Invitation to a 'Tea Party'

By FRANK MIELE

Apparently, I'm ahead of my time, but just by about three years.

It was in June of 2006 when I wrote my column proposing a new American revolt based on the Boston Tea Party.

As I wrote then, "We need something grander than a sophomoric prank to protest the inattention of Congress and the president to the sovereign powers of the American people. We need to get a message to the politicians in Washington that they do not own the country; they just run it - for us."

At the time, I was protesting against the Kennedy-McCain immigration bill, which would have granted sovereign citizenship to millions of illegal aliens. Fortunately, that bill was stopped cold by the American people.

But that was just one isolated skirmish. There has been a continuous assault on the sovereignty of the American people by the governing class for many years, including efforts to reinterpret or just plain ignore the Constitution and most recently the attempt to confiscate the wealth of the American people through the guise of a stimulus package, a housing industry rescue plan, a bank bailout and much more.

It appears (and we can only hope) that this may have been the last straw.

Rick Santelli of CNBC ignited the spark for a nationwide rebellion with his Feb. 19 on-air blast against the mortgage bailout, and it wasn't the logic of his presentation that made it "the rant heard round the world." Instead, it was the passion he felt when he talked about the federal government spending our money to rescue individuals and companies from the consequences of their own bad decisions.

"The government is promoting bad behavior," he said on the floor of the old Chicago Mercantile Exchange (now known as the CME Group). Turning to the traders behind him, he said, "This is America! How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor's mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can't pay their bills?" Needless to say, no hands were raised and booing ensued. A bit later, Santelli mentioned the idea for a Chicago Tea Party, probably in jest, and then investor Wilbur Ross Jr. perhaps not jokingly congratulated Santelli on his "new incarnation as a revolutionary leader."

Santelli took it in stride: "Somebody needs one," he said. "I'll tell you what. If you read our Founding Fathers, people like Benjamin Franklin and Jefferson … what we're doing in this country now is making them roll over in their graves."

Well, maybe the citizens of this fine land are about to wake up to what's going on. On Friday, protests were held in Washington, D.C., and across the country by a group called the New American Tea Party, which also calls itself "The Don't Tread on Us Coalition."

The idea is the same one proposed by me three years ago, by Santelli last month, and by Samuel Adams in 1773 - assert the power of the people against tyranny in all its forms.

Right now, as Santelli pointed out, the immediate crisis is the theft from U.S. taxpayers of their hard-earned wealth to reward bad behavior. That has certainly energized the citizenry, but the question is whether the public will return to quiescence when the next tax-rebate check (or some other bribe from Uncle Sam) shows up in the mail.

The problem which the current economic crisis has made plain is that the federal government has way too much power. Such centralized government was never the intention of the founders of our country, who enshrined in the Bill of Rights the notion that, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

This simple language appears in the 10th Amendment, and would seem clearly intended to limit the powers of the federal government to those powers specifically and expressly enumerated in the Constitution. Yet remarkably, for more than 200 years, and most particularly in the past 50 years, the federal government has brazenly and notoriously ignored the 10th Amendment and found a way to do pretty much whatever it wants.

Thus, very possibly the best strategy for the American people who worry about an out-of-control government is to reassert their 10th Amendment rights. Such a movement is well under way, and at least 21 states have passed legislative resolutions claiming their sovereignty and independence from federal mandates not covered by the U.S. Constitution.

Montana was well on its way to becoming the 22nd state on the list, except the resolution apparently fell victim to the 50/50 split in the House of Representatives when Democrats decided to kill the bill in committee last week. What's most disconcerting about the death of the bill is that it was handled on a party-line vote that reflected the hubris that is close to rotting our entire democracy from the inside out. It's about time legislators start to pay attention to their real bosses, the voters, instead of kow-towing to their party bosses.

House Bill 26 would have told Washington, D.C., that Montana is tired of being pushed around. It would have declared that the Constitution did not "give unlimited powers to the federal government" and "that if Montana accepts … inappropriate interpretations [of the Constitution] and continues to allow Congress to exercise unbridled authority, it would be surrendering its own form of government."

Brave words, and necessary ones. Let's face it: Sooner or later the people of America must take back their own government - or their government will take over them.

n Frank Miele is managing editor of the Daily Inter Lake and writes a weekly column. E-mail responses may be sent to edit@dailyinterlake.com