Art credit: www.daveposh.org
It’s Not Just Tactics, Mr. Speaker
By Jenny Beth Martin
7:27 PM 01/25/2015
“The
issue with the Tea Party isn’t one of strategy. It’s not one of different
vision … It’s a disagreement over tactics, from time to time,” said Speaker of
the House John Boehner, on 60 Minutes
Sunday night.
More
than a year ago, Speaker Boehner took serious offense when conservative
groups criticized a budget deal he favored. They had “lost all
credibility . . . I don’t care what they do.” So irrelevant is the Tea Party
movement that the Speaker took to 60 Minutes to complain about its criticism of
him Sunday night.
The
Speaker trivializes the differences that led to the biggest intraparty
rebellion against a sitting Speaker since the Civil War. His first problem
isn’t with outside groups, it’s his own GOP colleagues in the House. When one
out of every ten takes the extraordinary step of standing before his colleagues
and calling out the name of someone else for his job, he should realize he’s
got a problem.
As for
us, our opposition to his leadership centers on our belief that we do NOT, in
fact, share visions and strategies.
For
example, we oppose amnesty for illegal immigrants because we believe it would
not be fair to the millions waiting in line to get into America legally, nor to
the millions who already arrived legally after waiting in line. Amnesty rewards
lawbreaking, and only serves to incentivize further lawbreaking.
The
Speaker, on the other hand, dances to the tune of the Chamber of Commerce,
whose members and supporters want cheaper labor, and are, consequently, major
proponents of the kind of comprehensive amnesty legislation that passed the
Senate in 2013 and which the Speaker clearly wanted to put on the floor of the
House last year before Dave Brat’s stunning upset of the former Majority Leader
put the kibosh on those plans.
Moreover,
we seek a federal government that is actually smaller than the one we have now,
not merely one that is smaller than the one Barack Obama would prefer. We note
with disdain the Speaker’s willingness to sign off on budget and debt ceiling
increase “deals” that appear to have been negotiated by Popeye’s J. Wellington Wimpy — he will
gladly give the president a spending/debt ceiling increase now, in exchange for
the promise of spending cuts to come Tuesday. And when Tuesday arrives, somehow
the spending cuts never materialize.
Similarly,
we seek the repeal of Obamacare because we believe it tramples the fundamental
liberties guaranteed us by our Constitution, destroys patient choice, degrades
the quality of health care delivered, increases costs, and will ultimately
break the bank. The Speaker, on the other hand, seems perfectly content to
tinker at the margins (1099 repeal? Medical device tax repeal?) secure in the
knowledge that many of his major funders — the health insurance and
pharmaceutical companies who support Obamacare because of its mandates, which
lead to a massively growing client base, and, hence, increased profits — don’t
actually want him to fight to repeal the legislation.
Here’s
a test of the Speaker’s assertion that our differences are merely differences
in degree, not kind: Why has he refused to lead his GOP Conference to vote in
favor of the bill introduced by his colleague Ron DeSantis of Florida, which
seeks to overturn the August 2013 OPM [Office of Personnel Management] ruling
granting generous employer subsidies to Members of Congress and their staffs
for the purchase of health insurance through the Obamacare exchanges, in clear
violation of the law? That legislation is a fundamental part of a strategy
designed to raise the temperature inside the offices of the Democrat Members of
Congress whose votes are needed to build the necessary majorities for repeal in
both House and Senate; yet, given multiple opportunities to put the bill on the
floor, he has refused to do so.
Finally,
I would note one other difference with the Speaker’s view, specifically
regarding his assertion that the Tea Party’s opposition is manufactured for
fundraising purposes: Every dollar we raise is contributed voluntarily, by donors
whose only interest is seeking to influence their government to tax less, spend
less, and stop running up a massive debt. They seek little from the government
other than to be left alone, and we have nothing to offer them other than our
promise that we will use the resources they contribute to do the best job we
can to achieve our shared vision of greater personal freedom, economic freedom,
and a debt-free future.
JENNY BETH MARTIN is co-founder and national coordinator
of the Tea Party Patriots, the nation’s largest tea party organization.
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