There’s a lot of commentary about how conservatives are hamstrung when talking about race, or issues that touch on race at all — immediately, they’re accused of racism. But I think that militia/right-wing extremism presents a comparable rhetorical problem for the left. Pointing out that militia activity or conspiracy-mongering is on the rise is, as we saw last year, seen a slander on Americans who criticize the government, an attempt by liberals to rule all of that out of bounds.

As the court notes in its order, the Bill of Attainder clause has only been successfully invoked five times in the Supreme Court since the Constitution was signed. Still, Judge Nina Gershon of the Eastern District of New York ruled that this case may wind up being the sixth.

ACORN and its affiliates, represented by the Center for Constitutional Rights, “have raised a fundamental issue of separation of powers,” she wrote. “They have been singled out by Congress for punishment that directly and immediately affects their ability to continue to obtain federal funding, in the absence of any judicial, or administrative, process adjudicating guilt. … The public will not suffer harm by allowing the plaintiffs to continue work on contracts duly awarded by federal agencies.”

ACORN and its lawyers claim that Congress voted to cut off funding for the organization, which supports the development of low-income housing and voter registration, as the result of a right-wing public relations campaign against ACORN and others for their efforts to register low-income and largely Democratic voters.

President Barack Obama (WDCpix)

When President Obama showed up for a town hall meeting in New Hampshire on Tuesday, he heard more than just protests against health care.

“We don’t need illegals,” yelled a white-bearded protester into his megaphone outside the high school auditorium in Portsmouth, caught on video here. “Send ‘em all back. Send ‘em back with a bullet in the head the second time.”

If the threats of violence weren’t clear enough, the man goes on to say: “Read what Jefferson said about the Tree of Liberty — it’s coming, baby.” Thomas Jefferson’s actual quote was “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

As the heat gets turned up on the health care reform debate, anti-immigrant activists are using the issue to whip up fear and anger toward immigrants, portraying them as a costly and burdensome drain on any taxpayer-supported U.S. health care system. Angry questions about illegal immigrants getting health care at town hall meetings across the country have put many lawmakers on the defensive.

At his town hall meeting in Pennsylvania, for example, Democratic Sen. Arlen Specter had to assure protesters that illegal immigrants would not be covered. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has gone out of her way to make that point as well. Sen. Benjamin Cardin (D-Md.) faced similar shouted questions at his town hall forum on Wednesday, and repeatedly emphasized that illegal immigrants are not covered by the House bill. President Obama has also made the point, although it’s not clear that the anti-reform activists have heard it.

The protesters are spurred on in large part by immigration restrictionist groups who are using the health care debate to spread fears about immigrants. The restrictionist group Numbers USA, for example, has been posting video interviews online with unnamed “experts” warning that emergency rooms are overwhelmed by both legal and illegal immigrants, and that subsidized health care won’t be available for other low-income Americans because immigrants will be using it all up.

The Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, meanwhile, a non-profit research organization that says it’s “animated by a pro-immigrant, low-immigration vision,” is sponsoring a panel discussion next week in Washington called The Elephant In the Room: Immigration’s Impact on Health Care Reform. Steven Camarota of the center writes on the group’s web site that “one out of three people in the U.S. without health insurance is an immigrant (legal or illegal) or the U.S.-born child (under 18) of an immigrant,” and claims that immigrants and their children “account for one-fourth of those on Medicaid.” Yet “the enormous impact of immigration, both legal and illegal, on the health care system has generally not been acknowledged in the current debate.”

Immigrants’ advocates vehemently dispute the CIS statistics, and argue that immigrants — particularly illegal immigrants — are actually far less likely to use even emergency health services than American-born U.S. citizens are.

“We’re really concerned about what the anti-immigration community is doing to try and stop health care reform from moving forward,” said Jennifer Ng’andu, Deputy Director of the Health Policy Project at the National Council of La Raza. “We see it as those communities trying to stir the pot and create controversy. These are not folks who come to the table with solutions. They’re not looking to talk about a health care reform plan. They just assume that by creating anxiety about immigrants, that they’ll stop this debate.”

The protests have put lawmakers on the defensive. At town hall meetings focused on the health care debate, they’ve repeatedly been questioned about whether they support providing health care for illegal immigrants. Pelosi, Specter and Obama have all emphasized that illegal immigrants would not be covered under the current health care proposals.

