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Posts Tagged ‘Tea Party Movement’
August 15th, 2012 at 2:56 pm
We Are NOT Knuckle-Draggers, But Cut Boehner Some Slack

House Speaker John Boehner got himself in hot water last night when he appeared to be saying that people who opposed TARP were knuckle-draggers. I think it is very fair to assume, on close examination, that he did not mean, nor does he believe, that to be the case.

I explain the whole thing here.

The key new thing to report is the clarifying statement I received from the Speaker’s office, which responded with admirable promptness:

“The Speaker said Paul Ryan is a practical conservative, and that Paul Ryan is not a knuckledragger.  He did not say those who opposed TARP are knuckledraggers, and he does not believe TARP opponents are knuckledraggers.  He did not say tea partiers are knuckledraggers, and he does not believe tea partiers are knuckledraggers.  To the contrary, he has enormous respect for the tea party movement, which reflects the will of the American people and their desire for a government that respects our Constitution.  Whether you supported or opposed TARP, we all can agree the crony capitalist philosophy of forcing responsible taxpayers to subsidize irresponsible behavior – perpetuated and perfected under President Obama – has wrecked our economy, and has to end.”

Dave Schnittger

Deputy Chief of Staff

Office of the Speaker

November 15th, 2011 at 4:02 pm
Ramirez Cartoon: Which One Is Closer to 99% of America?
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Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

October 14th, 2011 at 9:50 am
Video: Occupy Wall Street Meets the Tea Parties
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In this week’s Freedom Minute, CFIF’s Renee Giachino contrasts the “Occupy Wall Street” protests with those of the Tea Party and highlights the mainstream media’s double standard in its coverage of the two.

 

July 27th, 2011 at 2:51 pm
Tea Party to GOP: Backing for Your Presidential Nominee Not Assured
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Last week, Ashton took a look at the Tea Party’s irritation with the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Just as in 2008, the Tea Party believes (with good reason) that the NRSC is trying to put its hand on the scales during Republican primaries and shut conservative challengers to establishment incumbents out of key races throughout the nation.

This may not be the biggest stage on which the Tea Party movement refuses to be broken in 2012, however. This will be the first presidential election since the movement has congealed, and Tea Party leaders are making known that they don’t intend to squander their leverage. Per a report on the Daily Caller today:

The country’s largest Tea Party organization is warning that the future GOP presidential nominee shouldn’t automatically count on having the support of its grassroots activists.

“There was some controversy that was created when another Tea Party group came out and said the Tea Party movement would line up behind whoever is the Republican nominee,” Mark Meckler, a national coordinator for the organization, said during a Christian Science Monitor breakfast briefing with reporters Wednesday. “I think that’s presuming an awful lot.”

“Tea Partiers are very independent folks by nature,” he said in response to questions from The Daily Caller, “they make their own decisions, there’s no organization, no leader to tell them what to do.”

Two things are striking about this development. First, the fact that members of the Tea Party — which is now into its third year on the American political scene — still have to explain that they are a leaderless movement unified around a set of loosely-defined core principles is remarkable, particularly when that explanation is directed at Republicans, who should be conversant in Hayek’s concept of “spontaneous order“.

Second, the Tea Party — long predicted to be co-opted by the GOP — is still boldly staking out its independence. That means any Republican presidential candidate hoping to inherit the keys to the White House will have to satisfy the conservative Tea Party base, establishment Republicans, and a fair number of independents. If that sounds like a tough road to hoe, it is. But it comes with one great virtue — any candidate with such a broad appeal would be an electoral lock. And if he (or she) lived up to those principles once sworn in, it could create just the kind of political coalition needed to unwind the dangerous excesses of the Obama years.

September 18th, 2010 at 5:37 pm
Pundits Can’t See the Tea Party Forest for the O’Donnell Trees
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It’s nearly a week later, but on this Sunday talk show-eve we can be guaranteed that tomorrow’s beltway chatter will be dominated by talk of Christine O’Donnell’s upset of Mike Castle in the GOP senate primary in Delaware. To save you the pain of sitting through Meet the Press, This Week, Face the Nation, Fox News Sunday and CNN’s State of the Union, here are the basic talking points you’re going to hear all morning: O’Donnell’s win proves that Tea Party radicals are taking over the GOP, ruining their chances for a majority this year and imperiling the long-term existence of the party.

