To Make Wins Stick, Tea Partiers Must Maintain Independence
As the dust settles from the 2010 Mid-Term elections, Tea Partiers are looking around and taking stock. For many, if not most, these elections were the first national-level contests they’ve been through as grassroots organizers. While the results were undeniably positive for the Republican Party, some wonder if those results bode just as well for the Tea Party movement as an independent entity.
The next Congress will be the first in 24 years in which opposing parties control the House and Senate. That’s not counting June 2001 through 2002, since Democrats and Republicans were essentially one War Party after 9/11. They aren’t one party this time. The Republicans’ mandate was unmistakable: shut down the Pelosi agenda.
One thing is clear: Congress will be deadlocked for the next two years. What this means for the grassroots activist is that at the federal level, the legislative battles we fight over the next two years will be easy compared to those fought over the last two years. Sure, there will be some defensive fights, but even “moderate” or “bi-partisan” threats, like environmental regulations or Internet regulations, will be easy to stop. For the most part, Congress will be frozen.
Don’t expect most groups, particularly local Republican clubs, to tell you this. They want your time, talent, and money working toward their priorities. It’s the job of a grassroots activist to know better. Real change is brought about by the infliction of pain upon politicians, not pleasure.
Going forward, here is what you can expect at the Federal level: in order to serve as counterpoint to the Democrats’ priorities, Republicans will offer their Constructive Republican Alternate Proposal (CRAP). A few candidates are already swirling about in the political ether. There is Newt Gingrich’s “American Solutions,” an ideological mess, based on public opinion surveys. It might be that, or it might be the weak-kneed “Pledge to America,” but either way it is a hopeless fight, known to its leaders as such, but useful to them for shaking down supporters for money and volunteer time.
Whatever proposal Boehner puts forward, the real agenda will be to turn the swing voters into Team R’s baseline vote. That it guarantees a return to the unaccountable practices of the George W. Bush years is not important to the people behind this agenda. It’s up to Tea Party leaders to recognize and alert their members to this deception, and direct their efforts into the activity that creates real change: building up their state-level organizations.
In North Carolina, Republicans have gained control of the General Assembly for the first time in well over a century. This was a vital achievement, since Congressional districts will be re-drawn this year, and we stand to see 100 years’ worth of gerrymandering undone. The long-term consequences of this victory will be felt long after 2012. However, it is still up to us as grassroots activists to make sure those we elected make good on those victories. It won’t be easy.
Remember when Team R controlled the White House and Congress, 2003-2006? Remember how their despicable acts led to Democrats taking it all back? Republicans stood behind record-breaking expansions of government power. The grassroots could not be mobilized against “their” party, even as it discredited their philosophy and ultimately led independents to look to the Left for answers. That will happen again, if we let it.
In North Carolina, we need very substantial, positive action from state government to reign itself in. The only way to bring that about is to treat every politician who will not support substantial, positive action for liberty as an enemy, regardless of party affiliation. Where Republican politicians fail and vote against us, we need an army to mobilize opposition against them in 2012. To do that, we will need to teach people about the real nature of politics, and about why they must remain in the 6% swing vote. It will involve convincing grassroots activists that to guarantee a politician’s cooperation, you must control his or her environment, not work to gain access to those in power.
People tend not to be swing voters because they view it as some sort of ideological inconsistency. The capital-L Libertarian could never support a Republican. The true conservative, by a Republican’s definition, will never vote against another Republican. But the pragmatic organizer, and the pragmatic voter, sets the bar where some politicians make it and others don’t. His or her vote is always in play.
Some Republicans got my vote this year. Some didn’t. Some Republicans I spoke out against. In this way, we maintain with any politician that we can be their friend or their enemy. With enough people doing the same, this is how we achieve our agenda.
While the federal-level legislative battles of the coming year will be easier, overall, grassroots activists will have a tougher road ahead. Committed Tea Partiers will have less in common with the Republicans than they have in the past. We will have to attack them for bad votes, and they will attack back. Because Republicans are in power, grassroots will be harder to mobilize. Money will be harder to raise.
To prevent this, we now need to focus on educating people about tactics. Supporters must understand why we are doing what we are going to be doing. Otherwise, the politicians and their allies will convince them that we are the enemy for endangering “our” wonderful majorities.
The future of the Tea Party movement, at least for the next two years, will lie in its success at building state-level groups that can confront and mobilize against politicians of either party. Our competition will be pied-piper organizations, most directly connected to one party or the other, which will work distract us from this. It will be a war of tactical philosophies, as well as a war of ideas.
There is one bright spot in the federal-level deadlock that offers hope for real change: Congressman Ron Paul is next in line to take charge of the House Subcommittee on Domestic Monetary Policy. This will put him directly in charge of the committee that oversees the Federal Reserve. He replaces outgoing Democratic chairman Mel Watt of NC’s 12th District. While the Bernanke Fed has been bailing out banks and insurance companies with freshly-printed money right and left, Watt’s tenure as committee chairman has seen the committee concern itself with such weighty matters as promoting small business development in Haiti and encouraging expanded public housing programs.
Paul, on the other hand, has promised a much more aggressive stance. In an interview on Thursday, Paul said, “I will approach that committee like no one has ever approached it because we’re living in times like no one has ever seen.” Paul mentioned that he hoped to use subcommittee hearings to educate the public about the causes of business cycles – which he believes are mainly attributable to monetary manipulation by central bankers. He has also hinted that he will use the committee’s subpoena powers to call a parade of Fed officials before the committee to testify about the Fed’s activities over the last year.
One thing is certain – Paul’s Audit the Fed bill, which gained over 320 co-sponsors during the last Congress before it was gutted in conference (due largely to the efforts of Watt, Barney Frank, and Chris Dodd), will see a resurgence in the new Congress. When asked on November 3rd on Fox Business News’ Scoreboard program what his priorities would be for the coming session, the senior Paul reported that he and his son Rand (who just won his election to be Jim Bunning’s successor as Kentucky’s junior U.S. Senator) would be introducing a bill to end the Federal Reserve altogether on the very first day of the new session.
Now there’s a change we can all believe in.
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