New House: Extremist Tea Party Rules

03 January 2011 |permalink | email article

The most audacious act by the Republicans when they assume the majority in the House on Wednesday is to do something the House historian’s office said has never been done in the chamber’s 221-year history. One rule is they will read the Constitution aloud. A second rule, more deliberately hostile, is a requirement that requires every new bill contain a statement by the lawmaker who wrote it citing the constitutional authority to enact the proposed legislation.

The Washington Post aptly describes it as the “tea party-ization of Congress.” To make the point clear Rep. Michele Bachmann, a tea party favorite, said voters on November 2 called for “an end to reckless spending and a renewed commitment to the Constitution.” She never provides detail.

The question being debated in legal and political circles off Capitol Hill is whether the constitutional rules are little more than a simply symbolic flourishes to appease the tea party base or business as usual after the half-hour it takes to read the Constitution?

Akhil Reed Amar, a constitutional scholar at Yale Law School and author of a book on the Constitution supports the reading but said as a whole “it doesn’t say what the tea party folks think it says.” He argues the Constitution charters a “very broad federal power” and not the narrow states’ rights document the tea party activists present it as. The debate about constitutionality splits largely on partisan lines, leading some legal scholars to say the new House rule might largely be about playing politics.

Tea party activists over the past year have handed out thousands of pocket-size Constitutions at rallies as a pillar of their grass-roots moment. It recalls the little red book, required reading by every Chinese during Chairman Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution in the 1960’s. Will Americans really buy into the radical tea party’s effort to interpret the Constitution?

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