Tea party owned by Republicans?

During the campaign of 2010, Lindsey Graham,(R-S.C., said that the tea-party movement was unsustainable, that it could not come up with a coherent vision for the country. More recently, he cautioned us that the new representatives who rode the tea-party tidal wave in November must help come up with "solutions" to our debt crisis.

Apparently, Mr. Graham missed that whole "obey the Constitution" message coming from tea-party rallies around the country for the last two years. The "solution" to our debt crisis is to put the federal government back in its constitutional box.

The causes of our economic and political crises could not be clearer. The country is teetering on financial collapse because too many groups found politicians willing to fund "solutions" to every problem imaginable. Of course, those groups then return some of the money to those same politicians in the form of contributions.

That system worked for the lobbying groups who drained the treasury of other people's money, and it worked for the politicians who raked in the contributions. The only people who got screwed were the mainstream Americans who had to fund the whole racket.

Though many Americans have rightly concluded that the policies of the radical left have brought this crisis upon us, the tea party recognized that this conclusion is only partly correct. Liberals comprise only about 20 percent of the population. Liberals do not have the numbers to force their will upon us. They had to have accomplices, "moderate" politicians who appeal to the mainstream during elections and then "reach across the aisle" to the radical left once in power.

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Don't miss Joseph Farah's book "The Tea Party Manifesto: A Vision of American Rebirth," in which he sets out a clear agenda for the movement he predicted would arise in response to Barack Obama.

Mainstream Americans formed the tea-party movement not only to correct the policies of the radical left, but also to deal with those "moderate" politicians who went along with the Beltway elites. And that explains why the tea party is not popular with "moderate" Republicans like Lindsey Graham and John McCain, and why such politicians are not popular with the tea party.

The tea party arose out of the recognition that a moderate is merely a liberal in slow motion. Liberals and moderates both take the country off the cliff into socialist tyranny. Liberals put the vehicle of state in gear, pop the clutch, and put the pedal to the metal, while moderates putter toward the cliff in second gear with the left-turn signal going nonstop. But the destination of both is the same, because both have failed to learn the lessons that our founders knew over 200 years ago.

The founders understood human nature. They knew that once people learned how to vote themselves money from the treasury, a democracy would spend itself into chaos and then tyranny would result. That is why they gave us a constitutional republic with a limited and specified role for government, a role that does not include transferring money from people who made prudent investments to those who made foolish ones, or bailing out unions when they push their companies and their states into bankruptcy, or trying to stop the climate from cycling between warm and cold periods as it has for eons.

The Republican Party should realize that they benefitted from the rise of the tea party in 2010 only because mainstream politicians typically gravitate to the Republican Party, and they tend to be driven away by the Democrats. But there are still many Republicans who are prone to Beltway Fever, and there is nothing to stop the tea party from supporting mainstream Democrats who challenge the extreme leftists who dominate their party. In fact, the country as a whole would benefit if both parties were pushed more in the direction of legitimate constitutional policies.

The tea party understands that a moderate Republican is only a liberal Democrat who knows which fork to use at a dinner party. It is arrogant for moderate Republicans like Lindsey Graham to presume that they can give advice to the tea party about our obligations. We are not on the same team.

The tea party is not a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican Party. We know what happened to the credibility of the NAACP, network news and the "education" establishment when they became mere extensions of the Democratic Party. We support Republicans only when they support the Constitution, and we will welcome any mainstream Democrats willing to do the same.

We do not require your advice, Mr. Graham. But you might want to listen to ours. Or you might want to look to your right in the next election.

Tim Daughtry is a conservative writer, speaker and political consultant with Concord Bridge Consulting in Greensboro, N.C.