Category: Society

The TEA Party is pretty wary of the federal government, its a well known fact that they think the Federal Government has become corrosive towards individual liberty.  You could call the TEA Party a coalition of conservatives and libertarians.  You could call them paranoid.  You could call them funny.  You could call them idealistic.  You could call them wacky.  All of these tittles do have some element of truth to them.  It’s not like a guy walking around in a tri-corner hat with teabags hanging from it  is necessarily hard to make fun of.  But whatever else the TEA party is/was, it was and remains a legitimate political movement.  Our laws are created to protect any group of people that are passionate about any issue, and there are groups from both sides of the isle that are exempt from taxes because they are legitimate political groups.  Speech, it would seem is the one thing the Government isn’t trying to tax these days.

Only, that doesn’t seem to be the case.  Apparently the IRS has been harassing groups with the words TEA party or Patriots in the title.  What it all boils down to is after the Citizen United ruling in 2010, the number of groups seeking 501(c)(4) status increased in order of magnitude.  Many of those groups were conservative, like the TEA party.  What appears to have happened is that following this sudden outgrowth of the TEA party, and the Citizens United ruling, some low level bureaucrats in the IRS specifically targeted the conservative groups.  They would target for auditing, demand donor information (which is illegal), name of who sat on the board (inappropriate), and in certain cases apparently asked question about the children of the leaders of these groups (HIGHLY inappropriate).  Keep in mind all of this is in the space of 2010-2012.  The run up to the 2012 election saw a lot of TEA party groups complaining about harassment, which most everyone dismissed as right wing wackos who were paranoid about the government.  Turns out they were right.

Let’s step back for a second and look at that.  The IRS was using it’s almost God-like powers of paper to cause these people no end of grief.  If you haven’t been harassed by a government agency you have no idea what a nightmare it is.  Think bumbling psycho stalker that happens to have all the keys.  The term “harassment” doesn’t do it justice.  But there’s something else that should send a cold chill of fear down your spine.  a branch of the Federal Government used its power to assist a political ideology, or  more accurately to punish an opposing political ideology that could have potentially, affected the election.  That should stop everyone cold.  That should cause congress, and the American people in all areas of the political spectrum break out in a cold sweat.  The gears of government are choosing a winner.

I know that Romney probably would have lost anyway, I know that Obama was still riding the “historic” wave, and the TEA party were just dismissed as loonies, but history has shown time and again that suppression of a political ideology by gears of the governing body is a very bad thing.  I’m not saying that the Sturmabteilung are going to be marching down the streets, or that the anarchists are going to finally “bring it all down.”  What I’m saying is that like Rome we have reached the apex of our power.  Our great philosopher leaders have come and gone.  We’ve had our Ceasars, we’ve had our Marcus Aurelius, and now the Praetorian Guard is auctioning off the crown.  This is a mark of corruption, perhaps of well meaning individuals, though that’s probably not the case.  We have devolved to the point were we are willing to intimidate and bully the very people our Constitution was designed to protect.

It should not matter to you where you stand on the political spectrum.  You may personally despise the TEA party.  You may be diametrically opposed to everything they stand for, at the end of the day you should still defend them from government abuses, and protect their right to free speech.  It should not matter how despicable you find them, the principle is the same, if it can be done to them, it can be done to you.  If you are say a died in the wool Paulbot, or a die-hard Obamanut you should be on your phones to your senator or representative, calling them demanding an investigation.  Your party affiliation should never matter when the feds are harassing someone about their political beliefs.  What’s even worse is that this is being put out by pencil pushers.  Its a tyranny of bureaucracy.  There’s no congress critter to throw out of office.  Much like a “fire and forget” javelin anti tank missile once the mountain of paper avalanches on someone, there’s no way to recall it.  It should give you all a cold sweat that one stroke of a pen in the wrong place, one decimal point in the wrong spot, one “low level” clerk in an office in Ohio can make your life a living hell or send you to jail.

This is your government doing this.  You, sitting there reading this, have a roughly 1/308,745,538 +/- ownership stake in the federal government.  Every bit of good it does on your behalf, every piece of property it owns, and every misstep it takes belong in some portion to YOU.  Abraham Lincoln called this a government “Of the People, By the People, and For the People.”  If the Government is picking winners, if the People don’t give a damn.  If the People are so apathetic that they do not act when their rights are clearly threatened, that they do not take ownership of their government, then this will no longer be the case.  It will be a government “Of the Government, By the Government, and For the Government,” and the people can go screw themselves.