Legislative and Oversight Accomplishments of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform | Committee on Oversight & Government Reform

Legislative and Oversight Accomplishments of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform | Committee on Oversight & Government Reform

For instance, in the IRS targeting scandal, the Committee reviewed millions of pages of documents from the IRS, Treasury Department, and other agencies and conducted 52 transcribed interviews that amounted to 309 hours of testimony (p. 69). The Committee’s investigation found that 80 percent of the delayed requests for tax-exempt status were for conservative non-profit groups, and that not a single “Tea Party” group was approved by the IRS between February 2010 and May 2013.

Full report compressed (document p 69)

Since IRS’s first admission of wrongdoing, the Committee has conducted an exhaustive investigation of the IRS’s targeting. The Committee reviewed over a million pages of documents from the IRS, the Treasury Department, the Justice Department, the Federal Election Commission, the IRS Oversight Board, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, and other custodians. The Committee conducted 52 transcribed interviews, totaling 309 hours of testimony. Despite noncooperation from the Administration and the destruction of a sizeable number of emails from Lois Lerner, the investigation presented clear findings. A review of public information showed that while more than 80 percent of delayed applications were associated with conservative groups, less than seven percent were associated with progressive or liberal agendas.316 Between February 2010 and May 2013, not a single group identifying itself as “Tea Party” was approved by the IRS.³¹⁷

POLITICAL PRESSURE ON THE IRS TO “FIX THE PROBLEM” During his State of the Union Address in January 2010, President Obama delivered a stunning rebuke of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. “With all due deference to separation of powers,” the President intoned, “last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests – including foreign corporations – to spend without limit in our elections.”330

Over the next ten months, in the lead-up to the 2010 midterm election, the President, members of his Administration, and allies in Congress carried out an orchestrated effort to discourage political speech by conservative nonprofit groups in an effort to fix the Citizens United decision. On the campaign trail, the President called conservative groups “shadowy” entities with “innocuous” and “benign-sounding” names that in reality “are running millions of dollars of attack ads against Democratic candidates.”331 Calling them “phony” and “front groups,” the President urged a “fix” to the Citizens United decision, which he believed allowed these allegedly nefarious groups to “pose” as nonprofits.332 The President’s allies in Congress and elsewhere echoed this call, working aggressively to delegitimize the Court’s decision and the Constitutional protections for nonprofit political speech.333 Senator Jeff Merkley urged action “so that no longer do you have a shadowy front group,”334 and Senator Charles Schumer similarly complained that “the public is under siege by advertising from shadowy special interest groups.”335

This rhetorical assault on the legitimacy of tax-exempt groups engaged in political speech was felt by the IRS’s Exempt Organizations Division. As the President’s public statements generated media attention, the IRS identified a Tea Party group applying for tax-exempt status as a “potentially politically embarrassing case.”336 Due to media attention, the IRS’s Washington office ordered the application to be elevated to Washington.337 The attention on media continued through the fall. In response to a tax-law journal article in September 2010,338 Lerner initiated a “c4 project” to assess the political activity of certain nonprofits in wake of Citizens United.339 She told her subordinates: “We need to have a plan. We need to be cautious so it isn’t a per se political project. More a c4 project that will look at levels of lobbying and pol. activity along with exempt activity.”340

I Can Destroy Your Reputation and Career in Two Minutes - Rachel Alexander - Page full

I Can Destroy Your Reputation and Career in Two Minutes - Rachel Alexander - Page full

There are even more disturbing ways cyber thugs are going after conservative activists. Donna Cruse, a vocal Tea Party activist, had one of these hateful people photoshop her Facebook page to make it look like she said something racist related to her credit union employer and how they give out loans. The screenshot was then posted publicly by Americans Against the Tea Party, and the credit union was contacted to complain about her.
The problem? They should have contacted the credit union first. The bank told the anonymous coward that she hadn’t been employed there since 2010! Her alleged comment makes no sense in 2014. Unfortunately, her current employer watched as the cyber storm occurred on the credit union’s site, and due to the frenzied public reaction to this hoax, she was immediately suspended and has been placed on indefinite, unpaid suspension. She is now receiving death threats. Her previous co-workers are afraid to associate with her, possibly out of fear for their jobs. Even more outrageous, Donna has many black friends - who I happened to notice in photos with her on her Facebook page - and last year, she shaved all her hair off her head to show her support for an ethnic friend who was undergoing chemotherapy for cancer.
Nevertheless, her current employer launched an investigation into her and found what they believed to be another Facebook profile of hers, but it was actually a dormant account of a leftist troll who simply changed the name and added a stolen photo, causing further investigation into her personally. In other words, Donna has become “the criminal” in the story. This is how they terrorize people on the right to the point of suicide.
I am fairly good with photoshopping, and know how simple it would be to superimpose a fake comment onto a screenshot of someone’s Facebook page. I photoshopped a screenshot of Barack Obama’s Facebook page to say he was becoming a Republican in less than two minutes. How this tactic could be used to take out conservatives is frankly terrifying. The best way to prevent it is to spread the word and explain how the photoshopping works. Someone loves Hitler? Someone wants to kill Obama? Someone is a white supremacist? Someone hates gays? Photoshopped sex photos? The possibilities are endless. The left is excellent at making this kind of thing go viral and getting activists to call and make complaints.

