A year ago if someone had told me I would be neck deep into the Tea Party movement, I would have thought them crazy.  But, times change and we hope for change and sometimes; we actually change.  In the course of this journey, I’ve seen the great parts where people help each other and leave the event site cleaner than when we arrived.  But, I’ve also noticed there is an element out there on the extremes who don’t think the Tea Party movement goes nearly far enough.  These folks make Hannity, Limbaugh and Beck look like altar boys for the GOP.  These 1%’ers are ready to start trouble and you can easily find their distorted message on You Tube, just as there are 1%’ers on the liberal side who want an immediate shift to socialism. But that fringe element is not the point of this.

I interact daily with members from 63 various groups in Wisconsin that all total represent about 250,000 people who want to continue the American Dream of “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”  The current politically correct, socialistic stance of the power hungry liberals is not about the American Dream.  The Tea Party movement sees both the DNC and GOP as out to continue giving away the country (the DNC to the Marxist and the GOP to big corporations).

The majority of the Tea Party folks I deal with are wanting to return this country to its roots and that means a smaller federal government, fiscal conservativism, more states rights and greater individual liberties.  The rally cry is… “Where does the constitution say the federal government has the authority to do this?”  We don’t want a nanny state.  We don’t want our monthly stipend.  We want control of our own lives!

The statists like to say… the federal government gets its authority from the general welfare clause from the Preamble… “promote the general welfare” and then they like to combine that with citing the necessity clause from the end of Article 1, section 8… “To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper.” But, they conveniently ignore the rest of that thought in necessity clause…“for carrying into Execution the foregoing powers…”   Those “foregoing powers” are the 17 enumerated powers as defined in Article 1, Section 8.  Sorry but if the founders had meant for the Federal government to overpower the states, they would not have listed the 17 powers of the federal government. 

Were that true, the founders would not have continued that thought of limited federal power by adding the 10th Amendment to the Constitution.  Additionally, since 1997, the House of Representatives has ignored Parliamentary Rule XIII 3Di which requires a Constitutionality check before legislation is voted on and is supposed to be submitted for review along with the CBO review of the costs.  If they followed this rule, it might save us lots of tax dollars in court challenges.

Speaking of court challenges, the federal government has already lost THREE supreme court cases (1992, 1995 and 1997) that already set precedence against the feds having the authority to pass Obama Care.  If the elected leaders cannot understand the necessity clause and insist on futile court challenges, will they ever understand that our tax money is not the government’s personal piggy bank that they can raid at any time?  At what point does this country reach critical mass that the wage earners can no longer support the sick, lame and freeloaders?  We all can’t work for the government or get a “gov’ment check.”

Within the Tea Party movement, we are sick of the GOP saying “too big to fail” and DNC claims of “we must do this for the children.”  This is supposed to be a free market economy, instead have over regulated to favor one special interest over another to the point that our system is completely dysfunctional.  The nanny state of our government has turned us all into incapable toddlers who require close supervision for basic survival. 

All of these reasons add up to reveal why the Massachusetts election on Tuesday was critical to both sides… 51% of the state’s voters consider themselves Independent even though DNC members outnumber GOP members by a 3 to 1 margin.  The Tea Party movement which also includes the other “third party” candidates represent that 51%. 

The true lesson from Massachusetts is that the electorate shrugged on Jan. 19th, 2010 and the people are throwing off the constraining yokes of the big government, nanny state.