And, lest we forget, Nevada's Sharron Angle gained wide attention last year during her unsuccessful Republican U.S. Senate campaign against incumbent Sen. Harry Reid with her repeated calls for "Second Amendment Remedies" -" urging her supporters to consider using guns for attaining the results they desired.
Last week's reading of the Constitution in Congress elevated farce exponentially.
Compounding the deception of excising slavery and three other items from that happy-face Constitution reading exercise, Republicans killed the voting rights of the six congressional delegates from America's remaining colonies in one of their first official actions.
By law, those six delegates cannot vote during regular congressional sessions. So stripping those delegates of their limited right to participate in occasional Committee of the Whole votes was mean-spirited and undemocratic -" contradicting Republican claims that the Constitution reading "celebrated democracy."
Those six disenfranchised delegates represent Washington D.C., Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam, Northern Marianna Islands and the Virgin Islands -" coincidentally jurisdictions with majority non-white populations--all citizens but without representation.
The Congressional conservatives' ideological confederates in the federal courts have long embraced a notion they call "original intent" -" imposing their thoughts about what they claim to know the nation's Founders thought.
Justice Scalia has defended his contention that 14th Amendment "equal protection of the laws" guarantees do not apply to women and gays by insisting that post-Civil War amendment was intended only to protect black males.
However, curiously Scalia didn't protect black males when he joined a court majority in December 2000 in using the 14th Amendment to stop the vote count in Florida -" a nakedly partisan action that put George W. Bush into the White House.
During that presidential election in Florida where candidate George W. was found to have "won' by 537 votes, his brother, Florida Gov Jeb Bush, launched a series of vote-stealing schemes that disenfranchised tens of thousands of blacks.
Those schemes included using a faulty felons list that falsely included the names of many people who had never been arrested for anything, and prevented them from voting.
That deliberate blocking of black votes was the type of race-based disenfranchisement the drafters of the 14th Amendment had specifically sought to preclude -" original intent.
Scalia's "attytoods' on the 14th Amendment resemble the opinion expressed by one U.S. Supreme Court Justice in a 1872 ruling rejecting the appeal of a woman barred from becoming a lawyer in Illinois: the "nature of things indicates the domestic sphere as that which properly belongs to the domain and functions of womanhood."
Arlen Specter, the 30-year U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania, castigated U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito during his farewell speech last month.
Specter, a long time Republican member of the Senate's Judiciary Committee, faulted that pair for repudiating their "confirmation testimony" promising to follow the Constitution and the intent of Congress when they backed the Citizens United ruling that permitted corporations to secretly bankroll political advertising.
The multi-million dollar political spending spawned by Citizens United is widely seen as having enabled the Republican congressional sweep in last November's election.
Criticisms of Roberts and Alito also came from Congressman John Hall (D -" N.Y.), another person leaving Capitol Hill.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
2
2
2