Why the Reviled Tea Party Was Right about Obamacare | The Fiscal Times

Link: http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Columns/2013/10/09/Why-Reviled-Tea-Party-Was-Right-about-Obamacare (via shareaholic.com)

Before we march the Tea Party off to the Guillotine, let's remember what fired up that unruly crew to begin with. In the midst of the economic crisis, the government went on a spending spree, shelling out hundreds of billions for TARP, Cash for Clunkers, the Stimulus – the list seemed endless. Our nation's debt and deficits soared; the financial crisis became a fiscal crisis.

And then came Obamacare. President Obama's signature healthcare bill promised even higher deficits (no one but Paul Krugman believed you could provide free healthcare to 30 million people and save money), more government intrusion, and possible chaos. The Tea Party was born.

Few deny that our government should help the truly needy. Many agree, moreover, that every American should have access to healthcare. However, the majority of Americans who were content with their doctors and insurance programs fear that Obamacare will damage our superb healthcare infrastructure.
Many also imagine that the cost of Obamacare will be considerably greater than advertised. In part, excess expenditures may derive from lax supervision. To again quote Dr. Coburn, "We have a new program coming out, the Affordable Care Act otherwise known as Obamacare, and there's no income verification at all. So we know that's going to get defrauded to the tune of billions and billions of dollars, so why would we continue to do the same thing that put us in trouble that we're in?"
The program could also cost more than expected because it is fatally flawed. Some hint that Obamacare's potential economic problems come from the frantic effort to sign up healthy young people. While we have heard breathless tales of the millions who have tried (mostly unsuccessfully) to log onto the government websites, we have heard little about what kinds of people have actually signed up.
Anecdotal evidence points to those receiving subsidies being top of the list; it is possible that the undoing of Obamacare is even now taking place.  If the Tea Party had a little more patience, the country might end up standing with them. At the least, they might spare them the guillotine.

Instapundit � Blog Archive � WELL, YES: The Tea Party Movement Was Born Under George W. Bush. Glad to see the reference to Pork…

Link: http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/176997/ (via shareaholic.com)

WELL, YES: The Tea Party Movement Was Born Under George W. Bush.

Hunt for the elusive Tea Party murderer | RedState

Link: http://www.redstate.com/2013/04/20/hunt-for-the-elusive-tea-party-murderer-continues/

Tea, Tobacco, and Science - Brendan P. Foht - National Review Online

Link: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/342622/tea-tobacco-and-science-brendan-p-foht

The paper is, at best, mediocre muckraking, and despite being published in a peer-reviewed journal, it does not rise even to the level of shoddy science. Its authors, three members of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California, San Francisco, arrived at the supposedly scientific conclusion that "the Tea Party has been influenced by decades of astroturfing by tobacco and other corporate interests." Unsurprisingly, commentators on the left were delighted to find an academic study — peer-reviewed, no less! — to give a gloss of science to their partisan opinions about those with whom they disagree. Also unsurprisingly, tea-party spokesmen voiced more skepticism about the paper's findings. Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity, one of the groups profiled in the paper, told Fox News, "If you're going to have a conspiracy theory, at least try to make it pass the laugh test."

Is This the Best They've Got?

Is This the Best They've Got?

via Power Line by John on 7/18/10

On its web site, the NAACP promotes its resolution accusing the Tea Party of being racist:

The resolution came after a year of high-profile media coverage of attendees of Tea Party marches using vile, antagonistic racial slurs & images.

