States' Rights: Idaho requires its attorney general to sue the feds if ObamaCare passes while Virginia, the cradle of liberty, heads the line of states in front of the federal courtroom. Somewhere Patrick Henry is smiling.

As the second coming of King George III seeks to impose the leftist mandate of national health insurance on the unwilling American people, the states are once again in revolt. This time they're unwilling to be the colonies of an imperial federal government determined to spend and tax us into bankruptcy while treating the Constitution as if it were bird cage liner.

Is this what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they risked being hanged by the British crown because they said we shouldn't be taxed without representation? Well, we have representation, and they care not about the people they represent. We can now pass laws by not voting on them, almost as if by imperial decree. We have become the Venezuela of Hugo Chavez.

Not amused is Idaho, the latest state to jump into the fray last Wednesday, with Gov. C.L. "Butch" Otter signing into law a measure requiring the state attorney general to sue the federal government if residents are forced to buy health insurance.

"The ivory tower folks will tell you, 'No, they're not going anywhere,'" Otter told reporters. "But I'll tell you what, you got 36 states; that's a critical mass. That's a constitutional mass." Otter shares the belief that nowhere in the U.S. Constitution is a mandate to buy health insurance or anything else. Otter warned House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in December that Idaho was considering such litigation. They yawned.

"What the Idaho Health Freedom Act says is that the citizens of our state won't be subject to another federal mandate or turn over another part of their life to government control," Otter proclaimed.

He believes in the 10th Amendment, in states' rights as defined in the Constitution. All powers not specifically given to the federal government belong to the states and to the people. Mandating health insurance is not one of them.

Some would say these states are stepping on Superman's cape, that federal law trumps state law.

Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli says that's true only when the federal law has some basis in the Constitution and is not in itself unconstitutional.

Cuccinelli is the driving force behind Virginia legislation making it unlawful to implement any federal legislation to compel residents to buy health insurance. He also warned Pelosi in a letter that Virginia would take legal action if the House employed "deem and pass" to enact sweeping nationalization of health care.

"If they ignore these constitutional requirements, we're not going to ignore them," Cuccinelli said recently on MSNBC. "We are going to defend the text of the Constitution."

This is not the "living Constitution" of activist judges and ambitious politicians seeking to "fundamentally transform" America, as President Obama said shortly before his election. This is the Constitution of limited powers and limited government, the one envisioned by Thomas Jefferson when he said government is best which governs least.

The states, as sovereign entities, granted express and limited powers to the federal government by way of the U.S. Constitution, Cuccinelli notes, not the other way around.

"For too long," he wrote recently in the Washington Examiner, "the federal government has operated as if it granted authority and freedom to the people and the states. It's time to start returning this system to its proper balance."

It's crunch time, fourth and goal for the liberal leviathan. We are seeing both sausage and history being made. What the administration and the Congress are trying to do is insane. But, yes, Virginia, in the Constitution there is a sanity clause.