Opinion

The Tea Party Is Still The Future Of The GOP

Niger Innis National Spokesman, Congress of Racial Equality
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The Tea Party and, indeed, constitutional conservatism as a whole is under assault from the mainstream media elite, the Democrat Party and their adjuncts in the federal government bureaucracy. As reprehensible as this all may be it is entirely predictable.

What hasn’t been as predictable is that some of the most vicious attacks on the tea party have come from our supposed political allies in the Republican Party — ironically a political party that has benefited greatly from us since our birth. With the slings and arrows the tea party has received from far too many establishment politicians and campaign consultants, it makes for an irresistible, downright Shakespearean drama.

As I rejoin TheTeaParty.net, the largest national Tea Party organization in America, I reengage with this fine organization at a time when some very ugly accusations are being made against us in the tea party movement.

We have been besmirched as racists, as misogynists and bigots of every kind. It’s been appalling to see these relentless and absurd accusations being slung not only from Democrats, from whom we’ve come to expect such incivility, but also from many within the establishment GOP.

There remains a bitter divide within the GOP. Media outlets love to convolute the facts and have labeled it the “Republican Civil War,” but in truth, the Tea Party is what the Republican Party should have been all along, and what it purports to be in various GOP platforms. The Tea Party promotes limited government, sound fiscal policies and accountability in government. These principles should not be anathema to a Republican Party that has the intention of being the party of principled constitutional conservatism — not merely “Democrat lite.”

No place is this adulteration of principle more evident than in Mississippi. Americans are focused on the election in Mississippi to witness what will emerge from what is, perhaps, the most bizarre election to have occurred in several decades. One would think that with a history of electoral shenanigans, Mississippi, perhaps more than any other state, would work harder to make sure their elections were both sound and transparent.

Moderate incumbent Senator Thad Cochran disgraced his office and has come to illustrate exactly what is wrong with the establishment GOP. So concerned with winning reelection, Cochran’s campaign affirmed what conservatives have long contended: the line between the Democrat and Republican establishment has been fully eroded.

Cochran’s campaign reached out to Democrats for cooperation in beating Tea Party candidate Chris McDaniel. They courted Democrats to vote in the Republican primary by painting McDaniel and the tea party as a whole as racists.

Robocalls peppered Mississippi Democrats, asking that they vote in the Republican primary for Thad Cochran, demanding that they help put an end to the tea party’s “disrespectful treatment of the first African-American president.”

The Cochran campaign is now mired in a legal challenge as reports emerge that Cochran staffers paid for Democrat votes, courting the black community for help to defeat the allegedly “racist” tea party candidate.

This is what has become of the Republican Party? In order to win reelection, the establishment GOP is willing to stoop to the lows we have seen from such Democrat cowards like Alan Grayson and Charlie Rangel? Is this what we can now expect from the establishment GOP, to simply shout “racist!” and campaign based on race-baiting and fear instead of leadership and good ideas?

These are dark days not only for the Republican Party, but for the American republic.

After the 2012 election, the Republican Party went into panic mode. Having lost an entirely winnable presidential bid, Republican strategists realized they had a diversity problem. It was plain to see that showing up in black and Hispanic communities once every 2, 4, or 6 years and engaging in a superficial pander-fest just doesn’t work.

So, these strategists got to work, conducting expensive studies, paying high-priced consultants and trying to figure out how to court minorities. The answer was right under their noses the whole time: they should have just asked the tea party.

People don’t like being conned. It’s why we tend to dislike used car salesmen. Honest sincerity goes a long way and the tea party movement is not a movement centered around gaming anybody; it’s a movement of principles.

These principles — limited government, fiscal conservatism and accountability in government — transcend race, ethnicity and religion. They’re common sense principles that are self-evidently universal. While the establishment GOP and the Democrats often work in similar ways, trying to discover ways to convince the American people to vote for the lesser evil, the Tea Party remains the most sincerely inclusive grassroots movement in America for one simple reason: we aren’t pretending to try to be “inclusive” or seeking window-dressed diversity.

We keep it simple. We’re conservatives who believe that government should work for us, not the other way around. Black, white, Latino, Asian — it doesn’t matter. Our movement removes identity from the equation and demands only a loyalty to the American values that made our nation the envy of the world.

Democrats and mushy Republicans love to lob accusations at this movement that threatens their grip on power. They charge that we are racists, but neglect to note the long list of minority candidates we so vehemently supported – often at odds with the twin establishment powers that be (Democrats and Republicans).

Our movement champions candidates and political figures like Ted Cruz, Katrina Pierson, Tim Scott, Ben Carson, T.W. Shannon, Herman Cain, Allen West, yours truly and many others. Those who are threatened by our movement once pretended that we didn’t exist; they called us “astroturf,” a purchased, fabricated movement. Soon, they moved on to claim that we were “dead” as a movement. Now, we’re “racists,” even “terrorists.”

The establishment GOP must come to terms with the fact that the Tea Party is the vanguard of a republican revival. Americans need a real choice in politics. They’re like a lobster boiling in a pot of scalding water — they don’t want a choice between high and medium on the stove – they want to be pulled out of the darn pot. If the Republican Party wishes to survive, they must learn that the tea party is not their adversary, but their future.