The Tea Party would claim, "We are moral, you are not; we represent America, you do not."

This becomes the rallying cry of culture war of civil war

Treaties including the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo

If all amended Constitutions after 1776 are declared null and void, said eliminations would also invalidate treaties approved by the U.S. Senate and signed by the President. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo signed in 1848 would be declared null and void reverting ownership of Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, California, Nevada, Texas, Wyoming, Colorado and Kansas back to Mexico.

The Tea Party vision

Tea Partiers tend to sound more like Thomas than Scalia. Every weekday on Fox News, Glenn Beck ― “the most highly regarded individual among Tea Party supporters,” according to a recent poll ― takes to his school room chalkboard to rail against progressives like Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt. “They knew they had to separate us from our history,” he says, “to be able to separate us from our Constitution and God.” In Beck’s view, progressives forsook the faithful Christian Founders and forced the country to adopt a slew of unconstitutional measures that triggered our long decline into Obama-era totalitarianism: the Federal Reserve System, Social Security, the graduated federal income tax. True patriots, according to Beck, favor a pre-progressive vision of the United States. When Nevada Senate nominee Sharron Angle says we need to “phase out” Social Security and Medicare; when Alaska Senate nominee Joe Miller asserts unemployment benefits are “unconstitutional;” when West Virginia Senate nominee John Raese declares the minimum wage should “absolutely” be abolished; when Kentucky Senate nominee Rand Paul questions the legality of the Civil Rights Act of 1964; when Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann claims Obama’s new health-insurance law violates the Constitution; and when various Tea Party candidates say they want to repeal the amendments that triggered the federal income tax and the direct election of senators ― this is the vision they’re promoting.

At times, the Tea Party can seem like a popularized, politicized offshoot of the Constitution in Exile movement.

Over the years critics have lodged dozens of objections to originalism ― the disagreements among the Founders; the preservation of slavery in the final product; the inclusion of an amendment process ― and they apply to the Tea Party’s interpretation of the Constitution, too. But at least originalism is a rational, consistent philosophy. The real problem with the Tea Party’s brand of Constitution worship isn’t that it’s too dogmatic. It’s that it isn’t dogmatic enough. In recent months, Tea Party candidates have behaved in ways that belie their public commitment to combating progressivism. They’ve backed measures that blatantly contradict their originalist mission. And they’ve frequently misunderstood or misrepresented the Constitution itself. In May, for example, Paul told a Russian television station America “should stop” automatically granting citizenship to the native-born children of illegal immigrants. Turns out his suggestion would be unconstitutional, at least according to the 14th Amendment (1868) and a pair of subsequent Supreme Court decisions. A few weeks later, Paul said he’d like to prevent federal contractors from lobbying Congress ― a likely violation of their First Amendment right to redress. In July, Alaska’s Miller told ABC News unemployment benefits are not “constitutionally authorized.” Reports later revealed his wife claimed unemployment in 2002.

The list goes on. Most Tea Partiers claim the 10th Amendment, which says “the powers not delegated” to the federal government are “reserved to the states,” is proof the Framers would’ve balked at today’s bureaucracy. What they don’t mention is that James Madison refused a motion to add the word “expressly” before “delegated” because “there must necessarily be admitted powers by implication.”

Angle has said “government isn’t what our Founding Fathers put into the Constitution” ― even though establishing a federal government with the “Power To lay and collect Taxes” to “provide for the common Defense and general Welfare” is one of the main reasons the Founders created a Constitution to replace the weak, decentralized Articles of Confederation. In 2008 Palin told Katie Couric the Constitution does, in fact, guarantee “an inherent right to privacy,” à la Roe v. Wade, but added “individual states…can handle an issue like that.” Unfortunately, Palin’s hypothesis would only be viable in a world without the Fourteenth Amendment, which gave Washington sole responsibility for safeguarding all constitutional rights. Then there are the proposed amendments. In the current Congress, conservatives like Michele Bachmann have suggested more than 40 additions to the Constitution: a flag-desecration amendment; a balanced-budget amendment; a “parental rights” amendment; a supermajority-to-raise-taxes amendment; anti-abortion amendment; an anti-gay-marriage amendment; and so on. None of these revisions has anything to do with the document’s original meaning.

