All right, fine, so House Whip Steve Scalise plopped himself down at the National Prayer Breakfast and said a thing, and what do we even do with this:

“This was a nation founded with a deep belief in God. Our founding fathers talked about it when they were preparing to draft the Constitution. In fact, Thomas Jefferson – who was the author of the Constitution – if you go to the Jefferson Memorial right now, go read this inscription from Thomas Jefferson: ‘God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?’

“You can’t separate church from state …. People would say, you know, when you’re voting on issues, how do you separate your faith from the way you vote? Faith is part of who you are.”

This is one of those things that really ought to be ignored by us, and yet the temptation to do otherwise is irresistible. What to do?

First off, Thomas Jefferson was not the author of the Constitution. He wrote the other one, the Declaration of Bugger-Off King George, whose famous lines are forever being confused with the Constitution because modern-day schoolchildren blow through learning about both of them in the span of a week or two and some of those school children grow up, eventually, to be ambitious stains on the nation who give ambitious public speeches without ever once bothering, in the decades between, to thumb through either document before pompously declaring What The Founders Intended In Their Own Minds. It is rote, at this point.

And, as Steve Benen’s rebuttal points out, Jefferson was one of the nation’s most aggressive advocates of that separation between church and state. The man spent more than a little time contemplating the divide between faith and religion, and his pointed thoughts on the matter have been grist for historians and academics and preachers alike for two centuries now; Jefferson was a veritable quote machine when it came to the need for government to butt out of organized religious expression. And we’re not even going to go through any of that here because it would be abso-tootly pointless. Go look it up if you want to—this isn’t a college course, I don’t have a tweed jacket and if you’re in ruinous debt right now, it’s for reasons other than textbook acquisition.

The reason we know that whole discussion would be pointless? Scalise’s second pronouncement. Declaring Thomas Jefferson to be the real author of the Constitution is small potatoes compared to this dreck, which is the equivalent of exhuming Jefferson’s corpse and using his skull as a spittoon.