The issue has gotten so heated that even the Congressional Hispanic Caucus issued a statement supporting health coverage only for “legal, law abiding” immigrants who pay their “fair share” for health care.

Under federal law, illegal immigrants are entitled to receive only emergency health care, although some states offer assistance to uninsured children. But conservative groups such as CIS and the Heritage Foundation complain that even emergency care for illegal immigrants is a big problem.

Immigrants’ advocates deny that that immigrants, legal or illegal, are driving up the costs of the health care system or disproportionately relying on government health services. And they point to a stack of studies showing that, on the contrary, immigrants actually use fewer health services than do American-born citizens.

A July 2009 article in the American Journal of Public Health, for example, found that insured immigrants had much lower medical expenses than insured U.S.-born citizens. And while recent immigrants constituted 5 percent of the nonelderly adult population, they were responsible for only 2 percent of adults’ total health care costs.

Meanwhile, a study by the non-partisan Kaiser Commission found that although noncitizens receive less primary health care than citizens, they are far less likely to use the emergency room.

The current House health care bill would not provide insurance coverage for illegal immigrants, and severely restricts coverage even for legal United States immigrants. Immigrant adults have to wait five years before becoming eligible for Medicaid or federal Children’s Health Insurance Plan benefits, for example. (CHIP covers pregnant women in addition to children.) That concerns both immigration and public health advocates.

“Legal immigrants might not achieve equitable access to health coverage in this health care reform bill, but they will be subject to the same requirements to purchase insurance,” said Ng’ara. “They pay the same taxes and will have to share in the responsibility of fixing our health care system, but they may be subject to waiting periods or restrictions before they qualify for many of the benefits.”

Michele Waslin, Senior Policy Analyst at the Immigration Policy Center, made the point in a recent blog post that including immigrants in any health insurance plan would actually help reduce the costs for everyone else. “An important function of health insurance is to pool risks and use premiums collected from the healthy to pay for the medical care of those who need it,” says Waslin. “It is common sense that the more people who pay into the health care system, the more the risk—and thus the costs—are spread out over the entire population.”

What’s more, she argues, public health improves the more people receive regular health care, including preventive services. “It’s also very expensive when people do not receive regular health care and wait until they are very sick to receive care,” she said.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest has concluded that “Comprehensive prevention programs are the most economical way to maximize health and minimize costs.”

The economics of health care may not be what’s actually motivating the controversy, however. The move to bar even legal immigrants from receiving any support to purchase health insurance is consistent with a broader rise in anti-immigrant sentiment that experts who track hate groups are noticing.

A new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center released this week, for example, noted a dramatic rise over the past decade of right-wing militia movements. The group attributes the phenomenon in part to “high levels of non-white immigration and a decline in the percentage of whites overall in America,” which has made race a much larger focus of its anti-government “Patriot movement.” The result, says the law center, has been that even “ostensibly mainstream politicians and media pundits have helped to spread Patriot and related propaganda, from conspiracy theories about a secret network of U.S. concentration camps to wholly unsubstantiated claims about the president’s country of birth.”

ConsiderThisNews has the video of protesters in New Hampshire, expressing their anger at President Obama. This is the highlight:

“We don’t need illegals,” says a white-bearded protester into his megaphone. “Send ‘em all back. Send ‘em back with a bullet in the head the second time.”

The man goes on to cite Thomas Jefferson, saying “Read what Jefferson said about the Tree of Liberty — it’s coming, baby.”

What Jefferson actually said was: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

It’s getting ugly.

“NOT EVEN ONE JUSTICE APPROVED SOTOMAYER IN RICCI CASE,” blares the headline of a statement from Wendy Long, counsel to the Judicial Confirmation Network, on the Supreme Court’s decision.

“Frank Ricci finally got his day in court, despite the judging of Sonia Sotomayor, which all nine Justices of U.S. Supreme Court have now confirmed was in error,” she writes.

Huh?  Today’s ruling, as I noted before, was 5-4. Five justices voted to require the city to present more evidence — what the Supreme Court calls “a strong basis in evidence” — that if the city had not thrown out the results of a promotional exam that had a disparate impact on minorities, then it would have been legally liable to any racial minorities denied promotions who sued under the civil rights law.

