Why a Tea Party?

Well, the historical reference should be an indication of our intent, but let me start with a little background.

It was in the spirit of rugged individualism that the right to “...the pursuit of happiness”, and not "happiness" itself, was such an important part of our Declaration of Independence. How we’ve degraded our thinking to the point where people feel the need to “spread the wealth around” through oppressive taxation and the redistribution of the wealth of our hard working citizens through various government programs, rather than earning one’s own keep, is beyond me. Thomas Jefferson likely articulated this concept best when he said “Never trouble another for what you can do for yourself” because when one depends on another's labors to support their existence, their existence will always be limited to what others are willing to give, rather than having the full potential of what they might be capable of achieving on their own.

The reason that I participated in the Tax Day Tea Party here in Greensboro was not simply to oppose the current administration’s spending proposals (although a tripling of federal government spending from one year to the next should be enough to make every citizen stand up in protest), but to oppose all of the unconstitutional spending that has grown out of control over the past 76 years since FDR proposed the first initiatives of the New Deal in 1933. There is more than plenty of blame to go around, for both democrats and republicans alike. I have no desire, as the liberals claim, to go back to the spending policies of the Bush administration, because, for the most part, those policies were wasteful and largely unconstitutional as well. My true desire is to see us, as a country, work our way back to the fundamentals of the Constitution, by passing a Balanced Budget Amendment, initiating across the board spending cuts to all federal benevolence programs and instituting a Line-Item Veto to eliminate pork-barrel spending and return our society to a point where spending is done and controlled at the state and local levels where proper oversight can truly be achieved, as outlined in the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution.

The U.S. Constitution is fundamentally a rulebook for government. Its guiding principle is the understanding that "the government" was a necessary evil and is a source of corruptive power and ultimate tyranny. The Federal Government’s responsibilities were confined to a few enumerated powers, involving mainly national security and public safety. In the realm of domestic affairs, the Founders sought to guarantee that federal interference in the daily lives of citizens would be strictly limited. They also wanted to make sure that the minimal government role in the domestic economy would be financed and delivered at the state and local levels.

The enumerated powers of the federal government to spend money are defined in the Constitution under Article I, Section 8. These powers include the right to "establish Post Offices and post roads; raise and support Armies; provide and maintain a Navy; declare War..." and to conduct a few other activities related mostly to national defense. The term “provide for the Common Defense and the General Welfare of the United States” meant just that – things that were good for “all” citizens such as a military to defend our country, a post office to provide a common and accessible means of communication, etc. It does not state “to provide for the individual welfare of the people”. No matter how long one searches, it is impossible to find in the Constitution any language that authorizes at least 90 percent of the civilian programs that Congress crams into the federal budget today. What if every adult in the United States decided it was the government’s role to “promote the individual welfare of the people” and quit their job tomorrow? Where then would the revenue come from in order for the federal government to provide for everyone’s individual needs?

As outlined in the Constitution, the federal government has no authority to pay money to farmers, run the health care industry, impose wage and price controls, give welfare to the poor and unemployed, provide job training, subsidize electricity and telephone service, lend money to businesses and foreign governments, or build parking garages, tennis courts, and swimming pools. The Founders did not create a Department of Commerce, a Department of Education, or a Department of Housing and Urban Development. This was no oversight: They did not believe that government was authorized to establish such agencies.

Recognizing the propensity of governments to expand, and, as Thomas Jefferson put it, for "liberty to yield," the Founders added the Bill of Rights to the Constitution as an extra layer of protection. The government was never supposed to grow so large that it could trample on the liberties of American citizens. The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution states clears and unambiguously, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited to it by the states, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." In other words, if the Constitution doesn’t specifically permit the federal government to do something, then it doesn’t have the right to do it and it certainly doesn’t have the right to confiscate our hard earned money in order to do it!

As constitutional scholar Roger Pilon has documented, even expenditures for the most charitable of purposes were routinely spurned as illegitimate. In 1794, James Madison, commonly referred to as both the Father of the Constitution and the Father of the Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments to the Constitution), wrote disapprovingly of a $15,000 appropriation for French refugees: "I cannot undertake to lay my finger on the article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents." This view that Congress should follow the original intent of the Constitution was restated even more forcefully on the floor of the House of Representatives two years later by William Giles of Virginia. Giles condemned a relief measure for fire victims and insisted that is was not the purpose, nor the right of Congress to "attend to what generosity and humanity require, but to what the Constitution and their duty require."

In 1827, the famous Davy Crockett was elected to the House of Representatives. During his first term of office, a $10,000 relief bill for the widow of a naval officer was proposed. Colonel Crockett rose in stern opposition and gave the following eloquent and successful rebuttal: “We must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living. I will not attempt to prove that Congress has no power to appropriate this money as an act of charity. Every member upon this floor knows it. We have the right as individuals to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of Congress we have no right to appropriate a dollar of the public money”.

