No legislation without deliberation: Republicans can learn from the nationwide Tea Party movement

All good children come home to share victories achieved abroad. This afternoon’s Tea Party protest in Seattle is just such a homecoming. Reminiscent of another Seattle creation – “The Wave” – the Tea Party movement began as a gut-level reaction by a mom-blogger, known as “Liberty Belle”; a need to get up and yell. Channeling her outrage into assembling an effective Presidents’ Day rally earlier this month was that critical individual act that is at the core of most successful movements for change. Although the purpose of that first demonstration was to protest the stimulus package that had moved through Congress, the bill that had not yet been signed into law by President Obama, Liberty Belle’s banner would be replicated in Denver to coincide with Obama’s signing of the bill into law. That was only the beginning.

After Denver, the Tea Party chased Obama’s stimulus victory safari to Arizona and then broke loose to spawn sister events in many other cities. As with any good Wave, the Tea Party returns to Seattle as a full-fledged movement that has coordinated scores of Tea Party gatherings in cities across the country, including a protest in Lafayette Park in Washington, D.C. (Michelle Malkin has a great list going on her site.) All excitations are that today’s protest will be larger, louder and more focused than its progenitor.

Despite the aristocratically-styled arrogance that seems to be the style guide of the White House and the Democratic congressional leadership, the Tea Party phenomenon must be causing some nagging concerns to legislators in the nation’s capital as it has found life beyond speaking out against a bill that has already been made into law. What started in its infancy as a ragged coalition of libertarians and Republicans (not noted for getting along very well), waving signs, eating symbolic roast pork and donning false pig snouts, has coalesced into a more sharply-focused declaration of outrage not about the product coming out of Washington, D.C., but about the process. While the President and his administration don on a worried clown face and tap the panic button with the neurotic compulsion of a video poker junkie, and the Democrat Congress takes full advantage of the diversion to pick the pockets of future taxpayers, the brick has been tied to the accelerator pedal of the legislative process. There have been other times in which process has superseded product as a motivation to take to the streets. The Tea Party movement has rescued a fading vestigial echo of pre-Revolutionary outrage, the acutely distilled frustration that surfaces when the social contract between government and governed is breached.

The real value of the Tea Party movement, then, is not in sending a message to the President or the Congress because - let's face it - they are not listening. Conservatives and libertarians are cheering on the Tea Partiers because the success of their cause will be something much greater than the stopping of a specific piece of legislation. The movement’s purpose is broader and more crucial to repairing the tattering fabric of American society, to revive in citizens a dedication to the principle that a government must not create laws without public deliberation. It was an idea that Obama himself was very much in support of during the campaign.

No legislation without deliberation should become the rallying cry of conservatives, liberals and moderates alike, but specifically for opponents of the sort of measures currently being moved through Congress at warp speed, creating a space for debate is essential. The causes of the current economic downturn are complex. The effects of proposed solutions must be considered before votes are cast. Deliberation should have never become an optional portion of the process, and its priority must be restored if these laws and the government that is enacting them can expect to be given legitimacy. Citizens have the right to organically grapple with issues on the basis of information and reason, rather than fear and false urgency. At the very least, reading the actual legislation prior to passage would ordinarily be considered essential.

Even if we agree that our nation’s economic state is the equivalent of a house engulfed in flame, legislators and voters need to decide with the input of constituents and experts if what they are pointing at their home is a fire hose or a flamethrower.

Fighting fire with fire, community organizing such as the Tea Partiers have done may be the most effective approach to take in opposing what some see as a wholesale demolition of the capitalist American economy. It is poetic that the organizing will be done to thwart political aims of the Godfather of community organization, President Barack Obama.

(The Seattle Tea Party Protest will be held February 27th at Westlake Center, 12:15-1:15 p.m.)