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“Defying The Laws Of Political Reality”: No Dirty Politics In IRS Investigations Of Tea Party

The conservative blogosphere is all-atwitter this afternoon over the revelation that the Internal Revenue Service targeted various Tea Party groups in the days leading up to the presidential election of 2012.

Sadly for the critics of the president, things are not always as they initially appear to be and the effort to paint the improper IRS activity as a White House directed political dirty trick is unlikely to gain the traction opponents would like to see catch fire.

Keep in mind that the kerfuffle does not involve the targeting of groups for audits seeking evidence of a failure to pay taxes. Rather, the problem involved the IRS’s review of applications filed by the various entities seeking tax-exempt status under the law.

At the time in question, many newly formed political organizations were seeking IRS certification that would allow them to  avoid paying taxes on funds raised—the overwhelming majority of these organizations being Tea Party related groups. As the IRS believed that many of those filing for exemptions were stretching the limits of qualification, some low-level staffers at the agency’s Cincinnati, Ohio office decided to target for closer review those organizations with “Tea Party” sounding names, such as “patriot” and, of course, “Tea Party”. In the effort to dig deeper to determine if these groups qualified, the agency people involved asked many of the filing organizations to disclose names of those who had made contributions along with other data they deemed necessary to determine if the group qualified for tax free status.

The problem is that the agents involved were not randomly conducting these checks on all the political organizations seeking tax free status and were specifically targeting the Tea Party related groups.

This was, clearly, improper activity which is why the IRS issued today’s apology.

What’s that you say? You still don’t believe that the White House was not involved in this?

That’s what I thought.

Maybe then, it will interest you to know that there are only two officials at the IRS that are political appointments—the commissioner (who is the boss) and the chief legal counsel.  And while you may be thinking that it would be a piece of cake for the White House to place a call to the Commissioner and nudge him into putting a little heat on Tea Party groups so that they would be kept busy defending themselves from government annoyance rather than putting their energies into defeating the President, it would not have been quite so simple a task for the White House to accomplish.

Why?

Because the Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service during the period in question was Douglas Shulman, a political appointee of President George W. Bush.

In fact, not only was Commissioner Shulman a Bush appointee, he would certainly have had no motivation to do the political bidding of a Democrat president considering that Mr. Shulman had already announced prior to the election that he would be stepping down from his post in November.

If you imagine that the President’s staff had the ability to go around the top political appointee at the IRS and attempt to influence the civil servants who work at the agency, consider how many levels of civil servants the White House staff would have had to persuade to do their bidding given that those who pursued the policy were well down the totem-pole of seniority, working away at the Cincinnati office.

Indeed, to suggest that the White House could get career civil servants to do its political dirty work would truly defy the laws of political reality.

If you doubt this—and you are someone who believes that the State Department behaved improperly in the Benghazi matter—consider the inability of State to direct the three highly placed State Department civil servants who testified before Congress this week to do as the politicians asked. This should give you some indication as to just how impossible it is for elected or politically appointment officials to get government civil servants to participate in their political schemes—let alone keep it all a secret heading into a presidential election.

Of course, all the obvious and logical explanations in the world for what really happened here will prove insufficient when it comes to  persuading some Tea Party groups that this was not the work of the White House.

As proof of what we can expect, check out what Tea Party Patriots co-founder Jenny Beth Martin had to say when calling for President Obama to personally apologize—

“It is suspicious that the activity of these ‘low-level workers’ was unknown to IRS leadership at the time it occurred. President Obama must also apologize for his administration ignoring repeated complaints by these broad grassroots organizations of harassment by the IRS in 2012, and make concrete and transparent steps today to ensure this never happens again.”

Clearly, Ms. Martin has very little grasp on how widespread the activities of the IRS are if she imagines that, in the big picture, the relatively small number of reviews of Tea Party related applications in the Cincinnati office was going to somehow capture the attention of the IRS Commissioner…who happens to be a Republican appointee.

