The Tea Party Movement: “Why Now?”

People keep asking, "Where was the Tea Party when… [Insert this or that affront to the Constitution that occurred during the Bush administration]?"

It’s a legitimate question because there were indeed many affronts to the Constitution during the Bush years and before, so I’ll answer that question:

It was simmering.

What is now called the “Tea Party Movement” has been simmering for years just below the surface of an increasingly collective and Progressive political juggernaut known as the American two party system. Future “Tea Baggers” have felt helpless and hopeless for decades over the choices they were given between candidates that would say anything to get into office and do anything to stay there, while an ever increasing percentage of the electorate became dependant on government subsidies and handouts. Election and re-election became dependant on pandering to those with their hands out, both rich and poor, at the expense of the middle class and the nation’s true producers.

Early organization of the Tea Party Movement was triggered  by the Wall Street bailouts during the Bush administration and not by actions of the incoming Obama administration, but that administration feels confident in blatantly stating, in action and word, its Progressive agenda and disregard for the Constitution - partially because of the apparent mandate that brought it to power, causing it to foster a mistaken, though understandable, assumption that a majority of Americans are in favor of its agenda. This administration’s blatancy is also due to its true belief in Progressivism with enough arrogance to think that they know what’s right for America and that the End Justifies the Means, even if that fickle majority of Americans doesn’t agree.

Heretofore hopeless and helpless patriots have thus been jarred to action and what began as a small tax protest has drawn followers across the nation searching for an outlet for their frustrations, a vehicle to fight back, and a Movement that finally gives them voice. The Obama administration is not the primary cause of the Tea Party Movement; it’s simply the catalyst of its growth. The underlying cause is decades of the central government using taxpayer money to buy votes and grow itself beyond proper boundaries as defined by the Constitution. The cause is now, more than anything else, the defense of that Constitution as the Framers intended it to be interpreted.

With very few exceptions, those associated with the Tea Party Movement are not racists, religious fanatics, or “wing-nuts”.  They’re conservative patriots, common citizens of the United States, who have been concerned for years about the path that their beloved country has been traveling, and they finally have a means of expressing their fears and frustrations with hope of being heard.