pic via Photo Phiend at flickr.com

Last week was an activist week for our most renowned conservative jurists, who of course cannot be activist by their own definition. And hey, now they get to hang with the Koch Brothers.

Clarence Thomas reenacted an old Steve Martin routine with his explanation for not reporting nearly three-quarters of a million dollars his wife made…“I forgot”.

Meanwhile, Antonin Scalia had a cameo at Michelle Bachman’s Teaparty Caucus told them to read the Federalist Papers to understand the Constitution.

That’s pretty much the throw away line for conservative legal “scholars”.

It was telling when Thomas stated in a speech that American’s have too many rights (“there’s a Publius’ hair on my Constitution”). Conveniently, the Federalist Papers argue for a Constitution without that inconvenient ‘Bill of Rights’. See Hamilton’s #84.

The Bill of Rights was included as a compromise to get the Constitution passed. A key demand of the long-forgotten Anti-Federalists. The kind of compromise modern Teapartiers would refuse to consider and modern Democrats would undoubtedly meet them halfway by discarding the very notion before talking compromise.

But in the late 18th Century the original Ten Amendments passed, written by Madison (i.e. the Founder who wrote the most important of the Federalist Papers, that damn flip-flopper!).

More than two centuries later only the Second appears to survive, having shot the other nine.