Or so the senator seems to believe.
A bloc of Senate conservatives, led by South Carolina's Jim DeMint, flexed their muscles Thursday, pledging to block any bill they alone deem wasteful or unconstitutional. ...McClatchy
Lordy. No wonder part of the North secretly wished the South really would secede and still do. There's something awful about the self-righteous, the sugary talk. It's 100% aspartame, really, not genuine sweetness. The Constitution, they figure, is more accurately interpreted (really?) by Christians and suthnas.
Wispy, sour Arizonan, John McCain, is joining DeMint in this crusade. So is Nevada's John Ensign (he's still in the Senate after that mess?). Anything to get a headline and stick it to more successful colleagues.
Beyond passing judgment on whether measures are constitutional, DeMint's new group wants any new spending to be offset by other funding cuts and for duplicative government programs to be consolidated or eliminated.
Most of us would go along with the elimination of duplicative programs and the notion of transparency. It's just that selective elimination (you know what that means, honeybunch!) tends towards a kind of Jim Crow attitude about legislation. Restricted buffets and mine has all the chittlins.
DeMint has a history of blocking others' efforts and making new friends in interesting ways.
The three freshmen who signed DeMint's pledge Thursday — Mike Lee of Utah, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin — received a combined $818,913 from DeMint's Senate Conservatives Fund in their GOP primary races against more mainstream candidates backed by establishment Republicans.
The donations to Lee, Paul and Johnson were part of $9.3 million that DeMint's leadership fund gave to conservative Senate candidates. Two other recipients — Marco Rubio of Florida and Pennsylvania's Pat Toomey — also were elected, but they didn't sign the obstruction pledge, which was sent Thursday to all senators.
In the end, DeMint gets to decide what's "constitutional" and what isn't.
Ilona Nickels, a former analyst for the Congressional Research Service and C-SPAN who's written extensively on government, said she's troubled by the group's vow to block legislation it deems unconstitutional.
"It's a stretch for any senator or group of senators to definitively declare a measure as constitutional or not," Nickels said.
"Constitutionality of a bill is a legitimate and frequent part of congressional debate on whether or not to pass it," she said. "But the final arbiter of what is or is not constitutional is, of course, the Supreme Court. The Senate or the House can't settle that question on its own."
