Craziest Republican of the Day: Tom Emmer

By Michael J.W. Stickings

The CRDs are coming fast and furious these days. Here's the latest...

From Eric Kleefeld at TPM:

The Minnesota Republican Party's official candidate to succeed Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who is looking ahead to a 2012 run for President, is a staunch conservative well to Pawlenty's right who has a long history of "Tentherism," the attempts by the far right-wing to invoke the Tenth Amendment and nullify federal laws on various liberal initiatives. He has even proposed a state constitutional amendment that would allow federal laws to operate in Minnesota only if they were consented to by super-majorities of the state legislature.

That's right, this guy isn't just to the right of Pawlenty, who's comfortably on the right, he's basically a far-right opponent of the federal government, a radical states'-righter who certainly would have been given a stamp of approval by Stephen Douglas, John Calhoun, and Jefferson Davis (even if his intellect falls far short of theirs).

Oh, and in case you think he's an extremist within the GOP and so not representative of the party as a whole, please note: He has been endorsed by the Minnesota Republican Party to be that state's governor. Pawlenty, a leading figure in the party (and a leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, is on his side -- enthusiastically:

We don't have any doubt about what Tom Emmer stands for or what his values are. He is strong. He is steadfast. He is clear... He is going to be the next governor of the state of Minnesota.

And, predictably enough, Sarah Palin loves him. If he hasn't already, he will soon become a highly visible star in conservative circles, including on Fox News. I'm sure the teabaggers will be fully on board, too.

And the Republican Party, which claims to be the party of fidelity to the Founding Fathers, once again proves to be a deeply un-American party, a party that stands for a radical alternative to the vision articulated in 1787, an alternative that would have torn America, then but a budding experiment in self-government, apart, and that would do the same now.

To be sure, the Founding Fathers did not envision a federal government as enormous and as powerful in so many areas as the one now, but that is only because they could not have foreseen what their country would become. And the growth of the federal government over the past 2+ centuries has taken place within limits imposed by the Constitution. Which is to say, the growth has been organic.

What these right-wing radicals want to do is to go in the opposite direction, stripping the Constitution of its essence and purpose, which was (lest we forget) to establish a federal government, and to replace what the Founding Fathers saw as a necessary and healthy balance between federal and state jurisdictions with what would amount to a federal government with virtually no authority at all. You might as well go to the National Archives, remove the original draft of the Constitution, and set fire to it in front of the Washington Monument.

Maybe it's for the best that Hamilton and Madison aren't around to witness this inglorious desecration of all that they fought to achieve.