Setting aside, for a moment, whether that evidentiary burden makes sense, there’s no question that only five of the nine justices supported it. The other four were just fine with the law the way it was, and believed that the city had presented sufficient evidence to satisfy its decision.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for the four justices in dissent, questioned the court’s “newly announced strong-basis-in-evidence” standard and recites in painstaking detail the evidence supporting the city’s decision. She went on to note that since the majority is announcing “a new legal rule,” then it should remand the case to allow the lower courts to apply it, since they didn’t have notice before that that’s what the rule was. “[T]he ordinary course is to remand and allow the lower courts to apply the rule in the first instance,” she wrote, chastising the majority for not following that usual course and instead deciding against the city of New Haven.

Within hours after the decision, conservatives had turned this notion that the majority should have remanded the case if it was going to decide a new legal rule into the idea that the four dissenting justices had repudiated Sotomayor and the reasoning of the Second Circuit panel on which she sat.

“This was a unanimous decision that the 2nd circuit was incorrect,” said Gail Heriot, a professor at the University of San Diego School of Law on a conference call organized by the Federalist Society this morning. “Nobody agreed with Sotomayor. Nobody.”

As Long continues in her release:

“Usually, poor performance in any profession is not rewarded with the highest job offer in the entire profession.

“What Judge Sotomayor did in Ricci was the equivalent of a pilot error resulting in a bad plane crash. And now the pilot is being offered to fly Air Force One.

Well, that’s not how Justice Ginsburg and her co-dissenters see it, as they made clear in this passage:

Applying what I view as the proper standard to the record thus far made, I would hold that New Haven had ample cause to believe its selection process was flawed and not justified by business necessity. Judged by that standard, petitioners have not shown that New Haven’s failure to certify the exam results violated Title VII’s disparate-treatment provision.

UPDATE: Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) has weighed in with his view of today’s Supreme Court decision in the Ricci case, and — suprise! — he reads the 5-4 decision as a 9-0 against Sotomayor, just like Wendy Long and the Federalist Society lawyers do:

Today’s decision is a victory for evenhanded application of the law. Saying the earlier decision was “antithetical to the notion of a workplace where individuals are guaranteed equal opportunity regardless of race,” the Supreme Court saw the case for what it is: a “race-based decision” that violates federal law. And while the Justices divided on the outcome, all nine Justices were critical of the trial court opinion that Judge Sotomayor endorsed. [Emphasis added.]

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Signs from a June 1 George Tiller vigil in Washington, D.C. (Flickr: pdeonarain)

The fatal shooting allegedly by a known white supremacist at the Holocaust Memorial Museum Wednesday in Washington is the second murder apparently motivated by a hateful ideology that’s come to national attention in the last two weeks. James W. von Brunn, the 88-year-old suspect and convicted felon, was well-known for sending mass e-mail messages such as “It’s time to kill all the Jews” and promoting elaborate conspiracy theories on his Website. Similarly, Scott Roeder, the 51-year-old accused of murdering abortion provider Dr. George Tiller in his Wichita, Kans. church, had a long history of ties to a violent right-wing extremist group, had previously threatened another abortion provider, and had just that week vandalized Tiller’s clinic.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Just as federal law specifically penalizes hate crimes, the law also makes it a federal crime to threaten or commit violence against abortion providers, or to vandalize their clinics. Yet as TWI revealed last week, the criminal law was not being enforced. The day after Dr. George Tiller was murdered, TWI obtained data revealing that under the Bush administration, criminal enforcement of the federal law designed to protect abortion providers and clinics had declined by more than 75 percent over the last eight years.

But there’s also a civil component to that federal law, known as the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, or FACE Act. That part of the law allows the attorney general to seek an injunction and compensatory damages for anyone who’s been harmed by any activity that violates the law. And it turns out that the Department of Justice over the last eight years didn’t use that part of the law to protect abortion providers, either.

Under the FACE Act, in addition to criminal charges, the Justice Department can obtain damages and an injunction against anyone who “by force or threat of force or by physical obstruction, intentionally injures, intimidates or interferes with or attempts to injure, intimidate or interfere with” anyone who provides or receives reproductive health services. It also allows the government to prosecute and sue anyone who “intentionally damages or destroys the property” of an abortion clinic, because they are frequently vandalized as part of protesters’ intimidation tactics. The clinic where Dr. Tiller worked, for example, was repeatedly vandalized, including just days before his murder.