One wonders if Ms. Martin’s indignation has anything to do with the fact that she and her husband were indebted to the IRS in the amount of over half a million dollars when they filed bankruptcy in 2008? Maybe it is Ms. Martin who owes the apology?

Still, the opportunity to make some political hay over the error will likely prove irresistible to the GOP.

So, let the Congressional hearings commence! I can’t wait to see Darrell Issa’s movie-style poster hyping these hearings as he did in this one posted to his Twitter site to get us jazzed about his Benghazi hearings—http://b-i.forbesimg.com/rickungar/files/2013/05/issamay6.jpg

Maybe this time he’ll spring for full-color art

 

By: Rick Ungar, Op-Ed Contributor, Forbes, May 10, 2013

May 12, 2013 Posted by | IRS, Tea Party | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Brace Yourselves Republicans”: Three New Facts About The Tea Party That You’re Not Going To Like

For a movement that’s helped to reshape the Republican Party—and by extension, reshape American politics—we know shockingly little about the people who make up the Tea Party. While some in the GOP once hoped to co-opt the movement, it’s increasingly unclear which group—the Tea Party or establishment Republicans—is running the show. Politicians have largely relied on conjecture and assumption to determine the positions and priorities of Tea Party activists.

Until now. The results of the first political science survey of Tea Party activists show that the constituency isn’t going away any time soon—and Republicans hoping the activists will begin to moderate their stances should prepare for disappointment. Based out of the College of William and Mary, the report surveyed more than 11,000 members of FreedomWorks, one of the largest and most influential Tea Party groups. The political scientists also relied on a separate survey of registered voters through the YouGov firm to compare those who identified with the Tea Party movement to those Republicans who did not. (Disclosure: The political scientist leading the survey was my father, Ronald Rapoport, with whom I worked in writing this piece.)

For the first time, we can now look at what a huge sample of Tea Party activists believe, as well as examine how those who identify with the Tea Party differ from their establishment GOP counterparts. Here are the three biggest takeaways from the study:

1. Tea Party activists are not Republicans.

Republicans are now reliant on the Tea Party. While the number of Tea Party supporters has declined since 2010, they still make up around half of Republicans, according to NBC/Wall Street Journal surveys. More important, they are the most active supporters when it comes to voting in primaries, volunteering on campaigns, and participating in various other activities political parties are reliant upon. Seventy-three percent of Republicans who attended a political rally or meeting identified with the Tea Party. The activists are vehemently anti-Democratic. Among the FreedomWorks sample, only 3 percent of people voted for Obama or a Democratic House candidate in 2008, and less than 6 percent identify as either independents or Democrats.

Yet the Tea Party activists doing work for the Republicans are surprisingly negative about the party they’re helping. While 70 percent of FreedomWorks activists identify as Republican, another 23 percent reject the Republican label entirely and instead, when asked which political party they identify with, choose “other.” Asked if they considered themselves more Republican or more a Tea Party member, more than three-quarters chose Tea Party.

Given that so many don’t identify with the GOP, it’s perhaps not surprising that the activists also rate the party they vote for so poorly. Given a spectrum of seven choices from “outstanding” to “poor,” only 9 percent of activists rated the Republican Party in the top two categories. Meanwhile, 17 percent put the party in the bottom two. In total, 32 percent rated the party in one of the three positive categories while a whopping 40 percent rated the party in one of the negative ones.

In other words, the activists providing a huge amount of the labor and enthusiasm for Republican candidates are, at best, lukewarm on the party they’re voting for. Few are concerned about what their impact on the future of the GOP will be. Which brings us to:

2. Tea Party activists aren’t nearly as concerned about winning.

Or at least they’re significantly more concerned with ideological purity than with political pragmatism. The survey asked FreedomWorks activists if they agreed or disagreed with the statement, “When we feel strongly about political issues, we should not be willing to compromise with our political opponents.” Altogether, more than 80 percent agreed to some extent. Thirty-two percent of respondents “agree strongly” with the statement. Meanwhile, less than 10 percent disagreed even “slightly.” In another series of questions sent out to FreedomWorks activists, the survey asked whether they would prefer a candidate with whom they agree on most important issues but who polls far behind the probable Democratic nominee or a candidate with whom they agree “on some of the most important issues” but who’s likely to win. More than three-fourths of respondents preferred the candidate who was more likely to lose but shared their positions.

