Most members of the House Tea Party Caucus voted in favor of big government and against constitutional rights in yesterday’s vote on extending the abusive Patriot Act.

The same inconsistency is there when it comes to the relative power between federal and local governments. Right wing activists say that local governments should have power above the federal government’s power, when local governments want to deny people rights. When local governments seek to protect constitutional rights, however, the same right wing activists show no respect for local decisions.

It is in this spirit that yesterday, the following 39 Republican members of Congress signed their name to a legal brief urging a court to block D.C.’s legalization of same-sex marriage.

Rep. Wally Herger of California decided last month that he wanted to form a congressional caucus (formally known as a Congressional Member Organization) and attract the maximum number of members possible from among his fellow members of the House of Representatives. And so he sent them a letter making this recruitment appeal: I am writing [...]

Texas Representative (and repeated presidential candidate) Ron Paul asserts his principled approach to politics on a regular basis. When Congressman Paul declines to vote for a congressional medal of honor for Rosa Parks, he says it has nothing to do with disrespecting the civil rights movement. No, no, says Ron Paul, he opposes spending even [...]

The Larochelles were seeking to separate the flag from the Constitution, and to make it a symbol of religious belief – and officially recognized by Congress as such. Congressman Mike Turner was more than happy to help them do this – and to try to use the boy scout as a tool to push religion as a wedge issue – when he introduced H.R. 3779.

If an oil company isn’t even using the leases of public lands they already have, why should they take on yet more leases… unless what those oil companies really want to do is just squat on their leases of public lands with oil under them only in order to prevent the oil from being drilled, thus decreasing supply and artificially driving up the cost of petroleum products so that they can make a bigger profit without doing any more work.

To vote for this bill was to insult the Constitution of the United States of America, and in doing so, to insult the USA itself. A vote in favor of this bill is a betrayal of the Oath of Office every member of Congress has taken. It is unpatriotic, and a grave breach of trust.

According to the sponsors of H.R. 6211, the American people are supposed to regard it as an “opportunity” to have big oil corporations come onto our public lands at a bargain basement rate, take whatever wealth they can find, sell it at a huge profit that won’t be shared with the rest of us, and then leave what they found as a scarred, poison wreck of its former self. Sorry, but I don’t see the “opportunity” in that.

Only someone determined not to see what’s happening around them could deny that America is going through profound economic suffering. Gasoline prices are up, and that means that there’s inflation for practically everything else we buy too. At the same time, work is increasingly hard to come by. New jobs aren’t being created much any [...]

This legislation does exactly what Republicans say they want to do. It makes public schools more efficient. In fact, the bill makes such plain sense that 27 Republican members of the House of Representatives crossed the aisle yesterday to vote in favor of it. Thanks to them, the bill passed, and will become law if passed by the Senate.