The Rand Paul CRA debate brings up a topic that usually only comes up in the context of judicial nominations, but it also shines a bit of light on what is actually pretty mainstream Republican thinking.
DavidNYC wrote about it back in 2004.
I'm hardly the first person to make this point, but it's one that bears repeating: While conservatives are preparing to pack the Supreme Court and the rest of the federal judiciary with right-wing judges who will seek to overturn Roe v. Wade, their real aim is a stealth campaign against the New Deal interpretation of the Interstate Commerce Clause (ICC).
Don't get me wrong: Roe and other hot-button social issues matter a great deal. But the power to destroy the ICC has much more far-reaching consequences....
Every time someone like this comes up for a nomination, we need to say that they want to make Social Security illegal. Not get rid of it - make it illegal. They want to make the minimum wage illegal. They want to make clean water laws illegal. This is not a mis-statement or exaggeration of their position. This is exactly what they propose.
Not very many Republican candidates or office-holders are either naive enough or dumb enough to talk about this stuff out loud--to make it the cornerstone of their campaigns. But Rand Paul's position that the Commerce Clause has been used too broadly is pretty standard thinking in the Republican party. It's essentially the founding philosophy of the Federalist Society, and has been the philosophical underpinning for the GOP since 1937 when Roosevelt's Supreme Court helped enact New Deal reforms.
So while Rand Paul is one of the few Republicans who will say it out loud, it's going to be on display in the Kagan confirmation hearings, as BTD reminds us. Republican Senators are going to use the health insurance reform law as their stalking horse. The Republican push to declare "Obamacare" illegal is subscribing to the same Commerce Clause philosophy as expressed not-so-subtly by Rand Paul.
Rand Paul is probably the only Republican in recent memory who has been stupid enough to use the Civil Rights Act as an example of the very mainstream Republican view of the overreach in Congress and the Courts in using the Commerce Clause. But scratch the surface of any Republican's assertion that health insurance reform is illegal, and you'll get the same philosophy.
So Paul isn't necessarily an extremist as far as Republicans are concerned, he's just not bright enough to realize he's not supposed to talk about this so brazenly.