In other words, the Tea Party cares more about what nominees believe than whether they can win—and compromising on politics means compromising on principle.

The findings help explain what’s happened in so many GOP primary races.  Both nationally and at the state level, moderate GOP officeholders found themselves with primary challengers. The Tea Party has helped propel several upstart candidacies, like Christine O’Donnell’s infamous effort to win Delaware’s Senate seat or more recently, Richard Mourdock’s successful challenge to sitting Senator Dick Lugar. In both of those cases, and several others, the Tea Party candidate has proved too extreme for the general election and lost. But despite the losses, the push toward conservative purity continues. A recent New York Times story showed that even House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, seen as the leader with the most clout in the Tea Party movement, has been unable to move the faction’s members in his party into more moderate terrain. In light of these survey results, that makes sense—Tea Party elected officials are simply reflecting their supporters. Meanwhile, those left in the establishment fear the party’s new direction.

3. Attempts to bridge the gap between establishment Republicans and the Tea Party are doomed to fail.

There’s no shortage of moves from Republicans to keep the Tea Party in the fold while shifting things more to the center. After the dismal GOP performance in the 2012 elections, establishment figures began pushing back against the Tea Party. Famous consultant Karl Rove announced a new political action committee designed to challenge extreme GOP candidates with more marketable ones. The national party even put out a report after the 2012 losses that pushed for more pragmatic candidates that could have a broader appeal. As noted, even Eric Cantor is trying.

But the gap between the two groups is huge. In the YouGov survey the study uses, more than two-thirds of Tea Partiers put themselves in the two most conservative categories on economic policy, social policy, and overall policy. Only 23 percent of non-Tea Partiers place themselves in the most conservative categories on all three issues; nearly 40 percent don’t locate themselves in the most conservative categories for any of the three policy areas.

Most jarring: On some issues, like abolishing the Department of Education and environmental regulation, the establishment Republicans are actually closer to Democrats than they are to the Tea Party respondents. That’s a gap too large to be overcome by a few political action committees and gestures of goodwill.

Tea Party activists dominate the Republican Party, and they’re no less willing to compromise with the GOP than they are with Democrats. FreedomWorks President Matt Kibbe summed it up nicely in his book title: Hostile Takeover.

Simply put, the GOP is too reliant on the Tea Party—and based on these survey results, the Tea Party doesn’t care about the GOP’s fate. It cares about moving the political conversation increasingly rightward.

 

By: Abby Rapoport, The American Prospect, April 29, 2013

April 30, 2013 Posted by | Republicans, Tea Party | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Who Gains”: Was Rand Paul’s Speech The Tea Party Response, Or Merely The Rand Paul Response?

After the State of the Union tonight, there was the Republican response. And after the Republican response? There was the Tea Party version.

Why does the Tea Party need its own response? It probably doesn’t, considering that the official Republican responder is Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, who won a primary against a more establishment Republican thanks to the backing of the Tea Party. But the movement is not a unified group, as they often like to remind the press. Even if the response does nothing for the conservative grass roots movement, it makes perfect sense for those actually involved in it.

The response is organized by Tea Party Express, as it has been for the past three years (Rep. Michele Bachmann gave the first Tea Party response, when she famously failed to make eye contact with the camera). Tea Party Express bills itself as “the nation’s largest tea party political action committee.” This is a little odd, considering it’s not a PAC at all. In fact, as a disclaimer at the bottom of its website and all ads says, Tea Party Express is a brand of a real PAC called Our Country Deserves Better, which is in turn controlled by the Sacramento, Calif.-based GOP P.R. firm Russo Marsh + Rogers.

