More On Daryl Metcalfe.

Not only is Daryl Metcalfe a crazie birther but he's a tenther as well!

Geez, this guy fires on all the wingnut cylinders, don't he?

First some of you may be asking, "What's a tenther?" According to this blogpost at the Wall Street Journal:

It describes those leaning on the Constitution’s Tenth Amendment to justify the shooting down of new federal legislation in the age of President Obama.

Then there's this from the American Prospect article cited by the WSJ blog:

Tenthers divine all this from the brief language of the 10th Amendment, which provides that "the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." In layman's terms, this simply means that the Constitution contains an itemized list of federal powers -- such as the power to regulate interstate commerce or establish post offices or make war on foreign nations -- and anything not contained in that list is beyond Congress' authority. [emphasis added.]

Here's the 10th Amendment, by the way:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

And here's Daryl Metcalfe speaking at a tenther rally this past March:


He's speaking at a rally organized by State Rep Sam Rohrer in support of HR 95 whose short title goes something like this:

A Resolution claiming sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States over certain powers, serving notice to the Federal Government to cease and desist certain mandates, providing that certain Federal legislation be prohibited or repealed and directing distribution.

As Metcalfe is a co-sponsor of the bill and he spoke at the rally, we're pretty confident on his "tenther" pedigree.

Daryl Metcalfe is also an idiot.

About a minute in to the above clip, Metcalfe quotes Thomas Jefferson:

The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down, that being the government, with the chains of the Constitution so the second, the government, will not become the legalized version of the first, the criminals."

So what's the problem?

Thomas Jefferson never said it. According to the Jefferson Encyclopedia:

So far we have been unable to locate such a statement in any of Jefferson's writings. He did employ the phrase "chains of the Constitution" at least once, however, in the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798: "...in questions of power then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the constitution..."

But now you may be thinking, hey maybe the Jefferson Encyclopedia is wrong and Metcalfe is STILL right.

Then why does this appear at Metcalfe's website?

It has been attributed to a Founding father to have said that "the two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down, that being the government, with the chains of the Constitution so the second, the government, will not become the legalized version of the first, the criminals."[Emphasis added.]

Note, of course, that the text on that page is from his remarks at that rally - in effect he's quoting himself - but somewhere between the rally and today (October 24, 2009) someone must've clued him in on the quotation. So he changed the text on the site.

The link to the speech is still there, though.

What an idiot.