"Everything Is on the Table to Be Considered for Rollback"

The left is so eager to smear the tea parties as racist that they have spent little time actually observing it to find out what really motivates it. But commentators on the right have recently come up with some very good observations.

Rich Lowry describes the movement as a "preemptive tax revolt": "the country has a roiling tax revolt prior to any imposition of significant tax increases. The tea-party movement is an act of preemption, based on the simple calculation that higher spending eventually means higher taxes."

Below, Tony Blankley makes a much deeper observation: that the tea party movement is a reaction against a whole previous century of creeping statism, and that the tea party members are studying the Constitution and the original American system of government—and potentially getting prepared to sweep away large portions of the "established" welfare and regulatory state.

Or as I put it, they're ready to move from a policy of containment of big government, to a policy of rollback.

Blankley's assessment may be overly optimistic—but it is a goal worth working toward.

"Obama's Liberal Push Meets Pushback," Tony Blankley, RealClearPolitics, April 14

The Republican Party must break with its long-established cautious instincts and make a bold stand for first principles of freedom and constitutional limitations on government—from full repeal of Obamacare to rolling back multitrillion-dollar deficits….

There has been a strong national presumption of legitimacy for most of the statist programs, policies, and rulings introduced by Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lyndon Baines Johnson and the Supreme Court. To challenge them drew sneering ridicule, not just from the usual liberal suspects, but from most mainstream Republican voters.

Creeping statism simply had become normative…. As a result, Reagan, Gingrich and the conservatives who supported them could, by and large, only slow down the growth of government….

But the financial panic and economic collapse of 2008 and Washington's shocking new proposals, laws, deficits and debt have changed the consciousness of a broad majority of the nation….

All the following acts have suddenly awakened Americans to their Constitution: (1) The nationalization of car companies and banks; (2) the subordination of the car companies' legal bondholders to union bosses; (3) the creation of trillion-dollar slush funds (the stimulus package) used for, among other purposes, the corrupt purchase of congressional votes; (4) the mandating of individual health insurance purchase against the will of Americans; (5) the attempt to have Obamacare "deemed" to have been enacted, rather than actually publicly voted on by Congress.

Amazingly, spontaneously, Americans are educating themselves about the details of our Constitution….

It is in this context that I urge the Republican Party to abandon its—until now—justifiable instinct to be cautious and limited in its call for traditional American freedoms and constitutional limitations on government….

The unnoticed Fabian creep of statism these past 80 years—the slow boiling of the frogs of freedom—has suddenly been noticed by countless millions of us freedom-loving frogs. The frogs are jumping out of the pot and are ready to overturn the pots—and the pot handlers.

Everything is on the table to be considered for rollback.