UNAmerican Tea Party Candidates for Office Who Don't Support or Approve of Our Constitution

I came across this article on AOL news this morning, over my first cup of coffee for the day:
"8 Candidates Who Want to Amend the Constitution", by writer David Knowles, AOL News Surge Desk.

The provocative first sentence particularly caught my attention, along with photos of Tea Party candidates I recognized, Sharron Angle, Joe Miller, and Rand Paul.

"Does the U.S. Constitution grant Americans citizens too many rights?"


CAN American citizens have too many rights?  Is that even possible, to have too many rights? Is THIS what they mean by 'smaller government' - chuck chunks of the Constitution? My next thought was...WHO, exactly, is it that has too many rights, according to these Tea Partiers, and which ones do they want to discard?  So often the Devil is in the details, and never has that been more true than of the Tea Party candidates.

I think we can all agree that being American, being PATRIOTIC, means supporting the fundamental ideas on which the United States of America was founded.  Those ideas were codified, first in the Declaration of Independence, and later, refined and further expressed in the United States Constitution and the accompanying Bill of Rights.  Those ideas have been expanded upon in subsequent Amendments, Amendments which have codified and corrected errors and omissions in the original document, such as giving women the right to vote- as a woman, I'm a huge fan of the 19th Amendment. I'm also a fan of acknowledging that black people are equal to white people, like being counted equally in the Census.  I'm also in guaranteeing them the vote, and in guaranteeing their citizenship after slavery and the terrible Civil War that for a time divided this country with the 14th Amendment.

There are three Amendments that the Tea Party supports discarding -- along with parts of others.

First, lets have the cast of characters who are self-proclaimed Tea Partiers, these UNAMERICAN,  UNPATRIOTIC candidates that want to curtail our rights, and to gut the Constitution, and harm our nation and its citizens.  Alphabetically, they are:
1.   Sharron Angle, running for the Senate seat representing Nevada;
2.   Paul Broun, running for re-election to the House of Representatives for Georgia;
3.   Ken Buck, running for the Senate seat for Colorado;
4.   Ken Landry, running for the House of Representatives for Louisiana;
5.   Mike Lee, running for the Senate seat for Utah;
6.   Joe Miller, running for the Senate seat for Alaska;
7.   Rand Paul, running for the Senate seat for Kentucky;
8.   Steve Southerland, running for the  House of Representatives for Florida;

I am not a scholar of our Constitution, by any means.  But as a conscientious citizen, I do have a basic familiarity with the document, dating back to my public school education.  If in writing this post, I can encourage even one person to revisit a document they also may think they know well, or.....well enough, then my time in blogging today will be well spent.

So, which Amendments do they think we should give the heave-ho?


Parts of the 14th Amendment, which grant citizenship to people who are born here; the entire 16th Amendment, which gives the federal government the right to tax people directly; and the 17th Amendment, which provides for election by citizens of Senators, instead of Senators being appointed by Legislatures.

Apparently, while making a lot of noise about listening to Americans, and wanting to empower Americans,  the Tea Party doesn't actually want Americans to have the power of selecting their Senators.  That is a right and a responsibility which they feel is best left to the legislatures to exercise for you, rather than give that power to you.  Apparently, the Tea Party doesn't think our citizens can or  should be trusted with that weighty responsibility.  They want someone else to do that for you.

And as for the 14th Amendment, following the logic of the Tea Party, had that Amendment not been enacted, those slaves who were either descended from people forcibly abducted and sold, or those who had themselves been abducted and sold would never have become citizens.  All of these Tea Party candidates for office, it is worth noting are white (as am I, btw).   Many on the political right have protested 'playing the race card' and claims the Tea Party is 'racist'.  This would be an excellent example of precisely that sort of racial insensitivity, if not outright racism, not only for this provision, but also Rand Paul's preference for seeing the accommodation clause of civil rights legislation overturned, that prohibits business from discrimination.

I would dearly love to see someone do a genealogy work-up on each and every one of these Tea Partiers, checking to see how many of THEIR ancestors actually would be legal under this premise.  Because if some of their ancestors are not legally naturalized citizens when they immigrated here, then following their logic, they would not be legal either, and should not be in this country, much less running for office.  A LOT of Americans would not be citizens if we were consistent with what the Tea Party candidates profess.  Glass houses, stones.

But of course, the Tea Partiers respond that they don't want to remove the citizenship of any existing American citizens (which might include them AND potential voters for them).  They only want to prevent those EEEEEEeevil Latinos from crossing our borders to have 'anchor babies', or Muslims who want to have 'terrorist babies' from having their children be citizens.  You know - people who are not like them in race or ethnicity, or religion, or politics.  Because they don't want these people to have rights if they are born here, they believe these people have too many rights.

I would refer our readers to their history books.  Those people in the past who have NOT had citizenship, in some cases have had citizenship specifically denied them by legislation, include blacks; women; Asians - from both China and Japan, but especially from China; Native Americans; and Hispanics.  Some legislation, like the 1937 legislation that effectively made marijuana illegal, was promoted by referring to these people as 'degenerate races'. (Don't get me started on the false assumptions made about women, especially myths relating to menstruation, like many qualified women being denied pilots licenses back in the early days of aviation.)

The claims about anchor babies and terrorist babies are garbage.  They do not hold up under fact checking.  These claims are just one more example of the Tea Party acting to cause "MORAL PANIC".  The link is provided for those readers who may not be familiar with the sociology term.

And the 16th Amendment, repealing that?  Another example of Tea Party promoted stupidity.  There is no other country in the world, but especially in first world countries, that does not engage in direct national taxation.  There is a good reason for this, practicality and efficiency of government. This is not the most offensive of the ideas the Tea Party endorses, but it might be the most stupid and irrational.  It is ideas like this, that throw out the baby with the bath water, that argues for opposing the Tea Party and the extremists on the political right, who would disavow the philosophy of the founders of this nation, disenfranchise their fellow Americans,  promote discrimination that would deprive  people of their rights and freedom, and cripple the national government of this country.  Their ideas would be laughable, out loud laughable, if they weren't so damn scary because of a few misguided, well-intentioned people taking them seriously.  These are bad ideas; being well-intentioned doesn't make these ideas good.

For those readers who are interested in a further comparison between the right attempts to amend the Constitution, compared to the far fewer proposals to amend the Constitution by the left and center which are proposing pragmatic, practical changes, not wildly ideological ones, see my earlier post In Defense of the Constitution of the United States.