The truth is for all their talk of purity, politicians like Palin, Angle, and Miller don’t seem to be particularly concerned with matching their actual positions to the Constitution they profess to worship. For them, the sacred text serves a higher purpose ― and in the end, that purpose isn’t hard to pinpoint.

Since the earliest days of the republic, Americans have, like the Tea Partiers, spoken of the Constitution in religious terms. In 1792, Madison wrote that “common reverence…should guarantee, with a holy zeal, these political scriptures from every attempt to add to or diminish from them.” George Washington’s Farewell Address included a plea the Constitution “be sacredly maintained.” In his Lyceum speech of 1838, Abraham Lincoln cited the document as the source of “the political religion of the nation” and demanded its laws be “religiously observed.” In 1968, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black called the Constitution his “legal bible,” and a few years later, during Richard Nixon’s impeachment hearings, Texas Rep. Barbara Jordan testified her “faith in the Constitution is whole.” But the similarity between these figures and the Tea Partiers ends at the level of language. For leaders like Lincoln and Jordan, the Constitution is a symbol “that supplies an overarching sense of unity even in a society otherwise riddled with conflict,” as sociologist Robin Williams once wrote. It is an integrative force ― the cornerstone of our civil religion.

We are moral, you are not; we represent America, you do not. Theirs is the rallying cry of culture war.

The Tea Partiers belong to a different tradition ― a tradition of divisive fundamentalism. Like other fundamentalists, they seek refuge from the complexity and confusion of modern life in the comforting embrace of an authoritarian scripture and the imagined past it supposedly represents. Like other fundamentalists, they see in their good book only what they want to see: confirmation of their preexisting beliefs. Like other fundamentalists, they don’t sweat the details, and they ignore all ambiguities. And like other fundamentalists, they make enemies or evildoers of those who disagree with their doctrine. In the 1930s, the American Liberty League opposed FDR’s New Deal by flogging its version of the Constitution with what historian Frederick Rudolph once described as “a worshipful intensity.” In the 1960s, the John Birch Society imagined a vast communist conspiracy in similar terms. In 1992 conservative activists formed what came to be known as the Constitution Party ― Sharron Angle was once a member ― in order to “restore American jurisprudence to its Biblical foundations and to limit the federal government to its Constitutional boundaries.” Today, Angle asserts “separation of church and state is an unconstitutional doctrine,” and Palin claims “the Constitution…essentially acknowledges that our unalienable rights…come from God.” The point is always the same: to suggest the Constitution, like the Bible, decrees what’s right and wrong rather than what’s legal and illegal, and to insist only they and their ilk can access its truths.

The Tea Partiers are right to revere the Constitution. It’s a remarkable, even miraculous document. But there are many Constitutions: the Constitution of 1789, of 1864, of 1925, of 1936, of 1970, of today.

Where O’Donnell & Co. go wrong is in insisting their imagined, idealized document is the country’s one true Constitution, and that dissenters are somehow un-American. By putting the Constitution front and center, the Tea Party has reignited a long-simmering argument over who we are and who we want to be. That’s great. But to truly honor the Founders’ spirit, they have to make room for actual debate. As usual, Thomas Jefferson put it best. In a letter to a friend in 1816, he mocked “men who look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the arc of the covenant, too sacred to be touched”; “who ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment.” “Let us follow no such examples, nor weakly believe that one generation is not as capable as another of taking care of itself, and of ordering its own affairs,” he concluded. “Each generation is as independent as the one preceding, as that was of all which had gone before.”

Original article from Andrew Romano, Newsweek