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Saturday, September 17, 2011

What does the U.S. look like if the Tea (Republican) Party wins?
Posted by Jill | 6:12 AM
Perhaps the most infuriating thing about the Obama Administration's political people thinking that they know best in the face of all evidence that their boss' presidency is crumbling around him is how vulnerable we all are to this Administration's blind hubris.

Ian Milhiser at Center for American Progress writes about what this country will look like under Tea Party doctrine, and even Americans who support the Tea Party now will be in for a very rude and unpleasant awakening when they see what it looks like:
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. While the House of Representatives pushes Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) plan to phase out Medicare, numerous members of Congress, a least one Supreme Court justice, and the governor of America’s second-largest state now proudly declare that most of the progress of the last century violates the Constitution.

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
    Indeed, as this paper explains, many state lawmakers even embrace a discredited constitutional doctrine that threatens the union itself.


What’s at stake

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.” In layman’s terms, the Tenth Amendment is simply a reminder that the Constitution contains an itemized list of federal powers—such as the power to regulate interstate commerce or establish post offices or make war on foreign nations—and anything not contained in that list is beyond Congress’s authority.


Social Security? Gone. Medicare? Gone. Medicaid? Gone. Education? Subject to the whims of communities, some of which will send a generation of children out in a world of technological advancement believing that a giant man in the sky created the world in six days and refusing all evidence to the contrary. E coli in your child's hamburger and salmonella in his lettuce and unregulated pesticide residue in the tomato slice?? All A-OK in Tea Party America. Hurricane destroy yourself? It's your own fault for not living in a stronger house. You're on your own. You don't get your paycheck this week? Tough luck. Neighbor leaving threatening letters in your mailbox because he doesn't like people of your religion or race or sexual orientation? Too bad, you have no federal protection, and if the local police hate you too, you are shit out of luck.

That's Tea Party America -- a mean-spirited, venal, hateful, place of raw social Darwinism; a highly ironic condition given the penchant of Teabaggers to call themselves "Chritians" -- so-called Christians who have obviously never read the Sermon on the Mount.

And yet here we are, with a Republican frontrunner who makes George W. Bush look like Mother Teresa by comparison, and an incumbent Democratic president and a campaign team who utterly refuse to look at how dispirited the people who voted for him are. And so it is highly likely that on January 20, 2013, we will be living in a nation that even those who profess to support the Tea Party agenda won't even recognize. And it will be too late.

So here we are, those of us still living in the reality-based community, with a choice of voting for an inept, out-of-touch president who has sold us out to the Republicans at every turn, or a very dangerous theocratic sociopath. Just how dangerous remains to be seen.

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6 Comments:
Blogger Bartender Cabbie said...
You are assuming that Good Hair will be the nominee of the Republican party. He will be exposed before long or he will have a "Howard Dean" moment and been seen for what he is.
9/17/11, 8:42 AM  
Blogger rjs said...
like my neighbor told me, this was a great country before roosevelt...

maybe he was talking about teddy...
9/17/11, 10:41 AM  
Anonymous The Wifely Person said...
I don't believe the overall American public is stupid enough to vote an creationist into office. Here's my take for what it's worth:

1) if the nomination's Perry, it's no sweat. Obama will win. people will RALLY to keep that kind of anti-science/religious mumbo jumbo outta the white house. There would definitely be a semi-viable third party candidate...which would split the vote and Obama wins.

2) Even Romney has his problems. he's seen as an appeaser. that, plus the Mormon factor is a tough combo. again, a third party know-nothing candidate appears, the vote splits down the middle, and obama wins.

3) Palin enters the race. Third party happens to try to find a sane candidate, vote splits, Obama wins

4) Huntsmen is vanilla ice cream, even though he's a Morman, too. If he can stick it out, and there are doubts he can last, he might pull in the centrist conservatives for the nomination. The TP will still launch a counter-candidate, the vote will split, and Obama wins.

Or, Obama becomes a lame duck and Hillary or Andy Cuomo or someone equally popular is drafted. Democrats win.

IMHO.
9/17/11, 12:30 PM  
Anonymous justme said...
Social Security? Gone. Medicare? Gone. Medicaid? Gone. Education? Subject to the whims of communities, some of which will send a generation of children out in a world of technological advancement believing that a giant man in the sky created the world in six days and refusing all evidence to the contrary. E coli in your child's hamburger and salmonella in his lettuce and unregulated pesticide residue in the tomato slice?? All A-OK in Tea Party America. Hurricane destroy yourself? It's your own fault for not living in a stronger house. You're on your own. You don't get your paycheck this week? Tough luck. Neighbor leaving threatening letters in your mailbox because he doesn't like people of your religion or race or sexual orientation? Too bad, you have no federal protection, and if the local police hate you too, you are shit out of luck.

Jill? I'm so sorry to have to keep bringing you back to REALITY but, this already IS what is happening NOW, under a BLACK, DEMOCRATIC president.

Earth to Jill. HELLO?
9/17/11, 6:10 PM  
Anonymous neonnautilus said...
Your list left out the end of clean air and water. They would do away with the EPA.
9/18/11, 10:54 AM  
Blogger Grung_e_Gene said...
None for All, and All for 1% ~ the Cry of the Teabagteers...
9/22/11, 4:43 PM  
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