Long Live the Tea Party

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I don’t usually agree with Rick Moran, who posts at PJ Media. But his piece “The Tea Party Is Dead, Long Live the Tea Party” was linked on Instapundit, and it had a few good thoughts, going back to the inception of the Tea Party groups in 2009:

But the tea party's real value to the country is that for the first time since the ratification debates over the Constitution, millions of people across the country were actually reading and discussing our founding document.

These weren't constitutional scholars sitting around some Ivy League lecture hall esoterically discussing the foundations of America. These were millions of ordinary people sitting at kitchen tables, in small church meeting rooms, on front porches and backyards probing the reasons America came into existence.

. . . What mattered was that ordinary people had taken a keen interest in preserving the spirit of the Constitution and the essence of our founding principles that are "self-evident" in that document at a time it has been under relentless attack.

. . .

This side of the tea parties was never widely reported on by the media, for very good reasons. The left hates getting into a discussion about what the Constitution says because they can't defend most of their ideas. Despite the fact that the founders wrote the Constitution so that basically anyone who could read could understand it, the left keeps insisting the Constitution says things that it doesn't.

Any clever lawyer or willing judge can twist the meaning of the Constitution so that it says anything they want it to say to accomplish any end they wish to accomplish. So the budget deal may have killed fiscal sanity in Washington and -- perhaps -- the tea party's political power to some extent. And the GOP may have co-opted most of the larger tea party groups to do the party's bidding.

What remains of the tea party is, to my mind, the best part. The desire of ordinary people to govern themselves, to take personal responsibility for their own lives, and to try to do something about the denigration and increasing irrelevance of the Constitution.

As Glenn Reynolds concluded: Don’t give up the ship.

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