Put aside the obvious bias of these remarks (remember how two years ago the GOP was imperiled because it was losing? Now apparently it’s imperiled because it’s winning). The truth is a lot more complicated.

It’s undoubtedly true that O’Donnell’s nomination makes it much likelier that Democrats will retain the Delaware seat that used to be held by Joe Biden. Delaware is a solidly blue state and O’Donnell’s deep Republican red — regardless of her virtues or vices — is never going to play as well as Castle’s fuschia statewide.

The Tea Party’s stated goal, however — moving the Republican party closer to the principles of small government — is on track for success in most of its other contested senate races throughout the country. Ken Buck in Colorado, Mike Lee in Utah, Ron Johnson in Wisconsin, Rand Paul in Kentucky, Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania, and Marco Rubio in Florida are among the Tea Party-backed candidates who appear on track for victory. Joe Miller in Alaska is a strong bet too, though Lisa Murkowski’s misbeggoten attempt at a write-in candidacy may tighten that race. Only Nevada’s Sharron Angle presents similar difficulties to O’Donnell, but on a far narrower basis. As of this writing, she’s polling essentially even with Harry Reid.

But there’s an even bigger misperception at work here. Since pundits only discovered a few weeks ago that Republicans had a shot at taking over the senate, they were able to put their Prozac back in the medicine cabinet with the O’Donnell win. This is a mistake. For while Delaware may have just slipped out of reach, two seats that were not previously part of the electoral calcuation are now in play.

The first is in Connecticut, where former WWE CEO Linda McMahon has pulled within five points of the supposedly invincible Attorney General Richard Blumenthal. The second is West Virginia, where the seat formerly held by Robert Byrd was expected to be an easy win for Democratic Governor Joe Manchin. However, industrial executive John Raese has closed the gap to within five points as well. Given the strong conservative turnout expected this year, these could both be sleepers come election night.

Don’t despair, conservative America. We’re just getting started.

August 25th, 2010 at 1:06 pm
A Tea Party Victory in the Last Frontier?
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That’s the way it looks after last night’s Republican senate primary in Alaska. Despite plenty of polling that showed him out of striking distance, attorney Joe Miller now looks poised to take down incumbent Lisa Murkowski once the final votes are tallied in the great untamed north.

Miller should be an interesting candidate to watch. He’s a true constitutionalist, calling for the abolition of the Department of Education and the phasing out of Medicare and Social Security.

Those positions, combined with his endorsement from Sarah Palin in the primaries, are going to lead the press to paint him as some sort of unhinged reactionary. That’s going to be tough, however, considering that Miller is a West Point grad with a master’s in economics and a law degree from Yale.

We noted last week that Tea Party activitsts are going to have to focus on ideas in addition to elections, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t savor victories when they can get them. Joe Miller could be a great addition to Washington — especially if he reverses the Senate’s longstanding hostility to unshaven legislators.

August 17th, 2010 at 2:02 pm
The Tea Party Movement’s Cliff’s Notes
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Nearly 25 years ago, Thomas Sowell wrote “A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles”, perhaps the single best volume on the fundamental philosophical differences between modern liberals and classical liberals (the progenitors of today’s libertarians and most conservatives). If your summer schedule doesn’t allow time for Sowell’s 350-page treatise (and it should), then you could do worse than turning to today’s Wall Street Journal.

Today’s edition of the Journal’s opinion section carries a piece entitled “A Tea Party Manifesto” by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey and FreedomWorks President and CEO Matt Kibbe (authors of the new book “Give us Liberty”). Contained therein is the best concise distillation of how Sowell’s conflict is playing out in Tea Party America:

The many branches of the tea party movement have created a virtual marketplace for new ideas, effective innovations and creative tactics. Best practices come from the ground up, around kitchen tables, from Facebook friends, at weekly book clubs, or on Twitter feeds. This is beautiful chaos—or, as the Nobel Prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek put it, “spontaneous order.”

Decentralization, not top-down hierarchy, is the best way to maximize the contributions of people and their personal knowledge. Let the leaders be the activists who have the best knowledge of local personalities and issues. In the real world, this is common sense. In Washington, D.C., this is considered radical.

The big-government crowd is drawn to the compulsory nature of centralized authority. They can’t imagine an undirected social order. Someone needs to be in charge—someone who knows better. Big government is audacious and conceited.

