The Tea Party Must Learn it Doesn't Run the Country

The next deadline for Congressional action on a comprehensive appropriations bill for the remainder of the current fiscal year is fast approaching. A bill has to be passed and signed by midnight Friday to avoid a shutdown of the Federal government. The fact remains that a deal will be made either before Congress jumps off the looming cliff or after.

My concern is less about the argument over how much to cut, or even about where to cut (although I find the grandstanding attacks on the likes of Planned Parenthood and NPR to be somewhere on the spectrum between silly and outrageous), than it is about what I sense may be an underlying motive on the part of the Tea Party hardliners: they are not necessarily for a limited government, but rather talk and act as if they want to so constrain the Federal government’s ability to function as to effectively do away with it. Think I am exaggerating?  What about efforts in several states to nullify Federal laws?

I am troubled, too by the continuing refrain “to take our government back” from those of us who voted a different way in 2008. The United States of America has a constitutional system that divides the government into three branches, and right now conservative Republicans control, as House Speaker John Boehner has acknowledged (but that House Majority Leader Eric Cantor doesn’t seem to comprehend), just one half of one of those three branches.

Ideologically, the American people are divided over the role, size and cost of government, and they are divided on how to and who should pay for it. I, for example, am willing to pay my share, but I’d really prefer to have GE pay its share as well. Like it or not Tea Partiers do not possess sole power to govern; you share it with the rest of us. I have also written before, twenty-plus million more people voted for Barack Obama in 2008 than voted for Congressional Republicans in 2010. Our votes--and our voices--still count and still matter, and they will do so as long as our constitutional republic exists. Sorry about that.

So, let’s deal. Let’s--and I know the word causes the more extreme elements of the Republican Party severe intestinal discomfort--compromise.  It is, after all, the American way!