LEST WE FORGET: On This Day: The Boston Tea Party.
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ON THIS DAY IN 1773: The Boston Tea Party. Think about that as you drink your morning coffee.
STEPHEN KRUISER: Do the Democrats Have Their Own Tea Party Movement?
Yes, in the sense that a bunch of well-informed, grassroots Republicans and independents politely insisted that taxes and spending were both too high, and the new Democrat upstarts are and want none of that.
NAH. IT’S THE NTE PARTY “NEVER TAXED ENOUGH”: Is this the Democratic version of the Tea Party?
HEY, IT’S NOT LIKE THEY’RE A TEA PARTY GROUP OR SOMETHING: IRS Grants Tax-Exempt Status To Lesbian ‘Pussy Church Of Modern Witchcraft’ That Excudes Men, Transgender People.
STEPHEN KRUISER: Politico Examines Leftist Incivility and Finds…the Tea Party.
But of course.
REMEMBER WHEN PEOPLE WORRIED THAT THE TEA PARTY’S OPPOSITION TO OBAMA MIGHT PRODUCE A CLIMATE OF VIOLENCE? Decapitated Animal Carcass Placed on DHS Official’s Porch.
MCCAIN WAS NO FRIEND TO THE TEA PARTY: Judicial Watch Obtains IRS Documents Revealing McCain’s Subcommittee Staff Director Urged IRS to Engage in “Financially Ruinous” Targeting.
The explosive exchange was contained in notes taken by IRS employees at an April 30, 2013, meeting between Kerner, Lerner, and other high-ranking IRS officials. Just ten days following the meeting, former IRS director of exempt organizations Lois Lerner admitted that the IRS had a policy of improperly and deliberately delaying applications for tax-exempt status from conservative non-profit groups.
Lerner and other IRS officials met with select top staffers from the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee in a “marathon” meeting to discuss concerns raised by both Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) that the IRS was not reining in political advocacy groups in response to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. Senator McCain had been the chief sponsor of the McCain-Feingold Act and called the Citizens United decision, which overturned portions of the Act, one of the “worst decisions I have ever seen.”
In the full notes of an April 30 meeting, McCain’s high-ranking staffer Kerner recommends harassing non-profit groups until they are unable to continue operating. Kerner tells Lerner, Steve Miller, then chief of staff to IRS commissioner, Nikole Flax, and other IRS officials, “Maybe the solution is to audit so many that it is financially ruinous.” In response, Lerner responded that “it is her job to oversee it all.”
So it seems that, as suspected, the GOP establishment was on the same page as the Obama Administration here.
JOHN PODHORETZ: The Ryan Retirement in Seven Points. Including:
The nature of the Tea Party and post-Tea Party GOP caucus is so fundamentally anti-institutional that the prerogatives of leadership are nothing now in the GOP. If a Republican is elected speaker after the 2018 midterms, it will be interesting to see how long he or she lasts.
2. A Republican likely won’t be elected speaker after the 2018 midterms. Ryan’s decision suggests he and others have seen enough internal data to know their capacity to hold their 23-seat majority is slipping away. Already this morning, another Republican, Dennis Ross of Florida, announced his decision to retire. That makes 42 GOP retirements among the 237 Republican members of the 115th Congress—a number vastly higher than any recent Congress’s. Most of these retirements are in districts a Republican will win anyway. But while all signs have pointed to significant Democratic gains in the 2018 midterms, the Ryan retirement isn’t just a sign. It’s like a fireball from the sky. And it will occasion more retreats and embolden more Democrats.
At the Federalist, Ben Domenech explores “How Paul Ryan Went From Young Gun To Gone:”
It’s easy to forget how Paul Ryan was vilified by the media. For a politician with so few marks against him – the worst thing one could say was that he suggested staffers read Ayn Rand – Ryan was treated incredibly unfairly in 2012 as a vice presidential candidate, with no moment greater than when his policies were described inaccurately by Martha Raddatz in a terribly run debate with no question was even asked about his signature Medicare reform policies.
Ryan’s response to this trend was to grow frustrated, and irritated, but also to carefully and politely explain his policy perspective in more detail, to try and convince his interviewers, to build momentum for the type of Republican Party he thought the nation needed. Donald Trump’s response to this was to punch the media in the face, repeatedly. The voters let us know which response they prefer.
When one of the most milquetoast Republican members of Congress is subjected to this sort of treatment…
…is it any wonder why GOP voters prefer someone who pushes back hard?
RICK MORAN: The Tea Party is Dead. Long Live the Tea Party.
Read the whole thing.
TAXPROF: The IRS Scandal, Day 1722: The IRS Apologizes For Targeting Tea Party Group. Congrats to Prof. (now Dean) Caron for keeping after this, and shame on his fellow tax professors who accused him of peddling fake news by following this scandal closely on his blog.
Lois Lerner and Holly Paz are basically arguing that if people find out what Lois Lerner and Holly Paz did to them, people will want to kill them. Even assuming that’s true, it’s not a very compelling argument for secrecy.
TAXPROF: The IRS Scandal, Day 1632: Department Of Justice Settles Tea Party Targeting Cases For Millions And An Apology. I remember when other tax professors were shamefully criticizing Paul Caron for paying attention to what they called a fake scandal.
THEY SHOULD BE GETTING SOME SCALPS, TOO, BUT NO SUCH LUCK SO FAR: Tea Party groups to get “substantial” payout over IRS scandal, lawyer says.
HARDBALL: McConnell Floats Names of Failed Tea Party Candidates in Response to Bannon Threat. “What do they all have in common? They’re in private life, and a Democrat is in the Senate.”
QUESTION ASKED: Could America’s Socialists Become the Tea Party of the Left?
