The Tea Party Is Driving America into Bankruptcy

Because they oppose Obama’s health care reforms, a few radicals are setting fire to the foundations of the U.S. economy. If they persist, the whole world will feel the effects.

A respected columnist writing for The Washington Post recently opined that the Republicans in the House of Representatives were “like a bunch of three-year-olds playing with matches.” He likened them to naughty children whose parents were unable to discipline them.

Like most such comparisons, this one is also lacking: Even three-year-old kids who set fire to their rooms are generally bright enough to learn not to do it a second time. But not the tea party gang within the Republican Party’s conservative wing in the House of Representatives. These radical-populist representatives are unteachable: Now they’ve set fire to the foundations of the oldest legislative democracy in the world. Through pure obstructionism, they persist in driving the United States government into bankruptcy.

Never before in American history has a basically stable principle such as the separation of powers been as threatened as it is today. Never before has it been more clearly shown that a truly tiny group of irresponsible representatives is capable of turning the productive cooperation of politicians, the president and the Supreme Court into a divisive, chaotic mess. Those few ruthless individuals with no principles only have to outshout the rest for it all to work. The founding fathers suspected as much, but they had no way of predicting the rise of the tea party that would ignore the spirit of the Constitution whenever doing so suited its own purposes.

And now it really does suit the purposes of this small but decisive portion of the Republican Party. The tea party faction has taken the Republican Party — and with it the rest of the nation — hostage. They simply and openly declare they will vote for a new budget if — and only if — the health care reforms popularly known as Obamacare, which they detest, are put on hold. That is something Obama cannot accept. To do so would constitute a gross violation of parliamentary practice. Obamacare is his most important program; besides, it already has the blessings of the democratic process and the American court system. The Congress of the United States passed it into law in the spring of 2012 and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld its constitutionality later that summer. People unwilling to accept those facts are not politicians; they only insult our intelligence and are downright dangerous to boot.

One must assume the tea party representatives are familiar with the law. They have even repeatedly given private civics lessons to more moderate Republicans. Some of the moderates have also warned that this intransigence can only be helpful to the Democrats and damaging to Republican interests in future presidential elections.

But the radicals on the far right have not been persuaded. They are driven by the abject fear that they might lose their congressional mandate in 2014 due to their own legislative failures: They got their start by opposing Obama’s health care reforms.

To them, Obamacare is the unacceptable interference of government in the lives of private citizens. But since this conservative faction was elected to Congress, they have suffered one defeat after another. They have made 43 attempts to nullify Obamacare, but the law is still on the books. Even the conservative U.S. Supreme Court has upheld its constitutionality.

The anti-Obama demagogues have totally failed in their main mission, but not even Obama’s re-election in 2012 has deterred them. Sheer frustration over that defeat explains their current rabid right-wing populist behavior. The fact that they have driven the government to the brink of insolvency is, in their view, the most notable tea party achievement thus far.

It can safely be said that the world won’t end with the mandatory furloughing of a few 100,000 government employees for a few days and the closing of some museums or in the event the Department of Agriculture is unable to give out advice to American farmers; it’s still mainly just an American problem.

But it’s unlikely to remain so. The radical wing of the Republican Party will be so power-drunk from this outing that they will want to add fuel to their fire in a couple of weeks. That’s when the U.S. debt limit will have to be increased. If it is not, not only will the American government go broke, the entire nation — the world’s largest economy — will be threatened with bankruptcy. The consequences for the U.S. economy will be catastrophic; they will be unpleasant for Europe and the rest of the world as well.

But the arsonists remain unperturbed by that. If they aren’t bothered by the hardships they’re willing to inflict on their own fellow citizens, why should they care about the rest of the world?