Tea partiers have a complicated relationship with the Constitution. They frequently profess their love for the document, yet they also seek to fundamentally alter it, for example by eliminating birthright citizenship and by inserting a crippling balanced budget amendment. However, one section of the document that tea partiers appear to be absolutely smitten with is the Tenth Amendment.  Unfortunately, their boundless adoration for the Amendment seems to have prevented them from reading it very carefully.

Senator Mike Lee's "cut, cap, and balance" pledge holds the full faith and credit of the United States of America hostage to a misguided effort to dramatically change the Constitution.  What Lee is not telling America is that his proposed Amendment represents a stark departure from our constitutional order.

In the current age of Tea Party nostalgia for our "original" Constitution, coupled with calls for state secession and nullification of federal laws, our nation's history in the immediate pre-civil War period is a useful reminder of the "more perfect union" we live in today. No one should "celebrate" a war that took such a horrible toll in American lives. But as the nation marks the sesquicentennial of beginning of that War, we should remember what the Civil War was all about.

The decision by Senate Republicans to place freshman Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) on the Senate Judiciary Committee, breaking their own rule against two Republicans from the same state serving on the same committee (Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) is a long-serving member of the Committee), raises the following question: do serious conservatives really want to affiliate themselves with Mike Lee’s wacky views of the Constitution?

Tea Partiers love the Constitution, except for the parts they want to jettison.  In fact, time and again, when they claim they want to restore our Founders’ Constitution, this means repealing Amendments that “We the People” have added to the Constitution over the last two centuries.

This is the tenth installment of Constitutional Accountability Center’s new series, ‘Strange Brew: The Constitution According to the Tea Party,’ exploring the Tea Party’s erroneous claims about the Constitution’s text and history.

This is the eighth installment of Constitutional Accountability Center’s new series, ‘Strange Brew: The Constitution According to the Tea Party,’ exploring the Tea Party’s erroneous claims about the Constitution’s text and history.

This is the sixth installment of Constitutional Accountability Center’s new series, ‘Strange Brew: The Constitution According to the Tea Party,’ exploring the Tea Party’s erroneous claims about the Constitution’s text and history.

This is the third installment of Constitutional Accountability Center’s new series, ‘Strange Brew: The Constitution According to the Tea Party,’ exploring the Tea Party’s erroneous claims about the Constitution’s text and history.

To mark this year’s Independence Day, the Tea Party went back to school to study the Constitution as part of a growing effort to use the document to wage political battle—particularly over the confirmation of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court—and to elect leaders who will remain faithful to the Constitution and its principles. As an organization dedicated to the text and history of the Constitution, Constitutional Accountability Center salutes this effort, at least in the abstract. We think the Constitution should frame our political debates and should be followed by our leaders, whatever their political stripe. But if the Tea Party wants to be taken seriously—and if it wants the media to continue fawning over it for its purported love for the Constitution—it should at least be required to make plausible claims about the words and meaning of our Nation’s charter.