Inspired by the Vermont senator’s success at forcing left-wing ideas into the nomination battle, the nation’s largest socialist organization, the Democratic Socialists of America, has watched its dues-paying membership, which historically has hovered around 5,000, swell to 25,000. The DSA is still nowhere near the levels of the Socialist Party in 1920, when nearly a million people voted for Eugene Debs, but its members, too young to remember the Cold War, much less the “red scares” of the 1910s and 1950s, aren’t content to sit quietly on the political sidelines, perennially irrelevant in a system built to sustain two major parties.
They want to win. And to do it, socialists are dispensing with their penchant for symbolic protest votes and their principled disdain for an electoral process they believe can’t deliver meaningful change. Sanders’ ability to run well in primaries across the country, say new DSA members, proved that democratic socialism isn’t destined for the kind of third-party tokenism that bedevils the Green Party and World Workers Party, among others. And it has opened their minds to an electoral strategy that was until very recently considered heretical.
“The only viable electoral strategy is to work with the Democratic Party,” says Michael Kazin, the editor of leftist magazine Dissent. “There is no viable third party.”
Either the Democrats are electorally screwed or the country is politically screwed — or eventually, both.
WEIRD HOW THIS NEVER HAPPENED AT TEA PARTY RALLIES: In Charlottesville and elsewhere, U.S. journalists are being assaulted while covering the news. Note the Stockholm Syndrome though.
“LAY IT ON THE LINE”: Judge in tea party case orders IRS to disclose employee names, reasons.
Judge Reggie B. Walton also said the IRS must explain the reasons for the delays for 38 groups that are part of a lawsuit in the District of Columbia, where they are still looking for a full accounting of their treatment.
Judge Walton approved another round of limited discovery in the case and laid out six questions that the IRS must answer, including the employees’ names, why the groups were targeted and how the IRS has tried to prevent a repeat.
At a hearing earlier this week, Judge Walton said it was time to get everything on the table.
“Lay it on the line. Put it out there,” he told attorneys for the IRS, who are continuing to fight some tea party groups’ demands for full disclosure.
Meanwhile, tainted IRS chief John Koskinen is still on the job.
TIME TO PRIMARY SOME FOLKS: Republicans repeal and replace the Tea Party.
Even when Republicans control the White House and both houses of Congress, liberalism remains the default ideology of the federal government.
A Republican Senate could not muster even 50 votes for the full repeal of Obamacare’s taxes and spending. Six Republican senators who had voted for repeal in 2015, when the party was merely pretending it was possible, flipped on Wednesday rather than deliver.
Five of the six represent states President Trump won in November. The sixth hails from a state Trump lost by less than 3 points.
An argument can be made that repealing these parts of Obamacare while leaving its regulatory structure largely in place is a bad idea. But we are discussing a law that Republicans spent seven years campaigning against. Every GOP senator except one either voted for repeal in the past or campaigned on it in a recent election cycle. Their leader was said to have a “secret plan” to repeal Obamacare “root and branch.”
There was ample time for a contingency plan or even a better approach to replacing the healthcare law.
No amount of time ever seems to be enough. Not 1 inch of ground gained by liberalism is ever ceded without a fight. Republicans can campaign against those gains. They can now tweet about them. But when it comes to action, Republicans can seldom do more than nibble around the edges. The slightest retrenchment of a healthcare law that did not even exist a decade ago is portrayed as a mass casualty event.
Repeal and replace some members.
“WELCOME TO THE TEA PARTY, DEBRA MESSING!” Republican Wants To Raise Taxes, Democrat Freaks Out.
Psst, attention Steve Bannon: Repeal the Hollywood tax cuts, if you want to really stick it to the lefties in Hollywood.
Jury Awards Man $833,000 In Tea Party Libel Suit.
A jury in Georgia awarded James Lyle a total of $833,000 Monday in his libel lawsuit against Lee Martin and the Tea Party Patriots.
The long-standing case came to end in Cherokee County, Ga., when the jury found the Tea Party Patriots and Martin defamed Lyle, who is the partner of Amy Kremer, the former chairman of Tea Party Express.
The case began in 2011 after allegations surfaced that Martin made defamatory Facebook posts about Lyle under the pseudonym “Dale Butterworth,” stating essentially that Lyle molested the child of Amy Kremer, his girlfriend.
That molestation, it turns out, never took place. But what did take place before the accusations aired publicly on Facebook was intense interpersonal drama in the Tea Party Patriots, an organization that was initially founded by four individuals, among them Martin’s wife Jenny Beth Martin and Kremer.
In 2009, Kremer left the Tea Party Patriots and decided to align herself with a rival group called the Tea Party Express. Following the separation of Kremer from the Tea Party Patriots, Martin aka “Dale Butterworth” made a post alleging Lyle molested Kremer’s daughter.
Sad, what became of so much of the Tea Party.
FRANK SANTARPIA: The Progressive Tea Party that Never Was.
A Progressive mirroring of the Tea Party Movement is the thing I feared most after the election of Donald Trump, and for obvious reasons. We saw in 2010 what a difference-maker an “enthusiasm gap” could be, and watched with delight as Progressive attempts to blunt the Tea Party tsunami with rallies of their own flopped miserably. We saw that such a level of engagement could change the face of Congress. And finally, candidate Hillary Clinton saw firsthand that such a gap could not be overcome despite her “inevitability.”
Progressives could have started such a movement — there is no disputing they have the numbers. But they didn’t, and here’s why: what passes for the Progressive Movement in the United States today lacks any real message, which is one of the principle reasons their candidate was on the short end of an enthusiasm gap in the first place. We protested the abuse of the Constitution and espoused the rule of law — not the election of Barack Obama. That then, is the chief difference. We objected to the man’s actions; they object to the man.
Well, that’s the inevitable result of losing an election for a movement which believes in a nation of men, not laws.