Like so many people involved in the Tea Party, Russo Marsh + Rogers saw an opportunity to cash in on the Tea Party movement and has done so adroitly, hitting up its members for small donations with incessant email solicitations, often from its numerous associated brands like “the Campaign to Defeat Barack Obama,” which help the effort present a broader image.

The PACs started by Russo Marsh & Rogers then take much of the money they raise and — this is where it gets clever — use that money to pay Russo Marsh & Rogers huge consulting fees. The P.R. firm was both the No. 1 and 2 recipients of cash from Tea Party Express in the 2012 cycle, taking in almost $3 million, while the Campaign to Defeat Barack Obama gave Russo Marsh & Rogers another $336,0000 (its third largest expenditure).

This is all by way of saying that Tea Party Express has very real incentives to remain relevant and present itself as speaking on behalf of the Tea Party movement.

The story is largely the same for Rand Paul, who is trying to take up the mantle left by his father, former Texas Republican Rep. Ron Paul, to lead a national libertarian grass roots movement that sometimes aligns itself with the Tea Party. Giving the “official” Tea Party Response lets Paul present himself as a leader of the movement and boost his cache with activists and the media.

So even if the Tea Party movement as a whole gains little from having a Tea Party response to the State of the Union on top of Rubio’s, Tea Party Express and Rand Paul certainly do, and the media is only too happy to play along, as it creates interesting GOP civil war drama and is another thing to write about.

So, what did Rand Paul actually say? Most of it was anodyne conservative talking points, very similar to what Rubio offered.

“Ronald Reagan said, government is not the answer to the problem, government is the problem. Tonight, the president told the nation he disagrees. President Obama believes government is the solution: More government, more taxes, more debt,” Rand Paul said.

“Presidents in both parties — from John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan — have known that our free enterprise economy is the source of our middle-class prosperity. But President Obama? He believes it’s the cause of our problems … You heard tonight, [Obama’s] solution to virtually every problem we face is for Washington to tax more, borrow more and spend more,” Rubio said.

“But we won’t be able to sustain a vibrant middle class unless we solve our debt problem,” Rubio said.

“The [debt] path we are on is not sustainable, but few in Congress or in this administration seem to recognize that their actions are endangering the prosperity of this great nation,” Paul said.

You get the idea.

But Rand Paul did break from Rubio in one major place — defense cuts. Congress is currently trying to head off the so-called sequestration, which will slash half a trillion dollars from the Pentagon. Republicans want to stop that, but Rand Paul doesn’t.

“Not only should the sequester stand, many pundits say the sequester really needs to be at least $4 trillion to avoid another downgrade of America’s credit rating,” Paul said tonight.

He also had some stronger rhetoric on immigration than Rubio. Despite being the GOP’s go-to guy on immigration, the Florida senator gave the issue barely a nod: Three sentences, one paragraph, and no specifics. He spent more time talking about his own biography and railing against Obama’s nonexistent plan to hike taxes.

While Rubio suggested that border enforcement would have to come before legalization of undocumented immigrations, Paul was more liberal, here saying, “We must be the party who sees immigrants as assets, not liabilities. We must be the party that says, ‘If you want to work, if you want to become an American, we welcome you.’”

The thing is, it’s hard to say if Paul is really speaking on behalf of the Tea Party here, or just his own idiosyncratic beliefs. There is strong widespread bipartisan belief that the sequester is bad and Rand Paul is likely the only member in the Senate who wholeheartedly supports it, let alone wants to go further.

While some polling suggests Tea Party members agree with Paul on defense cuts, he is at odds on immigration with the grass roots, which tend to be more restrictive than the elites. While the movement presented itself as something entirely new, it is largely just made up of the most committed conservative activists, and they seem to really care about fighting “amnesty.”

