Have You Heard? The Tea Party is Dead

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Matt Purple explains at The American Conservative that, after many throes of death, the Tea Party has finally expired. Building off of a post written by Matt Kibbe, formerly of Freedom Works, Purple declares the Tea Party dead with the recent passage of the two year budget. The budget killed the spending caps the Tea Party had fought so hard for. Purple writes:

Matt Kibbe is absolutely correct that the Tea Party is dead, and the mortician will note that its passing occurred around 5:30 a.m. last Friday morning, when Congress passed its two-year budget deal. That agreement vaporizes the Tea Party’s lone legislative accomplishment, the spending caps that were imposed in 2011; they were raised twice before, but never under a Republican president.

The GOP is thus back to where it was during the Bush administration, which it remembers as a period of policy success and which no one else does. And then out came the various Republican mediocrities to defend their new (same as the old) normal, after Senator Rand Paul had the audacity to stall the budget Friday morning while he railed against his colleagues’ hypocrisy.

America’s national debt now exceeds the entirety of her GDP, and trillion-dollar deficits are on their way back. It should say something that even Paul Krugman, the left-wing Rottweiler who battled deficit hawks during the Obama years, is calling on Congress to rein itself in.

During times of elite insulation and recklessness, sometimes a populist movement is just the medicine, and the Tea Party at least for a few years was one bracing dose of castor oil.

It’s worth remembering that the guy standing on the National Mall wearing a tri-cornered hat and waving a Gadsden flag is still in possession of far more sense than is your average Republican senator.

With the Tea Party dead at the federal level, it now behooves Americans looking for freedom to focus intently on the states they live in. Are you living in a pro-freedom, low debt, low tax state that leaves you and your family alone to pursue the American Dream in peace? Or are you living in a state that seeks to micromanage your affairs with nanny-state edicts, and to guide your consumption by taking your money and spending for you “for your own good?”

If you need help figuring that out, peruse for a moment my Liberty & Freedom map below. Click on your state and determine whether or not your representation is working for you in Washington, and your local statehouse.