Future Generations will celebrate tea party focus on debt

Guest Column by Jerry Shenk

New members of Congress are among the least powerful people in government — less powerful than their seniors in both parties; less powerful than many unelected bureaucrats in executive branch agencies.

Yet Americans have been barraged with formulaic left-wing talking points intended to convince us that a handful of House Republican freshmen identified as tea party legislators — less than 20 percent of one-half of one-third of the federal government — is holding the nation hostage.

We’re told that, since January — in only eight months following two years of a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress with a Democrat in the White House — this small group of tea party freshmen has taken over the country.

The charge is laughable. Those who buy that fiction are uninformed, stunningly naive or purely partisan. It’s true, tea party organizations, patriots and similar groups have influenced American politics. Tea parties have provided much of the energy for two major political stories — the 2010 midterm election and the 2011 debt-ceiling deal. But until the 2010 election, the media spent nearly two years largely ignoring the most important grassroots movement in recent American history.

Following the 2010 general election and the debt-ceiling deal, the American left needed a scapegoat to explain the broad opposition to the Democrats’ failed agenda and President Obama’s policies. Smugly convinced of their own rectitude, liberals have chosen to blame the tea party for the nation’s problems, for the same incivility the left has shown the grassroots or, for that matter, any others who merely disagree with them, and for the intransigent partisanship of which liberals themselves are guilty.

The most common accusation is self-serving nonsense. Anyone who opposes or criticizes Barack Obama is reflexively branded a racist. Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson saw “no coincidence” in “the birth of a big, passionate national movement [tea parties] that tries its best to delegitimize the first African-American president.”

Vice President Joe Biden called the tea party “terrorists.” One wonders what terms Biden reserves to describe those who blow things up. Nancy Pelosi has characterized the grassroots as “Astroturf,” swastika-carrying, uneducated dupes.

Ms. Pelosi would have us believe that Standard & Poor’s downgrade of America’s credit rating had nothing to do with the $4 trillion debt increase under her and President Obama in the two years their party had complete control of the spending process. Channeling George Orwell, Pelosi and her media enablers have called it the “tea party downgrade.”

Writing about the grassroots, Slate’s Jacob Weisberg condescendingly reported “that there’s no point trying to explain complicated matters to the American people.” It’s not that complicated. Practical Americans know instinctively that a debt-ceiling “debate” should have been unnecessary. Most normal Americans coming home to find the sewer backed up with sewage to the ceiling wouldn’t raise the ceiling, they’d pump out the sludge.

Many Americans have come to resent that liberals will not accept that the choices government faces are ones about which reasonable people can disagree. Rather than undertaking the effort to persuade their fellow citizens, liberals insist that those who oppose them are stupid, and that America is doomed, in Weisberg’s words, to an “excruciating form of self-destruction.”

That’s a difficult point to sell considering that principled conservatives are a political minority in America. Tea party sympathizers remain a plurality in electoral politics, not a majority.

Indeed, there is considerable skepticism among tea party supporters about the Republican Party’s ability to govern, to control spending, and to express and preserve acceptable core principles.

Neither formal parties nor social groups, tea parties believe that the government doesn’t reflect the will of the people. In 1773, the issue was taxation. Today, the tea party opposes the massive debt that will burden generations of Americans.

Without the tea parties and similar groups, there would have been no debt-ceiling debate. Without the tea parties, President Obama would be advocating additional unbridled stimulus spending and larger payoffs to his supporters in advance of the 2012 election. Indeed, he still does.

The pressure on national and state politicians to deal with government debt is solely the result of energy generated in 2009 by a spontaneous grassroots organization in response to reckless, irresponsible government spending policies. Future Americans will celebrate that event.