Fringe or Not Fringe, that is the Question

The lexicon of today's politics includes labels such as 'Birthers,' 'Tenthers' & 'Tea Partiers.' These are all off-shoots of the Republican Party but not necessarily affiliated with the G.O.P. and therefore seem to have a life of their own. In case you are unaware of the distinctions between these groups, here is a simple run down.

The Birther Movement

The Birthers are dedicated to the renewal of the constitutional government, starting with insuring that the President and Commander in Chief is a "natural born citizen."

They seek strict adherence to the Constitution of the USA.

The Tenther Movement

This is a movement urging states to exert their rights under the 10th Amendment. The Amendment, part of the Bill of Rights, states: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

The 'Tenther' movement comes from what advocates see as the federal government's forcing policies on the states -- most notably on health care reform, economic recovery measures and social issues.

The Tea Bag Movement

According to the official home of the American Tea Party movement, the Tea Party Patriots are a "community committed to standing together, shoulder to shoulder, to protect our country and the Constitution upon which we were founded!"

The name the "Tea Party" is a reference to the Boston Tea Party of 1773 when the colonists felt disenfranchised. Today the Tea Party is an acronym standing for Taxed Enough Already.

The Tea Party protesters want government off their backs and less taxes.

What all three movements have in common is a desire to interpret the constitution according to what they think the founding fathers intended, which means deregulation, less taxation and no social programs. In many ways, each of these groups is really a Tenther at heart.

Ian Millhiser from Center for American Progress wants to know if, "The Right Re-embraces Lunatic Legal Arguments from the Past" are we "Doomed to Repeat History?"

Spend a week listening to the right, and you’ll think the founders were all modern-day Tea Partiers. Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) thinks the Constitution forbids Congress to spend federal money on programs he personally disapproves of. Justice Clarence Thomas thinks that the minimum wage, child labor laws, and the federal ban on whites-only lunch counters all violate the Constitution. And of course, everyone on the right thinks that health reform is unconstitutional.

It’s enough to make you think they’re just making it up as they go along. It clearly can’t be the case that every single law cherished by progressives just happens to be unconstitutional.

Yet the reality is even worse. When the right’s view of the Constitution was ascendant 75 years ago, basic protections such as a restriction on child labor were declared unconstitutional; laws banning discrimination were unthinkable; and Social Security was widely viewed as next in line for the Supreme Court’s chopping block.

America’s right now wants nothing more than to revive this discredited theory of the Constitution. These conservatives are over-reading the Tenth Amendment, a provision of the Constitution that provides Congress’s power is not unlimited. So-called “tenther” conservatives are determined to use their twisted reinterpretation to shrink national leaders’ power to the point where it can be drowned in a bathtub. They must not be allowed to succeed for three reasons:

• Tentherism is dangerous. Monopolists seized control of entire industries during tentherism’s last period of ascendance. Workers were denied the most basic protections, while management happily invoked the long arm of the law when a labor dispute arose. Worst of all, Congress was powerless against this effort. And the Court swiftly declared congressional action unconstitutional when elected officials took even the most modest steps to protect workers or limit corporate power.
• Tentherism has no basis in constitutional text or history. Nothing in the Constitution supports tenther arguments. And tenther claims are nothing new. Each of them was raised as early as the Washington administration, and each was rejected by George Washington himself.
• Tentherism is authoritarian. Health reform, Social Security, and the Civil Rights Act all exist because the people’s representatives said they should exist. The tenthers express goal is to make the Supreme Court strip these elected representatives of power and impose a conservative agenda upon the nation.

The right’s quizzical lawsuits challenging health reform are just the tip of the tenther iceberg. If these lawsuits succeed, much of America’s most cherished laws could be next against the wall.

Read the complete article HERE.

These 'fringe' groups are becoming anything but fringe. Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) just recently chaired the first meeting of the House "Tea Party" Caucus. The group’s goal is to “promote Americans’ call for fiscal responsibility, adherence to the Constitution and limited government.”

The issue for many Republicans is how closely aligned do they want to be with the Tea Party, when much their agenda is not considered to be part of the mainstream.

Prominent GOP-ers who have joined the Tea Party Caucus so far:

• GOP Conference Chairman Mike Pence (R-IN)
• NRCC Chairman Pete Sessions (R-TX)
• Secretary of the House Republican Conference Rep. John Carter (R-TX)
• Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) -- the ranking member on the Select Committee on Intelligence who is also running for governor of Michigan
• Five other Republican members of the Texas congressional delegation: Joe Barton, Michael Burgess, John Culberson, Louie Gohmert, and Lamar Smith, (R-TX).

Also other GOP members include:

• Rep. Jerry Moran (R-KS)
  
• Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-KS)

Prominent GOP-ers who have declined invitations so far:

• Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH)
• Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA)

While the followers of these groups believe in their cause, others think that these splinter groups will either doom the country or be the doom of the Republican Party.

Birthers, Jewthers, Whatever

Andy Borowitz says, Look who's Jewish now!

Obama Gives Hanukkah Wishes in Hebrew; Birthers now Claim He Was Born in Israel

Birth Certificate Reads 'Baruch Shmobama'

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) - President Barack Obama's decision to wish Jews around the world a happy Hanukkah in Hebrew has added more fuel to the movement of the so-called Birthers, who now claim that Mr. Obama was born in Israel.

Orly Taitz, a leading Birther spokesperson, told CNN today that she had in her possession a birth certificate for Mr. Obama that was issued in Tel Aviv.

"If you look at the birth certificate, you will see the name he was born with, Baruch Shmobama," she said.

