Tea Party movement puts a scratch in leviathan, but too little too late?

From:
Wow … Just Wow
(The American Conservative) -- by Kelley Vlahos --

Twenty-six Republicans blocked what has largely become rubber-stamping exercises in Patriot Act renewals yesterday. Now that is news one doesn’t hear everyday, nor ever. For nine years I have been writing about the Patriot Act, an expansive set of super-law enforcement provisions designed to better pursue terrorists in the wake of 9/11, but instead have affected all Americans as they have been applied to regular criminal investigations, too, and contributed to the overall creep of the domestic national security state.

That the new Republican-held House has been the first in years to “just say no” to the Patriot Act is ironic, given that it was the White House and Republicans in Congress that rammed it all down everyone’s throats just as the dust was settling on Ground Zero in October 2001. Since then, lonely libertarians like Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, have joined forces with liberals on the Democratic side to challenge the new laws when they come up for extensions, but to no avail. In fact, sneaky Democrats on the House side last February tucked the sun-setting Patriot Act provisions into a shoe-in Medicare reform bill for an ultimately easy glide through Congress in 2010.

Sure, Democrats on the the Senate side, like former Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., have fought valiantly against both the GOP and their own lame Democratic leadership to stop what many federal courts have have deemed unconstitutional provisions of the Patriot Act, but again, got nowhere in the end. The influence of tough-talking GOP — you know, Republicans like say, Liz Cheney, who say that if you don’t support waterboarding you’re “coddling terrorists “– on looming re-election campaigns has always, in the end, overwhelmed any Democratic resolve to “reform” the laws (wasn’t that what Barack Obama promised when he was running for president? He even once said he’d repeal them).

Thanks in large part to these 26 Republicans, yesterday’s vote fell seven votes short of the two-thirds majority needed to pass the bill, which most people assumed was a fait accompli. The sunsetting measures contained in the bill include the controversial roving wiretaps provision (which allows the Feds to tap any communication device of a target without having to specify who or what they are targeting), the “lone wolf” provision, and the infamous Section 215, which forces libraries and businesses to turn over personal records and “any tangible thing” connected to suspects, with accompanying gag orders, in the course of an investigation.

The list of dissenting Republicans included nine freshmen, suggesting a heavy Tea Party influence...MORE...LINK
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Chris Moore comments:

Limousine conservative “national security” welfare king GOP insiders have long had a sweetheart deal with limousine liberal welfare queen Big Government lefties: You give us a blank check on “defense,” we’ll give you a blank check on government unions and “social welfare,” and we’ll all get rich at the public trough by taking the lion’s share for ourselves and charging the debt to future generations.

These plundering, post-Christian, liberal-capitalist Establishment lowlife’s are the reason this country has gone from the cat-bird seat coming out of the Cold War to the toilet in just over 20 years. As I’ve written before, never have so few plundered and squandered so much so fast.

The Tea Party movement is a start, but only a seriously draconian evisceration of the statist-corporatist leviathan and its works has any shot at salvaging any kind of future for America’s children, because these people aren’t real patriots and nationalists, nor are they “compassionate,” but rather bloodless elites, and they couldn’t care less if the country goes bankrupt other than how it might affect their bottom line.