So the question is: Was Rand Paul’s speech the Tea Party response, or merely the Rand Paul response? Either way, it was a coup for Russo Marsh & Rogers.

 

By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, February 13, 2013

February 14, 2013 Posted by | State of the Union, Tea Party | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Waiting For The Reckoning”: Inside The Republican Civil War

TPM Reader JB (a former GOP staffer if I remember right) doesn’t think either side of the current GOP struggle has reckoned with the first decade of this century …

I don’t think I rely on analysis dripping with the smugness and self-satisfaction your correspondent NS displays.

Instead, let’s eschew the pop psychology jargon and look at the public record. Both the Tea Party types and the big GOP donors represented by Karl Rove were fully on board with just about everything the Bush administration said or did. For all their zeal now, the only major policy issue on which Republicans now aligned with the Tea Party ever clashed with Bush was immigration reform — for which Bush himself, remember, didn’t actually fight that hard.

Neither side in this putative civil war has been willing to reckon honestly with the consequences of the Bush administration for the country (substantively) or the Republican Party (politically). Both do their best to present their views to the public as if the last Republican President had never existed. This has left both groups of activists somewhat unmoored; in politics, you talk ideology and principles when you can’t brag about accomplishments, because voters are a lot better at relating the latter to their own lives.

Since neither the Tea Party types or the big donors and the campaign operatives working for them are thinking of repudiating a Republican administration that lost two wars and wrecked the economy, they are left to air their differences on issues no one besides campaign junkies cares about. The self-styled conservatives complain that Rove and his people say mean things about them; the moneybags wing is dedicated to recruiting candidates who will avoid gaffes. Big deal.

Republicans in the 1930s and Democrats in the 1980s both resisted strongly the idea that their respective parties had earned defeat at the polls. In each case, several election cycles (and epochal world events) were required to restore the fortunes of the party that had earned the kind of defeat the Republicans suffered last fall — when a black incumbent Democratic President whose first term had coincided with the worst recession in 80 years nonetheless won reelection easily. It’s because neither the Tea Party nor the moneybags faction will face the real reason for that debacle that they are facing off against one another now.

 

By: Josh Marshall, Editor and Publisher, Talking Points Memo, February 8, 2013

February 10, 2013 Posted by | GOP, Tea Party | , , , | Leave a comment

What If the Tea Party Wins? They Have A Plan For The Constitution, And It Isn’t Pretty

In the Tea Party’s America, families must mortgage their home to pay for their mother’s end-of-life care. Higher education is a luxury reserved almost exclusively to the very rich. Rotten meat ships to supermarkets nationwide without a national agency to inspect it. Fathers compete with their adolescent children for sub-minimum wage jobs. And our national leaders are utterly powerless to do a thing.

At least, that’s what would happen if the Tea Party succeeds in its effort to reimagine the Constitution as an antigovernment manifesto. While the House of Representatives pushes Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) plan to phase out Medicare, numerous members of Congress, a least one Supreme Court justice, and the governor of America’s second-largest state now proudly declare that most of the progress of the last century violates the Constitution.

It is difficult to count how many essential laws would simply cease to exist if the Tea Party won its battle to reshape our founding document, but a short list includes:

  • Social Security and Medicare
  • Medicaid, children’s health insurance, and other health care programs
  • All federal education programs
  • All federal antipoverty programs
  • Federal disaster relief
  • Federal food safety inspections and other food safety programs
  • Child labor laws, the minimum wage, overtime, and other labor protections
  • Federal civil rights laws

Indeed, as this paper explains, many state lawmakers even embrace a discredited constitutional doctrine that threatens the union itself.

What’s at stake

The Tea Party imagines a constitution focused entirely upon the Tenth Amendment, which provides that “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people”—which is why their narrow vision of the nation’s power is often referred to as “tentherism.” In layman’s terms, the Tenth Amendment is simply a reminder that the Constitution contains an itemized list of federal powers—such as the power to regulate interstate commerce or establish post offices or make war on foreign nations—and anything not contained in that list is beyond Congress’s authority.