In a famous incident in 1854, President Franklin Pierce courageously vetoed an extremely popular bill intended to help the mentally ill, saying: "I cannot find any authority in the Constitution for public charity." To approve such spending, he argued, "would be contrary to the letter and the spirit of the Constitution and subversive to the whole theory upon which the Union of the States is founded." Grover Cleveland, the king of the veto, rejected hundreds of congressional spending bills during his two terms as president in the late 1800s, because, as he often wrote: "I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution."

Were Madison, Giles, Crockett, Pierce, and Cleveland merely hardhearted and uncaring penny pinchers, as their critics have often charged? Were they unsympathetic toward fire victims, the mentally ill, widows, or impoverished refugees? Of course not. They were honor bound to uphold the Constitution. They perceived—we now know correctly—that once the government genie was out of the bottle, it would be impossible to get it back in.

With a few notable exceptions during the nineteenth century, Congress, the president, and the courts remained faithful to the letter and spirit of the Constitution with regard to government spending. As economic historian Robert Higgs noted in Crisis and Leviathan, until the twentieth century, "government did little of much consequence or expense" other than running the military. The total expenditures for the federal budget confirm this assessment. Even as late as 1925, the federal government was still spending just 4 percent of national output. Compare that to 2001 when the cost of the federal budget was over 18 percent of national output as reported by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, almost five times the amount as a direct percentage!

Please don’t misunderstand my strict interpretation of the Constitution as an attitude of indifference to those who are truly needy. I simply agree with the Founding Fathers and think that acts of benevolence should come through private giving and charitable organizations and not forced from the taxpayers at large. I should be free to give to whomever or whatever cause I choose. By doing things in that manner, people are held accountable to their neighbors who are supporting them or helping provide for their needs, and those who are providing the support are in the best position to motivate that person back to self-sufficiency simply due to the closeness of the relationship. When assistance is provided in this way, one is less likely to continue the assistance if the person being provided for is not doing their part and doing everything they can to work themselves back to self-sufficiency. With our current system however, the only oversight comes in the form of a case-worker from a federal or state agency that they meet with once a month at best, providing little to no real interaction and having no true understanding of the circumstances, and providing minimal motivation on the part of the person receiving the assistance to change the situation. In this manner we are forced to support the lazy as well as those who are truly in need.

The true basis of the Tea Party movement isn’t about political party affiliation, democrat or republican, but rather the concepts of individual responsibility, fiscal responsibility on the part of our federal government and affirmation of the Tenth Amendment. People understand basic economics – within their own household budgets they understand that you can’t spend more than you make – and that you don’t get out of debt by spending more money that you don’t have to begin with. The groundswell is huge. It is estimated that over 300,000 people attended more than 770 anti-tax tea party demonstrations across the country on April 15^th alone, many that were held during lunch-time, thus preventing many more who would have liked to attend from doing so. And the movement will only continue to grow as more and more people continue to get fed up with having their hard earned money go to bailout unsound financial institutions, inefficient corporations with out-dated business models and the ever growing pork-barrel spending that’s pushed through congress and forced down their throats year after year with no end in sight.

The great part is that our elected officials in congress see this movement and recognize it for what it truly is, and quite frankly, it scares the hell out of them. The proof is when our current Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, discounts the reality of this grass-roots movement and plays it off as “astro-turf”, funded by the wealthy as an attempt to lower their taxes and return to the policies of the previous administration. The first initial reaction any person has to what they perceive as an imminent threat, is to deny its very existence or to play it off as something other than what it really is. Even President Obama claimed on April 15^th that he wasn’t aware of these “so-called Tea Parties” that were being planned. Are we expected to believe that the man holding one of the most powerful political offices in the world, with the intelligence capabilities of the CIA literally at his finger-tips, was not aware that nationwide protests against skyrocketing federal spending were being planned, especially when it was being reported and promoted on the internet for the last few weeks? Or are we to assume that this information was intentionally withheld from the President and that he is simply so far out of touch with the constituency that he hadn’t even heard of it? Either scenario makes him look like a fool. How is it that on one hand the Speaker of the House says this was all well planned and orchestrated by the GOP, yet on the other hand the President wasn’t aware of the movement’s existence, up to and including the very date the protests were held?

I believe this movement will do more to engage the largest cross section of American citizens than any other single event in recent history, to include the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. It is the responsibility of each of us to educate our friends, neighbors and co-workers as to the real spirit behind this movement and make sure the republicans do not attempt to high-jack this movement and claim it as their own - as a desire of the populace to move away from the left and towards the right - because it's not. This isn’t about left or right, it’s about uncontrolled, unconstitutional spending on wasteful programs and unnecessary pork projects at the expense of the responsible citizens who have worked hard to become self-sufficient and in some cases even affluent, and when it comes to wasteful spending, republicans are just as guilty as democrats are.

You owe it to yourself, your children and your grandchildren to take the time to educate yourself on the issues and the surrounding facts, take time to read the writings of the great men who wrote our Constitution, such as The Federalist Papers, and truly understand their thought-process as they wrote it, as well as their feelings toward the tyrannical government and unjust taxation they had just thrown off and were looking to prevent from replicating itself in the future. We must educate ourselves and each other, and we must take the time to get involved and participate in the discourse.

As Thomas Jefferson said – “We in America do not have government by the majority. We have government by the majority who participate”.