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MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry had a few words for old Fat Tony after the remarks he made during this week's Supreme Court hearing on the Voting Rights Act -- Voting is no ‘racial entitlement,’ Justice Scalia:

Dear Justice Scalia,

It’s me, Melissa.

By now, we know you well enough that there’s not much you can say or do that would come as a surprise. We can set our watches by your decisions that, predictably, will be in alignment with the Court’s most radically conservative reasoning. We know that unlike your friend Justice Clarence Thomas, who has a permanent mute button on, you will always voice an opinion, and it will be heavily influenced by your political agenda..

But even given all of that, what you had to say during Wednesday’s oral arguments still came as a genuine shock.

Commenting on Congress’s nearly unanimous re-authorization of the Voting Rights Act in 2006, you said, “I don’t think that’s attributable to the fact that it is so much clearer now that we need this. I think it is attributable, very likely attributable, to a phenomenon that is called perpetuation of racial entitlement.”

You went on to say, “I am fairly confident it will be re-enacted in perpetuity…unless a court can say it does not comport with the Constitution…It’s a concern that this is not the kind of a question you can leave to Congress.”

Racial entitlement? Not a question you can leave to Congress? Even for you, Justice Scalia, this is a particularly willful misreading of the Constitution you claim to adore.

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From the office of Sen. Bernie Sanders -- The 14th Amendment:

Senator Bernie Sanders spoke during a rare Saturday session. He made case for President Obama lifting the debt ceiling on his own by invoking a provision of the 14th Amendment. "The Constitution is very clear in saying that the debts of the United States ‘shall not be questioned,' Sanders said. "The president swears an oath to protect and defend the Constitution, and many constitutional scholars believe that the 14th Amendment gives the president the authority and responsibility to pay our debts regardless of the dysfunction in Congress. I think that's just what he should do if he is left with no other way to protect the full faith and credit of the United States." The idea is backed by leading legal scholars and by President Bill Clinton. He said that if he were still in the White House, he would use the amendment and "force the courts to stop me."

And from the Burlington Free Press -- Sanders calls on Obama to lift the debt ceiling with 14th Amendment:

Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont is calling on President Barack Obama to unilaterally lift the debt ceiling by invoking the 14th Amendment.

Section 4 of the amendment states that, “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”

Sanders, an independent, isn’t fazed by the possibility that using the amendment to bypass Congress on the debt limit could lead to an impeachment vote. He says Americans would thank Obama for dealing with the crisis.

“I suppose if you use the 14th Amendment and Republicans try to impeach him, that’s their right,” he said. “But I would suspect that the average American would say, ‘Given the options, thank you, Mr. President, for making sure that I at least get my Social Security check, that our soldiers get paid, that Medicare continues to function and that interest rates do not go way up.’”

Current law requires congressional approval for raising the debt limit. But former President Bill Clinton has said that if he were still in the White House, he would use the amendment and “force the courts to stop me.”

“I think the Constitution is clear, and I think this idea that the Congress gets to vote twice on whether to pay for (expenditures) it has appropriated is crazy,” Clinton said in a July 18 interview with The National Memo.

But Obama has said he does not believe invoking the amendment is a viable option. “I have talked to my lawyers,” he said on July 22. “They are not persuaded that that is a winning argument.”

Sanders said other options for action on the debt limit are “dismal.” He blamed “right-wing extremism” among House Republicans and their “refusal to look at anything that resembles a fair and sensible and balanced approach.”

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While I do not disagree with any of the points that CNN's Fareed Zakaria made to Anderson Cooper after seeing the turn that this debt ceiling hostage taking has taken with the extreme level of obstruction by these so-called "tea party" freshmen in the House of Representatives and as Zakaria pointed out, their refusal to do any negotiating at all during this debacle. But what both of them failed to point out here is that there is no "tea party." It's the extreme right wing of the Republican base.

It's a drummed up astroturf movement sponsored by corporate America that is not only one of Fox's making, but CNN's as well. I don't believe for one minute that any of these right wing Republicans actually believe that it's not necessary to raise the debt ceiling. I also don't believe that any of them are too naive to realize what kind of dangerous game they're playing with our economy. I don't believe they're acting out of ideological purity. I think they're willing to play bad cop to push the Overton window even further to the right so that the rest of them can jam through right wing policies that would otherwise be completely unacceptable to the electorate in the name of a fake, drummed up emergency.

It's shock doctrine and the "tea party" is playing their part as the useful idiots. And our media continues to pretend that they're some grass roots movement that is just beholden to some ideological purity and not just the extreme right of the Republican Party who is helping them to achieve their goal of destroying our social safety nets, which Republicans have hated ever since they've been enacted. And they're doing corporate America's bidding with helping to turn us into a third world country where we have no middle class left. That's their goal. They're not crazy. They're bought and sold.