Really? The NAACP's blog post is accompanied by seven photos, all of which are credited to Think Progress, a far-left web site. These photos evidently comprise the best evidence the NAACP has to support its claims against the Tea Party movement.
It is striking how weak that evidence is. Not a single one of the images is clearly racist (even assuming that they all came from Tea Party events; there is no way to tell that). One uses the N-word, but not as a reference to Obama. Rather, it describe taxpayers; Congress, not Obama, is the "slave owner." One sign shows President Obama as Hitler. That may be offensive, but it simply isn't racist--just as when, on thousands of occasions, liberals portrayed President Bush as Hitler, it was outrageous but not racist.
Another photo shows a sign that says, "The American taxpayers are the Jews for Obama's ovens." Again, that statement is hyperbolic and many would find it offensive, but it has nothing to do with race. Other signs I simply don't understand; one says, "Obama What you talkin about Willis? Spend my money?" The NCAAP thinks that is a racial reference, but it's too obscure for most of us, like this one: "The long legged mack daddy." I learned from a Google search that a "mack daddy" is a pimp. Again, a crude term at best, but virtually every politician has been called worse.
Basically, the NCAAP seems to think that any harsh criticism of President Obama is "racist." But all presidents are criticized harshly; often unfairly so. The NCAAP is trying to extend a special zone of protection around Obama, an effort that is doomed to failure. And its reliance on Think Progress doesn't inspire confidence. That site has faked video evidence to try to support the claim that the Tea Party is "racist."
Are Americans dumb enough to fall for this dodge? I doubt it. My guess is that only true believers take seriously the claim that those who are concerned about out-of-control government spending are "racists."

NIH-Funded Conspiracy Theory Smearing Tea Party Gets Even Wackier

Link: http://www.openmarket.org/2013/02/18/nih-funded-conspiracy-theory-smearing-tea-party-gets-even-wackier/

Federal cancer research money funded a “laughable conspiracy-theory report smearing” the Tea Party as being created by the tobacco companies and the Koch brothers, which we earlier debunked. The left-wing academics that authored it have “received $7 million” from the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health.
But the senior author of the “study,” Professor Stanton Glantz of the University of California at San Francisco, has now doubled down on his wacky conclusions. He told Fox News that the Tea Party ”pretty much originated with that smokers’ rights stuff.” As a sarcastic Rick Moran notes, if you doubt Glantz’s conspiracy theory, “It’s obvious you’ve missed the thousands of signs at Tea Party rallies calling for an end to tobacco taxes and setting up cigarette vending machines in grade schools.” As one Tea Party leader noted to Fox News, “If you’re going to have a conspiracy theory, at least try to make it pass  the laugh test … and this one doesn’t even do that.”

If we are to survive the looming catastrophe, we need to face the truth - Telegraph

Link: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/janetdaley/8685945/If-we-are-to-survive-the-looming-catastrophe-we-need-to-face-the-truth.html (via shareaholic.com)

The Tea Party faction within the Republican party was demanding that, before any further steps were taken, there must be a debate about where all this was going. They had seen the future toward which they were being pushed, and it didn't work. They were convinced that the entitlement culture and benefits programmes which the Democrats were determined to preserve and extend with tax rises could only lead to the diminution of that robust economic freedom that had created the American historical miracle.
And, again contrary to prevailing wisdom, their view is not naive and parochial: it is corroborated by the European experience. By rights, it should be Europe that is immersed in this debate, but its leaders are so steeped in the sacred texts of social democracy that they cannot admit the force of the contradictions which they are now hopelessly trying to evade.
No, it is not just the preposterousness of the euro project that is being exposed. (Let's merge the currencies of lots of countries with wildly differing economic conditions and lock them all into the interest rate of the most successful. What could possibly go wrong?)
Also collapsing before our eyes is the lodestone of the Christian Socialist doctrine that has underpinned the EU's political philosophy: the idea that a capitalist economy can support an ever-expanding socialist welfare state.
As the EU leadership is (almost) admitting now, the next step to ensure the survival of the world as we know it will involve moving toward a command economy, in which individual countries and their electorates will lose significant degrees of freedom and self-determination.
We have arrived at the endgame of what was an untenable doctrine: to pay for the kind of entitlements that populations have been led to expect by their politicians, the wealth-creating sector has to be taxed to a degree that makes it almost impossible for it to create the wealth that is needed to pay for the entitlements that populations have been led to expect, etc, etc.
The only way that state benefit programmes could be extended in the ways that are forecast for Europe's ageing population would be by government seizing all the levers of the economy and producing as much (externally) worthless currency as was needed – in the manner of the old Soviet Union.
That is the problem. So profound is its challenge to the received wisdom of postwar Western democratic life that it is unutterable in the EU circles in which the crucial decisions are being made – or rather, not being made.
The solution that is being offered to the political side of the dilemma is benign oligarchy. Ignoring national public opinion and turbulent political minorities has always been at least half the point of the EU bureaucratic putsch. But that does not settle the economic predicament.
What is to be done about all those assurances that governments have provided for generations about state-subsidised security in old age, universal health provision (in Britain, almost uniquely, completely free), and a guaranteed living standard for the unemployed?
We have been pretending – with ever more manic protestations – that this could go on for ever. Even when it became clear that European state pensions (and the US social security system) were gigantic Ponzi schemes in which the present beneficiaries were spending the money of the current generation of contributors, and that health provision was creating impossible demands on tax revenue, and that benefit dependency was becoming a substitute for wealth-creating employment, the lesson would not be learnt. We have been living on tick and wishful thinking.
So what are the most important truths we should be addressing if we are to avert – or survive – the looming catastrophe? Raising retirement ages across Europe (not just in Greece) is imperative, as is raising thresholds for out-of-work benefit entitlements.
Lowering the tax burden for both wealth-creators and consumers is essential. In Britain, finding private sources of revenue for health care is a matter of urgency.
A general correction of the imbalance between wealth production and wealth redistribution is now a matter of basic necessity, not ideological preference.
The hardest obstacle to overcome will be the idea that anyone who challenges the prevailing consensus of the past 50 years is irrational and irresponsible. That is what is being said about the Tea Partiers. In fact, what is irrational and irresponsible is the assumption that we can go on as we are.

