The answer is yes, unquestionably.
Dump the Tea Party, and the Republican Party may survive; the faction that is the Tea Party will die.
As it is, the Republican Party is imploding. Yes, on the surface, with Tea Partyiers included, the GOP looks like a majority party. But what does it matter, when a party’s members cannot agree, when they cannot accomplish anything?
The paralysis gripping the House of Representatives tells the story. Over the past few years, Tea Party intransigence has scuttled many constructive common-sense measures enjoying the assent of moderate lawmakers. At the Tea Party’s insistence, the House has approved countless Tea Party-centered bills that then die because they are so far out of the established mainstream. Americans want Obamacare; they want the federal government to continue to run; and, yes, Americans would rather have federal debt than to bring a protective Union to its knees. Yet the Tea Party has striven again and again to demolish elements of federal governance that generations of responsible lawmakers and jurists have painstaking built up.
The speaker’s contest gearing up in the House showcases the dilemma of a party that cannot control or even influence its own destructive minority wing.
Yet some of the leading figures of this do-nothing faction are now gunning for the Presidency, figures like Mario Rubio and Ted Cruz, so naïve and uncooperative (and in the case of Cruz so despised by his Republican colleagues) that they are incapable of collaborative achievement. Out of sync with everything but their own narcissism, these candidates would make poor presidents, since they haven’t a clue as to how to marshal party power.
Dumping the Tea Party would be painful for the GOP establishment but would leave the GOP free to forge legislation with centrists on the other side of the aisle. In terms of presidential politics, a purge would reassure moderate voters, who might respond surprisingly positively to this disinterested gesture of patriotism and good will.
The Tea Party are anti-federalists whose views, goals, and tactics jeopardize the power and integrity of United States. Cut the Tea Party adrift, and be the Grand Old Party again.
Image: “Congressional Scales” (1850),
published by the firm of Nathaniel Currier, courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Click here to go to the source.
The cartoon shows President Zachary Taylor uncomfortably balanced atop a scales filled with acrimonious legislators. He holds two controversial pieces of legislation as weights. Political opponents in the scales taunt one another, one declaring that ‘We can hold out as long as they can’; another that ‘My patience is as inexhaustible as the federal treasury.’
I totally agree with you. The Tea Party are a group of ill will and real rightists. UGH! Given that McCarthy has now bowed out of the Speaker’s race, those radicals have gained yet more strength, UGH! . . . I read in the paper that the number of staunch Tea Party House members is 30……….I must say they do have TONS of funding due to the ugly Koch brothers and can bombard their opponents with all kinds of nasty lies and un-truths.
It’s interesting what’s happening now, though, because when threatened with embarrassment, the Republicans are acting like a unified party. The effort to draft Paul Ryan to be speaker, which would only happen at the wishes of his ‘friends,’ is a marvelously traditional form of party action. The wishes of ‘friends’ used to drive a lot of what happened in American political parties.