New GOP House Leaders Dipping the Constitution in Tea

It appears that the new GOP House majority is taking the Constitution “seriously.” I think we can now officially call the GOP the Teapublican Party.

At the start of every Congress, each House must adopt rules which will govern how it will operate for the next two years. We’ve already heard that the Democrats in the Senate are mulling over changes to the filibuster (we’ll wait to see what happens next week).

Speaker-designate Orange Man Boehner and his caucus are proposing new rules for the House including the required reading of the Constitution, aloud, at the start of the session and that every new bill contain a statement by the lawmaker who wrote it citing the constitutional authority to enact the proposed legislation.

From the House Republican’s Rules website:

Honoring the Pledge to America

As promised in the Pledge, members will not be able to introduce a bill or joint resolution without a “statement citing as specifically as practicable the power or powers granted to Congress in the Constitution to enact” it. This will serve to refocus members of Congress, with every bill they introduce, on the Constitution that they take an oath to support and defend.

Keeping another promise made in the Pledge, under the new House rules, no bill will be voted upon without being available online for at least three calendar days. The rules package reads, “it shall not be in order to consider a bill or joint resolution which has not been reported by a committee until the third calendar day…on which such measure has been publicly available in electronic form.” This will ensure members, the media, and the American people have an opportunity to read the bill before any vote.

It seems that teabaggers around the country are just wetting themselves over this.

“It appears that the Republicans have been listening,” said Jeff Luecke, a sales supervisor and tea party organizer in Dubuque, Iowa. “We’re so far away from our founding principles that, absolutely, this is the very, very tip of the iceberg. We need to talk about and learn about the Constitution daily.”

Most Congressional scholars and experts consider this just cosmetic, something to keep the teabaggers at home and out of the GOP’s hair. I thinks it’s just theatrics. And while there will be “debates” about the constitutionality of every bill that is introduced in the House, nothing will get done. Maybe Orange Man and his Yeshiva Bucher of a Majority Leader should leave the Constitutional questions up to the courts and experts.

Akhil Reed Amar, a constitutional scholar at Yale Law School, said he supports the reading. “I like the Constitution,” said Amar, author of “America’s Constitution: A Biography.” “Heck, I’ll do them one better. Why only once in January? Why not once every week?”

But he added: “My disagreement is when we actually read the Constitution as a whole, it doesn’t say what the tea party folks think it says.”

Amar argues that the Constitution charters a “very broad federal power” and is not the narrow states’ rights document that tea party activists present it as.

But what I found funny/disturbing in this article was the following:

“You can do the talk, but you have to do the walk,” said Clifford Atkin, a leader of the New Boston Tea Party in Woodbury, Conn., who likened the increased focus on the Constitution to a religious conversion.

Beth Mizell, who leads a loose affiliate of tea party activists in tiny Franklinton, La., has attended weekend classes on the Constitution that she compared to a church Bible study. She said she is heartened that Congress is taking these steps.

While I’ve taken numerous oaths to protect and defend the Constitution, I also realize that I should not be worshiping it. Apparently, teabaggers around the country feel differently.