A Tea Party Shot Across The Republicans' Bow

If the Republican Party was starting to feel comfortable with the Tea Party, those misconceptions were dispelled last week when the Tea Party Express endorsed Idaho Democrat Walter Minnick for re-election to Idaho’s First Congressional District seat. This news came as a shock to Minnick’s Republican opponents and surprised local Idaho Tea Parties who have not yet endorsed anybody. And while the endorsement represents the opinion of a very small group of people who are not authorized to speak for anyone other than themselves, it does serve notice to the Republican Party that the Tea Party’s support should not be taken for granted.

From the time of the Tea Party’s origins, just over a year ago, the Republican Party has assumed that it would fall into line by Election Day. It was just this sort of arrogance that has made the Republicans a minority party. The Republicans have always taken conservatives for granted, assuming that they have nowhere else to go, just as Democrats have always taken African-American support for granted. This Republican complacency contributed to low Republican voter enthusiasm in recent elections.

If they are not already, unaffiliated or independent voters will soon outnumber either Democrats or Republicans. The Republican intelligentsia has inferred from this that the independents’ ideology resides somewhere between Democrats and Republicans, in the muddled morass of the “undecided” or the “moderates,” even though a large majority of Americans self-identify as conservatives. Republican strategists reacted by trying to close the ideological gap between the Republicans and Democrats by moving left. And doing so has hurt the party each time. Republicans have achieved their greatest success by embracing conservatism. Witness the Reagan and Gingrich revolutions. They have suffered their greatest disappointments under the moderation of George Bush the Elder and George Bush the Younger.

In truth the attraction of independents to the Tea Party shows that the independents were dissatisfied with both the Democratic Party and the Democrat-lite Party and were attracted to the idea of limited government and fiscal discipline, two concepts that the Republicans discarded before falling on hard times. Republican moderation has given us Carter, Clinton and Obama.

The Tea Party Express’s endorsement is not as odd as it sounds. The National Rifle Association has often endorsed otherwise far left Democrats who have nevertheless acknowledged the Second Amendment. The number of Democrats who receive the NRA’s endorsement has shrunk over the years as the Democratic Party’s leadership has purged itself of the ideologically impure. But over the years many a Republican was disappointed to learn that the nation’s preeminent defender of gun rights had put its considerable resources behind a Democrat.

Walter Minnick has had his moments. He did oppose Obama’s $787 billion Porkulus package, although his opposition was not based in any deeply held principles of limited government or fiscal responsibility. Instead he feared that by spending so much, so soon, he would exhaust the opportunity to spend money later. He underestimated the Obama regime’s proclivity for printing greenbacks as needed. Minnick also voted against Obamacare. Although we’ve learned that such “no” votes were opportunistically parceled out by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi around the country to Democrats considered most vulnerable. If Pelosi needed Minnick’s vote to pass Obamacare, he quite likely would have responded to her whip.

But those votes earned Minnick the admiration of Sal Russo, who holds the nebulous title of Tea Party Express strategist: “When you find someone willing to stand up, you got to stand up with him,” Russo said. “It can’t be a one-party issue,” he explained. “Fiscal responsibility has to be embedded in both parties.”

But the biggest problem with Walter Minnick is that, while his votes have placed him well outside the Democratic Party’s mainstream, his very occupancy of that House seat empowers Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, Barney Frank, and the rest of the extreme left that now rules Washington.

There is no formal organization in the Tea Party. Local Tea Parties do not take orders from the Tea Party Express and the Tea Party Express was elected by no one and no one answers to it. Its main claim to fame is that it travels in a very cool-looking bus and by the fact that it has been selected by the mainstream news media as spokesman for the Tea Party movement. The endorsement of Idaho Tea Parties will matter far more and the Tea Party Express endorsement will end up as no more than an historical curiosity.