One of our favorite recurring characters here in the shebeen is konzsitooshunal skolar Mike Lee, the now-senior senator—Hi, Mitt!—from Utah. Lee is reckoned to be a konztitooshunal skolar by roughly the same standard that Paul Ryan was reckoned to be an economic whiz kid—he says he is, plus he keeps getting elected.

So, when Ian Millhiser at ThinkProgress points us to this speech that Lee gave to The Federalist Society, we see that Lee's grasp on the actual Constitution is as eccentric—and as batshit—as was Ryan's grasp of tax policy and the federal budget.

In it, Lee warned of a brewing civil war, and claimed that the only way to avert violence would be to eradicate a long list of federal programs including “the interstate highway system,” funding for “K through 12 public education,” “federal higher education accreditation,” “early childhood education, the Department of Commerce,” “housing policy, workforce regulation,” and what Lee labeled the “huge glut of federally owned land.”

Mike Lee at the Kavanaugh hearings Win McNamee Getty Images

Lee, who also believes that federal child labor laws, Social Security, and Medicare are unconstitutional, claimed in his speech that America faces a stark choice — “federalism or violence.” According to Lee, when the federal government has the power to do pretty much anything, that thrusts the country into a “fundamentally un-American contest” to “determine which half of our nation will have the power, at least temporarily, to unilaterally impose its will and its values on the other half.”

This is the part where I remind you that Lee spouted this bafflegab at a gathering sponsored by the organization that is picking the people who will staff the federal judiciary for the next 40 years, and it is also the part where I point out that in 1869, when the federal government of Abraham Lincoln encroached on the sovereign rights of western states in order to complete that usurpation of state powers known as the transcontinental railroad, it chose Utah as the place in which to drive in that golden spike and complete the job.

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Or maybe Mike Lee's just still pissed because the FEC, an institution he gladly would see dissolved, blew the whistle on Lee's SuperPac scam in 2011, a hustle Lee set up to take advantage of the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, which Lee enthusiastically supports, despite the fact that it destroyed the rights of states to enact their own campaign-finance regulations—including a system in Montana that had been in place for 100 years.

Or maybe, Mike Lee is just another talk-show-caliber wingnut who got himself elected to a sinecure in the federal government he claims to dislike so intensely. Our lines are open.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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