One can get so used to watching career party politicians stretch, bend, fold, spindle, mutilate or openly flout the Constitution that it comes as a shock when one of them actually makes a correct reference to it.

And that correct reference when wielded by a courageous legislator can be a “shock and awe” spectacle striking fear in appointed bureaucrats who have never seen the Constitution used as it was designed.

Just such a case has happened recently as Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R) Minn. as a member of the House Financial Services Committee asks a question that is rarely uttered and obviously a subject of dread among both the unelected nomenklatura and the elected representatives in attendance. The question that wreaked such havoc? “What provision in the Constitution can you point to to give authority for the actions that have been taken by the Treasury since March of  ’08?”

Posted below is a video of the hearing on from Youtube. Things to watch for:

1. Chairman Barney Frank’s seeming (but not shocking) gender confusion. He seems to calls Rep. Bachmann “The gentleman from Minnesota.” Having met and conversed with Rep. Bachmann, this author can testify that there could be no mistaking her for a gentleman.
2. The complete inability of Secretary Geithner to cite a single constitutional delegation of power, explicit or “implied,” for what he, the Treasury Dept. or the Fed are doing to the economy.
3. Fed Chair Ben Bernanke’s a) suicidal tendency to rush in where angels fear to tread b) a complete inability to point to any actual constitutional authority other than an undefined congressional authority to appropriate funds and c) the American public should be kept in the dark because we are too stupid to discern how central banking works.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9DgMG-_6Ls[/youtube]

What Rep. Bachmann gives here is a quick lesson in Constitutional Government 101, a class that should be required for all freshman Representatives and Senators an all members sitting for 2 terms or more. Note too, that Rep. Frank gives a lesson in old-style partisan political hackery. When Bachmann asks a question that will,  frankly, cause Geithner and Bernanke to only make the inescapable hole that they have dug even deeper, he quickly steps in so that they will not have to answer the question, since there is no good answer to it.

This is the kind of representation that Christian constitutionalists want. What we need in the United States Congress is 435  Michelle Bachmann’s and Ron Paul’s and 100 more like them in the Senate. Then we might, if we are as a nation sufficiently repentant and reliant on Christ as our guide, begin to dig out from the unconstitutional nightmare that is the federal leviathan.