Yet despite these broad powers that Congress granted the attorney general in 1994 to prevent and combat violence against abortion clinics and providers, the Bush administration almost never used them. From 2000 until 2008, during the eight years of the Bush administration, the Justice Department filed only one civil case under the FACE Act. From 1994 until 1999, in contrast, in just five years of the Clinton administration, the Department filed 17 civil cases under the FACE Act — in addition to its much heavier load of criminal cases that we’ve reported before.

It’s possible, of course, that the law was so effective in its early years that it deterred all future violations. “I do think that the statute was very effective,” and “for the most part there were fewer complaints coming to us,” said Cathleen Mahoney, vice president and general counsel of the National Abortion Federation and director of the Justice Department’s Task Force on Violence Against Reproductive Health Care Providers until 2006.

But crime statistics provided by the National Abortion Federation show that violence did not stop when the Bush administration came into office. The group reports 3,291 acts of violence against abortion providers in the United States and Canada between 2000 and 2008 – and that’s only the number of incidents they know about. (The total number of incidents in the U.S. alone was not available.) The group warns on its Website that “actual incidents are likely much higher.” That number does not include threats, vandalism and harassment, which are also violations of the FACE Act.

The NAF — the organization that most closely tracks such data in the United States — also reports that between 2000 and 2008 there were at least 17 cases of “extreme” violence against abortion providers in the United States, such as arson, stabbing and bomb attacks. At least 607 letters threatening Anthrax contamination (they did not actually contain anthrax) were sent to abortion providers between 2000 and 2002 alone. During the entire eight years of the Bush administration, the federal government prosecuted only 11 individuals for any acts of violence against abortion clinics or providers.

Former Attorney General John Ashcroft, although opposed by many abortion-rights advocates for his vehement opposition to keeping abortion legal, did prosecute the infamous anti-abortion activist and convicted felon Clayton Lee Waagner for the anthrax threats, which attracted significant public attention because they were sent just after lawmakers and news organizations received letters containing anthrax spores, prompting nationwide fears of deadly biological terror attacks.

Waagner was an easy target: a fugitive who’d escaped from jail in February 2001 while awaiting sentencing on federal weapons charges, he was already on the FBI’s Top Ten Most Wanted List, the U.S. Marshals Service Fifteen Most Wanted List, and the Ten Most Wanted List of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. He was arrested in November 2001 and promptly claimed responsibility for over 550 anthrax threat letters sent to abortion providers in October and November. The letters were signed by the Army of God, an extremist anti-abortion organization that openly advocates violence against specific physicians who provide abortions. Waagner’s supporters in the Army of God, however, were not prosecuted or even sued for civil damages or injunctions under the FACE Act, although the group was responsible for distributing a manual that supplies detailed instructions for attacking abortion clinics, manufacturing bombs and cutting off the hands of abortion doctors, according to SourceWatch. The FBI has characterized the prosecution of Waagner as a “counterterrorism case,” suggesting that the “Army of God” is considered a domestic terrorist organization by federal law enforcement.

Yet despite the prosecution of Waagner in 2001, the Army of God today continues to do much the same thing. The group and its members continue to support and advocate the murder of abortion providers. Its Website, for example, on Wednesday celebrated the Tiller murder in this banner headline: “The lives of innocent babies scheduled to be murdered by George Tiller are spared by the action of American hero Scott Roeder. George Tiller the Babykiller reaped what he sowed and is now in eternal hell.” It commends previous convicted murderers of abortion doctors as “heroes,” and continues to host the “Nuremberg Files,” a notorious list of the names of abortion providers and recipients, with a line through those that have been killed and  names grayed of those who have been murdered. (The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in 2002 found that these constituted threats to the doctors.) As Rachel Maddow recently described the Army of God’s current Website on MSNBC: “You can actually scroll through pages and pages of mug shots and descriptions of bombings and shootings and murders and attempted murders — all praising the perpetrators, and even suggesting ways to get away with the same types of crimes that these people committed but you could do it without getting caught.”