The Tea Party, however, believes these powers must be read too narrowly to permit much of the progress of the last century. This issue brief examines just some of the essential programs that leading Tea Partiers would declare unconstitutional.

Social Security and Medicare

The Constitution gives Congress the power “to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States,” thus empowering the federal government to levy taxes and leverage these revenues for programs such as Social Security and Medicare. A disturbingly large number of elected officials, however, insist that these words don’t actually mean what they say.

In a speech to the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council, Texas Gov. Rick Perry listed a broad swath of programs that “contradict the principles of limited, constitutional government that our founders established to protect us.” Gov. Perry’s list includes Medicare and “a bankrupt social security system, that Americans understand is essentially a Ponzi scheme on a scale that makes Bernie Madoff look like an amateur.” And Perry is hardly the only high-ranking elected official to share this view.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) mocked President Franklin Delano Roosevelt for calling upon the federal government to provide “a decent retirement plan” and “health care” because “the Constitution doesn’t give Congress any of those powers.” Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), who engineered the House of Representatives’s dramatic reading of the Constitution earlier this year, claimed that Medicare and Social Security are “not in the Constitution” and are only allowed to exist because “the courts have stretched the Constitution to say it’s in the general welfare clause.” Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) said we should eliminate Medicare because “that’s a family responsibility, not a government responsibility.”

Because this erroneous view of our founding document is rooted in an exaggerated view of the Tenth Amendment’s states rights’ provision, many so-called tenthers claim that eliminating Social Security and Medicare wouldn’t necessarily mean kicking millions of seniors out into the cold because state governments could enact their own retirement programs to pick up the slack. This proposal, however, ignores basic economics.

Under our current system, someone who begins their career in Ohio, moves to Virginia to accept a better job offer, and then retires in Florida pays the same federal taxes regardless of their residence. These taxes then fund programs such as Medicare and Social Security. If each state were responsible for setting up its own retirement system, however, the person described above would pay Ohio taxes while they worked in Ohio, Virginia taxes while they lived in Virginia, and would draw benefits from the state of Florida during their retirement. The state which benefited from their taxes would not be the same state that was required to fund their retirement, and the result would be an economic death spiral for states such as Florida that attract an unusually large number of retirees.

For this reason, tenther proposals to simply let the states take over Social Security and Medicare are nothing more than a backdoor way to eliminate these programs altogether. If the Tea Party gets its way, and our nation’s social safety net for seniors is declared unconstitutional, millions of seniors will lose their only income and their only means to pay for health care.

Medicaid, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, and other health care programs

The Tea Party’s constitution has plenty of bad news for Americans below the retirement age as well. Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), for example, recently claimed that any federal involvement in health care whatsoever is unconstitutional because “the words ‘health care’ are nowhere in the Constitution.”

Sen. Coburn lumped Medicaid in with Medicare when he claimed that providing for the frailest Americans is a “family responsibility,” and Gov. Perry includes Medicaid on his list of programs that “contradict[] the principles of limited, constitutional government.” Sen. Mike Lee’s (R-UT) claim that “the Constitution doesn’t give Congress” any authority over health care is a blanket statement encompassing all federal health programs.

If this vision were to be implemented, all federal health care programs would simply cease to exist and millions of Americans would lose their only access to health insurance.

Education

Education is also on the Tea Party’s chopping block. Rep. Scott Garrett (R-NJ) routinely grills education secretaries at congressional hearings, insisting that the Constitution does not authorize any federal involvement in education. Similarly, Rep. Foxx insists that “we should not be funding education” because she insists doing so violates the Tenth Amendment. And Sen. Coburn does not “even think [education] is a role for the federal government.”

