Over the course of the next two months, the Tea Party movement may become to be seen (to mix a few metaphors) as more of a paper tiger than the tail that wags the Republican dog. To put it a little more concretely, the Tea Party may be losing some of its outsized influence over the Republican Party. It is still too early to state with any degree of certainty (since the Tea Partiers have shown themselves to be impressively resilient on previous occasions), but if Tea Party power is indeed on the wane it could signal a turning point in modern American politics.

Ever since the 2012 election (some would even say before the elections), Republicans have been at each other's throats. There has been an ongoing open civil war between the Tea Party and the Establishment Republican wing of the party. Tea Party tactics have been shown to be not only non-productive but at times downright harmful to the Republican Party as a whole (such as the government shutdown last year). The Tea Partiers, in their neverending quest for political purity, forced the Establishment Republicans currently in office to follow their lead. The Establishment Republicans went along out of fear -- the fear of "being primaried" by a more-pure Tea Party candidate. Was this fear justified, or was it a paper tiger without claws? The answer is different in different states and districts, but as the 2014 primary season truly gets underway it seems the Tea Party doesn't have a whole lot to show for their threats, at least not so far.

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There were two political stampedes this week, both towards and then back away from the same man: rancher Cliven Bundy. Bundy was a strange hero for conservative Republicans to adopt, since he is essentially fighting for his right to be a "taker" (in "conservativese") from the federal government -- a right that he refuses to pay for, and by doing so has broken the law. So he's a law-breaker and he wants to mooch off the public for free -- two traits which conservatives routinely rail against. I guess conservative Republicans can be forgiven, since there was all the excitement of guns and going toe-to-toe with the dastardly gummint agents -- which always causes conservative hearts to swoon.

Then Bundy opened his mouth and shared a few choice thoughts. About "the Negro" in America, and all sorts of other enlightening subjects. Just as quickly as the Republicans had stampeded towards Bundy, they all then executed a move that would have won them the barrel race, by reining in and wheeling about in order to gallop furiously away.

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Former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens has a new book out. In it, he proposes six new amendments to the United States Constitution. Three of these would change language in either the text of the Constitution or its amendments, and the other three are additions to the Constitution's text.

I'm not going to get into explanations of Stevens's proposals, so for more information on them, you'll have to read his book. However, here is the text of all of his proposals (added clauses are in bold), for your contemplation:

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The people who see everything through the lens of partisan politics are currently playing a rather crass game which might be called "guess the date of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's retirement." We'll get to the reasons for playing this game in a bit, but first the point must be made that Justice Ginsburg can stay right where she is for as long as she damn well feels like it. Which is entirely how it should be. Short of impeachment, the decision is hers and hers alone, as the Constitution demands. It matters not one tiny bit what anyone else thinks about her decision, which includes bored pundits looking to stir the partisan pot a bit in a slow news week.

Federal judges are appointed for life. There's a reason for this, and the reason is to avoid politics on the bench. An incoming presidential administration can legally fire all the lawyers in the Justice Department if it so chooses, but it cannot fire a single judge. This gives the judges themselves more independence from politics than anyone else in high office, which is exactly what the lifetime guarantee intended in the first place. Of course, judges can resign at any time, but the decision is solely theirs to make. And they are free to consider -- or not -- the political implications of the timing of their resignation, as they see fit.

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Today is Earth Day, and I'd like to take the occasion to give some credit to an oft-maligned group of people: hippies. I say this in all seriousness, without a trace of condescension or irony whatsoever, since they regularly get that sort of thing elsewhere (by the truckload). I say it because the radicals known as hippies have actually been amazingly victorious in changing American culture in all sorts of ways -- even though they seldom get any credit for pioneering ideas that were once considered (at best) "far out," but are now so mainstream that they fit comfortably in every suburb across the land. And Earth Day is a perfect time to do so, since it is the "hippiest" (to coin a phrase) of all the modern holidays and celebrations.

Now, I realize how a lot of people look down their noses at hippies and sneer -- both now and in the past. For many, in fact, the term is never used without the preface "dirty," which just goes to show how low their public image has almost always been. From the 1960s John Birchers to today's South Park, hippies haven't enjoyed much of a cheering section. Also, I should point out at the start that the term itself has changed over time, so that the hippies of today (or 1996, or 1983...) aren't quite the same as the hippies of the 1960s and early 1970s. I'm mainly going to refer to the original hippie culture of the Summer of Love and San Francisco that (later) moved out to communes to "live off the land," just to be clear. Call them "paleo-hippies," if you will.

What might be called the "triumph of the hippies" (a title I even considered for today's article) is pretty astounding when viewed from a historical perspective. It's a story of radical notions, crazy outside-the-box thinking, and far-out concepts becoming more and more acceptable -- until some of them are so ingrained into everyday life that it's now hard to even comprehend how radical and controversial their origins truly were. I'm going to start with two examples that don't even really fit my main narrative, just because they show how mainstream American public attitudes can change, over time.