It’s a war of voluntarism and freedom on one side against coercion and statism on the other. The Tea Party crowd should prepare for battle. Armey and Kibbe will provide the ammunition (as will other Tea Party authors, like CFIF’s own Ashton Ellis). Come November, it will  be time to take to the field.

May 19th, 2010 at 3:15 pm
The Best Political Speech This Year Comes from a Liberal Democrat

Too bad Nick Clegg lives in England.  This morning, the United Kingdom’s new Deputy Prime Minister and leader of the Liberal Democrat Party made a powerful speech every American Tea Party patriot will instantly recognize as the words of a kindred spirit.

Unlike this country’s “hope” and “change” president, Clegg is very explicit on how he and Prime Minister David Cameron plan to pass Britain’s next “Great Reform Act.”

There are three main objectives of the Act.

First, repeal all of the intrusive and unnecessary laws that inhibit a British citizen’s freedom by ending the government “culture of spying on its citizens;” prohibiting an “ID card scheme;” regulating the pervasive use of CCTV cameras; and asking citizens which laws should be abolished.

Second, reform the political system to make it open, transparent, and decent by making the House of Lords an elected chamber accountable to the people, and presenting a referendum on adopting a fixed term parliament and equally balanced electoral districts.

Third, radically redistribute power away from the center, into local into citizens’ local communities, homes, and hands by loosening “the centralized grip of the Whitehall bureaucracy” and dispersing “power downwards” to citizens instead.

There isn’t enough space to elaborate on all of Clegg’s proposals, but suffice it to say that he understands that political authority comes from the bottom up, not the top down.  To wit:

I’m a liberal.

My starting point is always optimism about people.

The view that most people, most of the time, will make the right decisions for themselves and their families.

That you know better than I do about how to run your life, your community, the services you use.

So this government is going to trust people.

We know that, when people see a real opportunity to shape the world they live in, they take it.

Every American angry at the state of our politics should read Clegg’s speech in its entirety.  Print it out if you have to; fix it to the refrigerator door so your family can read it too.  The second most powerful man in Britain’s new coalition government of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats is calling for more power to the people.  As we prepare for the November midterm elections, and the next presidential contest, it would do we the people well to take Clegg’s challenge and make it a litmus test for candidates seeking our support.

This is a sterling way forward.  Three cheers for Nick Clegg!

December 31st, 2009 at 1:14 pm
Hope for the New Year

Americans are not apathetic people.  Although liberty took several hits this year with wars and rumors of wars on health care, energy, and taxation, freedom’s defenders among the citizenry did not stand by quietly.  They threw tea parties.  They massed at Washington and hundreds of cities around the country.  They spoke boldly at town hall meetings, and found unlikely support.  They raised money, organized, and propelled candidates and ideas past the nay-saying conventional wisdom types.  They won, they lost, and are learning.  2009 was a dress rehearsal.  2010 is the main event.

Americans, by nature, are not defined by politics.  But when events warrant, Americans are willing and able to refocus the political class’s attention on first principles, reminding their hired hands that the government is by, for, and of the people, and that when the governing authority becomes violent towards the people’s self-evident, God-given rights, the people have the right to wipe the slate clean and start afresh.

There is much to be hopeful for next year.  Before next New Year’s Eve a new Congress will be elected.  Let us resolve this December 31st to refound America on our constitutional principles so that a year hence our resolutions can move from the public square to the president’s desk.  And let him dare refuse us.

December 9th, 2009 at 12:27 am
Will Palin Save or Destroy the GOP?
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Today’s version of the Washington Post’s “The Fix” blog notes that Sarah Palin gave a radio interview over the weekend where she seemed to leave the door open to a third party presidential run in 2012.  This could potentially be politically disastrous for the GOP come Election Day.

Under present circumstances, Palin probably doesn’t have a strong enough coalition to take the GOP nomination. What she does have, however, is an intensity of support that would likely lead many of her supporters to follow her out of the Republican Party’s presidential fold.  Given the schismatic tendencies that the Tea Party movement has begun to show, Palin could also potentially have a much more organized, coherent base than most independent candidates.

This prospect is just one more impetus for a Republican coalescence before the next presidential race.  From Theodore Roosevelt to Ross Perot, the legacy of strong third-party candidates has tended to be creating murder-suicide pacts with the candidate that they’re ideologically closer to.  If Sarah Palin bolts the GOP in 2012, she may end up spending two election cycles in a row being blamed for Barack Obama’s presidency.