If you read only one fairly long read before the long weekend, make it Ian Millhiser's essential account of a speech given by brogressive hero Rand Paul this week to a rapt audience of prime conservative meatheads at the Heritage Foundation in Washington. Not only will you find it a clear validation of the Blog's Five Minute Rule when it comes to any political pronouncement by any member of the Paul family, but also, you will see in Aqua Buddha's words a view of the United States that you and I -- and FDR, for that matter -- thought long dead and buried along with Chief Justice Melville W. Fuller. This is the guy whose ideas even some sensible liberals find intriguing. Stand With Rand, alas, and you Stand With Oligarchs, Living And Dead.

Lest there be any doubt that Senator Paul, himself an elected official, believes that the problem with American government is that it gives the people too much say over how they are governed, Paul endorses the Supreme Court's long-ago overruled decision in Lochner v. New York. Lochner, which Paul has also praised on the Senate floor, invented a so-called "right to contract" that employers could use to resist laws protecting their workers. The idea was that the Constitution places strict limits on any laws that interfere with people's ability to enter into contracts. So if an employer wants their employees to work 18 hours days, or if it wants them to sign away their right to unionize, or if it wants to pay them just a few pennies an hour, then the workers who agree to do so cannot seek refuge in the law even though they were forced into these jobs by desperate circumstances.

I mean, holy Jesus H. Christ on a croissant, I've lived my entire life around conservatives who want to roll back Supreme Court decisions -- Brown v. Board, Griswold v. Connecticut, Miranda v. Arizona, Roe v. Wade -- and so I'm used to that kind of thing. But here's a cat who wants to reverse a reversal. In doing so, he would take us altogether back to the days of slave wages, child labor, unbridled carnage in the workplace, and legally enforced serfdom within the American corporation. Millhiser does a good job tracing Aqua Buddha's intellectual journey on these matters back to a snake-oil salesman named Timothy Sandefur, who has spent his entire career coddled amid the soft cushions of wingnut welfare. Thereby protected from having actually to work for a living, Sandefur has been free to let his freak flag fly about the natural right of 12-year-olds to be breaker boys again. But that is far less interesting than the compelling case that Millhiser makes that the current Supreme Court, John Roberts presiding, already is halfway there to meeting with Aqua Buddha on most of these issues.

As time creates more distance between the present and the Court's brief flirtation with liberalism, however, more and more conservatives are likely to realize something that Paul has already learned - the Supreme Court can be a powerful force for conservatives, enabling them to enact an agenda that they are unable to advance in the elected branches of government. Indeed, for much of the period between the Civil War and the New Deal, Supreme Court litigation was the most powerful tool in the right-wing arsenal, a weapon that could sweep aside the collective will of the American people based on the command of just five men in robes. Roberts' flirtations with judicial modesty grew out of an anomalous period in Supreme Court history, when the Court thought very differently than it does today. There is no longer much strategic reason for conservatives to embrace judicial restraint.

This is both a shrewd analysis, and it is absolutely true. (In fact, more than a few liberal thinkers have warned about relying too heavily on the Supreme Court to stem the tide of reactionary movement conservatism. They were not altogether wrong, which is not to say that Brown, Roe, Miranda and Griswold weren't worth pursuing and are not worth defending.) If another Lochner case were to come before the Roberts Court, I wouldn't take any bet that Roberts would rule any differently than Fuller did back in 1905. And that is the world that Rand Paul believes is the proper world in which the rest of us should live and be free. What Paul Ryan is to economics, Rand Paul is to the Constitution and human liberty. The America he sees is no less a dystopian nightmare than the one Ryan sees when he thinks about a country without moochers. Of course, in Rand Paul's dystopia, we'll all be able to get high, so there's that.

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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