What the tea party wants, the tea party gets — at least for now.
On Monday, the tea party spooked one of the Senate’s biggest old bulls, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, into doing a full 180 on earmarks. He has agreed to stop Republican senators from tapping funds for roads, hospitals and other projects in their states, despite the risk that comes with failing to bring home the bacon when the next elections roll around.
Also on Monday, tea party leaders resorted to bullying their own newly elected members of Congress — not over earmarks or anything related to policy — but rather to force them to attend a tea-party indoctrination seminar in Washington that a tea party group had inadvertently scheduled to conflict with a long-established freshman orientation session hosted by the Claremont Institute. The tea party leadership did this by publishing the members’ personal contact info in an email blast to their followers, urging the tea bagger rank and file to call the new members and browbeat them into skipping the Claremont event in favor of the tea party seminar.
(As a tactic, unleashing the mobs on your own members over a scheduling snafu smacks of political amateurism — especially when it would have been arguably easier to apologize for the mistake and reschedule the event. For one thing, bombarding members of Congress with crank calls over such a trivial matter not only risks alienating them, it uses up precious political capital. What will tea party leaders do get the members’ attention when something more important than a seminar comes up — kidnap their dogs, send letter bombs?)
While the tea party was flexing its muscles with old bulls and newbies in Congress, one of their freshman had a full-on public conniption reminiscent of the adolescent meltdowns at congressional town halls that got the tea party so much coverage on cable news and Fox last year. During a legit orientation meeting, Dr. Andy Harris (R-Md.) indulged himself in a temper tantrum when he learned that, like 50 million of his fellow citizens who have gone without health-insurance coverage for months and years, he was going to have to do without — for 28 days.
Dr. Harris’ behavior infuriated regular Americans who believe that no American should be without coverage, especially when members of Congress — nearly half of whom are millionaires — benefit from socialized insurance coverage. Like the elderly tea baggers at those town halls who demanded that the government keep its hands off Medicare, Dr. Harris’ complaint smacks of the sort of hypocrisy for which the tea party has become notorious.
After all, it was socialized health insurance that so enraged tea partiers that they finally got up off their couches and poured into the streets to protest — this after having sat silently by in the early 2000s while George Bush, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner and the rest of Bush’s lockstep, goose-stepping GOP Congress piled debts and deficits up to record-breaking levels, rigged the financial system to benefit their corporate sponsors and crashed the economy. We didn’t hear a peep from future tea baggers while all that was happening.
Opposition to socialized health insurance was a top campaign issue for tea party candidates this year, including especially Dr. Harris. Most, if not all, of the tea-party aligned incoming members of Congress won their elections by railing against reforms to the system.
So why is it okay with the tea party that the politicians they voted for on Nov. 2 based on their opposition to socialist health coverage will, in February, become recipients of the same socialist coverage they were elected to oppose?
After Dr. Harris’ tantrum, Democrats in the House had the same question and drafted a letter demanding that Republicans who oppose health-care reform (in other words, all of them) forgo their government insurance coverage.
But these Democrats apparently haven’t quite yet figured out where power lies in the new conservative political apparatus. They sent their letter to the wrong guy — to Speaker Boehner. You know, the lobbyists’ best friend.
The letter should have gone to the GOP’s real bosses — the Koch Brothers, their stooge Dick Armey at Freedomworks, GOP political operative Sal Russo who runs the Tea Party Express bus-tour propaganda show, Tea Party Patriots, Tea Party Nation and the rest.
So here’s the letter, re-addressed to Republicans’ true bosses:
Dear
Senator McConnell and Representative BoehnerCharles Koch and David Koch; Dick Armey, FreedomWorks; Sal Russo, Tea Party Express; Tea Party Patriots; Tea Party Nation; TeaParty.org, et al:We were surprised to read in today’s article “GOP frosh: Where’s My Health Care?” in Politico that some of your incoming members are unhappy with the health benefits they are eligible to purchase under the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP) – particularly the fact that there is a delay before benefits take effect. Ironically, this is the same predicament millions of Americans currently find themselves in.
It is amazing that your members would complain about not having health care coverage for a few weeks, even after campaigning to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which will help provide coverage to millions of Americans who find themselves without health insurance for months or even years.
We also find it interesting that members of the Republican conference would have no problem taking away health coverage from hard-working Americans, but expect expanded coverage for themselves and their families. The system set up by the Affordable Care Act will allow Americans to choose the plan that works best for them from a variety of private insurance plans, just like the FEHB program that members of Congress are now able to access. The uninsured, small-business employees, and the self-employed will now be able to benefit from this same choice and competition.
It begs the question: how many members of the Republican conference will be forgoing the employer-subsidized FEHBP coverage and experiencing what so many Americans find themselves forced to face? If your conference wants to deny millions of Americans affordable health care, your members should walk that walk. You cannot enroll in the very kind of coverage that you want for yourselves, and then turn around and deny it to Americans who don’t happen to be Members of Congress. It is worth noting that in 2011, the Federal government will pay $10,503.48 of the premiums for each member of Congress with a family policy under the commonly-selected Blue Cross standard plan.
