by Matt Kibbe
At the same time, Joe was convincing many local activists to fill vacant county GOP leadership spots. “I just told them, ‘we can’t fix the Republican Party from the outside; we must get inside to make a difference.’”
Mulvaney was in the midst of his first term as a state senator, and had served just one term previously as a state representative, but he set out to take down South Carolina’s longest-serving U.S. representative. In his first month, Mulvaney raised $53,000, all of it from individual donors.19 While Mulvaney mobilized around Tea Party values and fiscal responsibility, Spratt used the national Democrats’ talking points, running against “Tea Party extremism.” Scott Huffmon, a political scientist at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, South Carolina, who moderated a debate between the two, observed “that both Mulvaney and Spratt see their chances for winning in the Tea Party—Mulvaney tapping into its conservative anger and Spratt tapping into moderates wary of its extremism.”20
Mulvaney relied heavily on mobilizing the Tea Party, and helped turn out an unusually high number of voters for a midterm election. Poll watchers reported the number of voters ran “a close second to the number in the 2008 presidential election.”21,22 Mulvaney defeated Spratt with 55 percent of the vote.23 (Spratt had won just two years earlier by a mammoth margin of 25 points.24) The hostile takeover had begun, and Mulvaney was just one example of the many Tea Party candidates who, because they actually believed what they were saying about smaller government, were sent to Washington as real agents of change.
Those responsible for breaching our constitutional contract kept hoping we would just go home. If they ignored us long enough, or attacked us viciously enough, maybe we’d go away. But there were basic freedoms, ingrained in every American, under attack. We were staying, finishing what the Founders started in the 1770s.
CHAPTER 6
SMALLER GOVERNMENT AND MORE INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM
WHILE MICK MULVANEY AND LOCAL TEA PARTY ACTIVISTS WERE BUSY beating the conventional wisdom and the Democrats in the 5th District, Tim Scott and local Tea Party activists were beating the Republican establishment and history in South Carolina’s 1st. When five-term Republican Henry Brown announced in 2009 that he wouldn’t seek reelection to the U.S. House of Representatives, a door opened for Scott, then a newly minted state legislator. In the nine-candidate Republican primary, Scott campaigned hard in defense of Tea Party values, and defeated established legacy opponents like Paul Thurmond, son of longtime South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, and Carroll Campbell III, son of a former South Carolina governor. Scott, an early signer of the Tea Party’s crowdsourced Contract from America, observed the wide appeal of the movement:
If you believe in entrepreneurship and capitalism, you believe in at least a third of what the Tea Party stands for. If you believe that you ought not spend money you simply do not have, you believe in another third. And if you believe that limiting the role of federal government in our lives is a way to return power back to the people, I think you might be a member of the Tea Party.1
The Tea Party’s Contract became an important wedge in an aggressively contested primary fight between Scott and Thurmond. In a final debate before the primary vote, “Thurmond did stumble at one point, when the candidates were asked if they had read and signed the ‘Contract from America,’ a tea party manifesto,” noted the Charleston Post and Courier. “Thurmond said he wasn’t familiar with the document. Scott quickly noted that he has signed it and incorporated it into his campaign material.”2 Tim Scott won the primary overwhelmingly, by 69 percent, just a few days later.
So Tim Scott, a one-term state legislator with the enthusiastic backing of local Tea Parties in the 1st Congressional District, handily beat the son of Strom Thurmond, who left the Democratic Party in 1948 to run for president as a pro-segregation Dixiecrat.
