his flawed constitutional theories that have defined his political career to date.

While perhaps not as careless as Akin with his rhetoric, Cuccinelli has embraced many of the same extreme positions:

1. He wants an abortion ban with no exceptions for rape or incest. His 2002 campaign website laid out Cuccinelli’s abortion views clearly: “Ken believes that human life begins at conception, and that human beings should be respected and protected from conception to natural death,” it said. “Ken would seek to require sonograms to be part of a 24-hour waiting period with an informed consent requirement. Ken opposes abortions that are not for the purpose of saving the mother’s life.” Over his political career, he has pushed to defund Planned Parenthood and embryonic stem cell research. He pushed for a ban on third trimester abortions — making no exception for serious health risks on the woman — and for “safety” regulations for abortion providers designed to force clinics to close. He has also highlighted his opposition to RU-486 and his support for a “conscience” law protecting the “right of professionals to refuse to perform an action that is inconsistent with their moral convictions” — such as providing emergency contraception — “without losing their job.” Cuccinelli frequently attacks Planned Parenthood and has suggested that the fact that abortion clinics in Virginia are in urban areas with large African American populations is an example of white racism. His “ultimate goal,” he has said, is to “make abortion disappear in America.”

2. He does not believe LGBT people deserve legal protections. Cuccinelli has made it clear that he believes same-sex relationships are immoral. In 2009, he told a Virginia newspaper, “My view is that homosexual acts, not homosexuality, but homosexual acts are wrong. They’re intrinsically wrong. And I think in a natural law based country it’s appropriate to have policies that reflect that.” After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in its 2003 Lawrence v. Texas case that such bans were unconstitutional, he still voted against repealing a state law making consensual sodomy a felony. He has actively pushed for state and federal constitutional amendments to prevent any legal recogntition of what he terms “what they’d like to refer to as ‘homosexual families,’” authoring a resolution calling for a federal amendment to invalidate any same-sex marriage, civil union, domestic partnership, or “other relationship analogous to marriage.” He has opined that “giving public sanction to homosexual marriage ends up redefining marriage and it’s certain to harm children.” He even opposed a state bill that allowed private companies to voluntarily provide health insurance benefits to employees’ domestic partners, warning it might “encourage this type of behavior.” His advisory opinion that Virginia’s public colleges and universities should rescind their non-discrimination policies was called “reprehensible” by a former Republican state legislator.
Read more

Senator-elect Ted Cruz (R-TX) is no stranger to fringe ideas. He authored an unconstitutional plan to nullify the Affordable Care Act. His first campaign ad touted his work helping Texas to execute an “illegal alien.” And he published an article last January claiming that the United Nations and billionaire George Soros are engaged in a nefarious global plot to “abolish ‘unsustainable’ environments, including golf courses, grazing pastures, and paved roads.”

If anything, however, Cruz’ new chief of staff suggests that Cruz’ determination to stop imaginary Soros conspiracies to destroy the game of golf is only the first part of an even more ideological agenda:

Senator-elect Ted Cruz today named as his chief of staff Chip Roy, a former Senate aide who helped Gov. Rick Perry write his anti-government tome Fed Up! . . . .

In a review of Fed Up!, Gene Healy – a scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute – credited him as “the guy who did most of the heavy lifting in the book,” though it’s hard to know exactly how much influence his views had. In the book, Perry called Social Security unconstitutional and a “Ponzi scheme.” He called it a mistake to allow direct election of senators, saying it was better to let Legislatures pick. He called for ending life tenure for federal judges and for repeal of the 16th amendment, which authorized a federal income tax. And he denounced as overreach federal efforts to regulate health care, pollution, labor conditions and energy policy.

It is likely that no book by any politician in recent history misunderstands the Constitution as badly as Fed Up!. Among other things, Rick Perry’s book attacks Supreme Court cases permitting “federal laws regulating the environment, regulating guns, protecting civil rights, establishing the massive programs and Medicare and Medicaid, creating national minimum wage laws, [and] establishing national labor laws.” It also claims that we have Social Security “at the expense of respect for the Constitution and limited government.”

And an incoming United States Senator chose “the guy who did most of the heavy lifting” in this anti-Constitution screed as his closest and most influential adviser.