In its strongest form, this position wouldn’t just eliminate federal assistance for state-run public schools. It would also eliminate programs enabling Americans to pay for their college education. Millions of students would lose their Pell Grants and federal student loans if the Tea Party’s full vision of the Constitution were implemented.

Some tenthers, however, offer a slightly less drastic position. It is commonplace for the federal government to grant money to the states if those states agree to comply with certain conditions. Federal law, for example, provides generous public education grants provided that states gather data on student achievement and comply with other such conditions. Many Tea Partiers argue that these conditions violate the Constitution. Thus, Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-TX), claims that the Constitution only permits the federal government to provide states with “block grants.”

The truth, however, is that the federal government has never told states how to educate their children—and it could not do so if it tried. Under a Supreme Court decision called Printz v. United States, federal laws ordering a state to take a specific action actually do violate the Tenth Amendment. So, the state of Texas is perfectly free to turn down federal grants if they do not like the conditions attached to them.

Moreover, it is not clear how federal grants of any kind can exist if Congress is not allowed to attach conditions to them. If Congress cannot constitutionally require states to spend grant money on standardized testing, for example, how can they require that it be spent on education and not on building a new wing for the governor’s mansion? Thus, even the slightly more moderate position advocated by people like Rep. Farenthold would likely eliminate the federal government’s ability to provide educational assistance to low-income students or otherwise help fund public schools.

Antipoverty programs, federal disaster relief, and other help for the less fortunate

Sen. Lee would go even further in cutting off assistance for low-income Americans. In an interview with a Utah radio host, Lee claimed that the framers intended all antipoverty programs to be dealt with exclusively at the state level. This would not only eliminate programs like income assistance and food stamps, it could threaten unemployment insurance, federal job training, and other programs intended to provide a bridge out of poverty.

In the same interview, Sen. Lee claimed that federal relief for hurricane, earthquake, tornado, and other disaster victims is “one of many areas where we ought to focus on getting that power back to the states,” a position that would kill the Federal Emergency Management Agency and prevent the nation as a whole from rallying to the support of a state whose financial resources are overwhelmed by a major natural disaster.

Food safety

Sen. Lee also claims that “the framers intended state lawmakers deal with” food safety in this same radio interview. This position would not simply endanger the residents of states with inadequate regulation of their food supply, it would also create costly and duplicative state inspection programs and impose logistical nightmares on food-importing states.

If a cow is raised in Texas, slaughtered in Oklahoma, and then sold as steaks in New York, which state is responsible for inspecting the meat? The likely answer is that all three states would have their own system of laws, tripling the regulatory compliance costs for the meat producer.

Moreover, if New York decides that Oklahoma’s inspections’ regime is inadequate, its only recourse would be to require meat producers to submit their products to a customs check at the border before it could be sold in that state. The result would be higher taxes for New Yorkers forced to pay for these customs stations, and higher costs for businesses forced to submit to inspections every time they brought food across a state border.

Child labor laws, the minimum wage, overtime, and other labor protections

Nearly 100 years ago, the Supreme Court declared federal child labor laws unconstitutional in a case called Hammer v. Dagenhart. Twenty-two years later, the Court recognized that Hammer’s holding was “novel when made and unsupported by any provision of the Constitution,” and unanimously overruled this erroneous decision.

Sen. Lee, however, believes that, while Hammer might “sound harsh,” the Constitution “was designed to be that way. It was designed to be a little bit harsh,” and thus we should return to the world where federal child labor laws are unconstitutional. Moreover, Lee has a very powerful ally prepared to sweep away nearly all national protections for American workers.

Under existing Supreme Court doctrine, Congress’s authority to “regulate commerce … among the several states” includes the power to regulate the roads and railways used to transport goods in interstate commerce, as well as the goods themselves and the vehicles that transport them. Additionally, Congress may regulate activities that “substantially affect interstate commerce.” This “substantial effects” power is the basis of Congress’s authority to make labor laws universal throughout all places of employment.

