Tea Party Nation: Doin' it our way

Of course the G.O.P. is going to shut the government down. It’s been taken over by the Tea Partiers, who hate the government. Shutting the federal government down is exactly what they came to Washington to do. Most of them said as much and were elected on those promises.

One newly-elected Tea Partier from Illinois, Joe Walsh, revealed his hand this weekend on ABC’s Sunday morning show when he said, “I don’t want a government shut-down, but if we have to have one, it might be good for us.”

Whoever said, “In order to save the village, we had to destroy the village” should be collecting royalty checks from Rep. Walsh.

The last time a budget impasse resulted in a government shut-down was during Bill Clinton’s watch, when the obdurate Newt Gingrich and his allies thought it would be a shrewd political tactic to use against the much-reviled opposition party president.

It backfired that time. When checks started not going out to all the thousands of government employees the shut-down effected, and trash started not getting picked up and schools started closing… the American People (if I maybe granted use of such a sweeping generalization) decided the shut-down was actually a very bad idea, and looked around for someone to blame. It obviously wasn’t the Big Government, tax-and-spend Liberal in the White House the G.O.P. had made Clinton out to be, so it must have been Team G.O.P. who was to blame.

And Team G.O.P. was ultimately forced to back down and eat poo, while Clinton soared out of office with record-high job-approval numbers.

You say, well, that’s a very interesting, if mostly hazily-recollected history lesson, Fang. So what?

And you would be right.

Because the new batch of freshmen Tea Party legislators not only have the general goal of reducing the size of government to zero, they have no interest in the history of what happened the last time it was tried. “History” is something the Elites study at their Ivy League institutions of Socialism, whereas the Tea Partiers I’ve spoken to and seen on TV—including the ebullient meet-your-Representative event attendees from the Joe Walsh piece—tend to be more here-and-now in their thinking. And right here and now, they know they hold the reins of power in their hands.

And based on the evidence I’ve seen and heard, it is exhilarating.

Credit where credit is due, some of the Tea Party’s talking points—out of context—make a lot of sense. For example, yes, average American citizens would indeed be hauled off to debtors’ prison if they ran their households’ finances the way the government manages theirs.

But holding the government to the same standard as the average American citizen, or vice versa, is a false equivalency. The fact is, the government has some powers the individual citizen does not. The government may legally possess atomic weapons; you or I may not. The government may legally execute its own citizens in most states; you or I may not. Oh, the list goes on.

The new Tea Party Elite—sorry, folks, when you’re pulling the strings in Washington, you are by definition the new Elite—are going to have a chance shortly to make an additional historical blunder when the issue of raising the debt ceiling comes up.

The debt ceiling is another bullshit Washington construct, a specious, though necessary, end-run around the law; since America can’t limit our spending to our “debt ceiling,” we just raise the ceiling every year. It’s like if your house was sinking in the mud and your solution was to keep adding floors above the mud, where you could continue to live.

The Tea Partiers are probably correct when they say it is a fiscal disaster waiting to happen, until the alternative is even briefly considered, which at the moment, would mean letting our metaphorical house sink all the way into the mud. Bloop!

There needs to be a third option, a crafty triangulation of some sort, that serves all masters; something like what Bill Clinton, Trent Lott and Dick Morris used to cook up cook up under the cover of night, at the height of the impeachment scandal. Finding that third way is the job of statesmen, but we are devilishly short of statesmen these days. All we have are feckless, self-marginalized Democrats, and a Republican party that can’t decide whether they want to cut off their own head, or their whole body, not understanding that to do one is to accomplish the other.

Rep. Walsh underlines this short-sighted philosophy on the ABC piece by summarizing the message his base has just delivered to him and that he plans to take back to Washington: Keep cutting, baby.

Tea Party Nation is almost upon us. No wonder they’re stocking up on guns and ammo. Like Laverne and Shirley, they’re gonna make all their dreams come true.