Perhaps you can show what they have done. Do you have anything?
Here is one of their agendas:
Identify constitutionality of every new law: Require each bill to identify the specific provision of the Constitution that gives Congress the power to do what the bill does (82.03%).
Reject emissions trading: Stop the “cap and trade” administrative approach used to control pollution by providing economic incentives for achieving reductions in the emissions of pollutants. (72.20%).
Demand a balanced federal budget: Begin the Constitutional amendment process to require a balanced budget with a two-thirds majority needed for any tax modification. (69.69%)
Simplify the tax system: Adopt a simple and fair single-rate tax system by scrapping the internal revenue code and replacing it with one that is no longer than 4,543 words – the length of the original Constitution. (64.9%)
Audit federal government agencies for constitutionality: Create a blue ribbon taskforce that engages in an audit of federal agencies and programs, assessing their constitutionality, and identifying duplication, waste, ineffectiveness, and agencies and programs better left for the states or local authorities. (63.37%)
Limit annual growth in federal spending: Impose a statutory cap limiting the annual growth in total federal spending to the sum of the inflation rate plus the percentage of population growth. (56.57%).
Repeal the health care legislation passed on March 23, 2010: Defund, repeal and replace the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. (56.39%).
Pass an ‘All-of-the-Above’ Energy Policy: Authorize the exploration of additional energy reserves (see Oil reserves in the United States) to reduce American dependence on foreign energy sources and reduce regulatory barriers to all other forms of energy creation. (55.5%).
Reduce Earmarks: Place a moratorium on all earmarks until the budget is balanced, and then require a 2/3 majority to pass any earmark. (55.47%).
Reduce Taxes: Permanently repeal all recent tax increases, and extend permanently the George W. Bush temporary reductions in income tax, capital gains tax and estate taxes, currently scheduled to end in 2011. (53.38%).
True, and obviously this hasnt worked on the national level. But has it worked locally? At the State level? Have they accomplished anything at the National Level except costing the taxpayers billions due to shut downs, etc?
When looking at the clean energy issue there is the surprising fact that many Tea Partiers are in favor of solar power, it is one of the few items were environmentalists that usually come from the left and tea partiers from the right agree. They have helped fight for the right of home owners and some renters against old fossil fuel generated power regional monopolies in several states.
Those Tea party groups do think that the old energy regional monopolies are establishment powers that do dislike seeing people becoming energy independent.
They believe power should be deligated to the most local of authorities which equals greater liberty for citizens. Obstructing Federal government at any turn is all win for them.
This tendency has either a close or a coincidental relationship (I’ll let you decide for yourself how you are going to go with it) with slavery, reconstruction, lynching and racism, at least in regards to the South.
The closer you have the law enforcement to you the easier it is to have him be one of your own, to control them, or at least to get a pass on things.
IMHO that is the real bug up the ass of those who rail at the federal government.
There’s no need to throw it back to Scylla. You asserted in your OP that the Tea Party “claim[s] all sorts of stuff.” One needn’t support the Tea Party to recognize that the assertion in the OP does not mention a single one of the things that they supposedly claim (also, I have no reason to suppose that Scylla does support them). Pointing out that fact does not obligate the observer to make his own list of the claims that you are the only one who has asserted actually exist.
Listing one or more of the items on their agenda (which, by its nature is aspirational rather than declaratory) doesn’t fulfill the request for specifics about what they claim (except insofar as it is a claim that these goals are what they want, but that’s kinda circular).
Speaking for myself, I’m happy to invite you to withdraw the first sentence of your OP and resubmit it WITHOUT the vagueness problems that Scylla has pointed out.
At least at the Federal level, the issue with the Tea Party is they only control 42 seats in the House, and maybe around 4-5 Senators (the Senate doesn’t have official caucuses like the House so it’s more vague as to who is a true Tea Partier there.) So they really don’t have enough power to enact legislation. They did essentially force John Boehner to retire, and they’ve been a big part of all the debt ceiling and spending authorization/budget fights, in that they represent a bloc that has never agreed to vote for any compromise. They are also often the fount from which periodic Obamacare repeal bills are started. But given their lack of control of the House leadership and their small number in the House and Senate they really haven’t had much opportunity to do anything.
Would they do things to help the common man if they had more power? They’d lower taxes, things of that nature. Whether you find that to be net beneficial or not is a political question, not a factual one.
In State houses the Tea Party has been more active, they’ve usually been behind:
-Expansion of right to work statutes
-Passing laws that prohibit municipalities from setting a minimum wage higher than the State minimum wage
-Passing Religious Free Restoration Acts
-Driving already shaky public pensions into ruin by paupering the State government with huge tax cuts
-Shutting down lots of things like DMV offices and etc due to their aforementioned large tax cuts
Tea partiers are not in favor of cutting medicare, medicaid or social security.
It is hard not to get political, but when the tea party talks about ‘shrinking government’ they mean programs that don’t benefit them, but benefit people they don’t like (like minorities). But you really can’t get meaningful savings from government by doing that.
About 80% of government spending (local, state, federal) falls into 4 categories. Health care, pensions, security (military/police/prisons), education. Unless you cut spending for those things, you can’t really cut taxes.