Tea Party Concerned Republicans Won’t Shut The Government Down

After millennials stayed home during the midterm elections, that opened a door for the wave of Republicans taking Senate control while expanding a House majority.

[su_center_ad]The Tea Party is worried that Republicans won’t be jerks.

The New York Times reports:

….a group of conservatives huddled anxiously in a conference room not far from Capitol Hill and agreed that now is the time for confrontation, not compromise and conciliation.

Despite Republicans’ ascension to Senate control and an expanded House majority, many conservatives from the party’s activist wing fear that congressional leaders are already being too timid with President Obama.

They do not want to hear that government shutdowns are off the table or that repealing the Affordable Care Act is impossible — two things Republican leaders have said in recent days.

“If the new Republican leadership in the Senate is only talking about what they can’t do, that’s going to be very demoralizing,” said Thomas J. Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, a conservative advocacy group that convenes a regular gathering called Groundswell. Any sense of triumph at its meeting last week was fleeting.

“I think the members of the leadership need to decide what they’re willing to shut down the government over,” Mr. Fitton said.

(my bold)

The government is the people. We elected our officials into office. It’s up to us to make it work. Like it or not, Republicans came out to vote whereas Democrats opted against casting a ballot for a multitude of reasons, but we don’t talk of shutting the government down because our fee fees are hurt. Instead, we need to find a way to make it work.

Tea Party conservatives, many of whom argue that the government shutdown last year was a sound strategy, said they were baffled by remarks after the election by Mr. McConnell that the Senate under his control would prioritize policies that Republicans knew Democrats would also support.

Many also fumed when Mr. McConnell stated the obvious: Republicans do not have the votes to repeal the Affordable Care Act because they cannot override a presidential veto on their own….

Any perception that Mr. McConnell is not sufficiently committed to repealing the health care law, despite his running hard against it in his own re-election campaign, would renew the same fissures among Republicans that preceded the government shutdown.

“That would cause a civil war inside the Republican Party,” said Richard Viguerie, a longtime conservative activist, referring to anything the party’s base saw as a halfhearted attempt at repeal. “There’s almost zero trust between the base and the Republican leaders.”

No one did more to demoralize Tea Party candidates and conservative agitators than Mr. McConnell, who vowed to “crush” every Republican primary challenger. (He did; none defeated an incumbent senator.) He also blacklisted Republicans who worked with groups supporting insurgents.

Privately, McConnell aides say they are less concerned these days about the impact of senators like Mr. Cruz, whom they describe as an “army of one.”

I find it adorable that Republicans are now fighting the Tea Party — the same movement that put the gavel in John Boehner’s hand. Tea Partiers run on a platform of dysfunction, clogging the wheels of progress while putting hog-castrators into power because they feel that Agenda 21 is an actual threat. Because jobs aren’t priority one, but stopping Obama from presiding is.

Until Republicans stop bending to the will of a wildly unpopular movement, then we should refer to them as the Tea Party, too. After all, Republicans demonized Democrats for supporting Obama, and some idiot Dems had the audacity to go silent on their support for the President even though the economy is healing despite the previous administration’s devastating blunders. [su_csky_ad]

D.B. Hirsch

D.B. Hirsch is a political activist, news junkie, and retired ad copy writer and spin doctor. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.