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NBC's Sunday morning political talk show Meet The Press has one thing going for it that almost no other television show can lay claim to: it will never ever be cancelled. The reason for this fundamental certainty is that NBC, by continuing the show, can continue to claim that they've got "America's longest-running television show." And NBC is never going to give up that bragging right, for any reason. So the show itself isn't in any kind of trouble, because there will be something airing on Sunday mornings called Meet The Press long after all of us are dead. It's about as permanent as you can get in the media business, in other words. It's been around for well over six decades, and it's not going away any time soon.

On the other hand, whether current host David Gregory is around for very much longer is becoming more of an open question these days, especially after the Washington Post just published a long story about the woeful state of affairs at Meet The Press under Gregory's lead. Ratings are down. Way down -- down to third place, behind both ABC's This Week and CBS's Face The Nation (which is currently leading the ratings pack), although still ahead of Fox News Sunday (which trails far behind in a distant fourth).

While most are focusing on a juicy tidbit from the Post story about a consultant hired to figure out what is wrong -- not with the show, but with Gregory himself -- what struck me was the tenor of the comments on the Washington Post website. Lefties and righties don't much agree on the reasons why, but they do agree on one basic concept: David Gregory is a terrible host. I didn't see a single comment defending him, in fact (although this is a purely subjective sample, I freely admit).

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Three hundred of these columns? To coin a phrase... far out, man.

We'll get to patting ourselves on the back in a bit, but first we'd like to propose a party game for this weekend's big 4/20 festivities across the land. So put this in your (metaphorical) pipe and smoke it.

The rules for this contest are pretty simple. First, you've got to picture a day in the future when the Weed Wars are completely over, with marijuana reform having won the biggest victory of all: a complete change in the federal government's viewpoint. Not just rescheduling, but descheduling, in other words. The feds throw in the towel and decide to treat marijuana not as a dangerous and illegal drug, but as a regulated vice like tobacco and alcohol. In other words, total victory for the reformers.

OK, got that image in your mind? Here's where you need to get creative. If marijuana is descheduled, what would happen to it, in terms of the federal government? Well, they would take it away from the Drug Enforcement Agency and the Office of National Drug Control Policy, and hand it off to the official "vice control" agency. But (and here's where the contest comes in) then they'd have to rename this agency.

The obvious choice would be to add it to what used to just be called "ATF" or sometimes "BATF" -- the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. This name was expanded a while back to include explosives, making "BATFE." Now, the easiest way to change the name gives us a rather strange acronym for the new Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, Explosives, and Marijuana: "BATFEM." Um... we're not sure that's an improvement over "Batgirl," really.

So our challenge is to come up with a better acronym. The rules: you can use either "marijuana" or "cannabis," and you can change "bureau" to "agency" or "commission" or any other governmental collective noun. This means you can add an M or C to the core letters A, T, F, and E; and then use a B or A or C (or whatever) at either end. Got that? So who has a better acronym than BATFEM for the real end to marijuana reform: what to call the bureau or agency that would federally regulate marijuana? This once seemed like pie in the sky -- too much to even hope for -- but is now within the bounds of possibility. So scramble those letters, and post your entries in the comments! Get creative!

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Over the past five or ten years, Democratic politicians have all but completed a full evolution (to use President Obama's term) on the subject of gay marriage. In 2008, both Hillary Clinton and Obama were against gay marriage. In the 2012 election, Obama came out in support while Hillary did so about a nanosecond after she stepped down as Secretary of State. It is now getting tougher and tougher for any Democratic politician to not support gay marriage. As I said, the evolution is almost complete within the party. The question I now ask is how long that evolution is going to take on a different subject: marijuana reform.

The reason the question is in the news is that Maryland's governor, Martin O'Malley, just signed a law which decriminalizes marijuana in his state. This is interesting for a number of reasons, not least of which is that it is no secret that O'Malley sees himself as future presidential material and he'll soon be running hard (for at least Hillary's veep slot in 2016) to achieve this goal. What is more interesting is that O'Malley initially didn't support the bill, and in fact spoke out against it as it was being debated. But now he has signed it, because his own party in the legislature disagreed with O'Malley. It remains to be seen whether he'll actually become a champion of the law or not, but he sure sounds pretty positive about it so far.

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Are political lies constitutionally-protected free speech? That's an intriguing question, and one that the Supreme Court is going to take up next week. What makes the question interesting is how a valid argument could be made either way, no matter what your personal politics. Both sides resent well-funded politicians who blanket the airwaves with what they see as the baldest of falsehoods, but on the other hand political free speech is an absolute bedrock of the American system of government. Where do you draw the line? Should a line even be drawn?

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If life were but a metaphor, the headlines would now be reading: "Train Does Not Wreck, Pulls Into Station 7 Minutes Early." Of course, I am speaking of Obamacare, a subject which Republicans have all but reduced (in their own minds, at least) to a mumbling mantra: "trainwreck... trainwreck... trainwreck." But as more and more good news appears, the real story (with apologies to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, of course) is "the train which did not wreck in the night."

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