Henninger: Why the Left Lost It - WSJ.com

Link: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703791904576076373704758778.html?mod=djemITP_h

Linking the tea parties to Tucson is both calculation and genuine belief.

The divide between this strain of the American left and its conservative opponents is about more than politics and policy. It goes back a long way, it is deep, and it will never be bridged. It is cultural, and it explains more than anything the "intensity" that exists now between these two competing camps. (The independent laments: "Can't we all just get along?" Answer: No.)
The Rosetta Stone that explains this tribal divide is Columbia historian Richard Hofstadter's classic 1964 essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." Hofstadter's piece for Harper's may be unfamiliar to many now, but each writer at the opening of this column knows by rote what Hofstadter's essay taught generations of young, left-wing intellectuals about conservatism and the right.
After Hofstadter, the American right wasn't just wrong on policy. Its people were psychologically dangerous and undeserving of holding authority for any public purpose. By this mental geography, the John Birch Society and the tea party are cut from the same backwoods cloth.
"American politics has often been an arena for angry minds," Hofstadter wrote. "In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority."
Frank Rich, Oct 17: "Don't expect the extremism and violence in our politics to subside magically after Election Day—no matter what the results. If Tea Party candidates triumph, they'll be emboldened. If they lose, the anger and bitterness will grow."
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tuesday in the Huffington Post: "Jack's death forced a national bout of self-examination. In 1964, Americans repudiated the forces of right-wing hatred and violence with an historic landslide in the presidential election between LBJ and Goldwater. For a while, the advocates of right-wing extremism receded from the public forum. Now they have returned with a vengeance—to the broadcast media and to prominent positions in the political landscape."
This isn't just political calculation. It is foundational belief.
So, yes, Tucson has indeed been revealing. On to 2012.

"Support that at your own risk"

"Support that at your own risk"

http://wizbangblog.com/2011/11/22/support-that-at-your-own-risk/

A clear concise piece describing why you have to be ignorant or gullible to be supportive of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

