Tuesday’s Asshat of the Day

Here’s another one where I’m not sure whether to give the guy the asshat award or a chutzpah award.

Joe Miller (Teabag-AK), claims that the minimum wage is unconstitutional. I guess Linda McMahon body-slammed him to say this.

Employees in the U.S. should not be provided a federal guarantee of minimum wage, Alaska Senate candidate Joe Miller said recently. The states, instead, should be left to determine the minimum rate that an employer can provide their workers, he argued.

“That is not within the scope of the powers that are given to the federal government,” the Tea Party-backed GOP insurgent argued in a recent ABC News interview. “That is clearly up to the states.”

Yeah, let’s leave it up to Walmart and McDonald’s and Home Depot what they believe the minimum wage should be. If that happens, you’ll see a lot of people making $2.50 an hour and still not have any type of benefits. Granted, some states (Alaska for instance) have a higher minimum wage than the Federal government sets, but that isn’t always the case. And the minimum wage isn’t even a livable wage.

But Miller doesn’t stop there. He also believes that unemployment benefits are unconstitutional, even though his wife took them when she left her job working for him!

In July, Miller suggested in a video interview that the U.S. Constitution doesn’t provide for unemployment benefits. And on Monday, he was again sticking with his anti-centralized-government theme, telling ABC News and Politico that he opposes the federal minimum wage. As with unemployment, minimum wage should be a state decision, Miller believes.

And even though he’s opposed to entitlement programs, he’s benefited from them.

Still, in recent weeks, Miller — also an opponent to Social Security and Medicare — has acknowledged utilizing federal programs, including subsidies, over the years. In the 1990s, he received more than $7,000 in federal farm subsidies for land he owned in Kansas, where he grew up. In 1999, he applied for and was granted a $77,400 state loan to buy 1,000 acres in Delta Junction under a program aimed at promoting the development of Alaska agriculture.

Miller and his campaign have fired back at critics who have called him a hypocrite, saying things like the farm subsidies were long ago and do not reflect on his positions today.

I guess the teabaggers are now using the Christine “I was a teenage witch” excuse. According to them, it doesn’t matter what they did in the past, only what the Democrats did and said.

And finally, he wants to repeal the 17th Amendment, which guarantees the direct election of US Senators.

He called the idea of a living, changing Constitution “bullcrap,” and said he would support an amendment for term limits as well as an amendment repealing the 17th Amendment, which allows for the direct election of senators by the public rather than by state legislatures.

Yeah we have a real stateman on our hands.

Joe Miller, our Asshat of the Day.