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The first interview that Rand Paul gave, after his acceptance speech for US Senator, he said that he will be pushing for the creation of a Tea Party Caucus. This is actually a bad idea and I sincerely hope that Dr. Paul does not put too much effort into making it happen. The potential benefits are far outweighed by the drawbacks.
First of all consider that the Tea Party and the candidates that they supported are not ideologically coherent. They don’t represent similar constituencies or interest groups. The only thing that they have in common is that they all want to decrease the size of government. Since this should be a common goal with all Republicans (and Democrats) they shouldn’t need to create a caucus specifically for that goal.
More importantly it runs counter to the strategy of the Tea Party as an outsider to normal political institutions. By creating a caucus within the Republican Party Dr. Paul will be encouraging a trend of making the Tea Party an institutional part of the Republican organization. This is a trend that should be resisted by Tea Party organizers. Part of the value of Tea Party activism is that it is a movement and not a political party.
One of the reasons that it is important to keep a distance between the Republican Party and the Tea Partiers is that it becomes harder to keep elected officials accountable if you are tied by party loyalty. The great challenge of the Tea Party movement will now be to hold the newly elected official’s feet to the fire. They need to ensure that they fight for the things that they said they will fight for.
This is far easier if at any point the Tea Party organizers can threaten to withdraw their support. This threat is a lot more difficult to carry out if their support is institutionalized inside a caucus. There is no one leader of the movement, so who decides who should be kicked out of this caucus? What criteria will members are judged by?
It is a much simpler idea to avoid any Tea Party Caucus and allow Tea Party support to flow in the sort of spontaneous way that is already happening. This keeps the movement in the hands of the people.
I am sure Dr. Paul means well for the movement, but a Tea Party Caucus would not benefit the movement.
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2 comments:
Yes, the problem with the Tea Party is they need to evolve as a movement. They are relatively new and need to avoid setting themselves up as a splinter, either within or outside the Republican party. There's a lot of work that has to be don't and rhetoric just doesn't cut it.
He doesn't mean a tea party caucus in that sense. He said people willing to work on the reform issues, whether House or Senate, Dem or GOP or independent. He wants term limits, reform so those getting big govt contracts contractually agree to not lobby, etc. He wants people willing to work on these issues, and cutting spending, regardless of whatever other relationships they might have.
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