The mainstream GOP has never claimed to focus on the economy. Indeed, most of the time they don’t mention it at all, except to say taxes are too high.
One thing that is interesting is that on a day-to-day level, Kay Bailey Hutchinson is leaving some huge shoes to fill. She has a rock solid reputation even among Democrats for running her office like a top and for taking good care of her state in “call your congressperson” kind of matters (even as a senator). When I think “Tea Party”, I don’t generally assume that kind of “time to make the doughnuts” style competency–it’s part of the price of being an outsider. Assuming a republican victory, it will be interesting to see if the office performs less efficiently and if that sours anyone on outsiders.
Speaking as a liberal, my primary complaint with the Tea Party is that their beliefs are fucking stupid and/or evil. They’re today’s John Birch Society. Hell, they’re today’s Confederacy. They’re largely older, white Southern men who get pissed off every time the country seems like it’s catering to other people.
As a liberal, gay, atheist from Boston, I’m disgusted by the fact that the Tea Party uses all of those as as code words for un-American. They’re opposed to a society that affords me any sort of equality. Yeah, they’re also annoyingly obstinate in these beliefs, but that’s well down the list.
Yeah, but wouldn’t you rather have a clear, transparent debate on how to move the country forward, one ideology vs. another, then the muddled, parochial, corrupt system we’d grown used to, where support for something like gay rights had little to do with principle and more to do with the relative wealth of the power brokers involved?
No. The US system of government seems to be designed for cross-party compromise, as much as that might involve corruption. If we’re going to have ideological battles, we’re going to need a parliamentary form of government.
Look at the era of civil rights legislation in the 60s. It passed with the support of non-Southerners of both parties, while being opposed by Southerners of both parties (there were only a handful of Southern Republicans at the time, but they were unanimously opposed). The Democrats had to work around having powerful committee chairs that could block the legislation, but eventually LBJ got it passed. It wasn’t necessarily pretty.
Nowadays, the Republican Party, both the mainstream, and the very slightly more batty Tea Partiers, have been able to stick together to block all Democratic efforts to reduce unemployment and sabotage the President. I’d prefer corrupt assholes who put their career ahead of their party than nihilists that put their party ahead of their country, at least given the system of government that we have. If a majority party could control the government and enact their agenda, like in a parliamentary system, having ideologically rigid parties works better.
And, in either system of government, the views of the Tea Party are a collection of delusion, bigotry, and misdirected anger that are an embarrassment to our country. The last thing those fuckers want is a transparent debate on the issues.
Compromise based on meeting halfway I like. Compromise by using taxpayer dollars to grease legislation, that’s corrupt. I agree that Tea Partiers should be more interested in compromise and I believe they will be more compromising after the elections. They just started getting elected and wanted to show that they will stand by their principles in the hopes of winning it all in 2012, a goal that is still quite achievable.
But the days of the Cornhusker Kickback or trading earmarks for votes are over.
No they aren’t. And now the deals are done in total darkness, so you’ll never know what’s happening.
And if the tradeoff is returning to the days of back-alley abortions, I’ll take Cornhusker Kickbacks.
My statement was probably too absolute and hyperbolic, corruption will always be with us. But the use of earmarks and logrolling is way, way down from the days of the Delay-Hastert-Lott Congress and I just can’t see how anyone can view that as anything but positive.
Bills should pass on their merits, not through votebuying using taxpayer dollars.
Cite?
I do dispute the premise that earmarks are universally negative.
So, did they decide abortion was the most important problem in America, or teh gay?
Kids on their lawn, actually.
I wish they were just nihilists.
Time to get a little bit more of a Hispanic perspective.
The trash that several members of the tea party are coming with is both clueless and offensive (not all of them are like that, but I do think moderate Republicans are not seeing what is going under the hood), via Facebook a clueless tea party cousin from Florida just forgets who I am and sends me birther and racist nonsence that I guess looks to several tea partiers and racists as “the new normal” way to do propaganda.
