When I helped co-found a San Diego Tea Party group in 2009, one of our biggest action items was battling against Obamacare.
Our members dialed Congress relentlessly, believing our representatives might weigh the will of the people. What ever delusions I had about that concept utterly vanished when then Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi paraded through a Tea Party rally by the Capitol with her big gavel.
As for Obamacare passage, that’s history, courtesy of congressional Democrats — and reports on the new law’s progress show that it is an even larger failure than we originally projected.
So, imagine our opinion of of the Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner when he gave Pelosi a big kiss and a warm hug—especially since he holds that position courtesy of the hard work of Tea Party members across the country.
Karen Beseth, aka “Lonely Conservative”, is less than impressed about one of first actions taken by Boehner upon resuming his duties: He booted boot two of the insurgent congressmen from the influential Rules Committee.
Too bad he doesn’t have so much ire for Democrats.
However, it seems that all the calls protesting the automatic choice of Boehner as Speaker may still have had an impact.
It wasn’t the Republican votes against House Speaker John Boehner that truly rattled the GOP leadership, it was the phone calls.There were hundreds of them, jamming the phone lines of the district and Capitol offices of dozens of House GOP lawmakers.The callers were not angry about legislation. Nor were they asking for help with a local matter. They were demanding their representative vote against Boehner Tuesday in his bid to win election to a third term as speaker.For the GOP leadership, the flood of calls was a game changer. It thrusted the leadership into triage mode as it scrambled to heal the growing rift among House Republicans.“We’ve never been lobbied quite like that,” House Rules Committee Chairman Pete Sessions, R-Texas, told the Washington Examiner on Wednesday. “We yesterday began a new era of circumstances, and one is that we have members who are going to solicit the outside in ways that they have not previously.”
The Republican leadership is about to make the unpleasant discovery that motivated Americans have not deleted their phone numbers and email addresses just because the GOP has control of both the House and Senate. Californian Karen Siegemund spearheads Rage Against the Media, which focuses on challenging the current media templates. Her plans are to keep the heat on the Republicans just as high, if not higher than it was on the Democrats:
What we have to do, I think, is remind our reps that the anger out here is very, very real. But if they do stand up for conservative principles, we will support them. What we have to do is keep up the pressure, to let them know we are watching, and that we support them as they help Boehner be the Speaker we need.
Of course, when it is time for the next election, the Republicans will, once again, ask for Tea Party money and its grassroots activism. But if this is how Speaker Boehner plans to proceed, when 2016 rolls around, Republican leaders may find themselves without the help of those who opposed the status quo.
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