The idea of governments laying a super-high tax on the sale of guns is starting to take hold, according to the latest dispatch from Americans for Tax Reform. Its story is linked on the Web site of Matt Drudge, whose nose for news is a medical miracle because of its uncanny ability to spot constitutional absurdities before other editors. Americans for Tax Reform quotes the governor of the United States territory of the North Mariana Islands as asserting that a thousand-dollar-a-gun tax should serve as a “role model” for states.

What’s so astonishing about this story is the possibilities it opens for government revenues. They’re almost endless. If, after all, the government can lay a thousand dollar a tax on the guns, that adds up to real money. There were in 2015 more than a record 23 million background checks for gun sales in America. If all those went through in the face of a $1,000 tax a gun, the government would be hauling in $23 billion. What a temptation to start taxing the rest of the exercise of other activities protected by the bill of rights.

Just think of it. You could start with a tax on prayer, another activity that the Bill of Rights prohibits the government from banning outright (or even, not to put too fine a point on it, abridging). If we’re processing 23 million background checks for guns, why, there must be trillions of prayers directed toward G-d. At a thousand dollars a pop, that would be quadrillions of dollars in government revenues, enough to refund all the unjust income taxes paid in recent years.

For that matter, the government could tax Americans for not quartering troops in their homes in times of peace. There are something like 125 million households at America. If one were to tax each of them a thousand dollars a peacetime night for not having troops quartered in them, the government would be rolling in dough. You wouldn’t even have to (though we suppose you could anyhow) tax an American a thousand dollars for each time he demanded to see a search warrant.

Then again, too, the government could slap a one thousand dollar tax on every person who invokes the Fifth Amendment right not to be forced to testify against oneself. Think of it. The government could tax the New York Times for every copy of every editorial it issues; if someone clicked on one of its anti-gun editorials, a thousand dollars could be deducted directly from the Times’s bank account and sent to the IRS. It could be a way of evening things out. The tax on guns could be met with a tax on opposing guns.

One of the astonishing things about this concept is that it pleases the Democratic Party nomenklatura. It got an endorsement three years ago from one of Chicago’s most famous left-wing politicians, Toni Preckwinkle; that occasioned the first New York Sun editorial on the idea of a tax on the Bill of Rights. The Americans for Tax Reform story linked on the Drudge Report includes a video of Hillary Clinton testifying before the Senate in 1993 in favor of a tax on the second article of the Bill of Rights. And she’s the smartest person in the Democratic Party, something to remember in the current campaign.