Although such conduct has in the past led to violence, the threats are often not prosecuted by local police. According to Dr. Susan Robinson, who used to perform abortions at the same Wichita clinic as Dr. Tiller did before it was closed: “they allow the anti-abortion protesters to set up dozens of crosses and leave them all day. Dr. Tiller went to the city attorney over the crosses, and complained that people block the clinic driveway,” she told journalist Amy Goodman. “He told me that the city attorney said, ‘I would rather be sued by George Tiller than the anti-abortion folks.’ ”

The federal law was enacted in part to fill in the gaps when local authorities refused or lacked the resources to bring charges. “Often local police won’t enforce the local laws against trespassing,” explained Mahoney, the former federal prosecutor. “It’s politically charged and local police want to stay out of it.” During her tenure at the Department of Justice, Mahoney said it was the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department that was charged with enforcing the FACE Act. That’s the same division that Inspector General reports and Congressional hearings eventually revealed repeatedly made hiring and enforcement decisions based on conservative political ideology rather than merit.

In the one situation in the last eight years that the Bush Justice Department decided did merit a lawsuit, in 2007, the charges were so serious that it’s not clear why the administration filed a civil suit rather than criminal charges. The federal government sought only an injunction – essentially, a court order telling the defendant to stop.

But this was no mere schoolyard-style harassment. According to the legal complaint filed by the Justice Department, John Dunkle, another member of the “Army of God”, had been publishing a monthly Web newsletter “encouraging readers of his publications to use deadly force against specifically identified reproductive health clinic physicians and staff, providing instruction on how to employ deadly force tactics; provoking physical and verbal confrontations with reproductive health clinic physicians, staff and patients at various clinics” and “publishing internet postings containing photographs and the home addresses of reproductive health clinic physicians and staff,” among other things.

The government also claimed that he “threatened a specific female clinic physician until she ceased providing reproductive health services in fear of the Defendants’ threats to her life.”

Those threats included “explicitly encourag[ing] his readers to kill the targeted individual by shooting her in the head”; publishing her name, photo and home address on his Web page and blog; and publishing instructions “regarding the specific means to kill the targeted individual, as well as how to escape detection upon the commission of her murder.” Such postings dated back more than two years, identifying the same person.

There is no question that such threats are criminal under the federal law, say legal experts. “Physical obstruction is not protected, violence is not protected and true threats are not protected,” said Louise Melling, Director of the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project, which has submitted several amicus briefs to courts defending the constitutionality of the federal law. A “true threat” has been defined by the courts has a threat that would reasonably be interpreted by the person hearing it as a serious threat to their safety.

Yet in the case of John Dunkle, whose threats caused a reproductive health provider to quit her profession, the government did not seek criminal penalties or even any monetary damages to compensate the victims and deter future crimes; it simply asked the court to tell him to stop.

Department of Justice spokesman Alejandro Miyar said that department officials decide whether or not to prosecute or seek damages in cases “on a case-by-case basis, and a number of factors are taken into account, including — among others — whether there is an identifiable subject and whether the matter is being pursued by local officials.” He was not aware of whether Dunkle had been prosecuted for related acts under state law, and there was no indication in the documents filed in the federal case that he had been.

Threats against abortion providers appears to have had a serious impact on the availability of the procedure, and particularly on the ability of women to obtain legal later-term abortions, even when the pregnancy threatens the woman’s life. According to the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit organization focused on sexual and reproductive health research, only two percent of all abortion providers in the United States currently provide such procedures, which are most heavily targeted by extremist anti-abortion groups. Women most commonly seek such abortions due to abnormalities of the fetus and threats to a woman’s health or life, and in many states they’re only legal if the woman’s health or life is in danger. Dr. Tiller and his clinic were therefore frequent targets of both violent threats and actions, up until the day before his death.

The FACE Act was adopted to prevent and prosecute this sort of violence, in part because Congress concluded that existing state laws and local law enforcement were unable to do the job on their own.

When President Clinton signed the FACE Act in 1994, he said: “We simply cannot – we must not – continue to allow the attacks, the incidents of arson, the campaigns of intimidation upon law-abiding citizens that (have) given rise to this law,” citing the murder of Dr. David Gunn in Florida in 1993, and the shooting of Dr. Tiller in both arms outside his clinic in Wichita that same year.

“No person seeking medical care, no physician providing that care should have to endure harassments or threats or obstruction or intimidation or even murder from vigilantes who take the law into their own hands because they think they know what the law ought to be.”

The statistics on enforcement of the FACE Act by the Justice Department suggest that during the Bush administration, protecting those physicians was no longer a high priority.

According to the White House’s experts, President Obama’s just chosen an extremely cautious, legalistic nit-picker.

“She’s a lawyer’s lawyer,” said Paul Smith, a partner at Jenner & Block who participated in the call.

