An open letter to the Tea Party and Conservatives

Posted by Judson Phillips on October 12, 2013 at 7:18am in Tea Party Nation Forum

To the Tea Party and the Conservative movement:

As the sun rises over Washington DC today, in the brisk Autumn breeze, the Republican Party’s freshly laundered white flag of surrender flies again.

The Republican leadership, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan and many of the other usual suspects are busy working out a deal which amounts to little more than the unconditional surrender of the Republican Party to Barack Obama.

While the GOP was allegedly fighting this shutdown over a year delay in the implementation of Obamacare, they will not get that in the final deal.  In fact, the GOP will get nothing.  Obamacare will be fully funded.  The Debt Ceiling will be raised.  Spending will increase.  It will be business is usual in Washington.

While the GOP leadership is unwilling to fight Barack Obama and the Democrats, fighting conservatives is another matter.

Two of the Kings of the RINO Establishment, former New Hampshire Governor John Sununu and former Mississippi Governor and RNC Chair Haley Barbour are attacking the Tea Party.  The RINOs are even recruiting candidates to run against Tea Party Congressmen such as Steve King in Iowa and Justin Amash in Michigan.  These candidates are so-called “pro-business” candidates.  They should be called, “pro-big business” candidates, as they are simply supporters of the crony capitalism that infects DC.

Sununu and Barbour are two of the Republican geniuses that thought President McCain and President Romney were good ideas.  Under their leadership, the GOP was slaughtered in 2006 and 2008.  By 2008, the GOP was on the political endangered species list and was only saved in 2010 by the Tea Party.

If the RINO establishment is more interested in fighting conservatives than fighting Barack Obama and the Democrats, so be it. 

Ted Cruz has more stab wounds in the back from the likes of Mitch McConnell, John McCain and Lindsay Graham than Julius Caesar had on the floor of the Roman Senate when he was assassinated.

If the Republican Establishment wants to play a scorched earth game with conservatives, bring it on.  To paraphrase the classic line from “Star Wars,” “You have failed us for the last time.”

If the Republican Party will not support conservative principles and will not support conservative candidates, it is time for the Tea Party and the conservative movement to create our own political identity and if necessary our own political party.

There are still good conservatives out there running as Republicans and we should support them as conservatives, not as Republicans.

In Virginia, Ken Cuccinelli, E.W. Jackson and Mark Obenshain are all running for Governor, Lieutenant Governor and Attorney General respectively.  They deserve the support of conservatives.  In New Jersey, Steve Lonegan who is running for the Senate seat, who is being supported by our good friends over at the Conservative Campaign, deserves the support of conservatives.   

But for much of the nation, it is a different story.  In South Carolina and Tennessee, conservatives are challenging RINOs Lindsay Graham and Lamar Alexander.  If the challengers win, they deserve our support.  If Graham and Alexander survive their primaries, conservatives should either vote third party or stay home.

The Republican establishment shrieks, that means a Democrat will win.  That is the problem the Republican Party has had over the last twenty years.  Their unique selling point has been we are the lesser of two evils.  Well, they are half right and the point they are right about is not their size.

RINOs like Lindsay Graham, Lamar Alexander, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan and John McCain all like to talk about how conservative they are. 

They are not conservatives.  They are the co-dependent enablers of the welfare state. In fact, let me be politically correct for once and call them by name, undocumented Democrats.

It is time for the Tea Party and the Conservative movement to move away from the GOP.  It is not a conservative party. 

In 2009, those of us who helped organize the Tea Party movement all had the same opinion that forming the Tea Party as a new political party was not what we wanted to do.  In hindsight, that may have been a mistake.

But as with many mistakes, they cannot be undone but they can be corrected.

It is an open secret in Washington that the Republican Establishment despises its base. 

It’s time to see how well the GOP functions without a base.