A Couple of Ideologues Debate Right Wing Theories

At Austin’s suggestion I attended the candidates debate for the 8th Congressional District put on by the Conservative Coalition of Montgomery County. It was, to say the least, an interesting experience. As he mentioned the audience was a modest collection of about fifty people. The two candidates were critical of Kevin Brady’s leadership and felt that he hadn’t been a reliable conservative leader. Both agreed that Brady was mistaken for voting for the TARP ‘bailout’ of the banks last fall. This is an issue that has split both political parties, but it’s generally regarded as the more liberal Democrats and more conservative Republicans who have been critical of TARP. The two candidates who showed up were Tyler Russell and Scott Baker. Both candidates seemed like amicable fellows, with records of service in the Air Force and a few years of experience in the business sector. Tyler Russell often seemed to be put on the defensive by Mr. Baker who characterized him as not being realistic in what could be achieved. (While both were ultra-conservative, Mr. Baker more readily admitted the need to compromise to achieve some level of progress on their issues. Mr. Russell characterized that sort of stance as being more of the compromise with progressives that he believed had damaged the Republican-brand name under Bush.)
The format for the debate was actually quite good because most of the questions came directly from the audience members themselves. The first question was from Conroe ISD school board member Chris Irish, who asked what, besides the TARP bailout, did the two candidates present find lacking in Brady’s leadership in Washington. Tyler Russell stated that Brady had been supportive of the creation of the Medicare Part D (the Bush Admin. Prescription Plan). Conservatives have long been critical of the Republican Party’s creation of this program. There is a lot that’s lamentable about the program. (The mandate that the government not negotiate drug prices, the cost of hiring private programs to administer it, the donut hole, etc.) The conservative position has been that the government should never make any attempt to make medical care affordable for our nations’ citizens. When asked the same question Scott Baker said that he wished Brady would sponsor H.R. 227, which would declare the government was taking the position that life begins at conception. (He made the claim that the Supreme Court stated in Roe that if the Congress would make a declaration on the issue it would nullify the decision.)
The fireworks began when an audience member asked the candidates what role they thought the Federal Department of Education should play. Scott Baker stated that it should do very little besides educate people about the Constitution. I realized this would be an unpleasing answer for the crowd who had a very specific idea in mind. Tyler Russell served them the red meat when he stated that we should abolish the Department of Education (for being unconstitutional) and asked what good it would be to teach people about it if the government refused to abide by its limits.
The two candidates radical ideas came into particularly sharp focus when the debate turned to economic issues. A woman in the audience asked what should be done with the inheritance tax, which she considered theft or stealing. The two candidates were quick to reply that they both thought that the tax was unconstitutional (as well as a form of theft) and should be repealed. When it came to the income tax Tyler Russell said that it should be ended and replaced with a sales or consumption tax. This is a particularly extreme position on taxes that will never be implemented. Sales taxes are strongly regressive and hit the middle/working class very hard because they are more likely to spend a greater portion of their income. When Governor Huckabee endorsed a version of the ‘fair tax’ for his campaign last year it was revealed that the effective rate of sales tax imposed would be somewhere around 30 percent. Defenders of the program often say that the government could counteract the regressive nature of the tax by offering a program of quarterly sales tax ‘rebates’ but such a plan would probably require a tremendous bureaucracy t o administer. (Since a basic argument for the implementation of the sales or ‘fair tax’ is the elimination of the IRS one would have to wonder what the point would be when this problem is factored in.)
Scott Baker took the more ‘pragmatic’ approach by saying that while he supports a consumption tax he’d prefer to start with a ‘flat tax’ whereby everybody is taxed at the same ‘flat’ tax rate instead of the ‘marginal’ tax rates that are assessed on different levels of income. Mr. Baker stated that until the 16th Amendment is repealed it would be best to defer a consumption tax so as not to risk a ‘double taxation’ of income. The most basic problem with the creation of a flat tax is that the authors who first wrote a book popularizing the subject in the 1980’s admitted that it would raise the tax rate of people with middle-class incomes while giving massive tax cuts to the wealthy. Even as it did so it would still fail to raise the current level of revenue and result in larger budget deficits at the very moment Mr. Baker is expressing concern about the size of our budget deficits.
Both candidates expressed the wish to shut the border. Mr. Tyler expressed the desire to arm Predator drones with missiles, thereby creating a military situation resembling the covert Pakistan War along the border with the United States. Mr. Baker sensibly stated that he didn’t want the military involved in police work on American soil. ( Posse Comitatus) He then went on to suggest such extreme measures as the withholding of Federal money from ‘sanctuary cities’ and suggested that the Constitution is misinterpreted as meaning that anyone born in the United States is an American citizen when he believes that was never the intention of the Founding Fathers.
What was most noticeable about the debate, from my perspective, is the types of issues that were not addressed. While the candidates addressed the question of the country’s addiction to foreign oil there wasn’t a single question directed at the candidates on the issue of global climate change. I suspected that I knew why this was the case, and I feel that my suspicions were confirmed when a member of audience handed me a pamphlet from the Eagle Forum whose headline article stated that the purpose of the United Nations Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen is the creation of “One World Government.” The author of the piece was Jerome Corsi who’s probably most famous for getting caught lying about John Kerry’s war record in 2004. When the subject of health care was raised Mr. Baker stated that Texas had made great progress by reforming the tort laws. Apparently the continued double digit percentage increase in the price of health insurance and the nearly one in four Texans who are uninsured (the highest level in the nation) are unimportant. I’m guessing results don’t matter to this crowd. After walking away from the event I realized that I had witnessed a very special kind of debate: one involving ideologues discussing theories. My guess is that several years from now both of these gentlemen will still be ideologues….discussing theories.