What is remarkable to me is how otherwise observant, thoughtful individuals have excused the endless stream of criminal acts perpetrated at and by OWS crowds. The line, as it goes, is: All causes or political movements are going to have fringe elements, and they are going to behave badly or stupidly. But you can't judge the whole based on the actions of those few. Their overall message is sound, and you can't discredit the people or their message, or allow yourself to be distracted from that message because of these acts.
There are two problems with this position. First of all, their message, their position, their entire ideology is far from sound. Don't let hypnotic, deadpan, monotone NPR radio announcers lull you into a sense of apathy or, worse, comfort over these people. The OWS people will tell you there is this system and it is designed to work against you, but there really is no "system." There are numerous, individual agreements between adults to exchange value: effort as any combination of talent, physical labor or intellectual skill for currency. And it's not exploitative; it is mutually beneficial. Suppose you make a lot of money; you can then hire me, as an employee, or as a vendor to help you make more, and if your business does well and I'm an investor, I make money when your stock goes up; when you make more money, you can open more stores so I have better selection, lower prices, and a closer, more convenient trip to make. In America and countries like it, quality, hard work and acceptance of personal responsibility results in success–if not now, certainly for your future. However, since this does leave out everyone who does not do those things, Occupy Wall Street finds its opening with such persons.
OWS asserts that, currently, the power is in the hands of the wealthy but that it should be the hands of academics and other people smarter than you and, therefore, know better than you what's best for you and everyone else. So their stated mission is replace the system with a new one that is leaderless. However, this is not an honest statement because it is incongruous with their perception of society. Social justice implies someone is being wronged (perhaps exploited or outright stolen from), and that there is a judicial punishment. Therefore, people that stratify society by classes of victims according to gender, race or even sexual orientation are doomed to seek supremacy, not just opportunity equality, for these victim classes. When you see someone demanding social justice, they are looking to shift the class for whom they see as the owner of social power; a shift that moves power from the so-called "haves" to the so-called "have-nots." It sounds like a good idea, but it isn't, and history proves it.
Look at the legacy of Che Guevara, Hugo Chavez and Venezuela or Fidel Castro's Cuba, the revolution that brought the Ayatollah to power in Iran or Kim Jong-Il and Mao's famine-stained brand of Communism in North Korea and China. The reality is, the only place where Communism ever "works" is when it is brought about through intimidation, fear, actual torture and death. While propaganda from the American Left perpetuates conspiracy concepts around the so-called military-industrial complex accusing the CIA and the Pentagon of all sorts of "black helicopter" or "men-in-black" tactics to silence political dissidents, you have actual oppression throughout Islamic Arab countries, Socialist Central and South American banana republics, and communist regimes in parts of Africa and Asia. Actual kidnappings, rapes, murders of people and their families, including children for preserving power.
In that world, there is no constitution that limits the government. There is no legislative representation. There is no due process. There is just the way of the state and what the intellectuals have decided for you, as an adult, what is best and right for you. Socialism is the creed of shared misery. Communism is the philosophy of outcome equality through universal failure. And they sell it on the concept that if nobody is rich, then there can be no one in a class above you. But that is the biggest lie of all, because the advocates of that system want to be in the class above you that tells you what you can or cannot drive, eat or buy, or how much money you are allowed to earn. The road to hell was paved with good intentions and the message of the Occupy Wall Street movement is no exception.
Then, there is the "every political movement has a fringe element" excuse. This does not fly because in another well-known political movement called the Tea Party protests, you did not have numerous felonies. Tea Parties have not hosted shootings, murders, dead bodies, sexual assaults including rape, public masturbation, public fornication, vandalism–including defecation on police vehicles, open use of illegal narcotics, trespassing, battery of journalists and peace officers, theft of private property, public health code violations and untold economic damage to the local businesses whose customers do not want to risk blood and urine being thrown at them while standing at a hot-dog cart. You can Google every single last incident I've named to find they've happened at least once in every single city where OWS has darkened the pavement.
There are too many of these incidents to call them one-offs in the same way that out of the 1.2 Million tea party protesters that showed up in Washington, D.C., you might have had a few dozen people hoisting racially incentive picket signs directed toward the President. However, not only were there very few outsiders willing to explain them away as minor, fringe elements that do not represent the core values of the Tea Party, there is former President Jimmy Carter claiming that the heart of their opposition to the President is based in racism. At Tea Party protests, parks have been left in nicer condition than before they arrived. Will we be able to say the same when the OWS crowd is eventually evicted from the parks and lawns of public buildings in our cities? If it was anything like the union losers that tried to occupy the state capitol in Wisconsin when Scott Walker tried to institute fiscal sanity in that state, the answer will be: of course not.
So, certainly, crony capitalism between Democrats in Congress and in the White House financial institutions–either through collusion or severe legal pressure–that nearly destroyed the American economy in 2008 is bad. However, the only thing worse than a problem is a bad solution. There are good solutions to that problem, and, it would be one thing if the OWSers were just too stupid to avoid bad solutions. But this is exploitation. The Occupy Wall Street people are gunning for the most important American value that there is, Individual Liberty, and they are exploiting the misery caused by Left-wing, big government policy to advance a cause that will end Individual Liberty.
Support that at your own risk.

--

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For the Record… More Blacks Supported Tea Party Movement Than Support #Occup...

For the Record… More Blacks Supported Tea Party Movement Than Support #Occupy Movement

via The Gateway Pundit by Jim Hoft on 11/26/11

They must be racists.

Today the Washington Post reported that African Americans, who are 12.6 percent of the U.S. population, make up only 1.6 percent of Occupy Wall Street.
It's too bad the Occupy Movement couldn't be like the tea party.
An April 2010 Gallup poll found that 6% of tea party support came from non-hispanic blacks.

Up twinkles for the tea party.
Where's the NAACP?

