Last Call

The great thing about the Tea Party is they're simply not shy about stating the fact that they honestly believe that rule of law should only apply to everyone but themselves.  This makes them patriots following the true intent of the Founding Fathers, or something...hence the preoccupation with simply getting rid of the parts of the Constitution they think are unconstitutional.

Incoming House Majority Leader Eric Cantor is part of a class of Republicans who say they want to change the country fundamentally -- and to that end, Cantor isn't dismissing a plan by legislators in his home state of Virgina to blow up the Constitutional system and replace it with one that would give state governments veto power over federal laws.

For several weeks now, conservative legal circles have been buzzing with Virginia House Speaker Bill Howell's plan to amend the Constitution so that a 2/3 vote of the states could overturn overturn any federal law passed by the Congress and signed by the President. Howell first floated the idea in a September Wall Street Journal op-ed he co-wrote with Georgetown University law professor Randy Barnett.

"At present, the only way for states to contest a federal law or regulation is to bring a constitutional challenge in federal court or seek an amendment to the Constitution," the pair wrote. "A state repeal power provides a targeted way to reverse particular congressional acts and administrative regulations without relying on federal judges or permanently amending the text of the Constitution to correct a specific abuse."

The pair say the plan is a response to the federal overreach created by "two 'progressive' constitutional amendments adopted in 1913" -- the 16th Amendment creating a federal income tax and the 17th Amendment allowing for the direct election of U.S. Senators, which were previously appointed by state legislatures.

Undoing both those amendments has been a key tenet of tea party rhetoric for a while now. 

To recap, these jokers want to give final real ultimate super ultra omega veto power to state legislatures in a Tea-ranny of the Majority situation, so they can just whip up enough of an angry mob to get rid of anything they don't like, federal legislative, judicial, and executive be damned.

Of course, the logical endpoint of all this is that state voters be allowed to recall the entire state legislature in case that they do not agree with the will of the people, right?

And the point isn't to get this passed into the Constitution, the point is to create a completely unattainable goal and use it as a tool to rally the base whenever conservatives suffer defeat.  Time and time again conservatives say they want to completely rewrite the Constitution the way "the Founding Fathers" intended to be and complain bitterly that the rest of the country thinks this is a stupid, naked power grab.

It's how politics works.  This too will become a useless talking point and a litmus test.