Now that we’re past the latest attempt by the treasonous America-hating Tea Party wing of the Republican party to prevent the U.S. government from functioning by refusing to fund vital services or pay our bills, it’s time to think about a way to stop these loony zealots from continuing to ruin our great country.

I believe I have a workable plan to rid ourselves forever of these enemies of progress. I’m speaking of such obnoxious, unpatriotic obstructionists as Senators Ted Cruz and Mike Lee and Representatives Ted Yoho and Michele Bachmann and those who support them.

We must deport all Tea Party members.

Now I’m a liberal lawyer and a college professor who’s taught constitutional history, not an ignoramus like those xenophobic Tea Party bigots who think that the Fourteenth Amendment’s right to birthright citizenship can be taken away from the American-born children of undocumented immigrants.

We can’t deport American-born citizens to another country without violating Tea Party members’ constitutional rights such as those of due process or equal protection, even if they often don’t recognize that women, racial minorities, lesbians and gay men have these rights, too.

Besides, even if we could deport the Tea Party, what foreign country could we deport them to? Who would want these losers messing up their nation?

I understand these concerns. And though I would move as quickly as possible to deport all Tea Party members – it’s not wise to keep vermin around your house any longer than necessary – I would not deport them to any foreign country.

Instead, I would launch a crash program, a kind of Manhattan Project, to get our most brilliant scientists to create a viable way to send people back into the past. Time travel will allow us to deport the Tea Party members to what is, indeed, American soil – but they’d be sent back to the eighteenth century!

And this, of course, would get around the problem of denying Tea Party members’ constitutional rights. This crazy wing of the GOP — soon to be G-O-N-E — would voluntarily self-deport to the 1700s.

After, all the fashion-challenged angry old white people of the Tea Party already love to gallivant around in colonial garb at their rallies. They’d have a place where they could strut in their three-cornered hats and white leggings and not look ridiculously out of place.

In the eighteenth century, Tea Party members could live in an America where minorities did not have equal rights (African Americans were slaves; Native Americans were massacred), where abortion and homosexuality were, if they ever occurred, punishable by death; where there was no ACLU, no Planned Parenthood, no labor unions, no minimum wage, no “entitlements,” no food stamps, no “safety net,” no ethnic studies, no Lady Gaga, no hip-hop, no New York Times or MSNBC, and few if any vegans, hippies, hipsters, atheists, environmentalists or Darwinists.

Everyone would be better off. The Tea Party members would be much happier living in the past. In the 1700s they’d be up-to-date rather than throwbacks to a previous era, constantly trying to undo the New Deal and the science of the past two centuries. Instead of longing for a bygone America, they’d be living in a place they’d rather be: a bygone America.

Of course, if they wanted to stay in large parts of the Southwest from California and Arizona to Texas and Colorado, these anti-immigrant bigots would be living under the Spanish empire, but hey, they probably would really love the Inquisition!

And maybe we could send some of them to the South circa 1863. Since they proudly wave the rebel flag of the Confederate States of America at the rallies demonstrating their hatred of our President, a few of them might want to be in Old Dixie fighting the Union army.

Whatever past century we send them to, with all Tea Party members deported, the rest of us here in the United States could actually achieve some progress.

Twenty-first century America: Love it or leave it.

Hasta la vista, Tea Party members!