North Carolina's Turn On The Rack, Again

Boy, North Carolina Republicans are really going straight for the insaneotrons, aren’t they.

A bill filed by Republican lawmakers would allow North Carolina to declare an official religion, in violation of the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Bill of Rights, and seeks to nullify any federal ruling against Christian prayer by public bodies statewide.

The bill grew out of a federal lawsuit filed last month by the American Civil Liberties Union against the Rowan County Board of Commissioners. In the lawsuit, the ACLU says the board has opened 97 percent of its meetings since 2007 with explicitly Christian prayers.

But FREEDOM and DON’T TREAD ON ME so we’ll ignore the First Amendment part that says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” and all that.  But it gets even more awesome, now with LIBERTY:

House Bill 494, filed by Republican Rowan County Reps. Harry Warren and Carl Ford, would refuse to acknowledge the force of any judicial ruling on prayer in North Carolina – or indeed on any Constitutional topic:

“The Constitution of the United States does not grant the federal government and does not grant the federal courts the power to determine what is or is not constitutional; therefore, by virtue of the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, the power to determine constitutionality and the proper interpretation and proper application of the Constitution is reserved to the states and to the people,” the bill states. “Each state in the union is sovereign and may independently determine how that state may make laws respecting an establishment of religion.”

The Tenth Amendment argument, also known as “nullification,” has been tried unsuccessfully by states for more than a century to defy everything from the Emancipation Proclamation of the Civil War to President Obama’s health care reforms to gun control.

So yeah, Tenth Amendment nullification, the South’s favorite “I can’t hear you Washington lalalalala” argument since 1828.  At this point we’ve got people actively saying that the Union doesn’t matter, that 150 years of precedent and a war fought over the issue doesn’t matter, and that states can do what they want so screw you.

It doesn’t actually work this way.  Or at least it didn’t before President Thugheart X Reparations came to power in his illegal Kung-Fu and waffles junta.  Now all of a sudden we’re dusting off the Fort Sumter gameplan again.  Sure, let’s keep up that outreach, GOP.

And lest we think this is a nowhere bill written by a couple of dinks from Salisbury who will get politically disappeared, it seems the GOP here is quite serious about passing this, as we see at the end of the article:

Eleven House Republicans have signed on to sponsor the resolution, including Majority Leader Edgar Starnes, R-Caldwell, and Budget Chairman Justin Burr, R-Stanly.

This one could get ugly.