Andrew Sullivan Is Wrong About the Supreme Court and Guns

Andrew Sullivan Is Wrong About the Supreme Court and Guns

via Hit & Run by Damon W. Root on 11/9/11

In a long post titled "The Tea Party's Fatal Delusion," Daily Beast blogger Andrew Sullivan takes aim at the "spasm of ideological abstraction and purism" which he says has gripped the American right since 2008 and manifested itself in all sorts of regrettable ways, from "draconian anti-illegal-immigration initiatives" to "the total denial of climate change." I agree with some of Sullivan's criticisms of the modern conservative agenda and disagree with others, but when it comes to his take on the Supreme Court and the Second Amendment he couldn't be more wrong. According to Sullivan, the right's current "spasm" has included "a Supreme Court happy to find radical new interpretations of the Constitution" such as "turning the Second Amendment into something more radical than anything previously contemplated."
Sullivan refers here to District of Columbia v. Heller, the 2008 decision where the Court held that the Second Amendment protects an individual right—not a collective one—to keep and bear arms. For an allegedly radical piece of conservatism, the individual rights interpretation of the Second Amendment has a curiously distinguished list of liberal admirers. Among them are Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, a longtime friend and adviser to Barack Obama, whose influential legal textbook American Constitutional Law was revised back in 2000 to endorse the individual rights interpretation of the Second Amendment. The two previous editions, published in 1978 and 1988, respectively, had argued that the Second Amendment protected only a collective right, but subsequent legal scholarship prompted Tribe to change his mind. "My conclusion came as something of a surprise to me, and an unwelcome surprise," Tribe later admitted to The New York Times. "I have always supported as a matter of policy very comprehensive gun control." Not exactly the words of a deranged Tea Party extremist.
Other liberal supporters of the "radical" individual rights interpretation include Yale law professor Akhil Reed Amar, one of the most respected progressive legal historians at work today, who has argued that the Second Amendment secures a "core right to self-protection," and University of Texas law professor Sanford Levinson, whose pioneering 1989 Yale Law Journal article "The Embarrassing Second Amendment" argued that it was time for liberals to take the entire Bill of Rights seriously.
In other words, several decades worth of legal scholarship and activism by players of all political stripes helped create the intellectual consensus that culminated in the Heller decision. It was no right-wing "spasm."
Finally, in regards to Sullivan's dubious assertion that Heller turned "the Second Amendment into something more radical than anything previously contemplated," I submit these decidedly non-radical words from Justice Antonin Scalia's opinion for the Heller majority:

Although we do not undertake an exhaustive historical analysis today of the full scope of the Second Amendment, nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.

Tea Party favorite in Congress is okay with civil unions

Tea Party favorite in Congress is okay with civil unions

via GayPatriot by B. Daniel Blatt on 10/6/11

It's always fascinating to see how liberals perceive conservatives.  They tend to define us not by our ideas or our most accomplished or eloquent leaders, but by the fringe extremists who cling onto our movement hoping to mean some meaning there. Yesterday on his eponymous CNN show, Piers Morgan suggested that Tea Party folk harbor [...]

NYU Law School Talk on the Tea Party and Popular Constitutionalism

NYU Law School Talk on the Tea Party and Popular Constitutionalism

via The Volokh Conspiracy by Ilya Somin on 10/3/11

(Ilya Somin)
This Wednesday, I will be giving a talk at NYU Law School on the Tea Party Movement and Popular Constitutionalism. The talk will be at 11 AM in Vanderbilt Hall, Room 202. NYU Professor Roderick Hills will comment on my presentation, and there will also be questions from the audience until around 12:30 or so.


I previously wrote about the Tea Party as a popular constitutionalist movement in this article. In my talk, I will explain why the Tea Party qualifies a popular constitutionalist movement despite the fact that that concept has previously been used mostly to describe movements on the political left and assess its main strengths and weaknesses. Like previous popular constitutionalist movements, the Tea Party has not avoided such problems as the impact of widespread political ignorance.


I will also suggest why its impact is likely to be a net positive on balance — including from the standpoint of the mostly left of center advocates of popular constitutionalism, a point I first developed in the article linked above. Given that it was inevitable that the combination of Obama's policies and a deep recession would produce a right-wing populist reaction, it is far better that it has produced a movement primarily focused on limiting federal power and spending than one focused on racial resentment or xenophobia, as was often the case in previous American history and in many European countries today. In addition, the movement's emphasis on limiting federal power could potentially increase democratic accountability in government — a central objective of many advocates of popular constitutionalism.


UPDATE: In this 2010 post, I discussed claims that the Tea Party's real agenda is racism.

Tea Party Message to Morgan Freeman: 'My Name Is Ali Akbar'

Tea Party Message to Morgan Freeman: 'My Name Is Ali Akbar'

via The American Spectator and The Spectacle Blog by Robert Stacy McCain on 9/28/11