The Hill reports that Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) is expected to take over the chairmanship of the House Judiciary Committee in January, replacing Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) who will lose his gavel due to term limits. Goodlatte is a hardliner on immigration who is expected to oppose immigration reform bills that fall under his committee’s jurisdiction, and he also embraces a far right “tenther” vision of the Constitution that would render most of what the United States government does unconstitutional. Indeed, in a town hall meeting in 2011, the incoming House Judiciary Chair claimed that Medicare and Social Security both violate the Constitution.

As video of the town hall meeting reveals, Goodlatte called these landmark programs unconstitutional in response to a question from a constituent regarding a chart Goodlatte displayed breaking down federal spending:

CONSTITUENT: I have three points I’d like you to elaborate on if you could. I’ve searched my Constitution for 20 years and I can’t find Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security in there. Those are forced on the American people by the courts. Now, we’ve all accepted that and American people have bought into that, but it’s unconstitutional simple as that, to me, I can’t find it –

GOODLATTE: Well, it’s not in the Constitution. The courts have stretched the Constitution to say its in the general welfare clause.

Just in case there was any ambiguity to Goodlatte’s understanding of our founding document, he reiterated his belief that Medicare and Social Security are unconstitutional in a later exchange with a different constituent:

CONSTITUENT: Everything that the federal government does on that pie chart is unconstitutional [...] If I violated my marriage contract the way the federal government violates the Constitution I’d be in divorce court tomorrow!

GOODLATTE: I hope you’re not. Here’s the deal. You’re absolutely right! But you have one problem, the Supreme Court ruling that these programs are constitutional.

Watch both exchanges:

To be fair to Goodlatte, he later states that it would not be practical to “just say we’re throwing out Medicare because its unconstitutional,” but this does little to change the fact that the man House Republicans want to place in charge of constitutional matters does not have even the most basic understanding of the Constitution. As ThinkProgress previously explained, The Constitution gives Congress the power to “to lay and collect taxes” and to “provide for the . . . general welfare of the United States.” There is no plausible interpretation of the words “general welfare” that does not include programs that ensure that all Americans can live their entire lives secure in the understanding that retirement will not force them into poverty and untreated sickness.

Moreover, Goodlatte’s constitutional objections to Medicare and Social Security are not his only admission that he does not understand the Constitution as written. In January of 2011 he was asked whether he believes the federal minimum wage is constitutional. He said that he did not know.

Citing a misreading of the U.S. Constitution and overblown fears of a collapsing U.S. currency, Montana State Rep. Jerry O’Neil (R) claims that he should be paid his legislative salary in gold and silver:

In a letter sent to Montana Legislative Services this week, O’Neil cites Article 1, Section 10 of the U.S. Constitution, which states in part that no state shall “make anything but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts.”

He said that in his 10 years as a legislator, he considered it a “trivial matter” and he “did not want to be branded as a fanatic over an issue of no consequence.” But now he says he is looking at the value of the dollar “in a new light.” . . .

In his letter, O’Neil points out that he does not want to be paid at the face value of $50 American Eagle gold coins or $1 silver American Eagle coins. He stipulates that he should be paid at their market values, currently $1,801 for the gold coin and $35.28 for the silver coin.

“Let’s say I made $1,800 in a month. They could give one gold American Eagle” or multiple silver American Eagles, he said.

Fears that the U.S. dollar is caught in a spiral of disastrous inflation are common among the tea party fringe, as are similar claims that the way to defend against such inflation is to horde gold and silver. Indeed, these misguided fears are widespread enough that scam gold dealers, such as Goldline, allegedly take advantage of them by selling overpriced gold to tea partiers and others gripped by false fears of inflation. In reality, inflation is currently both very low and quite stable — and it is well below the rate of inflation under most of President Reagan’s two terms.

Additionally, O’Neil’s reading of America’s founding document is constitutional gobbledygook. The Constitution does indeed provide that “No state shall . . . coin money; emit bills of credit [or] make anything but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts,” a provision intended to prevent the states from printing their own paper currencies, but the key words in this constitutional provision are “no state shall.” Nothing prevents the federal government from printing currency which, as anyone who has ever read the front of a dollar bill knows, is “legal tender for all debts, public and private.” That includes the salaries Montana pays its lawmakers.