GOP warned to knock off 'smoke and mirrors'

House Speaker John Boehner, Rep. Paul Ryan

Tea party voters will be "unforgiving" should their elected lawmakers in Congress fail to slash federal government borrowing and spending, according to leaders in the grassroots movement that largely is credited with turning Nancy Pelosi's Democrat-controlled House over to the GOP last fall.

"The House GOP should not even think about unhiding Obama's Mastercard until after enactment" of serious spending restrictions and other reforms, said William Temple, chairman of the The Tea Party Founding Fathers' Freedom Jamboree and National Straw Poll Convention scheduled Sept. 28 to Oct. 2 in Kansas City.

A news conference is scheduled May 9 at the National Press Club in Washington on the issue, officials said.

The warnings also coincide with the "No More Red Ink" campaign, a high-tech, grass-roots lobbying effort targeting House Republicans, who have the power to stop further borrowing in its tracks.

WND CEO Joseph Farah, the "Red Ink" campaign organizer, says 2011 may represent America's last chance to change directions on reckless spending and borrowing policies. He points to a number of polls showing Americans opposed to increasing the debt limit by overwhelming numbers.

He said the House Republican majority has it within its own power, without any Democrats helping, to stop the borrowing and spending.

For $29.99, individual letters are delivered to each GOP member of the House asking them to freeze the debt limit and bring back constitutionally limited government and fiscal responsibility to Washington.

Temple said something needs to be done and soon.

"Take aim at these pro-debt RINOs (Republican in Name Only) now with your phone calls, press releases or picketing! [House Speaker John] Boehner leads some rare white RINOs determined to stampede their House GOP caucus and our country over the financial cliff – and ignore signals from voters and the S&P bond ratings agency that we must act now to stop drowning our children and grandchildren in red ink. Yet, Rep. Paul Ryan's so-called 'courageous budget plan' adds $9 trillion to the federal debt."

Event organizers chastised House Republicans for defaulting on a recent promise to cut $100 billion from the federal budget.

Temple said the tea party members will not be forgiving this fall if House freshmen and others elected to address fiscal disasters "cave" to President Obama, Sen. Harry Reid and others.

The national debt ceiling is about $14.3 trillion, and officials expect the country's current pace of borrowing to reach that figure within the coming few weeks. The "Red Ink" campaign explains that House GOP members alone – with no cooperation from the Senate or White House – could bring the borrowing to a halt by refusing to authorize an increase.

While Democrat leaders have been sounding alarms about the nation being in "default" on its payments, several groups have analyzed the budget and have confirmed the U.S. would take in more than enough money to make debt payments.

Temple also explained that GOP members of Congress are going to be scored on their decision whether to grant Obama more borrowing and spending authority.

"If you vote to raise the debt ceiling, you get a zero for the whole year. If you don't vote to raise the debt ceiling, you score 100. Everything else – from votes on the budget to riders to repeals to trivial spending cuts – is just smoke and mirrors. We will be judging the House Republicans and their Democrat colleagues on one issue only: 'DID YOU VOTE FOR MORE DEBT?'" he said.

Dr. Allen Unruh, a South Dakota chiropractor and tea party leader said, "Everyone knows that Obama and Congress are borrowing 40 cents on every dollar the USA spends. The tea party, conservatives and independents of all stripes fought tooth-and-nail to stop Obamacare in 2010 – and yet in 2011, RINO Boehner doesn't even have the horns to demand repeal of Obamacare as a baseline condition of a debt vote! If the House GOP goes with him, RINO season opens with the 2012 Republican primaries."

Bob Vander Plaats, vice chairman of the Kansas City Tea Party Founding Fathers' Freedom Jamboree and National Straw Poll Convention, said, "America is craving bold statesmanship in the U.S. House and in the White House. The House GOP must play hardball on the debt ceiling for the sake of the hard-pressed, taxpaying families across the USA. If nothing else, they must seize this moment to fix health care entitlements."

Temple released a database of "pro-debt House RINOs" and urged tea party activists to take note.

