It seems that Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts has turned Mike Huckabee into a Tea Party true believer.
A few months back, when tea party activists were making the Doug Hoffman/Dede Scozzafava the proving ground for ideological loyalty, Huckabee was conspicuously absent until the very last minute when he jumped in over after Scozzafava had dropped out.
Similarly, in the Brown race, Huckabee basically sat on the sidelines, but in the wake of his win, Huckabee is suddenly climbing aboard the tea party bandwagon, first claiming that members of Congress "should be tarred and feathered as the original tea partiers would have done" and now declaring that "The Tea Party Movement is Changing America" and that he is thrilled to be a part of it:
The 21st century Tea Party movement is changing America. That’s not an overstatement, it is a fact.
The original Tea Party happened on December 16, 1773, when 5,000 patriots gathered at the Old South Meeting House, a site used for both worship and politics. Our Tea Party ancestors tossed the tea overboard to protest “taxation without representation” because they weren’t permitted to elect a member to the British parliament.
Today we have seen our government turn a deaf ear to the people, pushing through bailouts and stimulus spending without representation. For months they’ve tried their best to push through a health care bill that few wanted, only to be stopped again this time by the Massachusetts Tea Party and the election of Scott Brown on January 19.
But mark my words: Congressional Democrats and President Obama haven’t given up.
Now we are hearing rumors that the Senate may try to use reconciliation to get around the filibuster. Just another procedural maneuver to thwart the will of the people. Every member of Congress knows in their heart that the American people don’t want the health care bill that Congress has before it and yet they continue to push for it out of arrogance.The Tea Party movement was started by Americans insisting on fiscal responsibility in government, limited government based on the Constitution, and the free market system. They played a large role in the town hall meetings in August, at which lawmakers got an earful, they helped propel Republicans to victory in Virginia and New Jersey in November and again this month in Massachusetts. Now it’s time for the Tea Party patriots to step up again and help raise the pressure on Congress to bury Obama-care once and for all. I know they will. And I will step up with them.