It is important for the American people to know whether the members of Congress and members-elect who have called for the repeal of health insurance reform are going to stand by their opposition by opting out of the care available to them at the expense of hard-working taxpayers. We look forward to your response in the coming days about exactly how many of the members in the Republican conference will be declining their taxpayer-supported health benefits.
Sincerely,
Congressional DemocratsNormal Americans
Here’s the thing, tea partiers. Right now, less than three weeks after the elections, you have the wind at your back — what you want, you get. But the political winds are about to change — that’s what winds do. How you use your political capital now will determine the future of your “movement.” So far, it ain’t looking good.
You are vulnerable because if you stop delivering for your corporate masters or become an inconvenience to them, all that the Koch brothers, Sal Russo and the rest would have to do to obliterate you is to stop funding FreedomWorks, Tea Party Express and the other astroturf groups and redirect their millions to campaigns for establishment — meaning overtly pro-corporate — Republican causes and candidates.
Government health care is your issue. Now is the time. If you can expend your capital to bombard your new elected representatives with calls demanding they attend a seminar, you can certainly deploy those same tactics to force them to reject their government insurance plan. If you don’t, the fact that members of the Tea Party Caucus in Congress benefit from socialist health insurance will stand as confirmation that the tea party is a sham — that it is really about easily duped conservatives unknowingly working against their own personal best interests to prop up corporate profits; overly entitled, self-absorbed and selfish right-wing Boomers; overt and latent racism; and the other other dark motives ascribed to you by your critics.
I completely agree that if these new republicans really wish to demonstrate that they are principally against government-subsidized (read tax-payer subsidized) health-care, then they should remove themselves from the dole. Government employees have incredibly rosy retirement and benefit packages compared to the average private sector worker. According to USA Today article by Dennis Cauchon (March 8, 2010) Bureau of Labor Statistics data tells us that federal employees earn an average salary of $67,691 in 2008 for occupations that also exist in the private sector, while the average wage for the same jobs in the private sector was $60,046.
What’s even more interesting is that these figures don’t take into consideration retirement and health benefits that federal employees receive, which come to an average of $40,785 (per employee) in 2008. The corresponding private sector positions receive a mere $9,882 in benefits, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
Now I know that I’m on a left-leaning website. But can’t we at least agree that when we’ve reached the point where the burden of government, which weighs so heavily upon the backs of middle-class workers to this extent…as these figures demonstrate…that we need to drastically reduce the size of the government? Why, when we are losing our pensions, do government employees receive guaranteed benefits that cannot be touched? And there’s always more and more government employees… The private sector is being sucked dry, and even conservatives are guilty (under Bush). That’s why we need real classical-liberals in Washington, something I believe the Tea Party, (at least in principle), represents.
By the way, the health-care reform did nothing to lower rising health costs. In order to do that we need more doctors (meaning fighting the AMA and de facto guild socialism in the health-care industry) and less govt. regulation, which mainly serve to keep existing prescription drug giants and Blue Cross Blue Shield “immune” (haha) from competition.
Corey – The salaries of mid-level government employees are a statistically insignificant part of the federal budget, and a difference in salary of $7,645 for mid-level managers hardly makes the federal employees life more “rosy.”
It’s interesting that you would suggest that government pension of $40k is bad because private companies are so stingy with their pensions. Republicans constantly tell us how perfect priviate industry is — so why doesn’t it offer its employees decent pensions. You can’t live on less than $10k a year in most American cities.
But it is simply false that health care reform is driving up costs. The law has barely taken effect and the parts of that are in effect are not what’s driving up costs. The health insurance companies are driving up costs in order to wring every cent they can out of American taxpayers before the new laws go into effect in 2014.
For that matter, if private industry is perfect, why are we having a health insurance crisis in the first place. No one is forcing the health insurance corporations to rake in billions in profits every year while they leave 50 million Americans uninsured and cause the bankruptcies of million more.
They had at least since 1994 to get their own house in order — to solve the crisis. They didn’t.
Our system is not a “free market” economy as Republicans insist. We had a free market system in the late 19th century, and it was a disaster. The robber barons got rich beyond all measure while the poor lived in Third World Squalor. It was a liberal Republican, Teddy Roosevelt, who replaced that system with the regulatory capitalist system we operate under today — and it worked reasonably well until Republicans started defanging it in the 1980s.
Under regulatory capitalism, when industries work against the public good and against the interests of the United States, the government steps in and regulates them. The health insurance corporations have proved, over and over, that their only objective is profit. They don’t care about the quality of their products or if the products serve the needs of their markets, much less their customers — you know, the folks who pay the premiums. The executives of these companies do not care if their fellow citizens die in the streets.
In the consumer market, these companies have provided service so shoddy, so deliberately incompetent that it is literally a threat to human safety. In a just society, these corporations would have gotten what they deserve: Nationalization. If Obama and the Dems really were socialists, that’s what would have happened to them by now. The health insurance corps could resolve this crisis tomorrow, but they won’t, and that is, by definition, evil.
Tea party members must start putting their money where their collective mouths are. The elected officials like Michele Bachmann, Louis Gohmert, Steve King and Virginia Foxx must give up their socialized government health care. The rank and file must start endorsing their social security checks and returning them to the government uncashed.
Otherwise, they prove what I believe and most suspect: conservatism is nothing but a sham.