"A wise and frugal government which shall restrain men
from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government." (Thomas Jefferson)

Friday, May 18, 2012

Rhetoric of the so-called “Tea Party” Freshmen Doesn't Match Their Record

“If the tea party is not much more successful in primarying Republican candidates and then having those guys practice what they preach, the GOP is within a decade of going the way of the Whigs.” (Erick Erickson, Red State.com)

Those words by Erick Erickson ring true with a lot of Conservatives today who are feeling more and more disenfranchised by the elites/establishment of the Republican Party.  Not sure if things keep going like they have, it will take ten years.  Don't know when I have heard so many Republicans who are fed up -- it is not the people that threaten to go 3rd every Presidential election, it is the rank and file grassroots like me. Could not have envisioned even four years ago thinking of voting for a Libertarian candidate.  It just didn't compute.  Same could be said for 2010.

Then in 2011 Mitt Romney, the liberal from Massachusetts, was shoved at the grassroots by the establishment/elites as he was the answer to all because he was a businessman who had been a Governor of a very liberal State.  They left out the part that MA was in the bottom five of states creating jobs while he was Governor or the fact that when he was a Bain Capital he was a corporate raider where Bain bought up companies, laid off employees, put them out of business and shipped the jobs overseas.

In most of the early voting states he received than 40% of the vote except in rare instances like Michigan but that didn't stop the RNC from declaring him the presumptive nominee and filing the paperwork to join forces when there were still others in the race.  Now they tout his wins as something special even though state after state is having big problems at their Conventions although Oklahoma may still be the only state where the cops were called.

We are now discovering that the Tea Party candidates may not be the most conservative.  Surprise, surprise since the major Tea Party organizations (not local) were backed by Crossroads (Rove), Koch Brothers (Americans for Prosperity (AFP)), Fox News, Freedom Works (Armey), and others.  Not exactly a whole group of conservatives.  Remember Tea Party Express gave us O'Donnell in Delaware, Miller in Alaska, and Angle in Nevada -- really bad candidates for Senate.  Miller was so bad he got beat by the write in of the incumbent in Alaska.

With this ranking coming out of Freshman Tea Party elected members of the House, we find that as soon as some of them got to DC, they started acting like the establishment with their votes.  How do we hold their feet to the fire to vote conservative for limited government?

Maybe the only way to get members to vote for limited government is to form a party for limited government because the two main political parties are not getting the job done as the deficit continues to grow and has for some time.  Obama shares a lot of the responsibility for the deficit but Republicans under President Bush are not immune as they went on a spending spree.
The Club For Growth’s Depressing Study: Failure and Lies of the Tea Party Congresscritters
Posted by Erick Erickson (Diary)
Wednesday, May 16th at 6:26AM EDT  
There have been many studies out on the “tea party congress” and just how tea party it actually is. One study last year noted that 70% of candidates who went to Congress under the tea party banner were voting just like the Republican Leaders they ran against. 
Probably one of the best places to get a sense of this is the Club for Growth. Why? The Club ignores social votes and focuses only on fiscal votes — spending issues more than anything else. The tea party candidates went to Congress not just to repeal Obamacare, but were really motivated by out of control government spending, bailouts, etc. Remember, it was Rick Santelli of CNBC on February 19, 2009, who predicted this grassroots army of activists would rise up and say enough to out of control government spending and bailouts.  
(snip)
Things sort of spiraled from there sending a wave of candidates to Washington embracing the concerns of the activists who showed up to the tea party. 
They wanted to cut spending because of out of control debt, stop Barack Obama, end Obamacare, and they were willing to primary Republicans to do it. A number of Republicans lost. In some open primaries, the candidates who were supported by the GOP out of Washington went down in flames. 
But what of the candidates who actually went to DC on a wave of tea party support. Turns out some of them were liars and a lot of them behaved like the pigs in Animal Farm with some of them deciding they were more equal than others. 
The Club for Growth’s new study of this Tea Party Congress paints a rather depressing picture. You can see how the freshman of the Tea Party Class of 2010 preformed by clicking right here. 
If you want a more in depth look at the Congress as a whole, one of the best places to go is Heritage Action for America’s comprehensive score card. What you’ll find is not much better there. 
I’m afraid if the tea party is not much more successful in primarying Republican candidates and then having those guys practice what they preach, the GOP is within a decade of going the way of the Whigs.    
Source:  Red State.org
Read More about this Freshman Vote Study by Club for Growth at the links for each Freshman Congressman and you can see how their voting average was obtained.  The Club does not use social issues but economic issues for their rankings.   Interesting breakout for the Freshman newly elected members.  Unlike the American Conservatives Union who gives their conservative award to some Congressman who not conservative, the Club for Growth covers a whole range of bills as you see when you follow the links for each Freshman Member of Congress.
Freshman Vote Study 
In the 2010 election, 87 freshmen House Republicans came to Washington pledging fealty to the Tea Party movement and the ideals of limited government and economic freedom. The mainstream media likes to say that the freshman class is the most uncompromising group of fiscal conservatives in history...but just how Tea Party are they? Did all 87 freshmen always vote to cut spending and limit the size of government, or did some of them vote like the big-spending R.I.N.Os of the past?

This study was compiled from the Club for Growth's Congressional Scorecard, which evaluates lawmakers based upon their commitment to limited government and pro-growth policies. What we found was that while some freshmen have lived up to the promises they made to the tea party movement, dozens of them are big-spenders and are no different from many of the veteran Republicans they serve with.
While the rhetoric of the freshmen may be loud, the Club for Growth strives to hold lawmakers accountable by examining how they actually voted once they got to Congress. In many cases, the rhetoric of the so-called “Tea Party” freshmen simply didn’t match their records.
Click below to see how the Freshman voted:

Posted by Unknown at 2:48 PM
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