Muscular Liberalism

“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.”-Ronald Reagan

I remember in the early, heady days of the Tea Party movement I had an opportunity to moderate some local Town Hall events in Henrico County, a suburb of Richmond, Virginia in the heart of Eric Cantor’s district. Held at the Innsbrook office park,  they were designed to be civil affairs with people of different opinions getting a chance to listen to different viewpoints. 

Virginia’s Tea Party Senate Candidate Jamie Radtke brought a whole contingent of Tea Party faithful and I was happily surprised at their civil demeanor and their willingness to listen to opinions they did not share. 

One conversation I had with a prominent businessman gave me a glimmer of false hope. As the endless talk of freedom from government regulation dominated the conversation I brought up gay rights. This businessman told me he didn’t care what gays did and thought they should be allowed to be married. It was, after all, a liberation movement; a movement about the rights of individuals.

I figured that if the Tea Party were to ever have control over government institutions they would wreak economic havoc and potholes and bridges would never get fixed; but at least they would fight for the private rights of all individuals. 

Boy was I wrong. 

Turns out the Tea Party movement, given its first chance to govern in states across the nation, has become the most anti individual rights political movement we’ve seen in our nation since the 60s. And what’s really frightening, is that they have become quite effective at tearing apart the Constitution and destroying the rights millions of American citizens. 

Governors and legislators in a variety of states have quickly make government a vehicle for creating multiple classes of Americans with limited rights, including the most important right we all have as Americans; the right to choose our representatives in Government by voting.

The first sign of this frightening agenda came in Michigan. In 2011, shortly after Tea Party backed Governor Rick Snyder took office, he and the legislature created a new law that allows the Governor to dissolve any city or town council, local school board or any other government entity and have it taken over by an ‘emergency manager’ or a corporation; essentially privatizing an entire elected government body. 

It didn’t take long after the law was passed for the first declaration of martial law in one Michigan town. This past April the town council of Benton Harbor was essentially dissolved. According to one news report dated April 16, “Elected officials in that city are now limited to calling a meeting, adjourning a meeting, and approving minutes of a meeting. Beyond that, they can do nothing.”

Former Richmond City Manager Robert Bobb, used his powers as the “Emergency Financial Manager” for Detroit to fire hundreds of Detroit school employees without so much as a vote by the Detroit School Board. Said Bobb, “I fully intend to use the authority that was granted." Bobb was referring to a new law that gives these emergency czars, or Little Dictators, the authority to modify -- or terminate -- collective bargaining agreements.

In February, Bobb converted 41 of the district's schools into charter schools, after ordering half of all the district's schools shut down. Class sizes in Detroit are now 60 students to every teacher in some schools. 

These efforts in Michigan are a drastic form of the same thing that’s happening in Wisconsin; the effort to do the bidding of large corporations that limit the rights of workers to bargain for better wages. Corporations are more profitable now than at any time in American history, and one of the reasons is they have been able to get more people to do the jobs of more than one person and do so at flattened or lower wages while corporate CEO salaries have skyrocketed.

This was just the beginning of the Tea Party movement ripping the Constitution to shreds in the United States of America. 

In Virginia, Kansas and other states, Governors and Legislators have used creative legislation to make it nearly impossible for a woman’s health clinic to provide services to low income pregnant women, especially those who want to have an abortion. 

These states have forced clinics to make physical changes to their structures that echo the same restrictions as large hospitals, making the changes that are utterly unaffordable. This has left the entire state of Kansas with just one clinic that can provide abortions. 

In Florida, Governor Rick Scott and the legislature had the audacity to make it illegal for a pediatrician to discuss gun safety in the home with parents of their patients. While the National Rifle Association, an organization that used to promote gun safety, gave Scott an “A” in endorsing him for Governor, a Florida judge gave him an “F” in Constitutional authority. U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke decided the Constitution was still relevant; rendering the law a gross violation of the First Amendment rights of physicians and their patients. 

THE RIGHT TO VOTE-Tea Party Access Only

“There has never been in my lifetime, since we got rid of the poll tax and all the Jim Crow burdens on voting, the determined effort to limit the franchise that we see today,”

That was former President Bill Clinton, who grew up in the segregated south, expressing his alarm at Florida and a host of other states that are trying to restrict the rights of voters to be able to get to the polls. In this case he was talking of convicted felons who had served their time; people who were helped to get back into the voting process by none other than former Governor Jeb Bush.

In a frightening and well documented piece of journalism by Rolling Stone Magazine, dozens of states across the country are making it more difficult for senior citizens, students, Hispanics, African Americans and low income Americans to vote. Backed by the Koch Brothers’ giant oil conglomerate, many of these states have enacted laws that require the kind of identification that is often unavailable to these voters who tend to vote overwhelmingly for Democratic Party candidates. 

In Rick Perry’s Texas you can vote with the gun license but not a student ID.In Florida and Ohio early voting has been dramatically curtailed, making it more difficult to get to the polls for full time workers. 

In Florida, according to Rolling Stone, “six states have introduced legislation to impose new restrictions on voter registration drives run by groups like Rock the Vote and the League of Women Voters. In May, the GOP-controlled legislature in Florida passed a law requiring anyone who signs up new voters to hand in registration forms to the state board of elections within 48 hours of collecting them, and to comply with a barrage of onerous, bureaucratic requirements. Those found to have submitted late forms would face a $1,000 fine, as well as possible felony prosecution.

As a result, the law threatens to turn civic-minded volunteers into inadvertent criminals.”

Voter ID laws in several states, including Governor Scott Walker’s Wisconsin make it harder to get the newly required government IDs in time for elections. Again from Rolling Stone: “… roughly half of all black and Hispanic residents in Wisconsin do not have a driver's license, and the state staffs barely half as many DMVs as Indiana – a quarter of which are open less than one day a month. To make matters worse, Gov. Scott Walker tried to shut down 16 more DMVs – many of them located in Democratic-leaning areas. In one case, Walker planned to close a DMV in Fort Atkinson, a liberal stronghold, while opening a new office 30 minutes away in the conservative district of Watertown.”

Dictatorships in Michigan.  Government intrusion into patient-doctor relationships in Florida. Abortion rights curtailment in Virginia and Kansas. Jim Crow reruns in dozens of states across the nation.

The notion that the Tea Party is a movement about freedom is more than just another political lie. As the Tea Party has taken its collective seats in state and local governments it has proven to be a movement to make American citizens who don’t agree with them on a host of issues, essentially a second class, with far fewer rights. 

In achieving their goals in all these states, they have replaced individual American rights with the rights of large corporations to pollute, rip off their customers, keep worker wages at historically low rates and enrich their Boards of Directors beyond their wildest dreams. 

That’s why the Tea Party is so well funded. The large corporations know that for them to have the freedom to do business without regard to the health, safety and rights of individual citizens, they must limit the freedom of those citizens to elect leaders who will work to protect them.  

Maybe that “Don’t Tread on Me” flag should symbolize the rest of us, who actually care about the rights of each individual American citizen.