Jenny Beth Martin is co-founder and
national coordinator of the Tea Party Patriots, the nation’s largest tea party
organization, and is also chairman of the Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund.
“The issue with the Tea Party isn’t
one of strategy. It’s not one of different vision … It’s a disagreement over
tactics, from time to time,” said Speaker of the House John Boehner, on 60
Minutes Sunday night.
More than a year ago, Speaker
Boehner took serious offense when conservative groups
criticized a budget deal he favored. They had
“lost all credibility… I don’t care what they do.” So irrelevant is the Tea
Party movement that the Speaker took to 60 Minutes to complain about its
criticism of him Sunday night.
The Speaker trivializes the
differences that led to the biggest intraparty rebellion against a sitting
Speaker since the Civil War. His first problem isn’t with outside groups, it’s
his own GOP colleagues in the House. When one out of every ten takes the
extraordinary step of standing before his colleagues and calling out the name
of someone else for his job, he should realize he’s got a problem.
As for us, our opposition to his
leadership centers on our belief that we do NOT, in fact, share visions and
strategies.
For example, we oppose amnesty for
illegal immigrants because we believe it would not be fair to the millions
waiting in line to get into America legally, nor to the millions who already
arrived legally after waiting in line. Amnesty rewards law-breaking, and only
serves to incentivize further law breaking.
The Speaker, on the other hand,
dances to the tune of the Chamber of Commerce, whose members and supporters
want cheaper labor, and are, consequently, major proponents of the kind of
comprehensive amnesty legislation that passed the Senate in 2013 and which the
Speaker clearly wanted to put on the floor of the House last year before Dave
Brat’s stunning upset of the former Majority Leader put the kibosh on those
plans.
Moreover, we seek a federal
government that is actually smaller than the one we have now, not merely one
that is smaller than the one Barack Obama would prefer. We note with disdain
the Speaker’s willingness to sign off on budget and debt ceiling increase
“deals” that appear to have been negotiated by Popeye’s J. Wellington Wimpy —
he will gladly give the president a spending/debt ceiling increase now, in
exchange for the promise of spending cuts to come Tuesday. And when Tuesday
arrives, somehow the spending cuts never materialize.
Similarly, we seek the repeal of
Obamacare because we believe it tramples the fundamental liberties guaranteed
us by our Constitution, destroys patient choice, degrades the quality of health
care delivered, increases costs, and will ultimately break the bank. The
Speaker, on the other hand, seems perfectly content to tinker at the margins
(1099 repeal? Medical device tax repeal?) secure in the knowledge that many of
his major funders — the health insurance and pharmaceutical companies who
support Obamacare because of its mandates, which lead to a massively growing
client base, and, hence, increased profits — don’t actually want him to fight
to repeal the legislation.
Here’s a test of the Speaker’s
assertion that our differences are merely differences in degree, not kind: Why
has he refused to lead his GOP Conference to vote in favor of the bill
introduced by his colleague Ron DeSantis of Florida, which seeks to overturn
the August 2013 OPM ruling granting generous employer subsidies to Members of
Congress and their staffs for the purchase of health insurance through the
Obamacare exchanges, in clear violation of the law? That legislation is a
fundamental part of a strategy designed to raise the temperature inside the
offices of the Democrat Members of Congress whose votes are needed to build the
necessary majorities for repeal in both House and Senate; yet, given multiple
opportunities to put the bill on the floor, he has refused to do so.
Finally, I would note one other
difference with the Speaker’s view, specifically regarding his assertion that
the Tea Party’s opposition is manufactured for fundraising purposes: Every
dollar we raise is contributed voluntarily, by donors whose only interest is
seeking to influence their government to tax less, spend less, and stop running
up a massive debt. They seek little from the government other than to be left
alone, and we have nothing to offer them other than our promise that we will
use the resources they contribute to do the best job we can to achieve our
shared vision of greater personal freedom, economic freedom, and a debt-free
future.
Comments
Everything Jenny Beth says is true, but it’s
not the main event. The elephant in the room is that our economy is tanking
because of federal overspending, overregulating, excessive immigration,
excessive money printing, NAFTA and other bad trade agreements, with lots of
mal-investment because of UN Agenda 21 implementation based on the global
warming hoax. The federal government bribes the states with billions a year of
printed money to not object the federal government’s goal to completely wreck
America. The Global criminals bribe
elected officials with campaign contributions to allow this treason.
Boehner should be addressing this and so
should the rest, but I’m afraid the global Marxists own our Congress. Most real
Tea Party groups are battling Agenda 21 every day and we owe it all to our
elected officials. They rein everything they touch. We want to return to the Constitution (as
written) and dismantle the beast. I urge Jenny Beth to join us in this cause
and not just nibble around the edges. We are running out of time.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
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