Tea Parties

Tea Parties thrive when each member gets to work on his or her favorite issues. They routinely spend their own money for their campaigns including yard signs, newspaper ads and travel costs. They gather their own research, write blogs, speak at public meetings and show up when their issues are being discussed. Tea Parties employ militia tactics. The first time you even know they are around is when hundreds of yard signs begin to appear over a pending issue. Then they go back to their farms to earn a living.

Some show up at protest meetings across the country. You will find Tea Partiers who are focused on the national political scene and take issue with any number of problems. Most will name government overreach and overspending as one of them. Some work on right-to-life issues. Others believe immigration needs better control and less volume. Most want government to cut spending and waste.

Some Tea Partiers are also focused on state and local issues and are involved in finding candidates, backing them and endorsing them for office based on their compatible views on the issues. Looking up facts on the internet is a regular practice.

Tea Party Leaders continually email each other and attach articles and news related to issues. We meet to coordinate campaigns when needed. It’s clear that TV news and newspapers don’t publish everything we need to know to be able to tell what is actually going on. Media coverage tends to be low on facts and high on propaganda and wishful thinking.

We tend to be government watch-dog oriented, because we’ve traced most of our problems back to the “unintended consequences” created by government structures, regulations and legislation. We therefore tend to be in favor of bringing our federal government back into compliance with the Constitution and 10th Amendment, as written, because we believe they have done a miserable job and are destroying our economy, because they wandered out of their legal constraints. We believe the founding fathers understood liberty and the free market economy and the folks in the current group running our government don’t and haven’t for some time.

Rather than let them ruin our economy any further, we are asking the hard questions like: Isn’t having sound money a good policy ? Is having the Federal Reserve a good idea at all ? Shouldn’t we cut government spending to levels below what we expect to collect in revenue ? Has federal involvement in Education, Transportation, Energy, Healthcare, Housing, Welfare, the Environment and a myriad of other things improved or ruined entire segments of our economy ? Why does the federal government own more than a third of the U.S. land mass ? Why has government obstructed securing our borders and obstructed harvesting our own resources like oil and gas ? Why does the government act like “global warming” isn’t a hoax ? Why don’t they admit that we entered a 40 year trend toward global cooling several years ago ? Why do they still act like carbon emissions need to be reduced ? Why do they continue spend so much money to implement U.N. Agenda 21, when it’s harmful and unnecessary ? Do we have more Liberty than we had 100 years ago ? How are we going to get out of this mess ? Do we need to replace everybody in government ?

At the state level we ask: Why don’t we nullify Obama-care ? Why don’t we ban the EPA from entering Georgia ? Why do we authorize the creation of unelected, unaccountable regional governance transportation councils and violate our ‘home rule” provisions in the Georgia Constitution and usurp city and county sovereignty ? Why do we buy “wildlife preserves”, when we should be returning land to productive use ? Why does the state continue to fund bloated bureaucracies in education, public transit and other sand holes that belong in the private sector ?

At the city and county level we ask: Why does sewer replacement cost so much ? Why does road milling and resurfacing cost so much ? Why do we spend money on things only a few people use, but don’t have enough money to fix things everybody uses ?

Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader