Today, December 16, 237 years ago (1773), the event revered since then, the Boston Tea Party, took place, and galvanized the American colonists into the eventual movement for independence.
But one must remember that it still took two and a half years before the “Founding Fathers” agreed to move toward independence, as the Boston Tea Party crowd were considered radicals who were reckless and uncontrollable and irrational by many.
It is ironic, therefore, that many intelligent, thoughtful people consider today’s so called Tea Party Movement to be similarly radical, reckless, uncontrollable and irrational, and for good reasons!
Tea Party spokesmen in the differing movements that call themselves that title have called for radical actions, while claiming they revere the Constitution. But advocacy of measures such as the following belie what they claim to be their beliefs and goals.
These extremist statements and views include the following:
1. Modifying the 14th Amendment guarantee of citizenship to all born in the United States or its territories.
2. Repealing of the 16th Amendment which provides for a progressive federal income tax.
3. Repealing of the 17th Amendment, which provides for direct election of the United States Senate by popular vote, and returning the election to the state legislatures.
4.Repealing of legislation long established by federal law as an entitlement, including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Unemployment Compensation.
5. Elimination of the Departments of Education and Energy.
6. Wiping out of the legislation passed under the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
7. Elimination of the Federal Reserve System set up under the New Freedom of Woodrow Wilson.
8. Ending of the numerous reforms passed under the Great Society of Lyndon B. Johnson.
9. Termination of the agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, Consumer Product Safety Commission, and Occupational Safety and Health Administration signed into law by President Richard Nixon.
10. Promotion of “Nativism” by reviving fear of immigrants, and trying to ban immigration from “undesirable” parts of the world.
11. Promoting States Rights and Secession 150 years after Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War was supposed to have settled that issue for all time.
12. Advocating Christianity as a national religion, and a church and state alliance, while the Founding Fathers specifically avoided that idea, instead promoting separation of church and state.
The Tea Party Movement is not a reform group designed to improve this nation, but instead to take it back to the reactionary realities of the past, which were overcome by a growth in power and influence by the national government, including the Presidency, the Congress, and the Supreme Court, to make the country truly a nation “of, by, and for the people”.
The Tea Party Movement does not offer “change”, but rather negativism and a return to the Gilded Age and the 19th century, before this nation became the great country that it is, a beacon of freedom, progress, and opportunity for the world!