CNN helped to create this monster. Now we've got Zakaria and Cooper bemoaning how undemocratic they're behaving with Zakaria saying the president should invoke the 14th Amendment and end this nonsense. I don't disagree with him there either, but maybe if CNN was not playing cheer leader for these posers we would not be in the mess we are now with these right wing extremists dominating our House of Representatives and with having the power to threaten the United States' and the rest of the world's economy with their hostage taking during this kabuki theater.

Here's the transcript from CNN. Every time they say the words "tea party", substitute far right wing Republicans and maybe we'd have a halfway honest discussion going on here with where we are now, but one that still ignores CNN's willingness to prop these wingnuts and their "movement" up in the first place. One that they're still being dishonest about here.

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As Ryan Grim noted in his article this week, despite some House Republicans threatening impeachment if President Obama resorted to this to keep the United States from defaulting on its debt, but at least one Republican member of the Senate thinks the Constitution would trump the law -- 14th Amendment Option May Be Legit, Says Leading Senate Republican :

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said on Thursday that the Constitution may trump the debt ceiling, allowing the administration a way out of the default impasse.

Negotiators are considering gutting the social safety net in exchange for a vote to lift the debt ceiling. Grassley, in a conference call with local reporters, said that there may be another way out.

"There's one thing that hasn't been talked about yet, and I haven't checked on the constitutionality of it -- and I read the Constitution, but I don't remember reading this -- but in the 14th amendment, there's something that says something about the debt of the United States government shall be honored," Grassley said, according to a recording of the call. "The 14th Amendment includes a public debt clause that insists the obligations of the government 'shall not be questioned.'"

"So people are looking at the fact that maybe the debt ceiling bill that Congress presumably has to pass for the government to borrow more maybe is contrary to that constitutional provision, and that the administration may take out [loans] on their own -- just to borrow money -- and say that they can ignore the law," he said.

Grassley said that he was personally supportive of the debt ceiling, because it focuses attention on spending, but that if its existence was unconstitutional, there was nothing he or his colleagues could do. "I think it's a discipline that Congress uses effectively from time to time, maybe not to cut down on the amount of spending but to have a refresher course," he said. "It's a good discipline, so it bothers me if the Constitution provision would trump it, but that would be up to the courts to say. But who's going to argue against the Constitution? It's the basis of our government; it's the law of our land, and everybody has to abide by it."

"The Constitution trumps the law, obviously," he said. Read on...

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Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) said Sunday that it was a mistake to argue that it is unconstitutional not to raise the debt ceiling.

Section 4 of the 14th Amendment reads: "The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned."

On a conference call last week, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) told reporters that the idea that the 14th Amendment requires the debt ceiling to be raised was "certainly worth exploring."

"That's crazy talk," Cornyn told Fox News' Shannon Bream. "It's not acceptable for Congress and the president not to do their job and the say somehow the president has the authority to then basically do this by himself."

"We ought to sit down and work together, and it shouldn't take the form of press conferences like the president gave last week, where he was essentially the schoolmarm, scolding Congress for not getting its job done when, in fact, he is the one who has not stepped up and given us a proposal," he continued.

In May, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner pulled out a copy of the Constitution and read the 14th Amendment during a discussion with Politico about raising the debt ceiling.

"This is the important thing -'shall not be questioned,'" Geithner said.

For his part, President Barack Obama has sidestepped the question.

"I'm not a Supreme Court justice so I'm not going to put my constitutional law professor hat on," the president told NBC's Chuck Todd at a press conference last week.

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As Keith Olbermann and the Huffington Post's Ryan Grim discussed on Countdown, it's rather ironic that after all the talk from the "tea party" types out there with their so-called love of the Constitution, Senate Democrats are now looking at whether they might be able to put an end to this hostage taking and kabuki theater on raising the debt ceiling by using the 14th Amendment to declare that not raising it is unconstitutional.

Anyone want to take bets on whether they would be screaming to the hills if Democrats actually did this?

Here's Grim's article at the HuffPo -- 14th Amendment: Democratic Senators See Debt Ceiling As Unconstitutional :

Growing increasingly pessimistic about the prospects for a deal that would raise the debt ceiling, Democratic senators are revisiting a solution to the crisis that rests on a simple proposition: The debt ceiling itself is unconstitutional.

"The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law... shall not be questioned," reads the 14th Amendment.

"This is an issue that's been raised in some private debate between senators as to whether in fact we can default, or whether that provision of the Constitution can be held up as preventing default," Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), an attorney, told The Huffington Post Tuesday. "I don't think, as of a couple weeks ago, when this was first raised, it was seen as a pressing option. But I'll tell you that it's going to get a pretty strong second look as a way of saying, 'Is there some way to save us from ourselves?'"

