How Republicans are explaining the constitutionality of every bill they introduce.

It's Democrats, largely, who stick to the Commerce Clause for (largely doomed) legislation that would restore funding that Republicans want to cut. And Democrats act most interested in the rule when Republicans seem to be breaking it. When Rep. Joe Pitts, R-Pa., filed a statement calling the Affordable Care Act "unconstitutional" without citing a specific part of the Constitution, Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y., tore into him and told him to "follow the rules." But Pitts' bill got a vote anyway.

On March 15, the day Lamborn introduced his NPR defunding bill, there were 34 other pieces of legislation. All but six of them cited Article I, Section 8, most of them pointing to Clause 3, the Commerce Clause. Only occasionally does someone go the extra mile. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., did that after introducing a bill that would have expedited visas for two noncitizens. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, did it, sort of, after introducing his annual bill to create a U.S. Department of Peace:"Congress has the power to enact this legislation pursuant to the following: The preamble to the Constitution has the following injunction: '… to promote domestic tranquility.' This is the purpose of the bill."

Rarely, a legislator uses his statement to lecture the hall about the wisdom of the founders. Right before Congress recessed last week, Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., a freshman who won with the backing of the Tea Party, introduced the Competitive Health Insurance Reform Act of 2011. He submitted, for the Congressional Record, a statement citing the authority of Article I, Section 8, Clause 3, but continued with eight paragraphs of history and precedent, from the 19^th century to the 21^st, from United States v. South-Eastern Underwriters Association (1944) to the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. *

Gosar is a dentist by training, but when he introduced his bill, he did it with the gravity of a judge in the final scenes of a Grisham airport novel. "The interstate Commerce Clause does not, as some have suggested, contain federal powers that are unlimited," Gosar said. "Indeed, the original application of this clause was quite narrow, as most aptly described in Federalist No. 42. In that tract, James Madison explains that the purpose undergirding the regulation of commerce among the States was to prevent each state from imposing taxes, duties or tariffs on goods from another state that would in effect limit trade among the states and create animus that 'would nourish unceasing animosities, and not improbably terminate in serious interruptions of the public tranquility.' We follow here today, however, an accepted and long standing interpretation of the Commerce Clause that is not broad in that it regulates actual commerce involved between or transacted across state lines."

The very next piece of legislation introduced that day was the Emergency Mortgage Relief and Neighborhood Stabilization Programs Cost Recoupment Act of 2011, from Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass. He was more concise. "Congress has the power to enact this legislation pursuant to the following: Article I, Section 8, Clause 3 (the Commerce Clause)." Over and out.

Correction, March 25, 2011: This article originally referred to the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1990. (Return to the corrected sentence.)