Dueling TX-8 Teabaggers

                 Russell                                                                        Baker

What does a debate between two teabaggers look like?

That was the question that I was in my head as I went to the recent debate of the Republican candidates for the 8th Congressional District. Incumbent and usual teabag panderer, Rep. Kevin Brady failed to show. I guess he was a little scared from his previous encounter with the teabaggers up at the pizza joint in Conroe.

So that left us with Tyler Russell and Scott Baker, both teabaggers who have taken the oath to support Glenn Beck's 9/12 cult.

After today's news that the Tea Party actually polls better than the Republican Party on a generic ballot, I was wondering how much trouble the Tea Party candidates will pose to incumbents like Brady. Could they really do some political damage, or at least make guys like Brady blow a bunch of money in defense? The performance at the debate would surely give me a clue.

Unfortunately, I was unpleasantly surprised. About 50 people showed up, hardly the large turnouts that they claim at their actual Tea Parties. I guess if you can't bring your Obama=Hitler signs with you, it just takes all the fun out of the event. What respectable teabagger wants to go to a stuffy "establishment" event like a debate? But, I digress.

All that I knew about the candidates was that both were Air Force veterans and fairly young (Russell is 28 and Baker is 34). Baker started out his statement with some pretty typical teabag fare. Then, came Russell's turn. "I'm Tyler Russell and I'm running to be your next Congressman" he exclaimed with his high-pitched screech. Yikes. A few people actually laughed out loud.

He then rattled on with the usual drivel. The debate went on, with questions directed from the audience, not from the moderator. While both candidates sounded like they were reading from a Heritage Foundation handout (they literally did a few times), Russell's drivel was more of the hard line, doctrinaire sort. He looks at compromise as total capitulation and thinks if he just shows up to Washington and sticks to his "conservative principles" that everyone will see the light and fall into line. Baker, while offering similar hyperbole, is the more moderate or practical (if you can even say that) of the teabaggers. Yes, apparently the teabag comes in a few flavors.

