Weary of the mountain of lard buckets from all over America piling up in the halls, Raleigh Republicans are greasing the skids to restore the old Constitution.

One of the more curious aspects of American Gerrymandered Conservatism is the tendency of its beneficiaries to confuse a lack of effective challenge with omniscience.

We won all, therefore, we know all.

Yet even as they claim the Founders were divinely inspired, the denizens of the Right treat the Constitution not so much as a longer form of the Decalogue as a rough draft of The Handmaid's Tale.

Even Ted Cruz, who acts like the Constitution is a sexual fetish object, wants a document more customized- and inflatable- to suit his whimsies. In his snarling 2016 campaign romp he peddled no fewer than six new amendments.

So it's little surprise that the GOP members of the North Carolina General Assembly- who collectively sold their souls to a Koch Bros satrap, Art Pope, in 2010, and re-upped their IOU's in '12, '14, and '16- are doing their lords' work in calling for a Second Constitutional Convention to scrap the whole thing and remake it in their own graven images.

Senate Joint Resolution 36 is, on its face, an innocuous document. It calls for a gathering "limited to proposing amendments to the United States Constitution that impose fiscal restraints on the federal government, limit the power and jurisdiction of the federal government, and limit the terms of office for its officials and for members of Congress."

Of course, when you assemble a conclave wth the power to rewrite a nation's genetic code, it's hard to believe the honorables will be able to stop at just three topics (although that middle one contains multitudes).

There are guns to be liberated, sex to be regulated, and inequalities to be adumbrated.

Never mind that term limits and a balanced budget are unicorns Republicans have promised us for decades- remember the Contract with America in 1994?- and didn't deliver with the majorities America's chuckleheaded voters gave them.

They can do it Monday morning, too. But writing one's personal whimsies into a constitution is never about now, but later. Not about what I should do, but what you can't do.

North Carolina's 3/5-majority Republican state senate passed SJR 36 April 26, 29-20 (20% of the GOP caucus said hell to the no on this one).  One of the bill's main sponsors, Norman Sanderson, has even been working out in his fantasy intellectual gym:

Sanderson said he participated in a mock convention that came up with amendments for a balanced budget, for term limits for Congress and judges, and for states to be able to reverse a U.S. Supreme Court decision if 75 percent decide to overturn it.

The all-white, all Republican, all-but-one male sponsors of the Resolution invite comparison with the Founders. Hailing from the state's classic incubators of lunacy- the coast and the Smokies, where other recent brainwaves include developing a state currency in gold only, reinstating "normal" marriage, eliminating the right to vote for as many as possible, legalizing hit and run driving, and removing a constitutional ban on secession- they include a "consultant" who has never done anything but serve in the legislature since graduating college, two small biz owners, a statistician, an optometrist, and a real estate agent. The last, Joyce Krawiec, won fame in January for trumptweeting- it's like drunkdialing, only all thumbs- this advice:

A crowd in what is now Charlotte passed the first call for independence from Britain in 1775. North Carolina then embarked on an embrace of freedom and democracy that included pretty much every retrograde idea of the next two hundrd years, including rejecting the constitutional amendment giving women the vote (first use of the greased skillet argument).

So this is nothing new, eh?