Yet Justice Clarence Thomas claimed in three separate cases—U.S. v. Lopez, U.S. v. Morrison, and Gonzales v. Raich—that this “substantial effects” test is “at odds with the constitutional design.” It is possible that Thomas’s vision would still allow some limited federal labor regulation—such as a law prohibiting children from becoming railway workers—but anything resembling the essential web of federal laws that protect American workers today would be impossible.

Civil rights laws

Shortly after he won his party’s nod to be a U.S. Senate candidate, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) revealed that he opposes the federal bans on whites-only lunch counters and race discrimination in employment. In a rambling interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, Paul explained that, while he believes that Congress may ban discrimination from “public institutions,” he does not support antidiscrimination laws that regulate private business.

As Sen. Paul suggested in that interview, these basic civil rights laws—like national laws banning child labor and establishing a minimum wage—can be snuffed out of existence if Congress’s power to enact commercial regulations is read too narrowly.

In 1964, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the federal ban on whites-only lunch counters—once again relying on the “substantial effects” test to do so. For this reason, it is likely the Justice Thomas would strike down this and other federal laws protecting civil rights.

The union

Gov. Perry suffered well-deserved ridicule when he suggested in 2009 that Texas may secede from the union if “Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people.” But Gov. Perry’s ill-considered remark is merely a distraction compared to a much larger movement to effectively secede from the union one law at a time.

Gov. Perry joins lawmakers from New Hampshire, Montana, Virginia, Idaho, Florida, and many other states in backing unconstitutional state laws purporting to “nullify” a federal law. Many state legislatures have passed, and a few governors have signed, laws claiming to nullify part of the Affordable Care Act, and Perry signed a law that partially nullifies federal light bulb standards.

Nullification is an unconstitutional doctrine claiming that states can prevent a federal law from operating within their borders. Although nullification conflicts directly with the text of the Constitution, which provides that Acts of Congress “shall be the supreme law of the land…anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding,” it has experienced a significant revival among state lawmakers eager to second-guess national leaders’ decisions.

This doctrine is not simply unconstitutional, it is a direct attack on the idea that we are the United States of America. As James Madison wrote in 1830, allowing states to simply ignore the laws they don’t want to follow would “speedily put an end to the Union itself.”

Conclusion

America has long endured the occasional politician eager to repeal the entire 20th Century, but, as President Dwight Eisenhower observed nearly 60 years ago, “Their numbers [were] negligible and they are stupid.” Sadly, this is no longer the case. Tenthers increasingly dominate conservative politics and their numbers are growing.

If this movement succeeds in replacing our founding document with their entirely fabricated constitution, virtually every American will suffer the consequences. Seniors will lose their Social Security and Medicare. Millions of students could lose their ability to pay for college. And workers throughout the country will lose their right to organize, to earn a minimum wage, and to be free from discrimination.

Worse, because the Tea Party believes their policy preferences are mandated by the Constitution, they would do far more than simply repeal nearly a century of essential laws. Once something is declared unconstitutional, it is beyond the reach of elected officials— and beyond the voters’ ability to revive simply by tossing unwise lawmakers out of office.

For this reason, the Tea Party’s agenda is not simply one of the most radical in generations, it is also the most authoritarian. They do not simply want to eliminate decades of progress; they want to steal away “We The People’s” ability to bring it back.

 

By: Ian Millhiser, Center for American Progress, September 16, 2011

September 16, 2011 Posted by | Affordable Care Act, Class Warfare, Collective Bargaining, Commerce Clause, Congress, Conservatives, Constitution, Democracy, Democrats, Economy, Education, Elections, Equal Rights, GOP, Government, Health Care, Ideologues, Ideology, Income Gap, Jobs, Labor, Lawmakers, Medicaid, Medicare, Middle Class, Minimum Wage, Politics, Public, Regulations, Republicans, Right Wing, SCOTUS, Social Security, State Legislatures, States, Tea Party, Unions, Voters | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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