There was recently in the SDMB board a sprinkle of threads regarding that old chestnut of declaring that liberals are Nazis! (most of that idea came from Jonah Goldberg). Now I know that there is an even uglier related “theme” going on outside the regular media channels. (Yes they even think FOX is hiding the “truth” after they got rid of Beck)
From my tea party cousin I’m getting an effervescence of images equating the holocaust and the Nazis with liberals; why, don’t you know that after all the Nazis of the past were liberal too? :rolleyes:
Yeah sure, now why a Liberal like Albert Einstein did not join them is a mystery :smack:
As the Neo nazis are also against Jews and the “wrong races” today, you have to wonder why a good number of conservatives have no trouble believing on that many contradictory things regarding the Nazis, and it is really worse when a relative is also an Hispanic.
I see mostly a very ugly projection going on from the part of the extreme right nowadays; and so, we get to the “logical” conclusion that many extremists are reaching: that as “the liberals of today are the Nazis”, then the liberals are planning a holocaust, a “white holocaust” that is, as my crazy relative is informing me. :rolleyes: If he is expecting that the makers of that propaganda will love minorities like him, he has another thing coming if they do follow on what they do want to do to America. It is indeed like a chicken voting for Colonel Sanders.
I see it as an interesting investigation tool to check on what the fringes are doing, but I think I will unfriend him soon, better for the blood pressure.
I don’t think earmarks are universally negative, I was only complaining about the use of earmarks to get Congressmen to vote for legislation that they wouldn’t normally support. That’s just bribery.
You want a cite for the earmark ban, or something else?
The deficit, actually. The Tea Party has expended more of their political capital for proposing a tough deficit reduction plan that reforms Medicare than for anything else. abortion is a divisive but safe issue. Half the people will like what you do in most cases, half won’t. The budget is a lot tougher to deal with, which might be why the Democrats don’t want to propose a plan that reduces the deficit as much as the Republicans have.
At the state level, Republicans have also concentrated primarily on cutting state costs and have succeeded admirably.
I don’t know how you’d measure it,but I think we’re seeing a much, much better performance out of Republican officials than we did in the Bush era or previous. And the precise nature of the complaints coming from democrats only reinforces that they are actually governing as conservatives now.
Well I’d love to see a cite for an earmark ban, but that never actually happened.
I’m asking for a site showing the decline in earmarks. Bonus if you can demonstrate it being due to Tea Party candidates.
I don’t really doubt earmarks are down but do doubt it’s because of a principled stance against them. When your blocking every spending bill that comes up it doesn’t give you much to attach an earmark too really.
Teddy Roosvelt would punch them in the nose, conservation (of the environment) is something that they do not look for anymore.
Unfortunately, as the recent hearings regarding this very important issue showed, the blind are the the current Republican leaders.
Here’s the earmark ban:
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20023236-503544.html
Turns out the Republicans actually imposed an earmark ban on themselves before winning the 2010 election, and earmarks were way down:
CBS News) After years of intense public criticism, Congress has seriously curbed its earmark habit of spending tax dollars for pet projects outside the normal public review. The new “Pig Book” – which has tracked Washington pork since 1991 – says the amount of tax dollars destined for earmarks in 2012 is way down: $3.3 billion.
The high was $29 billion in 2006.
It’s not all rosy though, the earmark ban, like any other law drafted by professional lawyers, is something they want to get around:
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-07-26/earmark-ban-fails-to-stop-lawmaker-requests-for-spending
The House last week more than tripled funding for an updated version of a Cold War-era tank the U.S. Army says it doesn’t need. If the vote made questionable sense to some watchdogs in an era of tightening military spending, it made a lot of political sense to lawmakers seeking to preserve jobs in their districts.
Even with a two-year ban on earmarks, or pet projects that often can’t be justified as national priorities, the action was the latest evidence that members of the U.S. Congress are still finding ways to deliver the goods for their constituents.
…
I still think it’s a net plus though because this example isn’t just a one district type of thing where leaders offer one guy $10 million for his vote.
Is this just your gut feeling, because it contradicts what most Tea Party candidates have publicly expressed.
They have a rational reason to not compromise up to this point. They just won an election and they want to draw contrasts for the big one coming in 2012. If they’d started compromising right out of the gate, they might win points from the Beltway press, but they’d muddle their message and demoralize the base and possibly the independents who supported them as well.
If they don’t win in 2012, if Obama is still the President, they have to live with that for four years. We can’t go on like this another four years. If Obama is reelected, we’ll have compromise, because a) Tea Partiers will commit political suicide if they remain obstinate after the public has spoken that they prefer divided government, and b) Obama will have more flexibility since he also is not running for reelection and will want to establish a legacy.