njlauren
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There is a lot of mis statement of fact about the founding among the tea partiers, which is not surprising, because a lot of them are not particularly well educated, and they also tend to get their information from demagogues and talk radio rather than bothering to read and figure it out for themselves. What is even more sad is when someone like Scalia can say things that are patently false in a judicial writing, and not be challenged on it. He said the DOMA case should never have come to the Supreme Court, because the constitution doesn't mention a right to same sex marriage..this whole enumeration thing is a stupid argument, because it also didn't mention interracial marriage bans, either, cause it doesn't mention marriage at all....marriage is up to the states. However, he said the court doesn't have the right to override the will of Congress, and that is dead spot wrong, the Supreme Court was founded to be a check on the legislators, and what he also left out is the 14th amendment prohibits unequal treatment under the law; but Scalia argued they had no such jurisdiction, they had no right to decide the constitutionality of laws congress made! Really? So what was the Supreme court for, to have a place to sit in neat robes and pretend to work?
The literal interpretation of the constitution was made moot early on, when Marbury V Madison established firmly that the Supreme Court was the arbiter of the constitution, that is a classic example, because the constitution doesn't actually say what the Supreme Court did, one way or the other. Literalism also assumes the Constitution was meant to be a literalist document (not surprising, many of those who support this position are also religious fundamentalists) and there is a big problem with that, the people who wrote the constitution knew it wasn't complete, they didn't pretend it could be made so, and to get it made and ratified they left it deliberately vague. They also made amending the constitution difficult, because they wanted the 'holes' in the constitution to be figured out by legislators and the courts, they could have given us the California method of amending their constitution (which is a joke), but they didn't, they basically said "work it out, using knowledge of your time and place".
More importantly, the tea party haven't read history, their idea that they represent the 'patriots' who 'threw the tea over board' never read what was really going on (for example, the British tea even with the tax was a lot cheaper then the smuggled tea people were drinking; that boycott, not surprisingly, made some smugglers and merchants quite wealthy, including Hancock). Their image of the revolution and the founding is comic book simplicity, that these were a bunch of men, God inspired, who created this perfect constitution that has been destroyed by judges, liberal politicians and so forth.....course, the fact is, if you had their vision of America many of them would find themselves poor, maybe indentured servants, and whining about how unfair everything is, because they know very little about what sticking to the original constitution as written would mean, it would be a disaster area, and we would probably have Jim Crow, we would have a society with an aristocracy and everyone else almost serfs (take a look at the Antebellum South , it was pretty close)......
Santayana once said that those that don't read and understand history are doomed to repeat its failures, and with the tea party, it is even worse, because not only don't they read and understand history, they take in what someone else tells them is history and believe it like religious faith, which is pathetic.
BTW, before claiming this is a knock on conservatives, it isn't, it is a knock on a group of people claiming the conservative mantle who shouldn't be. People like William F Buckley and Goldwater hated people like the tea party types and the extreme right that has come to be called 'Conservative', Goldwater predicted that the GOP's southern strategy, and the "Reagan" revolution bringing in the evangelicals, would destroy conservatism, and he was right;Buckley called them the know nothings, and that hit the nail on the head. Look at the politicians closely associated with the tea party, and you see people like Cruz, Bachmann, Sarah Palin and their ilk, and what do you see? The whole "real american" nonsense, the culture of 'ordinary folks know best' which is nothing more then ignorance is bliss, it is anti intellectual, it is anti actually reasoning out a position, something that as much as I disagreed with them about things, Buckley, Goldwater and people like George Will at least had an argument to make, a reasoned one, even if I disagreed; the tea party is like the evangelicals, there is no reasoning with them, there is no interest in understanding nuances or realities, it is their way or the highway, and they have crippled the GOP and made it a laughingstock in many quarters.
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The Tea Party’s History of the American Revolution - 
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