There is a meme out there in the radical Republican Party about Shariah (Islamic law based on the Qur’an and other works) being imposed here in the United States. It has so much acceptance that a supposed 2012 Republican Presidential candidate, Newt Gingrich, could call for a Federal law banning it, at the Value Voters summit in Washington and get a standing ovation. To say that this kind of crazy gets right up my nose is an understatement on the level of saying the razing of Carthage was a minor property dispute.

It is hard to know where to start in on the stupid on this issue, but let’s begin on a point near and dear to my heart, the Constitution. The First Amendment makes it clear when it says:

Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

That means all religions, not just one. There is also the Article VI, Clause 2, the Supremacy Clause which makes the Constitution, Federal Laws and Treaties the supreme law of the land. No other law can supersede these laws, whether they be religious laws or State laws.

This whole “their going to try to impose Shariah!!” hysteria is just that, fear mongering to whip up the base of the increasingly insane Republican Party. What is particularly galling about all of this is the level of unselfconscious hypocrisy that goes along with these fears of religious law being established in the United States.

Today, Representative Ed Markey pushed this story back to the forefront with a Huffington Post piece. After setting the record straight on Romney’s falsehood and explaining the urgency of clean energy legislation, Markey finishes strong:

So the next time you hear Mitt Romney or other opponents of clean energy and climate legislation railing about the costs of action, you should multiply your suspicion by whatever number they are attempting to sell. Odds are, it is far from even-handed.

While this is a solid piece, and Representative Markey makes his case well, he barely mentions the other Republican politicians who have repeated this lie. I understand the value of pegging this on a potential 2012 Presidential candidate, but there are over a dozen current elected officials in the Republican party who have repeated this lie as well.

Since I last updated the count a few weeks ago, eight additional Republican politicians and party organizations have repeated the lie, bringing the total to 20.

I noted yesterday that Mitt Romney had picked up on the $1,761 cap and trade lie over the weekend, telling a starstruck audience at the hyper-conservative value voters summit that cap and trade legislation would “would cost the average American family $1,761 a year.”

Evidence has now surfaced that Romney told the $1,761 lie at least once before the summit began, in this interview with Human Events on Friday the 18th. Note the difficultly with which Romney struggles to explain not only how this is supposedly a 15% tax, but also the exact purpose of cap and trade legislation.

I mentioned last week that both CBS and Politico were forced to issue corrections on pieces they published citing inflated cost-estimates of a version of climate legislation that was never considered by Congress.

Despite immediate and forceful pushback from the Treasury Department, the Congressional Budget Office and environmental groups, solid reporting by the Wonk Room and the Washington Post, and thorough debunkings by Media Matters and Politifact, several leading GOP elected officials have begun citing the highly misleading figure.