Although Tea Party groups like Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks have emphasized the movement’s libertarianism and played down its social conservatism, several of Skousen’s 28 principles stress the role of religious virtue. The fourth principle, “Without religion the government of a free people cannot be maintained,” criticizes the Supreme Court for having misinterpreted Thomas Jefferson’s metaphor of a “wall” separating church and state.” Skousen argued that the First Amendment’s prohibition on a federal establishment of religion wasn’t intended to separate church and state but to prevent the federal government from disestablishing religion in the seven states that had officially established denominations during the founding era.

Some reputable legal scholars, like Akhil Reed Amar of Yale Law School, have made similar historical arguments. But in Skousen’s view, the implications of this history are radical: Skousen would encourage the states today to require “universally accepted” religious teachings in public schools, as long as they don’t favor one denomination over another. Justice Clarence Thomas — whose wife, Virginia Thomas, stumped at Tea Party rallies and helped create the Tea Party organization Liberty Central — has argued in a similar vein that the founders intended to prevent the federal government from disestablishing state churches, not from promoting religion. “Congress need not observe strict separation between church and state, or steer clear of the subject of religion,” Thomas wrote in a 2005 concurring opinion. (Embracing religious conservatism, states’ rights and opposition to elites, Thomas can be seen as the model of a Tea Party justice avant la lettre.) This kind of thinking may help to make sense of the otherwise perplexing constitutional views of the unsuccessful Tea Party candidate Christine O’Donnell, who famously asked in a debate, “Where in the Constitution is the separation of church and state?”

Along with Skousen’s 28 principles of liberty, the best guide to the Tea Party movement’s constitutional vision is a list of “101 constitutional questions to ask candidates” that is reprinted at the end of the new edition of “The 5,000-Year Leap.” In endorsing Mike Lee’s Senate candidacy, Paul Skousen, W. Cleon Skousen’s son, emphasized that, in his view, Lee was in perfect agreement with his father. “Mike Lee is a good friend of the family, and we support him 100 percent,” Paul Skousen told me. “He’s read Dad’s books; he had Dad in his home when he was growing up for visits and dinners, and he met Dad on a number of occasions before Dad passed away.”

Indeed, the 101 questions overlap with many of Lee’s most-controversial views. In the questions, Skousen concludes that most federal regulatory agencies are unconstitutional, including the Environmental Protection Agency and the Federal Communications Commission, because they blur “the founders’ division of labor between the states and the federal government.” Skousen says the obscure “enclave clause” of the Constitution doesn’t authorize the president “to lock up large blocks of land within a state as a ‘wilderness reserve,’ ” or to set up national forests or national parks within the confines of a state — an eccentric view the Supreme Court has rejected. Skousen also calls for the repeal of the 16th and 17th Amendments, which he views as an affront to states’ rights, and calls for the elimination of Social Security, welfare and the national debt as examples of wealth redistribution, which he considers unconstitutional because, in his words, the founders authorized the government only “to protect equal rights, not provide equal things.”

Not all Tea Party enthusiasts, of course, are devotees of Skousen, and Lee is just one senator. But the sort of thinking Lee embodies, rooted in a radical suspicion of the powers of government, is resurgent. And it is aimed not only at the political arena but also at the courts. The Tea Party’s leaders have expressed hope that the growing political support for the movement’s constitutional arguments will help persuade lower courts — and ultimately the Supreme Court — to strike down the new health care bill as unconstitutional. Matt Kibbe, president of FreedomWorks, told me that “courts look at public opinion, and on health care the courts are going to consider what the American people and the existing Congress think, although they may not admit it.”

If history is any guide, Kibbe is right that the courts follow the election returns: the constitutional arguments that Congress lacks the power to pass health care reform, which seemed far-fetched only a year ago, are more likely to gain traction in the courts now that the arguments are being resurrected in Congress and among the Tea Party faithful. In September, at one of the 162 public readings of the Constitution sponsored by the Tea Party group Let Freedom Ring, I spoke with Joe Walker, a Tea Party activist and Skousen enthusiast from Binghamton, N.Y. He stressed the urgent need to restore a populist vision of the Constitution. “We’ve had other nations who have fallen into disrepute,” he told me, because “they looked to government for the solutions. The solution is the people!”