Photo: Ali Akbar and Doug Hoffman
Whenever I introduce Ali Akbar to friends, I usually feel compelled to add the explanation that he's a Southern Baptist from Texas, which leaves him to relate the backstory: His African-American mother was a college student in Texas when she met and married an Arab exchange student, who subsequently abandoned his wife and son to return to his native country. Given the events of recent years, it is perhaps somewhat ironic that Ali grew up to become a Republican campaign strategist.
Ali's specialty is New Media, which explains how I met him in October 2009 during Doug Hoffman's historic third-party congressional campaign in New York's 23^rd District. It was my second trip to the district, and I arrived in the wee hours of Oct. 30 at a rental house in Lake Placid, N.Y., where I had been granted sofa-crashing privileges. The crew in the house were Eric Odom, Steve Foley and Ali -- who were working on the Tea Party news site 73Wire -- and Yates Walker, who had been brought in by Dan Tripp to run the Hoffman campaign's Plattsburgh office. There was pizza and beer and we talked until nearly dawn, then got up a few hours later for a trip to Plattsburgh, where Hoffman met at a diner with the mayor who endorsed him. As I said, it was "like reporting a hurricane from the eye of the storm." RINO Dede Scozzafava quit the race on Halloween morning, and the next day Ali rode with me for the high-speed 120-mile drive westward along Highway 3 to Watertown, N.Y. By the time we arrived, Dede had endorsed the Democrat, Bill Owens. On Election Day, Ali and I repeated our high-speed drive in the opposite direction to arrive at the Hotel Saranac for what we expected to be a victory celebration. It was a tearful moment when Hoffman conceded a narrow defeat, but as he said, it was "worth the fight."
NY-23 was, as several people said at the time, the "template" for a new kind of campaign operation that combines volunteer grassroots energy with New Media messaging and social networking. Through the subsequent careers of those who joined Hoffman's crusade (see "Battle Cry in the North Country"), you can trace a straight line from that against-the-odds Tea Party campaign to the Scott Brown victory in Massachusetts, Marco Rubio's defeat of Charlie Crist in Florida, the GOP mid-term victory in 2010, and on into this year's special-election victory in NY-9 and the 2012 Republican presidential campaign.
Over the course of the past two years, Ali and I have crossed paths in Boston, Alabama, Nevada, Georgia, Ohio and D.C., and shared a hotel suite during my recent visit to Tampa, Florida, for the Sept. 12 presidential debate. All of which is a preamble necessary to explain that when actor Morgan Freeman accused the Tea Party of racism, my friend Ali was hurt and offended and felt compelled to write an open letter:

Dear Mr. Freeman,
My name is Ali Akbar. I'm a 26 year-old African-American small business owner and a tea party activist. . . .
I idolized you as a boy. Growing up without a father, you were one of the strong black men in my life who gave me a model to follow. Each of the characters you played had dignity and confidence. I tried to emulate the strength you projected. . . .
I've attended dozens of tea party events. I've helped organize them, and I've even spoken at a few. The tea party is not what is often depicted in the news. It is people of all colors who are terribly concerned about the direction that America is heading. We don't trust big government to make decisions for us. And we fear that the present administration's spending is going to lead our country down a path to insolvency, much like what Greece is currently facing. . . .
I'm hoping that you'll come to a tea party in Tennessee - the place of your birth. Really anywhere in the country that works for you; I'll set it up with the one of the thousands of activists I know around our great country. I'd be delighted to introduce you to good people who will welcome you with open arms, disagree with you, and then feed you some of the best barbeque you've ever tasted. . . .

Read the whole thing. And if anyone has any doubts about Ali's Tea Party bona fides, tell them to get in touch with me -- or Doug Hoffman.

Media Treatment and the Tea Party

 

Media Treatment and the Tea Party

via Big Government by Jason Bradley on 9/28/11

In light of a recent poll showing America's distrust of the national media, I thought I would pick a topic for a case study. What better topical study is there when exploring the media's methods and concerns than with the Tea Party?
My approach was simple. I took data from 2010 and up to this point in 2011 based off key word searches in Google. For example, In 2010 I searched "Tea Party and racists" and pulled the number given from its search engine. On a positive side, as you can see from the chart, spending was a major keyword associated with the Tea Party in 2010. My, though, how the change a year makes.
In 2011, the tea party/racists word association climbed to over one million results, an increase from the year before.
The tea party/terrorists word association increased by over 10 million results from the year before.
As one would expect, tea party/spending word association dropped from over 17 million hits in 2010 to just over 300,00 heading into the tenth month of the year.
Some limitations to my approach
As I searched through the fist couple of pages of results, it became apparent that not every headline used "racism" or "terrorists" negatively. For example a writer at National Review Online or Big Government may use those two words in a headline, but it would be so to point out some ridiculous claim made by a blogger or media personality, etc. However, the fact that it must be done, that the words "racism" and "terrorists" are so commonly associated with the Tea Party around the web, and that point become moot. Because instead of laughing the assortment of yahoos who make these claims off the planet, conservatives and civic minded people busy themselves with defending the accusations.

The Tea Party has become victim to extreme media bias. A hostile media, though unpopular, can still help shape its public image. Throw in the fact that liberal members of Congress carefully select word usage for maximum effect, which guarantees a long shelf life in the news cycle, and the Tea Party's detractors get free media to vent their disapproval.
Some of the Tea Party's recent disapproval can almost certainly be attributed to those facts.

