The attention span of American voters is famously short, and today it appears that a majority of independent voters are ready to vote Republicans back into control in Washington, apparently having already forgotten how Republicans’ vaunted conservative principles evaporate the minute they gain power.

Meanwhile, buoyed by Democrats’ bad polling, Republicans are not only measuring the drapes at the Capitol, they’re already returning to their old ways — tossing aside their purported principles in favor of political expediency.

Case in point is a proposal last week from former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich — the smartest conservative in America, per the movie “Idiocracy” — that, in order to satisfy his political goal of degrading Islam, the government should seize the site of World Trade Center as a tactic for stopping construction of the Park 51 Islamic center near New York City Hall:

GINGRICH: I think the Congress has the ability to declare the area a national battlefield memorial because I think we should think of the World Trade Center as a battlefield site; this is a war.

The attorney general of New York, Andrew Cuomo, could intervene because frankly he has the ability to slow it down for decades if he wants to.

I am surprised that Mayor Bloomberg said it was okay and I think that if he reconsiders it, he’ll decide its not.

There are a number of different steps that could be taken. There’s no reason this has to occur and whether it’s city, state, or federal there are plenty of ways for America to stop it.

Just five years ago, conservatives howled when the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Kelo v. New London made it easier for governments to appropriate private property through eminent domain. Now, their smartest guy is suggesting that the government do just that. But he’s not talking about seizing a vacant lot by the railroad tracks. What Gingrich is proposing is that the government should commandeer one of the priciest tracts of land in the world — not for some high-minded purpose, but as an under-handed way to stifle religious expression of Muslims in Lower Manhattan.

This abrogates conservative principles in at least two ways. First, it flies in the face of the reverence Gingrich and his bagger hordes profess to have for the Constitution, which guarantees religious freedom in its First Amendment. And it is a diametrically opposes the right’s belief that seizing land via eminent domain is the worst of jackboot totalitarianism.

His proposal also ignores two key facts:

First, if the property on which Ground Zero sits — which is the footprint of the former World Trade Center plaza — were to be made sacrosanct, the Park 51 center site would not be affected. As it has been said many times, except, of course, on GOP-Fox television, the Islamic center is at least 200 yards from the northern boundary of the plaza.

Secondly, Ground Zero is now, and has been for decades, principally owned by not one but two governments, the states of New York and New Jersey. These governments have leased the property to public and private developers, who are in the process of building giant office towers on the site. Presumably, if Gingrich were to get his way, the construction of the towers would have to stop.

During the six years that Republicans controlled all three branches of government, they blew up the size of government, borrowed billions and crashed the economy. For those who believe them when they promise they’ll do better this time, this latest big government proposal from the GOP’s biggest thinker should give them pause.