(2014-03-17) — President Obama called on the Tea Party movement in the United States to rise up against Sunday’s Crimean vote to secede from Ukraine, a move he has characterized as unconstitutional.

“It’s a violation of the Ukrainian constitution,” Mr. Obama said of Sunday’s referendum in which Crimeans appear to have voted, under the watchful eye of Russian troops, to move into the Russian Federation. “As a former professor of Constitutional law, I’m asking my fellow Constitutionalists in the Tea Party to decry this abrogation of the Ukrainian peoples’ God-given right to self-determination.”

The White House said the president sees the Tea Party as “perhaps the last bulwark of constitutional defense which we urgently need to stand against all enemies foreign and domestic.”

“No charismatic tyrant should be allowed to manipulate the masses into trashing the bedrock of a civil and free society,” said President Obama. “The framers of the Ukrainian constitution understood the clear and present danger of a dynamic foreigner sowing the seeds of internal division and thus tearing this great nation apart. The Tea Party should warn Ukraine that it must unite, or die.”