What the Tea Partiers Actually Believe

For all the torrent of Tea Party coverage in the mainstream media, amazingly little of it focuses on what the tea partiers themselves are actually saying.

It is self-evidently obvious that this is am authentic grassroots movement, with a diversity of voices speaking from a diversity of towns across the nation. Ultimately the tea-party message comes through loud and clear in the “Contract From America,” a document which Ryan Hecker, a Houston tea-party activist and the national coordinator for the Tea Party Patriots, has labored to bring forth into the light of day.

Half a million people have voted in favor of it in less than two months, the Contract is the closest thing to a blueprint of tea-party policy goals and beliefs.

The top priority of the Contract is to protect the Constitution. After that comes the rejection of cap-and-trade, and demands for a balanced budget, and fundamental tax reform. Then comes number five: the restoration of fiscal sanity and constitutionally limited government in Washington D.C.

It's no accident that two of the top-five concerns of the tea partiers involve the Constitution.

Rounding out the Contract, the bottom-five planks focus on ending runaway government spending; defunding, repealing, and replacing government-run health care; passing an all-of-the-above energy policy; stopping pork-barrel spending; and ending tax hikes.

What stands out with the Contract from America is its emphasis on constitutional limits and restraints on everything government does: legislation, spending, taxing, and control of the economy. Can it be any clearer that no one in the tea parties trusts Washington at all?

With the Contract, tea partiers are reminding all of us of the vital importance of the Constitution in protecting our freedoms. They are demanding a rebirth of the notion of the consent of the governed. We don't work for the government: it works for us.

The tea partiers are free-market true-believers. who desire a return to the Reaganism of the 1980s – a time of freedom and prosperity in this country. In particular, their calls for a balanced budget (plank three), restoring fiscal responsibility (plank five), ending out-of-control government spending (plank six), and stopping pork (plank nine) highlight populist opposition to runaway government spending/government power.

Clearly the tea partiers don’t trust Congress to solve this problem, so they intend to use the heavy artillery of constitutional restraint.

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Contract FROM America
We, the citizens of the United States of America, call upon those seeking to represent us in public office to sign the Contract from America and by doing so ...