Why does any of this matter? Because Tim Scott is African-American. Because he is the first black Republican to win a seat in the U.S. Congress in South Carolina since Reconstruction. Because establishment hacks like Jimmy Carter want to play the race card, want to change the subject, want us to believe that “an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man.”3 But Scott doesn’t particularly see the world as black-and-white, and he’s not particularly interested in accepting the establishment’s categories or the establishment’s rules. “What I am eager to do is be an ambassador to all groups on my issues,” he tells a reporter with the Daily Beast. “Sure,” he will meet with “the Urban League or black business groups to talk about economic empowerment and the importance of fiscal responsibility, but I’m not going to be their black Republican.”4
Jimmy Carter, meet Tim Scott. He’s the new congressman from North Charleston, South Carolina. He thinks that “Americans need to know that the Tea Party is a color-blind movement that has principled differences with many of the leaders in Washington, both Democrats and Republicans. Their aim is to support the strongest candidates—regardless of color or background—who will fight to return our country to its Constitutional roots of limited government, fiscal responsibility, and free markets.”5
CONSTITUTIONAL CONSERVATIVES
IN KENTUCKY, ANOTHER U.S. SENATE RACE PITTED ESTABLISHMENT Republicans against the Tea Party. Rand Paul, son of Texas congressman Ron Paul, announced his candidacy in May 2009 and by the end of June had raised $102,000, mostly from small donors. By the end of the 2009, he’d raised almost $1.8 million, with more than half coming from small donors and less than $6,000 from committees.6
But Paul’s popularity among donors and his dominance in the polls wasn’t enough to win the support of establishment Republicans. In May 2010, Kentucky’s senior senator, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, endorsed the establishment favorite Trey Grayson in the race to fill retiring senator Jim Bunning’s seat. McConnell, who feared Paul wouldn’t play by the establishment’s rules, provided “behind-the-scenes assistance” to Grayson’s traditional establishment campaign, which featured McConnell in the “largest ad buy of the campaign to date.”7
But none of that mattered. Voters turned out in droves for the Republican primary and overwhelmingly supported Paul, who earned almost 59 percent of the vote.8 The Washington Post reported that the percentage of registered Republicans voting in the 2010 Kentucky primary was the highest since 1998, and was larger than the percentage of registered Democrats for the first time since the state began collecting data, in 1982.9
“I consider myself a constitutional conservative, which I take to mean a conservative who actually believes in smaller government and more individual freedom. The libertarian principles of limited government, self-reliance and respect for the Constitution are embedded within my constitutional conservatism,” Paul wrote in a USA Today editorial in August 2010. “I also believe that the common bond of liberty can unite Americans and build a winning political coalition to stand up against big government elites in both parties while reclaiming our freedom and prosperity.”10 Paul’s words in effect amounted to a Tea Party manifesto, representative of what any candidate or activist marching under the Gadsden flag might say.
And Rand Paul went on to win the general election handily.11
TARP! TARP! TARP!
IN MAY 2010, THREE-TERM INCUMBENT UTAH REPUBLICAN SENATOR Robert Bennett, an aggressive spending earmarker on the Appropriations Committee and longtime advocate of an “individual mandate” in health care, was ousted in the second round of voting at the state Republican convention. Tea Partiers had taken over the caucus process, trumping Bennett’s “support of big-name conservatives such as Karl Rove, Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney,” USA Today reported.12 Bennett was eliminated in the second round of voting, finishing third to two newcomers. Caucus delegates were chanting “TARP! TARP! TARP!” as the Republican incumbent went down to defeat, bluntly eulogizing his vote in favor of the unpopular bailout. In the final statewide runoff, the Republican establishment chose Tim Bridgewater to
replace Bennett, and even Bennett endorsed him.13 But voters had someone else in mind, giving the Republican nomination to first-time candidate Mike Lee, who went on to earn nearly 62 percent of the vote in the general election.14 Lee, the very first candidate to sign the Contract from America, was outspent by the establishment’s favorite, but the young constitutional lawyer won the ground game by running on the idea that the federal government should live within its means, and within the strict limits set out by the Constitution.
