Thousands of Americans have been attending tea parties all over the country to protest the outrageously reckless spending in Washington and the unprecedented levels of debt the federal government is incurring in the name of saving our economy. 

The root of the fiscal problems is that the United States broke loose from its constitutional moorings of limited government and private property rights. Institutions long venerated were debased as too many politicians disregarded constitutionally prescribed processes by which they were to operate government institutions. Once the Constitutional restraints were broken, politicians were free to follow the whims of the moment and do whatever they thought they could get away with.   To fix the problem, fundamental reform is needed in order to get back within our constitutional system.

The founders of our constitutional republic were much smarter and much more faithful to principle than the feckless politicians of today. Perhaps former Supreme Court Justice Joseph Storey, writing more than 150 years ago said it most eloquently: “Let the American youth never forget that they possess a noble inheritance, bought by the toils and sufferings and blood of their ancestors; and capable, if wisely improved and faithfully guarded, of transmitting to their latest posterity all the substantial blessings of life, the peaceful enjoyment of liberty, of property, of religion, and of independence. The structure has been erected by architects of consummate skill and fidelity; its foundations are solid; its compartments are beautiful as well as useful; its arrangements are full of wisdom and order; and its defenses are impregnable from without. It has been reared for immortality, if the work of man may justly aspire to such a title.  It may nevertheless, perish in an hour by the folly, or corruption, or negligence of its only keepers, THE PEOPLE.” 

It is time for the people to stand up and demand better form the politicians they elect! We must faithfully guard and transmit to future generations the constitution we inherited from our worthy ancestors.   The task should begin with Congress – the branch intended by the framers to be the one closest to the people. It is the branch that can be repaired the quickest if enough people demand that it change.

Congress has become so debased that it is no longer even capable of producing good legislation. Two leading political scientists, Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann of the

left-leaning Brookings Institution wrote a book about Congress a few years ago called The Broken Branch. Mann and Ornstein describe Congress as “an institution that has strayed far from its deliberative roots and a body that does not live up to the aspirations of envisioned for it by the framers. This problem is not just stylistic, or something that offends academics and other analysts. Bad process leads to bad policy – and often can lead to bad behavior, including ethical lapses. Those consequences affect all of us….The need for change, we believe, is compelling and urgent.”

The House of Representatives was set up so that every citizen of the United States of America would have equal representation in that body. It consists of 435 members who are supposed to have the same powers, rights and privileges to represent the interests of the people of every congressional district. Each state has two Senators and each Senator is supposed to be one one-hundredth of that body. But the Senate and the House of Representatives have been corrupted over the years so that a few powerful legislators can too often impose their will on the Senate and the House and bully the other members to go meekly along. This deprives millions of US citizens of their right to equal representation in the United States Congress. This is fundamentally at odds with the Constitution.  

Perhaps the most egregious example of Congress at its worse and of the fact that tens of millions of Americans lack real representation in that great institution was the “$787 billion “economic stimulus” bill The final version of the stimulus was passed so quickly through both the Senate and the House on February 13, 2009 – fittingly a Friday the 13^th – that no one alive, certainly no member of Congress, even knew what they were actually voting on. . House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had the House version of the bill drawn up in secret and amendments were not allowed. The bill was basically “take it or leave it” with the President claiming that a failure to vote for the bill was a vote to destroy the US economy.  

Just weeks after the Friday the 13^th vote, most members of Congress publically professed outrage that AIG executives received $165 millions in performance bonuses for the period in which the company was being saved from bankruptcy by a $130 billion taxpayer bailout. Had any of the Congressmen or Senators been able to read the stimulus bill, they would have known that the bill expressly provided for these bonuses. How could these lawmakers profess to be “shocked, shocked” by what they had themselves so hastily voted for a few weeks earlier?

The justification for many of the horrible bills Congress has passes the last six months bill was that the economy will completely stop functioning very shortly if the bill under consideration were not passed at once. That was a steady refrain since late September, 2008. The claim is that we “have to do something.” Sometimes something can be done that makes a bad situation even worse. 

The Democrats blame former President Bush for all of the bills they claim they need to pass to deal with the economy. The problems in the economy did not materialize over night and there is blame enough to go around. Certainly President Bush did not handle the situation well when it first surfaced last September and he was the first to request a bailout bill The Democrats in Congress, including then Senator Barack Obama, hastily embraced, whether it was constitutional or not.

But the bad economy did not justify bad and unconstitutional legislation. If a small fire developed in your kitchen, and the firemen showed up with a tanker truck and proceeded to attempt to put out the fire by spraying gasoline on it, could they justify the counterproductive and foolish action by claiming they had inherited the fire? A bad situation does not excuse a bad attempt to fix it. The economy got in trouble because of enormous amounts of debt that could not be repaid. The problem will not be solved by incurring trillions more of debt that will be extremely difficult to repay.

The levels of spending and the debt being proposed by the President and enacted by the Congress are truly staggering. There were numerous bailout bills totaling more than a trillion dollars, a budget blueprint that will add $9.3 trillion more to the federal debt over the next ten years, and a $410 billion supplemental appropriations bill which contained almost 9,000 earmarks – many of which were wasteful on their face. (This supplemental appropriations act was signed by President Obama even though candidate Obama promised to end earmarks and go through the budget line-by-line making cuts).  

The crushing burden current politicians are piling on future generations of Americans will have to be repaid by enormous tax rates combined with unprecedented levels of inflation. This is what those attending the tea parties are voicing their concerns about. After the tea parties are over, the only true keepers of the Constitution, the people need to stay engaged and demand reforms that will return this country to the constitutional government that served us so well for over two centuries.