Summary of Tea Party Arguments

Summary of Tea Party Arguments

by Scott Zuke [http://pureonsense.com/?page_id=168]

http://pureonsense.com/?p=199 Reprinted with permission from the blog "Pure Onsense"

[This concise and thoughtful treatment of the movement and WST-Frederick are partially based upon an interview with Joshua Lyons, a co-Founder of the group.]

Authors note:
I wrote what follows as an e-mail to a friend and former professor who wanted to know why I thought the Tea Partier groups were worth giving a fair hearing to–she admitted having some doubts about their arguments and motives. The summary I provided is pretty brief, but covers all the major points to the best of my memory, and as sympathetically as I could reconstruct them. (The whole thing could stand some revision and cleaning up, but I thought it was worth sharing anyway).

Update: Information Age indeed! The WST folks picked up on this post in no time, so I’ve made some proofreading edits. If there are any substantial shortcomings in my summary, I’m sure I can count on them to mention them in the comments section. For more official information, see We Surround Them Frederick’s official website and their blog.

_____________________________________________________

I’ll try to summarize their main arguments as succinctly as I can, based on their articles and a discussion I had with Joshua Lyons, one of the co-founders of We Surround Them Frederick (WST):

1. Big Government Is Bad

The federal government, through case law over the last 70 years or so, has expanded far beyond what the Founder’s intended. They cite the Federalist Papers as laying out that the powers of the Fed Gov’t were intended to be numerated and few, and for the States to pick up the rest. They say that health care reform is unconstitutional because such a program is not among the powers enumerated to Congress in Article 1, Section 8. Congress typically argues that the “general welfare clause” is open ended and gives them the authority, but WST denies this based upon the Federalist Paper #45, which was written by Madison, who also wrote the “general welfare” clause in the Constitution. ”The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite.” That is, WST says, the specific powers listed in Sec. 8 were intended to be exhaustive, not open-ended. Therefore, whenever Congress has done anything not specifically listed there or elsewhere in the Constitution (all amendments included) it has done so illegally. They often refer to a particular article (here) that presents the history of how certain judges and court cases, beginning with the New Deal, began redefining the general welfare clause through case law (that is, circumventing a Constitutional amendment, which would presumably be more difficult).

It’s also worth noting that WST favors a couple aspects of health care reform that they believe would be in keeping with the Constitution. They call for tort reform and opening up health insurance programs to competition with those based in other states, which they believe falls under the commerce clause.

2. Big Government Is Dangerous

One of WST’s biggest concerns–and here I have to agree with them–is the growing budget deficit. Lyons, with whom I spoke in person, had studied a number of economic indicators and claimed to have sources who believe that OPEC is considering dropping the dollar as the standard currency for trading oil. I don’t know enough about economics to confirm or deny most of what he told me, but common sense seems to tell me that allowing a huge deficit to balloon or even just remain for any prolonged period of time is dangerous. On this point, they are truly non-partisan: they hold Bush and Obama equally accountable for the stimulus bill and they claim that they were no friend to Bush even during his presidency on account of the huge expansion of government he spurred. (Lyons said he began studying Constitutional history eight years ago, implying disagreement and disappointment with Bush, who was socially, but not fiscally conservative).

3. What It’s Up To

At the root of everything, they view Big Government, which they say includes basically every president and Congress since Wilson, as following a liberal progressive agenda that seeks to wrest liberty from individual citizens by convincing them to give it up piece by piece. If you come back at them by saying that big government initiatives like the Civil Rights Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act were actually efforts to ensure and protect liberty to citizens who were systematically disadvantaged, they fall back to a couple of arguments. First of all, they say that such matters should be left in the hands of the states (one of their fundamental principles is that the level of government that is closest to the people governs best). And second, they lament the plight of…

4. The Forgotten Man.

The Forgotten Man is the citizen who is, without his consent, required to hand his money over to the government in order to address some cause that–while well-intentioned–could have been handled without a law that tread upon his rights. (This leads into their whole argument against “redistribution of wealth”). When I talked to Lyons in person, I managed to drill into this argument a bit and I think what I arrived at is that they are opposed to the government ordering something that should be a moral choice, left to the individual citizen to decide. They claim that Forgotten Men are in fact compassionate and willing to help their fellow downtrodden citizens, but that the government does not have the authority to dictate compassion. (The blog post explaining the whole Forgotten Man thing is

here. FYI, I left my response in the comments section below the post, under the name PureOnsense).

Now I’m probably leaving off a few other important points, but I thought this would suffice to give you a taste of what these guys are up to. Partly in response to questions I posed to them through their website and other places, they wrote up a nice explanation of why they do not discuss much in the way of specific policies under current debate

here. In short, they think the entire political debate is fundamentally flawed: you can’t debate how to best set up health care reform when the reform itself is unconstitutional from the start.

So what I find interesting in all of this is that their agenda is not what I expected at first when the tea parties started showing up on tv over the summer. They are not subtly rebranded Bush supporters or Republicans, nor are they in any way racist, as the mainstream media very unfairly entertained for weeks on end without substantiation (I’d never before bought into the “mainstream media bias” argument until I started communicating with WST. I can’t help but see that they’ve been pegged as a dumb mob and left at that. It wasn’t until a week ago that I even heard the word “libertarian” mentioned by a pundit on CNN. The media has done a pathetic job covering the content of these groups’ arguments, and it really bothers me, even though I’m not fully on board with them).

When it comes down to it, they are simply concerned that the government is becoming too powerful and too overbearing, and their response has been exactly what the Founder’s would have wanted from concerned citizens. There are some shaky aspects to their views that will put them at a major disadvantage to liberals, and they recognize that they come off as lacking compassion when they oppose well-intended legislation aimed at social justice—they reply that social justice should be achieved socially, however, rather than through laws that strip personal liberties even while claiming to do the opposite.

And that’s about as sympathetically as I can summarize their views at this point. What I came to see after talking with Lyons was that he had a very well realized set of principles from which he was able to draw his arguments effortlessly. As for me, on the other hand, I realized I could not articulate my principles nearly so well, either to him or to myself. I have a feeling that there are things about what he argues don’t sit well with me, but my political views aren’t so well developed that I can put my finger on the problem yet. I will continue to work on that.

Categories:

politics

Comments (0) Trackbacks (0) Leave a comment Trackback