Takeover (28 page)

As a practical matter the Pledge to America was mostly about Republicans promising not to do things they had relished doing in the previous decade.

In many respects the Republican Party is like a business that has an exceptionally good product that is not selling because the sales people are not trusted.

All too often the GOP is represented by guys who come across as scam artists with loud suits and bad toupees, who need a breath mint and whose sales pitch is not believed because they are obviously more interested in their commission than in serving the customer.

When the face of the GOP is not the scam artists of the Big Government Republican establishment the party tends to do well.

The establishment GOP could make all the pledges it wanted, but if it did not push hard in the new Congress to return America to limited constitutional government, establishment Republicans could expect most Republican incumbents to be seriously challenged by Tea Party movement candidates.

The 2010 election, as everyone now knows, proved to be a historic “wave election,” and Republicans had their best election in six or seven decades.

Several things happened to make the Tea Party wave possible.

One was the Tea Party movement: a citizen uprising that provided Republican candidates across the country with hundreds of thousands of grass roots volunteers, small donors, and advocates.

We have the radical policies of the first two years of the Obama presidency to thank for creating the middle-class rebellion that became the Tea Party movement. “We the people” were rising up, but it would never have happened without Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and their radical Left agenda.

Ever since I’ve been in national politics, people have periodically asked me, “Richard, how can we stop America’s slide toward socialism?” I reply that our slide toward socialism could stop only when things get real bad, real fast—just like the old frog-in-boiling-water story.

Put a frog in a pot of boiling water and he will immediately jump out. Put him in a pot and then slowly turn up the heat and the frog will stay there until he is cooked. When Big Government progressive Republicans and Democrats were in charge, we were being slowly cooked, but with the radical liberal Obama in charge, things got really bad really fast and the frogs started jumping out of the pot to create the Tea Party movement.

Equally important was that the face of the opposition to the Democrats was not the usual Big Government, Karl Rove–type Republicans. In 2010, when voters saw the opposition to Obama and the Democrats, they saw Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Mike Lee, the Tea Party volunteers, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Mark Levin. Clearly they liked that better than the Republican establishment.

And here were the results:

• The Republican Party gained sixty-three seats in the US House of Representatives, recapturing the majority, and making it the largest seat change since 1948 and the largest for any midterm election since the 1938 midterm elections.

• The Republicans gained six seats in the US Senate, expanding its minority.

• The GOP gained 680 seats in state legislative races, to break the previous majority record of 628 set by Democrats in the post-Watergate elections of 1974.

• This meant Republicans controlled twenty-five state legislatures, compared to the fifteen still controlled by Democrats going into the crucial post census reapportionment.

• And finally, after the election, Republicans took control of twenty-nine of the fifty state governorships.

There were, along with this remarkable victory, some notable failures. For example, Nevada Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle, who emerged from a crowded field to take on the Senate’s Democratic majority leader, Harry Reid, and Delaware’s Tea Party–backed Republican Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell, who knocked off liberal establishment Republican congressman Mike Castle to claim the nomination. Both O’Donnell and Angle lost in spectacular fashion.

In postelection armchair quarterbacking, the defeats of Angle and O’Donnell in two potentially winnable elections were taken by the Republican establishment as evidence that the Tea Party was somehow a drag on the GOP.

This rewriting of history conveniently overlooks the fact that the Republican establishment immediately abandoned Angle and O’Donnell as soon as they won their primaries. If the Republican establishment considered them to be “not ready for prime time,” they did nothing to help them get ready, and plenty to damage their campaigns by criticizing them and filling the media with GOP insider predictions of inevitable losses now that their favored candidates were rejected by the voters.

In reality, there was no evidence to suggest that a candidate, such as liberal Delaware Republican Mike Castle, who was defeated in the primary, was going to automatically prevail in the general election. The claim that the Tea Party cost the GOP control of the Senate was solely based on the idea—thoroughly discredited in 2006 and 2008—that conservatives and right-of-center voters had “no place to go” and would always vote Republican.

What’s more, it ignored the tough Senate races that were won, such as Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, in all likelihood only because of the new energy and new voters brought to the campaign by the Tea Party.

The newly elected Tea Party–backed public officials hadn’t even been sworn in yet when we began to hear from the likes of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and lobbyist Trent Lott, that Republicans would have done much better without the Tea Party. The blame for the GOP’s failure to capture the Senate lay, in their view, with Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, the Tea Party Express, and their grassroots, limited-government constitutional conservative voters.

Because political parties always do better without actual supporters, right?

The RINOs, reaction to the 2010 election results was a reaction that can only be described as deluded, or insane or (dare we say it?) DeMinted. It was also further evidence that, while the Republican Party is alive and well at the grass roots; its Big Government establishment wing is flailing in its death throes.

Sen. Lindsey Graham’s grousing showed that the Big Government Republicans no longer contribute to the party’s success either intellectually or in putting boots on the ground. They contributed only money and kvetching, plus an occasional last-minute endorsement of a Democrat running against a Tea Party–backed Republican.

The 2010 election made it clear: the era of Big Government Republicanism was ending.

I wrote in an op-ed in the
Washington Times
that “Big Government Republicans [should] take their place in the dustbin of history beside the slavery-accommodationist wing of the Whig Party, it is time for Tea Partiers to take the next logical step in the development of their movement.”

Limited-government constitutional conservatives need to begin the hard work that will ensure that future Republican nominees, at all levels from constable to president, are supporters of Tea Party principles. It is time to flood GOP meetings, to seek party offices ranging from precinct committee member to national convention delegate, and to gently (or not) push aside the party’s moribund, incompetent leadership.

