As Joan McCarter of the Daily Kos reports, Iowa Senate candidate Joni Ernst is the latest entrant in the Tea Party's shoot-from-the-lip style of Zany Campaign Rhetoric. McCarter reports that, in responding to an Iowa State Legislative Candidates survey for Ron Paul's libertarian-aligned Campaign for Liberty in 2012, she came out in favor of "nullification," a legislative device in which a state legislature votes to nullify a federal statute. In this case, she would have Iowa nullify Obama Care and authorize local Iowa law enforcement to arrest federal officials attempting to implement it.
That such a zany position would be held by a Tea Party candidate comes as no surprise. Whenever Tea Party ideologues fail to get there own way, they invariably come up with extreme measures to impose their minority views. Not only do they not play well with others, but they are also repeatedly willing to sacrifice patriotism in the name of ideological zaniness. So what if the Civil War was fought, among other things, to prevent Southern States from nullifying antislavery statutes? Super Patriot Ernst apparently has no time for historical context or for devising reasonable solutions that would preserve rather than tear down our nation.
Proving that consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, as Emerson once said, Ernst also advocated for nullification last fall when, according to McCarter, she told the Iowa Faith & Freedom Coalition that Congress should not pass any laws "that the states would consider nullifying."
Never mind that Ernst is a state legislator supposedly knowledgeable in the messy art of lawmaking. That nullification of federal statutes by states is not legally permissible is immaterial. What matters most to Ernst--and other Tea Party candidates who hold similar irrational and divisive views, is that she march in lock-step with her benefactors--the anti-patriots known as the Koch Brothers, whose Americans for Prosperity PAC has long supported adoption of nullification.
Of course, promoting a strong America has never been one of the Koch's strong points. In fact, as recently documented by Tim Dickinson in the September-24th issue of Rolling Stone magazine, these two, holier-than-thou multibillionaires have a consistent history of financial and environmental fraud. Small wonder, then, that they would attract candidates like Ernst who are willing to resort to any means--legal or otherwise--to get what they want.