Thomas Langhorne, reporting for the Evansville Courier Press, has an article about the Tea Party opposition to a referendum as to whether Vanderburgh County and Evansville City governments should be consolidated.
Less government? A will-of-the-people referendum? What’s not for a tea-partier to like? The official story is “too much power in one person’s hands.” My suspicion is that, if the consolidation resulted in a conservative having more power, the local tea party activists wouldn’t be opposed. For all their talk of principles, the only unifying theme I can see in the Tea Party is electing Republicans. A more efficient government is great until the efficiencies come in the form of more power for Democrats.
I’m not unsympathetic to concerns about consolidation of power. But, if you’re going to streamline government, it is almost necessarily going to involve removing power from many hands and putting them into few or one pair of hands. Mussolini, they say, made the trains run on time; but that efficiency came at a price. That’s a down-side to running government like a business.
As an aside, the descriptions of the various Tea Party factions in the article remind me of the various Jewish liberation splinter groups in Monty Python’s “The Life of Brian”: Tea Party Patriots, Hoosier Patriots, Tri-state Tea Party, United Freedom Makers . . . might well be the People’s Front of Judea, the Judean People’s Front, the Judean Popular People’s Front, and the Campaign for a Free Galilee.
I don’t know how a tea party group can be opposed to a referendum….which is all about populist politics which is what I beleive the tea party is all about.
Of course, considering the way referendum’s are rigged with biased wording, I don’t have a lot of faith in them. It’s really easy to engineer particular outcomes by writing a biased question.
For what it’s worth, Democrats make the same arguments against consolidation in Lake County. I tend to agree with them.
In Lake County, unigov would be dominated by Gary interests. How well has that worked out for Gary?
Do you ever take right-leaning people at their word? Couldn’t a cigar just be a cigar. ;)
No. The “cigar” thingy is an exception, not a rule.
I cringed when I read the original article in the CP. It is extremely misleading to state that the “Tea Party opposes” an issue, especially in this case. Can you say Republicans or Democrats oppose anything? Even with abortion, a litmus issue if there ever one was, there are stragglers (Scott Brown, a Repub Senator in Mass is pro-choice, Brad Ellsworth states he is pro-life). This is even more true of the Tea-Party, which other than opposing Obamacare, has people of all sorts of different views.
The CP article which started this mess refers to members of a statewide organization, and not anyone local other than Mike Sandefur, an “active member” that didn’t even speak on the record. Consolidation is an extremely complex issue, that comes with lots of issues (do we have an equal police chief and sheriff, do away with one, or something in-between?) If a poll were to be taken of actual local tea-party members, I doubt there would be a strong consensus either way.
I can’t agree with Doug’s sentiment that the Tea-Party exists to elect Republicans. First, if that were the case, Tea-Party darlings like Sharron Angle and Christine “not a witch” O’Donnell should have never made it past a primary.