This week, DeMint announced that he would employ his senatorial privileges to put a hold on virtually all legislation until after the midterm elections. After which, he anticipates giddily, the clown car will stop at the steps of the Capitol and disgorge its contents, all of whom will have the propellers on their beanies spinning in the same direction as his. This is what democratic self-government has come down to in the 21st Century — a coup DeMint.
He doesn't really have a grip on the etiquette, though. Usually, when you seize control of the government, the first thing you do is grab the radio station, so you can explain why you did it, and then you blockade the airports to make sure you have an audience. Of course, Jim DeMint hasn't had to bother with all that. He has the Senate Rules, and he has the will to use them, and he is, after all, from South Carolina, which has always considered its membership in the United States of America to be largely honorary.
This attitude began with John C. Calhoun, who was, hands down, more brilliantly wrong than any other person in American history. Calhoun dedicated his life to developing the doctrine of nullification, which cheesed off Andrew Jackson and, ultimately, was the philosophical basis for one side of the Civil War. (Calhoun based a lot of his thinking on the work of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison during the crisis over the Alien and Sedition Acts. However, what he was doing with it made Madison so queasy that, in an 1832 letter, aging Jemmy referred to nullification as "...so monstrous that it would seem impossible that it should be sustained by any of the most sympathizing States." Madison saw where this was heading.)
Later, South Carolina gave us Strom Thurmond and his bold stand against treating black people like actual Americans; an evil, hypocritically miscegenatious mountebank who wrecked the Democratic party morally for decades. (Thurmond's now considered so loathsome by the rest of the country that he managed to ruin Trent Lott's career by proxy.)
Do read it all.