Go Ahead, Disprove It!

Andy Borowitz always has a funny tongue-in-cheek report.

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) - Just moments after she broke with fellow Republicans and voted in favor of health care reform, Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) came under fire from the GOP for allegedly lying about her nation of birth.

"This vote is going to raise suspicions, once again, that Sen. Snowe was born in Kenya," said GOP Chairman Michael Steele. "We demand that she prove, once and for all, that she is definitely not Kenyan."

Orly Taitz, leader of the so-called "birther" movement, said that Sen. Snowe's vote was "textbook Kenyan" behavior.

"She's putting her tribe first," Ms. Taitz said. "When I heard what she did, all I could think of was one word: Kenyan."

Ms. Taitz said that Sen. Snowe "has not produced any legal documents that say 'I am not Kenyan' on them, and that speaks for itself."

The 'GOP' has become the 'WP'

If you don't believe that the 'Grand Old Party' has become the 'Wingnut Party,' just consider the messages of three prominent Republicans.

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN)

Bachmann has claimed that health care reform is unconstitutional.

It is not within our power as members of Congress, it’s not within the enumerated powers of the Constitution, for us to design and create a national takeover of health care. Nor is it within our ability to be able to delegate that responsibility to the executive.

Of course she is dead wrong.

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC)

DeMint claimed that health reform violates the Tenth Amendment and urged state legislators and governors to "champion individual freedom" by resisting the bill.

DeMint said he would love to see states go to court to invoke the Tenth Amendment: "If we had some states come together and say the only way to save this country is to push back."

Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R)

Perry has endorsed "state sovereignty resolutions" that demand the federal government "cease and desist" enforcing many laws with which conservatives disagree.

Perry — who suggested in April at one of the right-wing “tea parties” that Texas may have to secede from the union — even went so far as threatening to invoke the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to resist health care reform and suggested other states would do the same.

Ian Millhiser in an article titled, Rally 'Round the "True Constitution" defines "tentherism."

Tentherism, in a nutshell, proclaims that New Deal-era reformers led an unlawful coup against the "True Constitution," exploiting Depression-born desperation to expand the federal government's powers beyond recognition. Under the tenther constitution, Barack Obama's health-care reform is forbidden, as is Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. The federal minimum wage is a crime against state sovereignty; the federal ban on workplace discrimination and whites-only lunch counters is an unlawful encroachment on local businesses.

The Progress Report lends some historical perspective to this issue.

Indeed, while "birther" conspiracy theorists make increasingly outlandish attempts to dismantle President Obama's legitimacy, "tenther" constitutionalists like Bachmann, DeMint, and Perry hope to dismantle an entire century's worth of progressive legislation.

Tenthers derive their narrow vision of the Constitution from a strained reading of the Tenth Amendment, which provides that the Constitution contains an itemized list of federal powers and anything not contained in that list is beyond Congress' authority. In the tenthers' eyes, Congress' powers must all be read too narrowly to allow most federal statutes to exist. However, the tenther constitution bears little resemblance to the words of the document itself.

Contrary to tenther claims that federal spending programs like Medicare or Social Security are unconstitutional, Article I of the Constitution empowers Congress to "lay and collect taxes" and to "provide for...the general welfare of the United States," which unambiguously authorizes it to spend money in ways that benefit the nation.

Similarly, Congress' broad authority to enact regulatory schemes that "substantially affect interstate commerce" easily encompasses laws like the federal minimum wage and the requirement that businesses do not discriminate on the basis of race. As Roosevelt chided tenther-like conservatives from his era, "The Constitution of 1787 did not make our democracy impotent."

Where do other Republican politicians stand on the issue of radicalism in the Republican Party?

US House Representative Wally Herger, of California’s 2nd congressional district, expressed “enthusiastic approval” of a town-hall attendee who described himself as a “proud right-wing terrorist,”

Recently, Rex Rammell — a Republican candidate for governor in Idaho — joked to an audience that he’d like to hunt President Obama.

Even some Republicans have recently commented on this trend toward radicalism.

In April, 2009, Sen. Arlen Specter announced that he was switching parties to become a Democrat. In a statement released to the press, Specter explained that the GOP has left moderates behind and “has moved far to the right.”

Since my election in 1980, as part of the Reagan Big Tent, the Republican Party has moved far to the right.

In May, 2009 on "Meet the Press," MSNBC's Joe Scarborough took issue with this popular yet obviously debatable theme:

[W]hen I hear Democrats like Arlen Specter and read editorialists like E.J. Dionne saying how liberal--or, or how conservative the Republican Party's become, they've got it backwards. We have not been conservative as a party, we've been radical.

UPDATE: The following article by Adele M. Stan, The Wing-Nut Code: What Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin Are Really Saying to Their Followers, states:

You thought they were just unhinged. But here's what they're really saying to the armed and dangerous.

The point is that when Beck throws up a graphic of a segmented snake as his project's mascot, or Palin speaks of her native land as the "sovereign" state of Alaska, they're blowing a kind of dog-whistle for the armed and paranoid who make up the right-wing, neo-militia "Patriot" movement and the broader "Tea Party" coalition.

The 10th Amendment movement is tied in with the Tea Party and patriot movements: On the Web site of the Tenth Amendment Center, one finds yet another version of the "Don't Tread On Me" flag, and links to 35 state groups identified as part of the patriot movement -- a number of them state chapters of Glenn Beck's 9-12 Project.

"Birther" Nonsense

Only in America would corporate big media spend such extensive amounts of time covering Orly Taitz, a foreign-born and raised nutcase, challenging the nationality of the president of the United States.