In "Setting the Record Straight: The Tea Party and the Constitutional Powers of the Federal Government," CAC's Elizabeth Wydra and David Gans maintain that it is important that a "national conversation engage the real Constitution of the United States and not the ‘Constitution According to the Tea Party.'"
Wydra and Gans note that Tea Party leaders have been loudly arguing that the Constitution sharply limits the powers of the federal government and essentially sets up a "weak national government, incapable of addressing national problems like the health care crisis in America." The authors say the Tea Party's arguments of such a constitution do not "stand up to the test of text and history."
As noted in the Issue Brief, Tea Partiers and their supporters are bent out of shape over the recently enacted health care reform law, maintaining that the measure goes way beyond the powers delegated to the federal government by the Constitution.
Wydra and Gans write:
Tea Partiers declare that they want to go back to the ideas of the Constitution, but
what they really want is to return to the Articles of Confederation. The Tea Party's principal claim that our country's Founders established a sharply limited, weak national government fits more with the failed, discarded Articles of Confederation than with the Founders' second and lasting attempt to craft a national charter, our Constitution.
...
The Articles of Confederation, adopted by the Second Continental Congress in 1777 and ratified in 1781, established a confederacy built merely on a ‘firm league of friendship' between thirteen independent states. There was only a single branch of national government, the Congress, which was made up of state delegations. Congress under the Articles of Confederation had some powers, but was given no means to execute those powers. Congress could not directly tax individuals or legislate upon them; it had no express power to make law that would be binding in the states' courts and no general power to establish national courts, and it could raise money only by making requests to the states.
The Tea Party's distortion of the Constitution includes intentional denial of the constitutional amendments that have "added to Congress's express constitutional powers, ensuring that Congress has all the tools it needs to address national problems and protect the constitutional rights of all Americans," Wydra and Gans write. "Indeed, most of the amendments added to the Constitution during the 19th and 20th Centuries expanded the power of the federal government. The Tea Party's reading of the Constitution depends on ignoring or repealing these critical amendments."
See CAC's entire report here. For further discussion of the Tea Party's twist on the Constitution, see Wydra's recent article for The Huffington Post.
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court heard