For a party that not only claims to love the Constitution so much, but to honor and respect it the way it was (in their opinion) originally drafted, conservatives sure love to push amendment after amendment, trying to reshape the document to line up with their current party platform. The latest: give states veto power over the federal government. If two-thirds of the states don’t like a federal law, they can send it back to Congress.

Now, this seems just a little bit redundant to me; after all, the people who vote for those state legislatures are the exact same people who vote for the Congressional representatives.

Of course, a lot of this is simply playing to the base; in conservative circles, there is a newfound love of states’ rights (which conservatives immediately and unabashedly ignore when states try to do stuff like legalize marijuana or or pass right-to-die legislation), and so a PR stunt (bound to fail, and even if not, it would be a horrible mess to put into practice) which would play up the states would play nicely in campaign commercials next year.

However, when conservatives propose Constitution amendments, it is often based upon short-term interests, like when they wanted to repeal citizenship requirements for the presidency because they were excited about running Schwarzenegger as the party’s candidate.

So I have to wonder: would they be introducing this amendment, even with it bound to fail, if it were Democrats and not Republicans who controlled a majority of state legislatures?