By declaring the debt ceiling unconstitutional, the White House could continue to meet its financial obligations, leaving Tea Party-backed Republicans in the difficult position of arguing against the plain wording of the Constitution. Bipartisan negotiators are debating the size of the cuts, now in the trillions, that will come along with raising the debt ceiling.

Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said that the constitutional solution puts the question in its proper context -- that the debate is over paying past debts, not over future spending.

"The way everybody talks about this is that we need to raise the debt ceiling. What we're really saying is, 'We have to pay our bills,'" Murray said. The 14th Amendment approach is "fascinating," she added.

The White House referred questions on the constitutionality of the debt ceiling to the Treasury Department. Treasury declined to comment.

Go read the rest since there's more there. I'd be happy if they started making this argument in public and put an end to the hostage taking we've seen over the last few months.

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Ed Schultz talked to Salon's Joan Walsh about right-wing ideologue Justice Antonin Scalia's statement that the 14th Amendment doesn't protect protect women from discrimination.

Antonin "Women Don't Have Rights" Scalia will teach Republicans the Constitution:

Hey, did you hear that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia doesn't really believe in the the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment? Apparently, being an "originalist" means reading the minds of the framers and not interpreting what they wrote literally:

Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn't. Nobody ever thought that that's what it meant. Nobody ever voted for that.

OK, well, all the Amendment says is that equal protection under the laws will be afforded to citizens, not "straight male citizens," or whatever distinction Scalia's making here. Scalia can be very literal-minded sometimes, like when he explains that the Eighth Amendment doesn't forbid torture because interrogations aren't "punishment." Other times, he gets fuzzier with the language; despite the fact that the government is not allowed to establish or promote religion, Scalia is OK with "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance. The Constitution always happens to only mean whatever an ultra-conservative Republican asshole thinks it means, isn't that funny?

As Walsh pointed out, the real irony here is that this is the same man that thought the equal protection clause applied to Bush in the Bush v Gore decision.

Stephen Colbert got his digs on Supreme Court Justice and Constitutional "originalist" Antonin Scalia in his Word segment as only he can.

You know what else is insane folks? All the special rights minorities are asking for these days. Gay Americans want the right to be married in California. Mexican Americans want the right to drive through Arizona. And Muslim Americans want the right to be Muslims.

But if we keep giving the rights, there will be fewer rights left for us. That’s just mad. Well luckily there is a way to preserve our rights and it brings us to tonight’s Word—Original Spin.

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Stephen did a good job of whacking the Republicans for their fear mongering on anchor babies and for wanting to change the 14th Amendment in this segment from Tuesday.

All I can say is thank goodness I've got Stewart and Colbert around to mock these guys because our sorry excuse for "news" sure is hell isn't holding their feet to the fire for their insanity.

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As Anderson Cooper explained on his show this week, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) was recently spreading his completely unfounded conspiracy theory that women are coming to the United States to have "terror babies".

REP. LOUIE GOHMERT: I talked to a retired FBI agent who said that one of the things they were looking at were terrorist cells overseas who had figured out how to game our system.

And it appeared they would have young women who became pregnant, would get them into the United States to have a baby. They wouldn't even have to pay anything for the baby. And then they would return back where they could be raised and coddled as future terrorists.

And then, one day, 20, 30 years down the road, they could be sent in to help destroy our way of life, because they figured out how stupid we are being in this country.

Then he went on Fox Business Network and changed his story.

GOHMERT: It first came to my attention. Some of us were traveling to the Middle East last August, a year ago. And a lady on the plane was telling one of our group that they were about to have their second granddaughter. Her husband was with Hamas. Her grand -- I'm sorry -- her son-in-law was with Hamas -- and that they were going to do with the second as they did with the first grandchild. Daughter is going to come to America right before it's born on a tourist visa, have the baby.

They just like the option of having American citizens in the family.

Hamas, we recognize as terrorists. They're coming over -- oh, and she added, as a real kicker: And you know what the best part of it is? We don't have to pay anything for the baby to be born.

Apparently Rep. Gohmert didn't want to come AC360 and defend his story, so we got treated to this wingnut Texas State Representative Debbie Riddle instead. If Michele Bachmann ever gets ousted from the House of Representatives it looks like we've got a replacement waiting in the wings in the Texas State House. Does she remind anyone else of a cross between Mary Matalin and Marsha Blackburn?

Rep. Riddle insisted that the conspiracy theory put out there by Rep. Gohmert is a real threat and claimed as Gohmert did that her sources were "ex-FBI agents". When questioned for any proof of her claims, Rep. Riddle didn't take to kindly to Cooper's tepid questioning.

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