Tea Party: It’s Not Just Taxes, It’s The Constitution
The
NPR put together a very fair and balanced radio story on the tea party movement, covering specifically the Manassas Tea Party. It emphasizes that the tea party isn’t just about fiscal responsibility, but the importance of our focus on the Constitution as well.
The Tea Parties started as an anti-big government, anti-tax movement — T-E-A stands for “Taxed enough already?” But Tea Partiers have another pressing concern — an obsession, really — the United States Constitution.
Along with the “Don’t tread on me” flags and the George Washington impersonators, the Constitution is ubiquitous at Tea Party events, whether it’s reproductions of the original parchment or pocket-sized copies.
The NPR story goes on to discuss why it is to the advantage and importance of the Tea Party to continue their focus on the Constitution:
the Tea Party is giving a big grass-roots boost to the elite conservative legal movement, whose views of the Constitution are already well-represented on the Supreme Court.”Right now, four and probably five of the justices are much more sympathetic to the Tea Party view of the Constitution than they are to the Obama administration view,” he says.
With more than 20 states currently pursuing legal challenges to the new law requiring individuals to have health insurance, the Tea Party views on that issue will eventually have their day in the highest court. But until then, the Virginia Tea Party Patriots and others like them will keep pushing their case in the court of public opinion.
You can listen to the 5 minute radio spot here. And yes…that is my bellowing you hear opening the piece:
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Interesting program. What are your views on the Constitution? The Tea Party Patriots, boasting 50,000 registered members, asserts it provides the most detailed mission statement and principles. “Constitutionally Limited Government” is one of its three “core values.” (The other two are Fiscal Responsibility and Free Markets.) Their site states they:
“We believe that it is possible to know the original intent of the government our founders set forth, and stand in support of that intent. Like the founders, we support states’ rights for those powers not expressly stated in the Constitution.”
However, a review of the original intent of our founders suggests a huge conflict between the quoted sentences. The non-partisan site (http://www.gpoaccess.gov/constitution/pdf2002/028.pdf) discusses the original intent and subsequent Supreme Court interpretations of the Tenth Amendment. The following paragraphs are excerpted from that GPO pdf document. [Adobe Acrobat can be downloaded free from its website if your computer can't read pdf.]:
>> There is nothing in the history of its adoption to suggest that it was more than declaratory of the relationship between the national and state governments as it had been established by the Constitution before the amendment or that its purpose was other than to allay fears that the new national government might seek to exercise powers not granted, and that the states might not be able to exercise fully their reserved powers.’’<> That this provision was not conceived to be a yardstick for measuring the powers granted to the Federal Government or reserved to the States was firmly settled by the refusal of both Houses of Congress to insert the word ‘‘expressly’’ before the word ‘‘delegated,’’ and was confirmed by Madison’s remarks in the course of the debate, which took place while the proposed amendment was pending, concerning Hamilton’s plan to establish a national bank. ‘‘Interference with the power of the States was no constitutional criterion of the power of Congress.” << [The GPO pdf document includes footnotes to support its discussion.]
The GPO document goes on to discuss a lengthy set of conflicting Supreme Court decisions that alternated between (a) accepting the meaning of the Tenth Amendment based on original intent of the founders and (b) supporting alternative interpretations that ignored original intent.
1) Does the movement really understand the Constitution and the various Supreme Court decisions that determine how specific disputes about the Constitution's meaning are resolved?
2) Do you recognize the inconsistency of this core principle?
3) If so, how do you reconcile the conflict?
4) Why not restate the desire for reigning in the growing reach of the federal government (a position with which I am generally, but not entirely, sympathetic) in a more consistent manner, i.e., without falsely claiming that you are going back to the intent of our nation's founding fathers?