What If the Tea Party Wins?

The Center for American Progress has a new white paper (you can read it here) that looks at the consequences of the Tea Party prevailing in its effort to rewrite the United States Constitution and/or read it so narrowly that many much needed federal programs would be labeled "unconstitutional" and cease to exist. While the extremist in the Tea Party largely identify themselves as conservative Christian, their underlying agenda is driven by greed and a desire to throw everyone but themselves under the bus. That they view themselves as Christian is beyond farcical. Some will say the white paper is alarmist and falsely crying wolf, but see what the Christianist/Tea Party crowd is doing in Virginia, I would argue that it is not. Here are highlights from an Center for American Progress overview of the white paper:

In the Tea Party’s America, families must mortgage their home to pay for their mother’s end-of-life care. Higher education is a luxury reserved almost exclusively to the very rich. Rotten meat ships to supermarkets nationwide without a national agency to inspect it. Fathers compete with their adolescent children for sub-minimum wage jobs. And our national leaders are utterly powerless to do a thing.

At least, that’s what would happen if the Tea Party succeeds in its effort to reimagine the Constitution as an antigovernment manifesto.

It is difficult to count how many essential laws would simply cease to exist if the Tea Party won its battle to reshape our founding document, but a short list includes:
■Social Security and Medicare
■Medicaid, children's health insurance, and other health care programs
■All federal education programs
■All federal antipoverty programs
■Federal disaster relief
■Federal food safety inspections and other food safety programs
■Child labor laws, the minimum wage, overtime, and other labor protections
■Federal civil rights laws

The Tea Party imagines a constitution focused entirely upon the Tenth Amendment, which provides that “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people”—which is why their narrow vision of the nation’s power is often referred to as “tentherism.”

The Constitution gives Congress the power “to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States,” thus empowering the federal government to levy taxes and leverage these revenues for programs such as Social Security and Medicare. A disturbingly large number of elected officials, however, insist that these words don’t actually mean what they say.

In a speech to the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council, Texas Gov. Rick Perry listed a broad swath of programs that “contradict the principles of limited, constitutional government that our founders established to protect us.” Gov. Perry’s list includes Medicare and “a bankrupt social security system" . . .

[T]enther proposals to simply let the states take over Social Security and Medicare are nothing more than a backdoor way to eliminate these programs altogether. If the Tea Party gets its way, and our nation’s social safety net for seniors is declared unconstitutional, millions of seniors will lose their only income and their only means to pay for health care.

Education is also on the Tea Party’s chopping block. . . . The truth, however, is that the federal government has never told states how to educate their children—and it could not do so if it tried. . . . . So, the state of Texas is perfectly free to turn down federal grants if they do not like the conditions attached to them.

Sen. [Mike] Lee [(R-UT)] would go even further in cutting off assistance for low-income Americans. In an interview with a Utah radio host, Lee claimed that the framers intended all antipoverty programs to be dealt with exclusively at the state level. This would not only eliminate programs like income assistance and food stamps, it could threaten unemployment insurance, federal job training, and other programs intended to provide a bridge out of poverty.

You get the drift. Greed, false piety, a total lack of compassion, and a hatred of those deemed "other" are the hallmarks of the Tea Party.