Bring Back the Tea Party

By Philip Klein

Thursday, August 05, 2021

 

Rick Santelli’s 2009 rant against government bailouts on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange is widely seen as one of the triggers for the development of the Tea Party in the early months of the Obama administration. The movement gained steam as Democrats passed a massive economic-stimulus package and rammed through Obamacare. After propelling Republicans to take over Congress, it set up high-stakes standoffs over the size and scope of government and fidelity to the Constitution that came to define the Obama era.

 

The cynical take on the Tea Party movement was that all the talk about returning to constitutional principles and shrinking government was disingenuous and would disappear the moment a Republican became president. This had been the traditional pattern as Republicans went soft on controlling spending during the Reagan years only to retake Congress on a small government platform in 1994, and then as so-called compassionate conservatives abandoned fiscal restraint during the Bush era only for Tea Party Republicans to revolt under Obama. The cynics proved correct insofar as Republicans stopped claiming to care about debt and deficits when Donald Trump was in the White House. However, the chain ended there. To put a fine point on it, were the Biden era to have followed the previous pattern, his presidency would have triggered a return to Republican demands for fiscal responsibility and warnings about the unsustainable debt. But there is currently no sign of this happening.

 

Six months into Joe Biden’s presidency, the opposition to his sweeping agenda is practically nonexistent. This week, in direct violation of his oath of office, President Biden extended a moratorium on evictions despite acknowledging beforehand that doing so would be illegal. Meanwhile, his party is trying to push through a multi-trillion-dollar package that will radically transform the relationship between citizens and government from birth through retirement. This is a five-alarm fire for conservatism and Republicans should be fighting Biden with every tool at their disposal. Instead, Republicans have remained largely silent about his unconstitutional power grab and, far from resisting his spending spree, are greasing the wheels for it by agreeing to pass one of his top priorities — an unnecessary infrastructure bill that is effectively an appendage of the larger social-welfare package.

 

It should be noted that the lack of concern for debt and deficits cannot be chalked up to the U.S. being on more solid fiscal ground than it was a decade ago. On February 19, 2009 — the day of the Santelli rant — total U.S. debt was $10.8 trillion. As of this writing, it is $28.4 trillion. In 2011, when Paul Ryan released a budget that was dismissed as alarmist, he warned that if no action were taken, debt as a share of the economy would reach 87 percent by 2021. We’re now sitting in 2021, and the Biden budget estimates that the debt will reach 109.7 percent of GDP this year — smashing the previous World War II record.

 

The 2009 economic stimulus and Obamacare, which fueled the Tea Party backlash against government largesse, were estimated to cost about $800 billion and $900 billion, respectively, at the time of passage. (Though the cost of Obamacare was closer to $2 trillion over a decade when fully implemented). If Biden were to get his current agenda passed, it would make those numbers look like small potatoes — bringing to $6 trillion the amount of spending he would have signed within the first year of his presidency. And this comes on top of the $4 trillion that had been spent in reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic in the ten months before he was sworn in.

 

Republican weakness cannot be simply explained by their lack of power. During the first two years of the Obama administration, Democrats had massive majorities in both chambers and Republicans fought Obama tooth and nail. Biden, on the other hand, came into office with narrow majorities and Republicans are rolling over for him. So why are Republicans acquiescing? And why aren’t they facing much outside pressure for their feebleness?

 

One big factor is that Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party transformed it away from one that at least claimed to care about addressing the nation’s long-term fiscal challenges. Today, conservatives are much more fired up about various cultural-war issues than they are about the fight to limit government. In some cases, they simply deprioritize concerns about the debt. In other cases, they actively oppose the idea of making a cause of fighting for less government. This is either because they see restraint as a barrier to fighting battles such as that against Big Tech censorship, or because their economic populism leads them to support entitlements and social-welfare spending.

 

The Tea Party was far from perfect, and its poor strategic decisions (such as the ill-fated effort to defund Obama’s signature legislative accomplishment while controlling just one chamber of Congress) have been well documented. That said, the Tea Party served one important purpose.

 

Historically, the path of least resistance was always for Republicans to come to Washington and rubber stamp more spending. At the height of the Tea Party’s power, there was a period during which Republicans were more afraid of voting to increase spending than they were of voting to cut spending. That was an important development that effectively put the brakes on Obama’s legislative agenda after 2010.

 

Today, the U.S. is at a scary point in its history. The last time the nation racked up so much debt, it was in response to the short-term crisis of World War II. Yet once that crisis ended, so did the elevated spending. Furthermore, at the time, Medicare and Medicaid did not exist, and Social Security was in its infancy — with more than enough in tax collections to pay for the relatively small number of retirees, who were not living as long.

 

Yet now the U.S. is emerging from a pandemic that arrived when we already faced a looming crisis caused by our unsustainable entitlement programs. And instead of scaling back spending, Democrats — with Republican help — are further ramping it up. If there is any hope of avoiding dire fiscal consequences, it is of supreme importance that the Tea Party mount a comeback.