How incompetent? Polls show that conservatives outnumber liberals by more than two to one nationally, and that conservatives outnumber liberals in forty-nine of fifty states, yet the Left dominates our country’s politics, media, academia, and, increasingly, big business.

Such is possible only because members of the Republican establishment are more concerned with the needs of Washington, DC, lobbyists and Wall Street than the needs of Main Street. They worry more about their popularity down at the country club than about the concerns of working-class and small-business-class Americans.

And they know so little about how politics really works that, offered the opportunity to tap into the energy and activism of tens of millions of Tea Partiers, they greet these new recruits with derision and disdain.

I am regularly asked how conservatives and the Tea Party movement hope to pressure Republican leaders or influence the Republican Party.

Wrong question!

With regard to the GOP, the proper goal of the Tea Party movement should not be to pressure Republican leaders, but to become the Republican leaders. The goal should not be to influence the Republican Party, but to become the Republican Party.

It is hard for conservatives to understand that establishment Republicans are the enemy. They are not people who can simply be talked out of their commitment to Big Government; they must be defeated because they are blocking the path to saving America.

The Democrats under President Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi drove millions of voters right back into the arms of the Republicans. But if Republicans return to their bad habits—if they start working for K Street lobbyists instead of Main Street—they will, in my estimation, pay a terrible price.

People will say, “Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, and the Republican Party is dead.”

Voters had given Republicans one more chance to get it right. They were on probation.

Senator-elect Marco Rubio of Florida, one of the great Tea Party successes of the 2010 election, and because of his embrace of amnesty for illegal aliens, one of its greatest subsequent disappointments, said much the same thing in his victory speech.

“We make a great mistake if we believe that tonight, these results are somehow an embrace of the Republican Party,” Senator-elect Rubio said after handily defeating his two opponents. “What they are is a second chance—a second chance for Republicans to be what they said they were going to be, not so long ago.”
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S
ince the formation of the Reagan coalition, and the wise decision of Reagan’s team to welcome social conservatives into the Republican Party, the conservative movement consisted of three legs: (1) fiscal conservatives, (2) national defense conservatives, and (3) social or traditional-values conservatives.

In 2010 the Tea Party movement became the fourth leg of the conservatives’ new big table. It not only brought millions of new people to the political process; it also brought more energy, enthusiasm, and excitement to politics than we’ve seen in the last one hundred years.

However, it was an open question after the election whether Republican leaders would have the wisdom to welcome the Tea Party movement into the GOP in the way that Ronald Reagan and his team showed in welcoming social conservatives into their coalition and the Republican Party.

It didn’t take long to figure out that the short answer was no. The Republican leaders of today don’t have the wisdom of Reagan and his team, and it appeared to me that today’s Republican leaders would rather be in charge of a permanent minority than share power
in a winning coalition.

Senator Jim DeMint spelled out the challenge for the newly elected Tea Party–backed members of Congress in an op-ed in the
Wall Street Journal
welcoming freshmen senators to Washington:
“You must now overcome determined party insiders if this nation is going to be spared from fiscal disaster.”

Or as I put it in an interview with the
New York Times
as the 2010 campaign drew to a close, “We’re all on the same page until the polls close Nov. 2.” After that, “a massive, almost historic battle for the heart and soul of the Republican Party begins.”

Jim DeMint understood how the Capitol Hill establishment worked better than just about anybody.

He was warning Tea Party leaders, and the millions of grassroots, limited-government constitutional conservatives who voted for Tea Party–backed candidates, that the minute the polls closed on Election Day 2010, all promises in the establishment Republicans’ Pledge to America were null and void, and that a promise from Republican insiders not to go back to the old ways of earmarks, pork, and deficits was only as good as the Tea Party’s willingness to hold the GOP’s feet to the fire.

One of the first indications of just how hard this was going to be was to be found in the deliberations of the House Republican Steering Committee and its decisions about who would chair committees in the new Congress.

Two of the most important committees that could make a real difference if chaired by a limited-government constitutional conservative were the House Appropriations Committee and the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.

The choices Republicans offered to head the House Committee on Energy and Commerce were Texas congressman Joe Barton and Michigan congressman Fred Upton.

Electing Barton would require waiving the term-limit rule because he had previously chaired the committee and then served as ranking member. Barton’s close ties to the oil industry made critics
of corporate welfare nervous, but he had an otherwise conservative voting record. The alternative, Fred Upton, was rated as the tenth most liberal Republican in the House, based on lifetime American Conservative Union ratings.
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Upton had also drawn conservative ire by serving as the Republican sponsor of the “light bulb law of 2007,” a measure that effectively outlaws the traditional incandescent bulb, and earlier he had supported oil- and gas-drilling bans in the Gulf of Mexico and the Great Lakes.
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Upton “has never fought for anything on our side in his life,” one conservative activist told the
Washington Examiner’
s Tim Carney. “Since he doesn’t believe what we believe, how is he going to get out the message?” “Anybody but Upton!” became the conservative battle cry.

While the conservative grass roots focused on Upton’s ideology, those of us who have been around Washington for a while recognized that, regrettably, a lawmaker’s voting record isn’t how party loyalty is measured on the Hill.

Leadership staffers and K Street lobbyists and others with an inside track on the Republican Steering Committee’s deliberations recognized that Upton had raised a lot of money for other Republican candidates through his TRUST PAC by hosting fund-raisers, and by transferring funds from his campaign.
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