At a Tea Party rally less than a month before the state convention, candidate Mike Lee argued that the U.S. Constitution had “fostered the development of the greatest civilization the world has ever known.” He pulled his copy out of his pocket, holding it up as he had at every event he had spoken to across the state of Utah. “I will not apologize for this document or the country it has created—nor will I tolerate those who ignore it.” As the Deseret Morning News would later observe, “Lee’s very public embrace of the Constitution was . . . shrewd and prescient. As a candidate, he was tapping into the political zeitgeist of the time, a feeling that the nation has become unmoored from the bedrock principles outlined by the Constitution.”15
Receiving news of the Republican incumbent’s defeat, Senator John Cornyn, head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, had this to say: “Senator Bennett has long exemplified the strong values and deep work ethic of his state, and he has fought tirelessly for lower taxes and limited government on behalf of Utah’s best interests.”16
In Florida’s U.S. Senate primary, the NRSC endorsed RINO Governor Charlie Crist immediately after he announced his candidacy. The Republican Senate campaign committee had pledged to stay neutral. Cornyn justified picking winners and losers from the top down, despite the fact that Marco Rubio was already a declared candidate and the Republican Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, by arguing that Crist “is the best candidate in 2010 to ensure that we maintain checks and balances that Floridians deserve in the United States Senate.”17 Floridians disagreed, and as Rubio’s popularity grew, Crist embarrassed his establishment Republican backers by ditching the GOP primary and announcing he’d run for Senate as an independent. Rubio won decisively in a three-way race, with the enthusiastic support of Tea Partiers on the ground.
Why is it that Tea Partiers are always accused of “splitting the party,” when, in practice, the only ones to split it are establishment favorites like Arlen Specter, Charlie Crist, and Senator Lisa Murkowski, who successfully ran a write-in campaign outside the party ticket after losing the Republican primary to Tea Party favorite Joe Miller? Borrowing the Democrats’ “extremist” talking points, Murkowski accused the “radical” Republican nominee of wanting to “dump Social Security, no more Medicare, let’s get rid of Department of Education, elimination of all earmarks.”18 Despite breaking party ranks, Murkowski maintained her position as ranking member on the powerful Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
There seems to be a double standard, just as with the duplicitous application of First Amendment rights to Tea Partiers and to Occupiers. But maybe there’s an ironclad consistency to the standard being applied here as well? When is one meeting singled out of countless other meetings and arbitrarily determined by legislative counsel to be a “simulated hearing”? When are grassroots activists deemed to be “domestic terrorists”? When are Republican candidates not supported by their party’s elite?
The answer to all these questions: When the established order is threatened. When senior management feels threatened by a shareholder uprising. When new people start participating in the democratic process, along with their newly elected representation in Congress, bringing to Washington, D.C., new ideas and specific plans to balance the budget, repeal government-run health care, and restore the constitutional firewall that protects the freedoms of individuals from an encroaching government.
There’s an institutional hostility to change whenever the changing aims to take power and money back from the federal government. The trend seems remarkably predictable when you think about it like this.
KEYNESIAN MATH
IN SPITE OF THE ESTABLISHMENT’S ISSUE-WAFFLING, HAND-WRINGING, expectations management, and hesitancy to back Tea Party candidates, Republicans gained 6 seats in the Senate (7 if you count Scott Brown’s special election in Massachusetts) for a total of 47, crushing Democratic dreams of a supermajority. Republicans gained 63 seats in the House, for a total of 242, their largest majority since 1947. In 2009 and 2010, Republicans won 720 new seats in state legislatures, to hold a total of 54 percent of state seats, the most since 1928. After 2010, Republicans controlled both chambers in 25 states, an increase of 11 and the most since 1952.
The number of freshman winners who had signed the Contract from America: forty-five House members and eight senators.