NYT Sunday Review Pushes Old “Billionaires Run the Tea Party” Lie

NYT Sunday Review Pushes Old “Billionaires Run the Tea Party” Lie

via Big Journalism by Warner Todd Huston on 9/27/11

It is a lie that serves as the left's basic narrative for the birth of the tea party movement and this weekend it was The New York Times's turn to push that lie claiming that the tea party is "led by veteran conservative activists and bankrolled by billionaires." This bull hockey (yes, I said bull hockey) can't be debunked enough, because to undermine the legitimacy of the tea party movement, extremists and left-wingers pretend to be journalists push this lie for all its worth.

Left-wing Georgetown Professor Michael Kazin, who masquerades as a history professor by day, penned this latest piece for the Times pushing the left's favorite false narrative about the tea party movement. The piece lamented the loss of the spirit of activism and protest in the American left and revealed a taxpayer-funded professor longing for the violent anarchist protests of the early 20th century.
Kazin cries that the left has lost its umpf and wails that "the tea party rebellion" has instead come to the fore:

"Instead, the Tea Party rebellion — led by veteran conservative activists and bankrolled by billionaires — has compelled politicians from both parties to slash federal spending and defeat proposals to tax the rich and hold financiers accountable for their misdeeds."

Of course, his blithe claim that "the tea party" is run and funded by the rich and powerful in conservative circles is simply untrue. It is a claim repeated over and over again by the left and its handmaidens in the Old Media.
The truth is that "the tea party" is no single entity funded by billionaires and run by long-time conservative activists. This is a lie that reflects what some call "projection" because it is the left that operates this way. Left-wingism in America is a top down, big money game and always has been. There are no true grassroots efforts on the left. The tea partiers, however, are not like that and never have been.

Firstly, the real truth is that there is no such thing as "the" tea party. Tea party groups are usually small, rarely interconnected, and barely funded by anyone — even their own members, unfortunately. Also, there is no true national organization that can legitimately claim to "be" the tea party, though many are out there trying to urge activism.
So, where does this "billionaires funding the tea party" claim come from? Mostly from two groups. One is Americans for Prosperity and the other is Freedom Works. Both are most certainly heavy activists, both have a large bankroll behind them (one is funded now by the dreaded Koch Brothers), both have big name conservative activists working for them, and both most certainly do coordinate with tea party groups.
But neither actually run any tea party groups. Cooperating with is not the same as running. And more importantly, both were around long before the Tea Party movement started.
Additionally, both were taken by surprise by the fervor of the tea party movement and both had to hustle to catch up with the movement. Far from controlling the tea party movement, both AFP and Freedom Works were swept along with it.
I have worked with both organizations and did so before the tea party movement began. I was also involved with the group that started the first big tea party event in Chicago. So, I know first hand how little the big money and the big names in conservative activism had to do with the tea party movement.
Many of these folks were certain that the tea party would be a flash in the pan that would have no sticking power. They were surprised when the opposite happened and were left on the outside looking in at the beginning.
Few tea party groups have much by way of money. Almost every tea party activist is a true grass roots organizer working out of pocket, for the cause, with only their fervor for America and their principles guiding them. There is no "billionaire" buying them lunch, much less footing the bills for their groups.
So, whenever you see this lie that the tea party is "led by veteran conservative activists and bankrolled by billionaires" know that this is the way the left is attempting to control the narrative. It is a lie, certainly, but, as most leftists believe, the more you yell out the lie, the more people that will come to believe it. So, when you see this lie, debunk it, won't you?

Tucson Tea Party Speaks Out After Weeks of False Accusations & Death Threats

Tucson Tea Party Speaks Out After Weeks of False Accusations & Death Threats | The Gateway Pundit

...This brings us to the second part of the tragedy: the efforts of some to turn this horrific event and investigation into a political witch hunt. The Tucson shooter, by all accounts, acted irrationally and alone. However, the response by certain members of the media and political class was coordinated, pre-meditated, and certainly intended to do harm to people that they disagreed with politically, all the while knowing that there was no real connection.

The term, although rarely now used, is “calumny.” And it didn’t just start on the day of the shooting.

Because lies and intimidation couldn’t silence you, they now seek to ensnare you with a velvet rope of “civility.” The “tone and civility” argument is a wall that will grow ever higher as we try to scale it. No amount of grace, no level of penance, no measure of timidity can ever pay the price of a sin that we didn’t commit. We have been civil, we have shown restraint, we have gathered in large numbers to seek truth and earned the respect of the community for the measured manner that we did this....

For reference: Republican Rhetoric, Right-Wing Terror...

David Brooks on the Faults of the Tea Party — Faults That MOST DEFINITELY!!!1!!1! Are Not Shared by Obama

Patterico's Pontifications » David Brooks on the Faults of the Tea Party — Faults That MOST DEFINITELY!!!1!!1! Are Not Shared by Obama
Double Standards in action.