By Michael John Donohue | The Save Jersey Blog
I was there on April 15, 2009, in a lashing nor’easter.
There were small groups of Americans from all walks of life across the country holding signs and protesting the mountain of taxes that Americans find themselves under every day. Our cars are taxed. Our properties are taxed. Our phone calls are taxed. Our hotel rooms are taxed. Our cell phones are taxed. Our beer is taxed. Our income is taxed. Nearly everything we own or touch is taxed by some governmental agency. So, in 2009, a nationwide effort took shape to protest all of these taxes. It took the acronym T.E.A. This stood for Taxed Enough Already. This fit nicely into a story that we all learned in grade school about the Boston Tea Party.
American patriots threw crates of tea, as the story goes, into Boston harbor to protest the tea tax. It was an aspect of the “no taxation without representation” cry that the colonist utilized as part of the justification for the American Revolution. Thus, the T.E.A. Party was born. It was, in fact, the Taxed Enough Already Party.
If you were there in Cape May County on April 15, 2009, you darn near froze to death as you were pelted by sleet and wind and rain in a howling gale that made the magic marker on our signs run. We stood on 9th Street in Ocean City and scores of drivers honked in support as they drove by. We stood in the teeth of the nor’easter on Main Street in Cape May Court House and many more drivers on Route 9 tooted their horns. We ended the day on Texas Avenue at Cape May harbor and listened to classic patriotic music and kids reading from the Declaration of Independence as the wind still blew and the rain kept falling. It was a great day and the message was: We are Taxed Enough Already!
The effort to protest out of control taxes was so successful on April 15, 2009, all over the United States, that it spawned a national movement to keep the pressure on elected officials. What no one knew was the amount of angst that was out there among ordinary people. Folks were more fed up than anyone imagined. They joined the T.E.A. party movement by the thousands. They wanted to see government reformed and the tax burden reduced. In the 2010 Congressional elections, T.E.A. party volunteers played a key role in returning control of the House of Representatives to Republicans. T.E.A. party people got actively involved in campaigns; knocked on doors; raised money and turned out the vote on Election Day. All of this effort was put forward in order to elect candidates who would commit themselves to reducing taxes and the size of government.
But something happened along the way. Somehow a fringe element began to define the T.E.A. party. This fringe obsessed over Barak Obama’s birth certificate and religious affiliation. They took a combative, even threatening, tone when it came to public discourse. This gave the liberal national media exactly what they were looking for. Since 2011, the main stream media has portrayed the T.E.A. party as racist, flag-waving kooks, full of hatred and intent on destruction. They have latched on to images of the one or two oddballs in a crowd of thousands of peaceful demonstrators and sold this image to the nation as the face of the T.E.A. party. This is not what the T.E.A. party is at its core and certainly not what it was ever intended to be. Sadly, since it has no central leadership and no unified structure, the T.E.A. party was ill equipped to fight that public relations battle. They allowed themselves to be defined in this manner.
Slowly, many of the citizen activists who followed their civic impulse to do good by joining the protests of April 15, 2009, drifted away from the T.E.A. party movement. Over time, many of the leadership roles were taken over by some on the fringe. Instead of keeping focus on the Taxed Enough Already founding concept, they began to focus on a growing list of litmus tests for Republican candidates and elected officials. It seems as if every day brings some new loyalty test or issued standard by which Republicans must be judged and anyone falling even an inch outside the mark is branded a R.I.N.O. (Republican in Name Only). Recently, even Rand Paul, once the darling of the T.E.A. party, was attacked and called a R.I.N.O. for saying he was willing to vote to reopen the partially-shutdown federal government. Somewhere along the way T.E.A. stopped standing for Taxed Enough Already and instead seems now to mean Treat Everyone as Adversaries.
A political party cannot fight for long on two fronts. It cannot long sustain the the battle of ideas in the public arena against the other side of the aisle and fight a wing of its own supporters at the same time. Politics is hard work. Elections take courage, money and extraordinary commitments of time and energy. The distraction of internal battles can be deadly to the chances of success. The 2013 version of the T.E.A. party needs to begin to understand this. They have no home on the left. The more they do to damage the prospects of Republican candidates, the more they undermine their original purpose which drew so many people to their ranks. The ultimate delusion among many is a belief that if they can get rid of all the R.I.N.Os, even if that means that Democrats get elected, eventually, some candidate who can pass all of the various T.E.A. party litmus tests will arise and conquer. That is a pipe dream.
Believe me, there are no knights on white horses in politics. There is no super hero waiting in the wings to swoop in and save the country. What we have are human beings with an impulse to engage in politics and public service. They are flawed and fragile, just like everyone else. They need support, sometimes even when we disagree with them, because, as Ronald Reagan said, “A person who agrees with me 80% of the time is a friend and ally, not a 20% traitor.” The T.E.A. party was supposed to be a Conservative movement that would focus on those core principles of smaller government; lower taxes; a hand-up instead of a hand-out; personal responsibility and a belief that America is still the “shining city on a hill” that can support human freedom and dignity throughout the world. That is why I became a Conservative and that is what most Conservatives stand for. It is time for the T.E.A. party to get back to its roots: Taxed Enough Already. This is a message that crosses party lines and resonates across all demographics.
As a Tax Enough Already protest movement, the T.E.A. party can play a critical role in electing Republican candidates that will fight for those Conservative ideals. By embracing Reagan’s admonition to gather those 80% friends and allies, the Conservative cause cannot fail. The United States is a middle-right country. Poll after poll has shown that. The T.E.A. party could be a major positive force in electing Republicans and bringing America back from the destructive Left. However, as a fringe but influential element that determines who is and who isn’t a R.I.N.O., the T.E.A. party will only ensure that Republican candidates go down to defeat and that the liberal agenda it so despises advances that much more quickly.
Well that hits the nail on the head. Doubt it will get through though .
Terrific write up and largely right. The TEA party should stay away from social issues and focus on fiscal matters. I will say to be fair, on the other side the regular GOP does need a severe kick in the rear end. The TEA party should be doing that, but in a constructive way. Lets face it, the GOP should have won the 2012 presidential election and they have themselves to blame. The Tea party is not the only guilty party in that.
so true
The grassroots beginnings of the Tea Party were taken over by the billionaires i.e. the Koch Brothers and began the "astroturf" effort. Now just by seeing photos of the extremists in terms of their racist and uninformed rantings and signs, the Tea Party has succumbed to the wing-nuts and plummeted in opinion polls.
The GOP was pretty useless when it came to supporting Steve Lonegan, the Republican candidate for US Senate. Guess they were the ones being purists who would rather the Democrat won.
The liberals running for office in NJ are calling the GOP Tea Party extremists, just because they want lower taxes and no more Obamacare like the majority of NJ citizens do!