Today, it is quite fashionable for establishment Republicans to fret publicly over how many seats the Tea Party “lost” in 2010. Republican senator Dick Lugar, who was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1976—nearly four decades ago—blamed Tea Party activists for failing to win a Republican majority in the Senate in 2010: “Republicans lost the seats before in Nevada and New Jersey and Colorado where there were people who were claiming they wanted somebody who was more of their Tea Party aspect, but they killed off the Republican majority.”19
Presumably, he meant to say Delaware, not New Jersey, but confusing two contiguous states is not the issue here. The question is, what majority? Before the Tea Party, Senate Republicans faced a seemingly insurmountable challenge just blocking a Democratic supermajority. “We’ve not only got to play defense,” said NRSC chief honcho Cornyn, “we’ve got to claw our way back in 2010. It’ll be a huge challenge.”20 Now a net pickup of seven seats was our bad, I suppose some bizarre form of Keynesian math in reverse.
Maybe that’s the only argument an establishmentarian like Lugar has left, facing his own Tea Party challenger in 2012. Channeling onetime Republicans Charlie Crist and Arlen Specter, Lugar tells CNN he believes, “If I was not the nominee it might be lost. A Republican majority in the Senate is very important, and Republicans who are running for reelection ought to be supported by people who want to see that majority. I think the majority of Tea Party people understand that too.”21
A SEAT AT THE TABLE
THIS INSURGENT GRASSROOTS MOVEMENT HAD OUTPERFORMED EXPECTATIONS from day one, accomplishing things that few within the establishment had imagined possible. First a protest movement was predicted to fade with the passage of Obamacare. Now an organic GOTV machine was expected to disassemble, like a typical political campaign, on November 3, 2010. This latest prediction was particularly shortsighted, given that many activists had first cut their grassroots teeth fighting legislative proposals like the spending stimulus and the health care takeover.
Maybe they just wanted us to go away? But that’s not what happened.
Fighting a bad idea was one thing. Coming up with better ideas and drafting specific legislation is on a whole new level. We had a seat at the table, but the cards were still stacked against change. The right policies were defined by the Contract from America, creating an incredibly cohesive set of policy priorities for the new freshman class. But the legislative path from where we stood on November 3, 2010, to where we need to be required a continued evolution and increased sophistication in Tea Partier tactics.
How do we repeal and replace Obamacare? How do we cut spending and reform entitlements, balance the budget, and get our fiscal house in order? How do we rein in the power of politicians, government employees, corporate rent-seekers, and an army of special interests that have enriched themselves at taxpayer expense?
While it is true that Republicans only controlled, in Speaker John Boehner’s words, “one half of one third of the government,”22 it is undeniable that the Tea Party started setting the agenda and shaping the conversation even before the Class of 2010 was sworn into office. The dominant conversation in Washington, D.C., quickly be
came one about how best to cut deficit spending and get the burden of big government off the backs of workers and job creators. The freshman class was demanding as much because the citizenry demanded it of them.
The debate was now how much to cut; not how much more to spend. The debate wasn’t about whether we should repeal Obamacare; it was now about the best way to replace it and restore individual control over your family’s health care decisions.
Typically, freshman legislators are little heard from, assigned to backwater committees and expected to follow their leadership, particularly in the House of Representatives. But the sheer size of the freshman class, and the now indisputable power of the grassroots movement behind them, forced a rewriting of the rules of the game. The largest freshman class in seventy years was given unprecedented representation on the most important committees that affect spending, taxes, regulation, and new entitlements like Obamacare. “Most of the 22 House Republican freshmen-to-be selected to sit on much coveted, A-list committees won their races with Tea Party backing,” the Hill reported. “The House Republican Steering Committee last week added the incoming members to the rosters of four powerful committees: Appropriations, Ways and Means, Energy and Commerce and Financial Services.”23
The House leadership also decided to include two freshmen at the leadership table, and the historic class elected Tim Scott as one who would meet weekly with the Elected Leadership Committee. “In just eight months,” Columbia’s State would later report, “Rep. Tim Scott has skyrocketed from state legislator to House Republican freshman class leader who stood up to his party bosses in high-profile debt talks and is heading his party’s attack on federal economic bureaucrats.”24