Tag: Tea Party

Categories
ideological culture political challengers

Is the Tea Party Dead?

Newspapermen used to keep files on major figures, for that inevitable day when the newsworthies shuffle off that final coil. Timely obituaries don’t just “happen.”

Heedless of the danger of a premature obit, today’s journalists seem always ready with an autopsy, even before the corpse cools.

Every few years we endure talk of the death of a major political party. Journalists love this sort of speculation. And apparently it’s so forgettable that it never really sticks to the journalists who trotted out the last false prophecy. In the real world, sociologists study what happens to cults “When Prophecies Fail”; in journalism, the eternal cranking out of copy goes on as if nothing happened.

The Last Democrat, a book produced at the height of the Bill Clinton scandals, argued that Americans would never again elect a Democratic president — Americans, you see, had finally wised up, given up on the old redistributionist racket. Wishful thinking.

The book should be prominently placed on every would-​be prophet’s desk. A cautionary title.

Today, the old political rackets have ratcheted up, and Democrats are riding high. Sort of.

So now, after Tuesday’s elections, we hear talk of the death of the Tea Party.

A possibility? Yes. But remember: it was never a real party, and it was never about tea. It was (as near as I could make out) about responsibility. In government.

I can’t see how that idea will ever go out of style.

Though how it will win, that’s harder to envision.

And whether the name will stick with the idea, that’s another matter, too. Tea and revolutions, like obituaries, must be prepared in advance.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
insider corruption

IRS’s Targeting Was Targeting

The more we learn about the latest IRS scandal, the harder it is to evade what it is all about: the systematic thwarting— for years on end — of legitimate applications for tax-​exempt status submitted by Tea Party and other conservative groups.

It’s getting pretty thick and deep in the redoubts of those still claiming that only a few rogue, overwhelmed IRS clerks fashioned the policy “accidentally.”

Far from being limited to the inadvertent machinations of a few harried, bungle-​prone IRS clerks huddling furtively in airless, lightless, low-​ceilinged Cincinnati basement rooms, the scheme to put the Tea Party applications on the glue-​laced slow track has its origin in the nation’s capital. We’re now learning that the IRS chief counsel himself is implicated in the determination to be dilatory.

That’s a guy named William Wilkins. Appointed by the President.

Some also still claim that left-​leaning non-​profits were as much beleaguered by unwarranted IRS delays as right-​leaning non-​profits. The facts don’t support this notion. Some “progressive” and “Occupier” groups seem to have undergone slow review, but not the same pattern of excessive inquiry and drill-​down information mining that has emerged for conservative groups.

Moreover, an IRS abusing our civil liberties equally isn’t the answer.

As Carol Liebau noted last week, the latest revelations confirm that “there was, in fact, a dedicated ‘Tea Party Coordinator’ at the IRS, a position that has no analogue on the left.…” IRS targeting does not equal standard scrutiny. “The term refers to concerted efforts to harass law-​abiding Americans (seeking tax-​exempt status) based on their (right-​leaning) viewpoint alone.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
government transparency tax policy

The Block Stops Here

We were initially told that the IRS had apologized to Tea Party and patriot groups for blocking them from non-​profit tax status.

But there has been no apology.

Instead, last Friday, Lois Lerner, the head of the tax-​exempt division of the Internal Revenue Service, confided to a group of tax attorneys at an American Bar Association conference in Washington. She admitted that the IRS had indeed been guilty of unfairly delaying and blocking Tea Party and conservative groups from establishing tax-​exempt organizations, as these dissident groups had been complaining about for years.

Who was to blame? Only mere “low-​level employees” — no senior management, heaven forfend.

Then it was disclosed that senior IRS muckety-​mucks actually knew in 2011 — well before the IRS commissioner assured Congress that the agency wasn’t doing precisely what it was doing. Now, latest disclosures put the beginning of the political bias policy all the way back to 2010.

Of course, the IRS vehemently denies that politics played any role.

And what about Barack “buck-​stops-​here” Obama?

“I first learned about it from the same news reports that I think most people learned about this,” the president said in response to a question, adding, “I think it was on Friday.”

In denial, the president spun, “If, in fact, IRS personnel engaged in the kind of practices that had been reported on and were intentionally targeting conservative groups” and “if you’ve got the IRS operating in anything less than a neutral and non-​partisan way, then … it is contrary to our traditions.”

Well, if these ifs weren’t so (traditionally?) evasive, we might take the prez seriously.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
video

Video: Ron Paul started the Tea Party movement

Brian Doherty, author of a new book on Ron Paul, talks about Ron Paul’s transpartisan political movement:

A very concise and yet broad view of what the congressman from Texas has been up to, what he believes, and his significance in contemporary political debate.

Categories
political challengers

Who’s In, Who’s Out

Hopes for a “Tea Party”-based revolution sputter against the rocks of partisan politics. The non-​partisan nature of the movement has dribbled away as Republicans — not Democrats — have courted Tea Party support.

And GOP leaders have remained firmly in control.

James Hohmann, writing in Politico, shows that the old guard “has withstood the tea-​party revolution.” A recent insider meeting in Scottsdale showcased the persistence of the old way of doing things:Tea Party protest sign: Liberty is all the stimulus we need

The … movement’s influence has waned everywhere since its apex in 2010. Most visibly, the Republican Party is poised to nominate the most pragmatic of the men who ran for president this cycle even though many tea-​party groups vocally opposed him during the primary. Indeed, Mitt Romney received a coronation of sorts at a unity lunch here Friday, soaking up standing ovations and basking in blessings from 2008 rival Sen. John McCain.

Though it may be that “it’s only a matter of time” before Tea Party folks run the GOP (as “the longtime national committeeman” from my state put it), the price of admission to the higher ranks seems calculated in the abandonment of principle. Hohmann quotes one old party hand as saying that Tea Partyers need to learn “that everybody who is in government is not evil, that we’ve got some really good people in government. Let’s don’t burn the barn down to get rid of the rats.”

And here you have the real problem.

Real change isn’t about putting “better people” in office. It’s changing the principles by which anyone in government — good, bad, or indifferent — must operate.

The founders knew this. Today’s Republican insiders do not.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

Categories
ideological culture too much government

Better Late Than Never?

“Too little, too late.” I am not alone to suspect that the Occupy movement — the 99 percenters — started its protest against corporate greed and government cronyism several years too late.

Where were the Occupiers when the Tea Party protests started?

Dancing in the streets over the Obama presidency? Many Occupiers may have lagged because they thought that “their man” could and would clean up corruption and make Washington work for the everyone — or at least the “middle class.”

The “too late” charge can be directed against the Tea Party, though — and has been, repeatedly. The Tea Partyers waited to organize until a liberal Democrat was in the White House, one who saw Bush’s big government and, well, raised it.

Many would admit, later, how not “theirs” Bush was. Still, few protested Bush’s big government push.

To the Tea Party’s credit, it was first — kicked off by Rick Santelli’s CNBC “tea party rant” in early 2009, against the upsurge of bailouts for banks, car companies, home-​buyers, you name it, as well as the very idea of government stimulus. (Though I ranted earlier.)

The time to protest cronyism and corruption in American government? The moment one opens one’s eyes to political reality.

Maybe the great age of protest has finally come.

I hope it’s not too late.

It always seems like citizens should have stood up to abuse of power sooner, but being late to the action is no excuse not to stand up now.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.