That Lt. Gov. Phil Bryant and many Mississippi Republicans are aligning themselves with the tea party comes as little surprise. Bryant told The Clarion-Ledger last week that tea-party beliefs "are much like mine."
Republican lawmakers have largely embraced the cantankerous, almost exclusively white party, but the GOP should be nervous about championing its call. Tea partiers can make radical demands, ranging from the Mississippi Tea Party's dangerous call for a return of the McCarthy-esque General Legislative Investigating Committee to its hypocritical push for phasing out welfare programs.
State lawmakers created the GLIC in the 1950s to study "un-American activities" and present its findings at every regular session. We have no idea what constitutes "un-American" in the modern tea party's agenda, but the information the GLIC gathered throughout the 1950s and 1960s commonly dealt with activities "intended to overthrow, destroy, alter or assist in the overthrow, destruction or alterations" of the U.S. or state constitutions, and the State Sovereignty Commission used its reports to justify laws requiring racial segregation.
During the 1950s, the GLIC—now defunct—had a habit of linking communist activity to the desegregation movement, but we're not sure how something like that can be used to press the tea party's agenda. GLIC investigations wouldn't get much done on the local level regarding the recent change in U.S. health-care laws because those revisions must be changed at the federal level. The same argument goes for gun-control laws and laws guiding the states on property taxes—two other issues tea partiers tend to abhor.
The tea party push to roll back welfare programs is hypocritical because of the close proximity the average tea partier has with the nation's welfare system. Look at the crowd at any tea party rally in Mississippi, and you'll find people who qualify for Social Security (or will soon) making the party's call for welfare restriction appear disingenuous, at best.
We also don't see the party's push to eliminate property taxes in favor of a higher sales tax getting traction among the majority of Mississippians, who hover more closely to the national poverty level than any other state in the nation. Imagine the annual tax deduction for property taxes that many Mississippians take on their federal income taxes disappearing and being replaced with a higher sales tax on groceries, gasoline, that new car part you need—we don't see that happening, nor should it.
In fact, if most Mississippians understood the total implications of the Mississippi tea-party message beyond "get Obama out of the White House," they'd probably drop the platform like a dead rat.
Keep that in mind as you try to tie a tea bag to your GOP lapel.
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