Justin Lane / EPA-Landov
Robert DeMarco holds flags during a Tea Party rally in White Plains, NY, in late October.
The grassroots, fiscally conservative movement has put Republicans back in power, but how will it get them to cut spending?
by Ben Adler
For a grassroots insurgency whose core activists say was started in opposition to a proposal by President Bush—the TARP programs to rescue the nation’s major financial institutions—the Tea Party movement has ended up in a strange place: helping to elect Republicans. To be sure, Tea Partiers have moved the Republican caucus to the right, especially on fiscal issues, but first and foremost they have returned to power a House Republican leadership that was complicit in Bush’s free-spending, interventionist ways. The likely next speaker of the House, Rep. John Boehner of Ohio, supported Bush’s most expensive and activist government initiatives: the Medicare prescription-drug benefit, the invasion of Iraq, No Child Left Behind. Veteran congressmen—and pork procurers—are poised to take control of powerful committees. The Tea Party–backed victors, by contrast, will be relatively powerless freshmen.
So, will the expanded Republican caucuses in Congress pursue fiscal restraint? Grassroots conservative activists and small-government advocates all say the same thing: not unless the public in general and the right-wing base in particular holds them to it. “The heavy lifting will take place after the election,” says Don Todd, research director at Americans for Limited Government and a former research director at the Republican National Committee. “The public makes it feasible for Congress to do the things they want it to do.” That’s why conservative activists say the plan is to provide positive as well as negative reinforcement. “When they do the right thing we give them a hats-off, and when they do the wrong thing it’s important to note that too,” says Ben Marchi, Virginia director of Americans for Prosperity, a national organization promoting fiscal conservatism that worked closely with Tea Party activists in in battleground districts.
This applies to Democrats as well as to Republicans. The sentiment is echoed by Jenny Beth Martin, national coordinator for the Tea Party Patriots, a national network of hundreds of local Tea Party groups. The Patriots, it is clear, do not put much stock in the notion that the Republican leadership will pursue their agenda, but they hope to have a reliable caucus within the GOP. “If [new Republican members] vote to uphold our core values, against pressure from their party leadership, we can give them the political backing they need,” says Martin, vowing that the Tea Partiers’ frantic pace of calling, e-mailing, rallying, and lobbying Congress will not slow.
They’re likely going to have a lot of opportunities to protest. Past Republican takeovers of the federal government have led to conservative activists feeling betrayed by concessions to political pragmatism and policy necessity: Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and the last Republican Congress abandoned various pledges to cut spending and ultimately accrued massive debts. The same political and mathematical realities apply today: Social Security, Medicare, and defense spending are popular among the older voters upon whom the GOP relies. If you do not cut those programs, and you do not raise taxes, you simply cannot balance the budget—even if Republicans fulfill their campaign pledge to cut domestic discretionary spending down to its 2008 levels. “People think the two parties argue about government spending, but they’re really arguing over a very small piece of government spending,” says Scott Lilly, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank, and a former staff director for the House Appropriations Committee. Even Tea Partiers who would be willing to see spending cuts to defense or entitlement programs are being set up for unavoidable disappointment, because Republicans did not even propose any such cuts in their campaign platform.
Story Compliments Of Newsweek.com
