Alert: Conservatives, Tea Party's, Trying to take ownership of the Constitution.

For me, this is not a new story, but a newer movement to own the past. Glenn Beck is currently trying to take ownership and "re-energize" the "I've Got a Dream" speech. The conservative activist Supreme Court has redefined the Second Amendment and corporate free speech rights in the First Amendment.

But what's worse could be the tea party and courts unrelenting attempts to own the Constitution without a whimper or an aggressive fight to turn them back. We can always debate the meaning, but we can't take back the prevailing "marketed" identity of our founding document, once the opposition has defined it. It's called positioning. "Defining" whatever it is, before someone else does. No one does this better than Republicans, who have no specific national solutions to call their own, but can't stop talking about how much worse the country is due to the Democrats. The Washington Post explains:

"Tea party" activists across the nation tried to put the "independence" back in Independence Day … with … gatherings focused on the Constitution -- and how to use it for political gain. Coupled with an upsurge in organized classes and book clubs, the trend reflects a growing effort among conservatives to teach supporters how to do political battle using an inviolable weapon: the nation's founding documents … by arming supporters with the detailed knowledge to back only those candidates who are loyal to their ideals.

Debatable ideals that neither ideology owns. That healthy "ideal" allows for compromise, utilizing the best and strongest ideas from both sides, or at least provides a great alternative back up plan. What we're seeing now is a desire for a total takeover, one nation, one thought.

Kerry Scott, an organizer of the Alexandria Tea Party …"And having an understanding of the Constitution can lead to electing people who will uphold it."

A Constitutional understanding that may be wrong, and blindly obedient to the words and not the broader meaning. Like the following:

The view that the Constitution does not permit such federal actions as the passage of health reform, the regulation of the environment or the imposition of educational mandates on the states is, of course, a controversial one. Where the tea party sees an encroachment of states' rights, the left sees a valid interpretation of the mandate, described in Article 1, Section 8, to provide for the "general welfare."

Scott and others look primarily to the Constitution's 10th Amendment, which grants to the states all powers not specifically given to the federal government. Like those on the left, they also point to Article 1, Section 8, which enumerates Congress's specific powers, including the right to tax and to regulate commerce. Some conservative activists also point to the 17th Amendment, but in this case they oppose it. That amendment established direct election of U.S. senators by popular vote rather than appointment by their state legislatures. The thinking in that case is that the amendment removed the powerful Senate from control by the states.

Of course, those individuals who have nothing to do with the original meaning of the Constitution have an equal say in what direction the country takes:

Groups distributed pocket-sized copies of the Constitution and advertised 12-week classes they've organized to study it. They also promoted weekly book clubs, where they are reading such titles as "Capitalism and Freedom," economist Milton Friedman's manifesto on free markets, and "The Five Thousand Year Leap," in which anti-communist W. Cleon Skousen asserts that the United States is a Christian nation whose founders were guided by the Bible.

Freidman's greed and Skousen's unhistorical belief in a Christian nation is proof there is a partisan agenda here, that picks and chooses what the founders personally meant (through some time travel hot tub psychic connection). But like the terrifying 2,000 page health care reform bill, the hundreds of volumes of tax code and now the many pocket size Constitutions, large numbers matter most.

"I've read the Constitution 20 times in the past two months," said Brock Price, the Va., farmer who organized "An American Event" Saturday. "People are ignoring it. Politicians do not know anymore what's right and what's wrong."

Ah, the intricacies of Constitutional law.