Sunday Sermon: The Tea Party Goes to Washington

Dearly Beloved of the Tea Party:

The Democrats have thrown in the towel. The president  is making his excuses pre factum. The national Democrats  circle the money wagons, pulling cash from dozens of races once thought competitive.  They recognize that votes are commercial commodities, and they can't afford many of them, so they desperately defend the 40 acres around the homestead in hopes of living to fight another day.

So the "conservatives," the Republicans, and  the Tea Party  will win. I haven't read anyone, high or low, who can articulate a plausible event which would  change this.

Welcome to power and Gordian knot of how to use it.

Oh, I know you'll begin with the ego trip of trying to snag preferable offices in the Rayburn and  Hart buildings. You'll direct your handlers to lobby for the committee assignments most likely to attract the teevee cameras to your angelic faces.  You'll almost immediately have a thousand bills drafted, proposals going nowhere except, via posturing, pandering,  news releases to your district  newspaper desks.

Having won your seats by vilifying Washington and its politicians you will, before the cherry blossoms bloom again,  have become Washington politicians,  sharing the breed lust to remain one.

The troubling thing is that, as a group, however loosely organized,  you have no more coherent message than the scoundrels you replace. The mantra of "lower taxes, smaller government"  -- an outstanding idea -- flows trippingly from the tongue and meets loving ears among the over-taxed, over-policed, over-regulated American citizenry. Unfortunately it collides between those ears, on the rock of "where's mine?".

Meaning what are you going to do after you abolish the Department of Education? (Another good idea.) A significant number of you are winning less because you have workable notions about  how to restore liberties and more because you have rekindled the hopes of the window-peeping theocrats.  So you will think seriously about  the fund-raising and electoral benefits of a gay marriage amendment, a Constitutional ban on flag burning, a positive assertion that teachers must lead public classroom prayers.

Given another primary source of  your vote-buying money, you can't fail to sympathize with the welfare queens represented by the Farm Bureau, the National Federation of Independent Business, the Chambers of Commerce, the American Bankers Association.  After all, the next election cycle starts about the time you hire the first meat to staff your office.

Redistributing honestly earned wealth is both morally wrong and economically destructive whether the pigs you feed are coke moms  breeding for DHS  checks or Hank Greenburg's insurance giants.

The chattering media have been faithful about attaching the term "libertarian-leaning" to your Tea Party.  We will shortly know whether they know what they are talking about and, in the unlikely event they do,  whether you mean it.

As  any simple Bob Jones U graduate knows, all sermons should conclude with an exhortation, a plea for holiness, an invitation to sign on the dotted line.

Here's mine: Please cleave to the notion that The United States of America is not really a place, wonderful though that place is. It is not an adaptation of Roberts Rules of Order, however important procedures may be. America is an idea, and that idea is liberty, the ultimate sovereignty of the individual human being in his private affairs.