And Thee And Me And He And She &…
By Dr. Rod Beaman, D.O.
The Tea Party movement flourishes. What started no more than four years ago as a loose, splintered group of people concerned with runaway government taxes has metamorphosed into a political force that cannot be ignored.
It seems to have emerged in multiple locations across the country. I attended the first meeting of one in a coffee house in Five Points right after the 2008 election. There were about eight people.
Shortly, the term Tea Party was being bandied throughout cyberspace and I attended another organizing meeting of a Tea Party, in a library not far away just a few months later. Attendance was well more than a hundred.
Since then, there has been a series of demonstrations across the country on April 15. That tradition has continued. I have attended two of the April 15 demonstrations.
Like many others, I came to the Tea Party movement from Ron Paul’s 2008 presidential campaign. Many of us here in Jacksonville did. We also have moved to the Republican Liberty Caucus (RLC).
Here in Florida, the RLC was organized in 1991. Nationally, it emerged from the ashes of several predecessors. There has been growing political restiveness over the past twenty years, especially within the Republican Party. Today, more and more the ranks of the RLC and the various Tea Partys are being embellished by dissatisfied Republicans and they are in turn bringing their message to the Republican Party, the one major party that even seems interested in at least hearing what we have to say.
Early on, I assumed the role of coordinating the outreach campaign for Northeast Florida RLC (RLCNEF). I would routinely send out notices of our meetings to the various Republican Executive Committees and clubs of the counties that comprise Northeast Florida.
Once, I received a response from a recipient advising me that we might be breaking the law by using the word Republican which is supposed to be reserved to organizations approved by the Party state chairman, at the time, Jim Greer. Greer sent letters to 10 state chapters of the Republican Liberty Caucus warning the Caucus not to use the word Republican.
After a series of confrontations between Greer and several of our officials, the RLCNEF retained the right to use ‘Republican’ in its name. The battles were bruising with several Northeast Florida Republicans siding with Greer who used stream roller tactics to stifle dissent against his autocracy. Ultimately, after the in house brawl, Greer was ousted as chairman. Just months later, he is now under indictment on corruption charges.
Ron Paul has presented a conundrum for Republicans. On the one hand, he has been a proponent of free market policies that have been core beliefs for the party for decades, specifically those espoused by Robert Taft, throughout The New Deal. That record gave Robert Taft the title of Mr. Republican. It also helped stop his nomination for president by the party three times. That opposition led to the me-too Republicanism that attempted to block Barry Goldwater’s nomination in 1964.
But Ron Paul has also been a proponent of non-interventionism in foreign countries and disengagement from overseas involvement. His opposition to the Iraq and Afghanistan actions has earned him the ire of many Republican leaders. The problem is that Ron Paul’s position is more consistent with that of Mr. Republican Robert Taft than even Barry Goldwater’s and Ronald Reagan’s.
Taft opposed the founding of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) on the grounds that it would permit the executive to pursue foreign policy without Congressional approval. Talk about prescience!
Ron Paul is committed to no protracted military actions without a declaration of war by Congress, a position that is far more consistent with Taft’s than what has prevailed. It is Congress that is supposed to determine foreign policy, not the Executive and certainly not an unbridled agency like the CIA.
This disagreement engendered fierce opposition to Ron Paul’s presidential campaign in 2008 within the GOP. When I was serving a similar outreach function for his campaign, I frequently experienced outright anger and hostility from various area Republican leaders including warnings not to attend their meetings to campaign! Yet, as another club president remarked to me, why should Republicans be so antagonistic toward us inasmuch as we agree on at least 90% of the issues and yet turn around and fall over themselves welcoming the support of Joseph Lieberman whose voting record could barely have been distinguished from Ted Kennedy’s or Barack Obama’s?
Why indeed? Is victory so precious that it must come at the sacrifice of all principle? The Republican Party has far more to fear from those who would cater to Joseph Lieberman than it should ever fear from the Tea Parties and RLC. Adherence to principles has a way of winning in the long run. A fellow named Jesus Christ is one example.
The development of the various Tea Parties and the recent growth of the RLC have been pretty contemporaneous. One common characteristic of all the meetings has been a reverence for The Constitution. Copies are distributed and passages cited regularly.
This is why the collectivists hate us. Whether they are called Democrats, liberals, socialists, fascists, Marxists or outright communists as many should be, they cannot deny the truth of The Constitution and that is their crucial problem. All of their programs are unconstitutional and they know it! That is why they also fear us.
They fear an increasingly informed electorate that is asking questions of the leaders and candidates of both parties. Joe the Plumber was a perfect example.
They also fear things like what happened June 8. Two Tea Party candidates won. In Nevada, In a three-way race, Sharron Angle won the Republican nomination for senator, to face Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. One opponent was Danny Tarkanian, the son of the former University of Nevada at Las Vegas basketball coach Jerry Tarkanian. He enjoyed terrific name recognition. The other was Sue Lowden, a former state party chairman who had the backing of most Republican regulars. Angle won, going away, with a late surge.
In South Carolina, Nikki Haley, a political neophyte, won the primary for governor but will face a runoff against the runner-up because she didn’t receive the necessary 50%. In the California Senate race, the Tea Party candidate, Chuck Devore, came in a strong third with 17.6% of the vote. Just a few weeks ago, in Kentucky, Dr. Rand Paul, the physician son of Dr. Ron Paul, won the Republican primary for Senate over the endorsed candidate.
Now how quickly the knives come out. Rand Paul has received the equivalent of an alleyway mugging because of his views on some clearly unconstitutional sections of the 1964 Civil Rights Bill that Barry Goldwater voted against for precisely the same reasons. Nikki Haley is being attacked with charges of extramarital affairs; this coming from the party that gave us Ted and John Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Bill Clinton, Barney Frank and Gerry Studds. It will get much, much worse.
Look for the increasing vitriol, nationally, from attack dogs like Stephanie Miller, Frank Rich and Leonard Pitts. Locally, look for more frequent alarms being raised at Jacksonville Progressive Talk Radio, WJSJ, Folio Weekly and other fever swamps of the lunatic left. You see, what they fear isn’t just that we might win. We might not win but then the republic is doomed.
What the Leftists and Republican establishment types fear the most is a public educated about The Constitution. The RLC and Tea Parties must continue to make The Constitution and taxes the battleground. Unlike them, we have nothing to fear from an enlightened public.
An educated public means an electorate that will question the legitimacy of what this gang of thieves began to build, in earnest, nearly a century ago. They have been plundering us since and want an ignorant electorate.
Let us serve this notice on the Democrats and the GOP. We are not going away.
The American War for Independence began over taxes that amounted to less than three percent of the estimated gross domestic product of the time! The debate over freedom emerged from that dispute. We owe the memory and the bloodshed of those original tax rebels no less.
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Mon, Jul 5, 2010
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