For instance, while Baker says we may need to reduce some of the unfunded mandates of the U.S. Department of Education, Russell says we should just abolish the entire Department, regardless of the consequences. Where Baker says we should go after employers who employ illegal immigrants, Russell says we should send them all back to their country of origin. We'll be covering more of the actual substance of their debate in a later post.

All in all, looking purely through the teabag prism, I'd have to say that Scott Baker won the debate. He was far more articulate than Tyler Russell and his answers, while still pretty nutty, seemed thought out. Russell's delivery was terrible. He stumbled around and didn't seem to know what he was talking about, calling border guards "INS agents" when the INS doesn't even exist anymore and even if it did, they don't guard the border.  Every now and again he would employ some blatantly obvious maneuver to throw in one of his great personal attributes, which is only good politics if you are smooth at it. After each question, he'd puff up like a chicken getting ready to lay an egg and seemed a tad bit too emotional. He came off as a big braggart whose ideological fervor crowds out any shred of pragmatism. Political beliefs aside, he's not the kind of guy you want representing you in Congress.

All in all, it's really a shame. If the teabaggers could mount a decent challenge to Kevin Brady, they might actually come close to beating him in a Republican primary. Stranger things have happened and I think many Republicans are underestimating the grassroots power that these groups have in a primary. But instead, they have split their teabag vote amongst two candidates, neither of whom possess the stature or skills to beat Kevin Brady.

And that's more of a reason why it was a shame that Kevin Brady didn't show up tonight. He claims he has votes on Monday night, but I think he truly was recollecting his previous scuffles with the tea zealots. Had he been there tonight, I'm sure it would have been less akin to a Jr. High debate, and more akin to a conservative form of mud wrestling.

Conroe Tea Party- July 2nd, 2009

Click here for pics

On July 2nd I had the opportunity to attend the 'tea party' for the northern Houston area held in Conroe. It was an event held to protest what the organizers believe is the gradual encroachment of high taxes, more government involvement in people's lives and a lessening of individual freedoms. There was a lot of complaining about 'socialism' and the feeling that things in this country have been heading in the wrong direction since President Obama was sworn into office in January. Despite the attempt by the organizers to deny the partisan preferences of the gathering the mask would occasionally slip. The best speaker of the night was undoubtedly a charismatic African-American pastor who preached the evils of liberalism. Behind him was a photograph of a billboard put up in a predominantly African-American part of Houston which makes the assertion that MLK was a Republican. (This is a half truth typical of conservatives on the civil rights debate. Its akin to saying that Strom Thurmond was a segregationist Democrat. Both statements were true, but both men eventually aligned themselves with the party that was more welcoming to their goals.)

I had expected the usual extemist talk heard among the far-right and I wasn't disappointed. The speakers repeatedly invoked the idea that the United States is a Christian nation founded on Biblical principles. Its strange that this seems so confusing to many people but the Founding Fathers took pains to keep religion separate from our government. The only mention of religion in our Constitution is the First Amendments guarantee that people can practice freely and that no official church would be organized.

The main topic off the night centered on gripes from conservatives that Obamas health care plan would result in socialized medicine which would force people to accept "rationing" from government bureaucrats. One problem with that complaint is that forty six million people currently have very little access to health care because they lack health insurance. Most Americans currently have health insurance but they're often denied coverage because 'managed care' is basically designed to deny as much care to the members as possible. There are currently hundreds of thousands of people working in the health insurance industry and many of them are basically 'bean-counters' who's job is to make sure that very little is actually spent on tests or treatments. The currently situation has an eerie parallel to what the conservatives at this tea party claimed to fear most: health insurance that often denies important treatments to 'control costs.'

I left at the end off the event almost feeling a little bad for the sponsors. It was sparcely attended and the crowd often seemed to lack enthusiasm. Overall the event was a strange mixture of extremist thought and boredom. I've included photos of the 'crowd' to demonstrate the sparce attendance and of some of the signs so that the reader can get a sense of the pet issues which motivated those in attendance. This wasn't your run of the mill Republican gathering. I guess there is a limited demand for extremism.