The Coup Attempt

I wonder what the press coverage would be like if the left faction of the Congressional Dems decided to shut down the government and threaten to let the country slide into default unless they got single payer health care or tighter gun control laws.

If this sets a precedent, and a faction of a minority party can make policy by threatening to blow up the whole house, then what's the point of having elections?  They won't mean anything anymore (a lot less than they do now).  We could be like the old Soviet Union and have pro forma elections that put a fig leaf of legitimacy on policies and candidates that were decided in advance.
I suspect that this doesn't bother Teabagistan because they are The People, the "real Americans."  Everyone else (the remaining 75% - 80%) are all parvenus and usurpers as far as they are concerned.

The press describes the Tea Party as a "grass roots" movement.  Sure, there's a lot of riled up bitter old white people out there in the rural areas and gated suburbs, but they've been angry since 1952 when the GOP passed over Robert Taft for Eisenhower for the Presidential nomination (some would argue that they've been mad since 1865).  They've been angry at the GOP Establishment since William F. Buckley booted off his show John Birchers and anyone else who couldn't or wouldn't distinguish between a liberal and a communist.  How "grass roots" is a movement generously funded by right wing billionaires, think tanks, and corporate lobbies?  The young dirty hippies who made Occupy happen didn't have anything like the Koch brothers to pay their bills.  They also didn't have a whole teevee network devote its full energies to propagating their movement (PBS and NPR's coverage of the Occupy movement was patronizing, skeptical, and frequently hostile).   Tea Party rallies could get enthusiastically friendly live coverage on Fox News no matter how small (or how crazy) the turnout at their Washington DC demonstrations.  Occupy had to rely on its own resourcefulness and live-stream their events online.

And now Teabagistan threatens what amounts to a coup d'etat if all 3 branches don't rescind or remake a law that was duly passed by both houses of Congress, reviewed by the Supreme Court, and effectively passed by the voters in the last Presidential election.  As far as I'm concerned, they want nothing less than a reversal of the 2012 election.

There's been a lot of good writing on this, but the best in my opinion is by James Fallows at the Atlantic here, here, here, here and here.


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Fascinating analysis of the Tea Party constituency driving all of this by Michael Lind:

The Tea Party right is not only disproportionately Southern but also disproportionately upscale. Its social base consists of what, in other countries, are called the “local notables”—provincial elites whose power and privileges are threatened from above by a stronger central government they do not control and from below by the local poor and the local working class. Even though, like the Jacksonians and Confederates of the nineteenth century, they have allies in places like Wisconsin and Massachusetts, the dominant members of the Newest Right are white Southern local notables—the Big Mules, as the Southern populist Big Jim Folsom once described the lords of the local car dealership, country club and chamber of commerce. These are not the super-rich of Silicon Valley or Wall Street (although they have Wall Street allies). The Koch dynasty rooted in Texas notwithstanding, those who make up the backbone of the Newest Right are more likely to be millionaires than billionaires, more likely to run low-wage construction or auto supply businesses than multinational corporations. They are second-tier people on a national level but first-tier people in their states and counties and cities.