“She’s someone who cares about the craft, about the details of facts,” he said. “She’s a cautious lawyer….who was a corporate lawyer herself….She reads statutes narrowly.”

Harvard Law Professor Martha Minow described Sotomayor’s decision in a securities case that turned on the how Sotomayor read the word “buyer.” In fact, she read the law so literally that the Supreme Court reversed her, said Minow: “they said, ‘let’s be not so stingy’ ” about it.

Sotomayor’s opinions, according to Kevin Russell, a partner at Howe & Russell who writes for SCOTUSblog, reveal a “judicial modesty” that’s “very respectful of precedent.”  In a case brought by the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy, for example, she rejected a challenge to President George W. Bush’s “global gag rule,” which prevented foreign organizations receiving U.S. funding from using their own money to provide abortions or abortion assistance.

Russell added that Sotomayor has also shown herself to be very deferential to the judgments of government agencies. When passengers were bumped from a flight by an airline and claimed it was due to racial discrimination, Sotomayor  ruled that the anti-discrimination laws are trumped by the international Warsaw Convention, which regulates the liability of airlines in international flights.

“Judge Sotomayor is not the sort of judge who sees it as her role to reverse every decision she disagrees with,” said Russell.

As a result, experts agree that it will be difficult to predict how she’d rule on issues like the breadth of the Second Amendment, gay rights, or other civil rights matters that have yet to come before her.

“There isn’t any indication that she has a broad reading of the liberty clause or due process clause,” said Minow.  “At the same time she is a master of the interpretation of law and relating of law to fact,” she said. “She would be participating in the careful application of the constitution to facts.”

Sometimes, those applications have disappointed even plaintiffs in discrimination cases, where her own comments might suggest that Sotomayor would be more sympathetic.

In 1999, for example, she ruled against a black nurse who claimed she’d been fired due to her race, age and a disability. Sotomayor allowed the nurse to move ahead with the disability claim, but threw out the other claims.

“There was ample evidence that the hospital had accommodated white nurses with similar disabilities,” Glenn Greenwald, now a Salon columnist but then a lawyer for the nurse, told The Wall Street Journal. “She rather coldly dismissed what I thought were good claims.”

So it’s starting to sound like Obama nominated a highly capable technocrat. Setting aside her personal story of achievement against all odds, is her approach to the law the sort of change that Obama’s more progressive supporters will believe in?

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Andrew Lee Patterson identifies himself as the state leader of the National Socialist Movement, Oregon Unit, and said he has been a “storm trooper, first class” with the movement for about six months. Other unit leaders from around the state selected him as leader based on his active involvement, he said.

The 29-year-old with a shaved head said he and his staff in Phoenix coordinate activity around the state, while a local unit focuses on recruiting and Southern Oregon issues — especially illegal immigration and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

More seriously, reporter Anita Burke mentions in her story that “the Department of Homeland Security issued a report warning that right-wing extremist groups, including white supremacists, have boosted recruiting and mobilizing efforts,” and there’s no mention of the way House Republicans are angrily demanding apologies and firings for the suggestions in the report. That story might not be playing as an “outrage” beyond the Beltway and talk radio.

House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) declined to offer a comment on calls for Napolitano’s resignation.

Look, if Boehner doesn’t even want to comment, then it’s not happening. This should be called out for what it is: the far-right wing of the House GOP making the rest of the party look bad by doubling down on a faux controversy that the leadership only wanted to use for a news cycle of “defending the troops.”

To wit, here’s Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) — who has called for opponents of the president to get “armed and dangerous” and publicly suggested that Obama wants to force young people into re-education camps — denying that right-wing extremism exists.

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I wrote a book called ‘Religion of Peace’ — which [Little Green Footballs' Charles] Johnson wrote a favorable review of — and I looked, and didn’t find, Christian extremists who were trying to replace the Constitution with Biblical law. They’re a myth. They’re the Santa Claus of the left.

He did say this, but he added the caveat that there are Christian activists who want to institute Biblical law through legal means, and who are extreme, but not terrorists.

The people they invoke are the Christian reconstructionists like [R.J.] Rushdooney, but if you read them they’re open about their agenda. It’s not secret. And they say that they want to bring back Biblical law using Constitutional means.

I didn’t want to get into the weeds on this tangential issue, so I cut this, but it’s important to note that Spencer acknowledges the existence of these sorts of fringe Christian activists.