Posted on 11/11/2013 10:35:12 AM PST by jazusamo
Third parties have had an unbroken record of failure in American presidential politics. So it was refreshing to see in the Tea Party an insurgent movement, mainly of people who were not professional politicians, but who nevertheless had the good sense to see that their only chance of getting their ideals enacted into public policies was within one of the two major parties.
More important, the Tea Party was an insurgent movement that was not trying to impose some untried Utopia, but to restore the lost heritage of America that had been eroded, undermined or just plain sold out by professional politicians.
What the Tea Party was attempting was conservative, but it was also insurgent — if not radical — in the sense of opposing the root assumptions behind the dominant political trends of our times. Since those trends have included the erosion, if not the dismantling, of the Constitutional safeguards of American freedom, what the Tea Party was attempting was long overdue.
ObamaCare epitomized those trends, since its fundamental premise was that the federal government had the right to order individual Americans to buy what the government wanted them to buy, whether they wanted to or not, based on the assumption that Washington elites know what is good for us better than we know ourselves.
The Tea Party's principles were clear. But their tactics can only be judged by the consequences.
Since the Tea Party sees itself as the conservative wing of the Republican Party, its supporters might want to consider what was said by an iconic conservative figure of the past, Edmund Burke: "Preserving my principles unshaken, I reserve my activity for rational endeavours."
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Therefore was the Tea Party-led attempt to defund ObamaCare something that met Burke's standard of a "rational endeavour"?
Absolutely. As ZeroCare drives the middle class onto Medicaid, it will then be recognized as the only voice that truly fought this monstrosity. The only people who "suffered" during the shutdown were the bureaucrats who got paid vacations.
Some of the Senators who refused to back Cruz because he had no chance, turned around and proposed a bill “keep your insurance” that also had no chance.
hypocrites.
BookMark
No. The Republicans were a third party, at a time when the Whigs had a record of electing presidents and controlling Congress. This is not to say that there are many exceptions to the assertation he makes, though.
The republicans were clearly outmatched and the effort in and of itself was never going to succeed. However there is another possibility Sometimes a single spark can start a fire.
I recall that there was a man in a middle east country selling vegetables on the street to support his family. When the authorities refused to allow him to continue, he set himself on fire to protest what he could not control.
As it turned out, the public was so incensed that they overthrew the government.
Yes. It made pinning Obamacare on the GOP in general and Cruz in particular virtually impossible, which I believe may have been Cruz's goal all along.
I admire Mr. Sowell. But I did a Google search on Sowell and Congress’s constitutional Article I, Section 8-limited powers and came up with unrelated links, the section 8 related to housing. So like most other celebrity conservatives, Sowell evidently isn’t keen on Congress’s Section 8-limited powers. (Keen probably isn’t the right word.)
Regarding the Tea Party name, just as global warming alarmists extended the life, at least for a short while, of their junk science movement by changing the name of their agenda from global warming to climate change, I think that Tea Party is long overdue for a name change. I don’t have marketing training to volunteer a name that would hopefully stick to reducing the size of unconstitutionally big federal government, but here’s a college try.
I’m trying to encode Congress’s constitutional Article I, Section 8 limited power into an easy-to-remember acronym-like name, but that’s difficult.
CCAIS8LP (can’t even pronounce that)
But I’m sure that patriots get the idea.
It could be argued that Millard Fillmore was actually the Whig candidate in 1856, the first year the Republicans fielded a candidate, explorer John C. Fremont. James Buchanan won a three-way contest that year with 45% to Fremont's 33% and Fillmore's 22%. But Fillmore (even as a former Whig President) did not use the Whig Party line. He went by the American Party. The Whig's did, of course, run a few more people for office on the state and local level, but the last national election where they had any role was the contentious election of 1860. Their candidate, John Bell, ran under the Constitutional Union banner and was third runner-up behind Lincoln (39.7%), Douglas (29.5%) and Breckenridge (18.2%) though he actually managed to win three states (Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky) to one for Douglas (Missouri).
Interestingly, Lincoln was a former Whig himself and changed the name of the Republican Party to National Union Party, selecting the only Confederate U.S. Senator to remain loyal to the Union (and former Whig) Andrew Johnson as his running mate.
Yep, several of the liberal RINO’s not only didn’t back Ted Cruz they were openly hostile to him.
I'm not clear on what you're trying to say here since nowhere in the article does Sowell even mention section 8.
Maybe you could elaborate more on what you were attempting to say about this piece..........
Why is he using past tense?
Wishful thinking?
I respectfully disagree with Mr Sowell on this one. While it was not possible to overcome a Democrat Senate or quisling republicans, the value of the shutdown exercise was not in it’s potential for victory, but in its’ awakening of a sleeping American electorate. 2014 elections will define the success of that strategy.
As I said, I admire Mr. Sowell.
However ...
Knowing that there are many low-information voters in the nation, voters who are clueless about the federal government's constitutionally-limited powers, I question why so many conservative commentators, such as Sowell, don't seem to lift a finger to try to get such voters up to speed on Congress's limited powers. Not enlightening voters with the federal government's limited powers just gives activist justices the opportunity to contintue to get away with calling unconstitutional things like federal Obamacare constitutonal. <
The question is are conservative commentators just as low-information as the voters they talk about concerning the unconstitutionally big federal government, or all conservative commentators RINOs?
If that didn't help to clarify my previous statement then let me know.
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