Temple, a Revolutionary War re-enactor who led the tea party movement's 1.6 million-person march against Obamacare in Washington, is a Vietnam combat veteran, who formerly worked at the Pentagon and as a Secret Service employee. He also serves as pastor at a small African-American church in Georgia.

He says the gathering scheduled in Kansas City will be a "Woodstock,"

Temple believes House Republicans have the power to bring federal spending back under control.

He said Mark Meckler, co-founder of Tea Party Patriots, believes his team absolutely rejects any vote to increase the debt ceiling, and public opinion polls confirm more than two-thirds of Americans agree.

"By hiding Obama's Mastercard, we starve the federal beast," he said. "We oppose more debt. But, because I know our people very well, I think it's safe to say that the tea party movement as a whole might possibly forgive Boehner and the House Republicans a bump in the debt ceiling if:

Obamacare first is repealed;
the increase would be limited to $100 billion, "not a penny more";
entitlements of Medicare, Medicaid and the U.S. Tax Code's medical-inflation drivers are fixed beforehand;
at least HALF of discretionary spending gets cut;
Boehner stops misleading House members and all America by echoing Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's false claim that House inaction on the debt ceiling equals default to federal bondholders;
the House Armed Services Committee and the Pentagon slow down on injecting open homosexuality and females into forward combat roles;
Social Security's unfunded liabilities are addressed in advance;
a balanced budget amendment requiring a supermajority for tax increases passes the House and Senate for ratification by states;
the House leadership follows the lead of Tea Party Caucus leader Rep. Michele Bachmann, freshman class chair Kristy Noem and Sens. Mark Rubio, Rand Paul, Jim DeMint and others who already have been "talking tough" on the debt limit.

On the issue of Obamacare's repeal, Unruh said, "If Boehner's Republicans of 2010 really, truly felt Obamacare was an outrage last year, why isn't the House GOP majority of 2011 absolutely demanding its repeal – along with a fix of all other health care entitlements – as one of the price tags for extending President Obama's credit card privileges for a few more months?"

Temple said a hike of $100 billion is a month's worth of increased spending by Obama.

"It usefully sets up another debt ceiling confrontation later, a set of ratchets by which to jack-down this monstrously-high federal deficit," he said. "This is smart negotiating – not Paul Ryan's opening 2012 budget bid to add $9 trillion to the debt, and not John Boehner's recent cave for a paltry $20 billion in cuts so that, Heaven forbid, the Lincoln Memorial goes unstaffed."

Vander Plaats said the entitlements have to be addressed.

"Everyone agrees, from the president, to his deficit commission, to the Republicans, to the pundits, to the think tanks, that the bleeding must stop. So, why does Paul Ryan's so-called visionary budget delay these outflow fixes for a decade? Why did Boehner engineer the defeat of a better budget from Rep. Jim Jordan's Republican Study Committee? And, why does President Obama, with whom the buck stops, belittle Ryan's limp-noodle plan as draconian? In fact, if the GOP mans-up to require Obamacare's repeal as a condition of a debt ceiling vote, the president will desperately need the trophy of bipartisan Medicare/Medicaid reform and deficit reduction to save face."

Temple said large cuts would address another growing problem: spending that is "unconstitutional, unsustainable, silly or evil."

"How can we tell future generations that we saddled them with trillions in debt for Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, HUD, Planned Parenthood, National Public Radio, tobacco subsidies that cause cancer and EPA CO2 regulation of human exhale?" he asked.

"How can we tell our children that we dug their debt-grave in order to hold official Washington harmless from the kind of layoffs the private sector has experienced – in a recession caused by Congress's banking and housing policies? How can we tell them we kept on borrowing $4 billion per day in order to buy up a third of the U.S. corn crop for ethanol subsidies that spike food prices for the world's poor?" he said.

Featured speakers at the Kansas City event will be conservative author and activist David Horowitz, Conservative Messenger K. Carl Smith and WND CEO Joseph Farah.