Washington Held Hostage by Nuts

"When government fears the people, there is liberty.  When people fear the government, there is tyranny"

 --Thomas Jefferson

On Monday September 30, 2013 two guests on C-Span’s Washington Journal were Norman Ornstein (American Enterprise Institute) and Thomas Mann (Brookings Institution) co-authors of “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks”.  The congressional scholars were talking about the gridlock in congress, particularly with the advent of the “Tea Party” in 2010. 

This quote from their book seems to sum up the new Republican Party that has been created by billionaires including the Koch Brothers, DeVos Family and other ALEC members.

“The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.”

In 2012 billionaires plowed huge amounts into the campaigns and lost big; take for instance, Sheldon Adelson, the casino mogul.  Adelson was the single largest money man of the 2012 cycle, spending more than $53 million on super PACs bankrolling a Romney victory as well as funding Senate and House races.

All the Republicans he backed at state level — Rabbi Shmuley Boteach in New Jersey, George Allen in Virginia, and Connie Mack in Florida, among them — lost. Add the casino billionaire’s primary candidate of choice Newt Gingrich, who he backed to the tune of $20 million, to his negative tally.  And while $53 million may sound like quite a chunk of change, it’s not much for a guy worth $20.5 billion. 

Forty-two Forbes 400 list members backed Mitt Romney through his Restore Our Future super PAC — or more than 10% of the country’s richest. Between them, they spent over $33 million on attempting to remove President Obama from the White House through that one political committee alone.

These billionaires through the Tea Party Republicans not only want to repeal the Affordable Health Care Act, but they want to repeal the last election.  These billionaires are saying “we lost the election but this is how we can win it, shutting down the government and using the debt ceiling negotiations to advance our agenda.” 

Senators Ted Cruz R-Texas and Mike Lee R-Utah are spearheading the government shutdown.  Both of these Senators are Tea Party members.  Cruz had made it known he intends to run for President even though he was not born in the United States. 

This duo also went to the House of Representatives and advised Tea Party members to defy their leader, Boehner and demand the Tea Party agenda or shut down the government.  Boehner has caved to the Tea Party demands in order to preserve his role as Speaker of the House.  He has sold his soul and will regret it, he is now owned by the billionaires.

These Tea Party members call themselves, Tea Party Patriots.  Vice-President Henry Wallace said:

“They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution.  They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest.  Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection”. 

This is America’s future if we don’t stop them now.

By Patricia Baeten