The Iowa GOP Is Being Helpful

In the heartland, Iowa Republicans know what middle-class Americans are going through and have a detailed plan to help them recover from these trying social, military, and economic issues that we're all going through together.

Just kidding.  The Iowa GOP is just as batshit crazy with the Obama Derangement Syndrome as the rest of them and their new freebase crazy drug of choice is ratifying the so-called "original 13th Amendment" from 1810.

Adopted in December 1865, the current 13th Amendment of the Constitution prohibits “slavery” and “involuntary servitude” in the United States or any place under its jurisdiction. The Iowa GOP is not trying to overturn this amendment to reinstate slavery. Instead, it wants to reintroduce the “original 13th Amendment” first offered by senator Phillip Reed of Maryland in 1810. The amendment states that “if any citizen of the United States shall accept, claim, receive or retain any title of nobility or honor” from a “foreign power, such person shall cease to be a citizen” and “shall be incapable of holding any office of trust.” In receiving only 12 out of the 13 votes needed for ratification, the amendment was never adopted.

Traditional supporters of the idea are known as “Thirteenthers,” who seek to prevent those with the title of “esquire,” such as lawyers and bankers, from participating in government. But according to its spokeswoman, Danielle Plogmann, the Iowa GOP supports it as an attack on President Obama’s Nobel Prize win:

There are, of course, other implications of Thirteenthism, such as ensuring that the United States never again suffers the humiliation of having a president win the Nobel Peace Prize. That was just what the Iowa Republicans had in mind, according to Plogmann, who wrote in an e-mail that the plank “was meant to make a statement about the delegates’ opinion about Mr. Obama receiving the prize.” (Presumably they didn’t mind if, in the process, they were also making a statement about any American scientist or writer unlucky enough to win a Nobel.) Unfortunately for them, the Department of Justice looked into whether Obama needed Congressional approval to accept the Nobel under the existing emoluments clause, and based on the meaning of “foreign state” (which would not cover the Nobel Prize Committee) concluded that he did not.

That legal distinction doesn't matter, the whole point of the movement is to try to find any excuse to pile on Obama and attack him as the Foreign Other Usurper who must be expelled by Real Americans from the White House by waving the word "constitution" around and trying to justify their irrational and undying hatred for President Obama.

Seriously, Iowa GOP?  This is what you think the people of Iowa need to be spending their time and energy on as Republicans?  Not jobs, not the economy, not the environment, not education...you have to go push some idiotic historical asterisk to try to de-legitimize and demonize the President?

Gotta love those Republican solutions to America's problems.