Plenty of battiness in the GOP belfry lately. Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) wants to deport American citizens, as in the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants. Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) wonders whether the district represented by Rep. Raul Grijalva has been ceded to Mexico. Another Iowan, GOP congressional candidate Pat Bertroche, wants to implant microchips in illegals. And Colorado gubernatorial hopeful Scott McLobbyist thinks Arizona’s fascist immigration law is just peachy.

Have graying Yippies finally infiltrated the GOP? Or it it just that the lead in those Chinese-made flag lapel pins is wreaking havoc with their teensy brainpans?

Linda Greenhouse, who writes about the Supreme Court and the law for The New York Times, says she won’t be visiting Arizona again “as long as it remains a police state, which is what the appalling anti-immigrant bill that Gov. Jan Brewer signed into law last week has turned it into.”

Greenhouse — a Pulitzer Prize winner who teaches at Yale Law School — warns that all the soothing jabber about “reasonable suspicion” and “lawful contact” is so much chin music, a scanty “fig leaf of reassurance,” given that this odious law provides that a person “is guilty of trespassing by being present on any public or private land in this state” while lacking authorization to be in the United States, which she says creates “a new crime of breathing while undocumented,” a lighter shade of DWB (Driving While Black).

She goes on to say that while it’s by no means a safe bet, given the current roster of the Supremes, pre-emption by the federales seems to be the best line of attack, noting that high-court precedents “make clear that immigration is a federal matter and that the Constitution does not authorize the states to conduct their own foreign policies.”

In the meantime, she proposes that “the good people of Arizona — and anyone passing through — walk the streets of Tucson and Phoenix wearing buttons that say: “I Could Be Illegal.'”

That ought to punch their buttons.