Is There Room In Congress For A Tea Party Caucus... Filled With Supporters Of Bush's No-Strings-Attached Wall Street Bailout?

Last week, two of the most extremist crackpots on the American political landscape, Michele Bachmann (R-MN) and non-Board certified Rand Paul (R-KY), each promised to start a Tea Party Caucus in Congress. “I think I will be part of a nucleus with [Sens.] Jim DeMint (R-SC) and Tom Coburn (R-OK), who are unafraid to stand up,” Paul said. “If we get another loud voice in there, like Mike Lee from Utah or Sharron Angle from Nevada, there will be a new nucleus.” Two more pathetic panderers would be hard to find anywhere-- and the fact that this comes during the same week that the NAACP has asked the tea partiers to ostracize the racists among them, makes one wonder about the racism that is always hovering above the heads of these two far right politicians. One has to wonder, outside the Old Confederacy, what mainstream politicians would join such a caucus. In fact, Shailagh Murray did just that in yesterday's Washington Post. Senator Bob Corker, a mainstream conservative from Tennessee, ran for the hills when Murray managed to ask him. "I don't know about that," he replied with a nervous laugh. "I'm not sure I should be participating in this story."

Republican lawmakers see plenty of good in the tea party, but they also see reasons to worry. The movement, which has ignited passion among conservative voters and pushed big government to the forefront of the 2010 election debate, has also stirred quite a bit of controversy. Voters who don't want to privatize Social Security or withdraw from the United Nations could begin to see the tea party and the Republican Party as one and the same.

NRSC head, John Cornyn, worried that Rand Paul's and Sharron Angle's fanatic views-- which he politely calls "provocative"-- will tar the whole party with their destructive apocalyptic nihilism, is very cautious. He wants wins in Kentucky and Nevada, but he's petrified that if lunatic fringe teabaggers like Paul and Angle become the face of the GOP, the party will be doomed outside of the Deep South.

Former Senate majority leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.), now a D.C. lobbyist, warned that a robust bloc of rabble-rousers spells further Senate dysfunction. "We don't need a lot of Jim DeMint disciples," Lott said in an interview. "As soon as they get here, we need to co-opt them."

But Lott said he's not expecting a tea-party sweep. "I still have faith in the visceral judgment of the American people," he said.

Sen. Robert F. Bennett (R-Utah), who failed to survive his party's nominating process after running afoul of local tea-party activists, told a local Associated Press reporter last week that the GOP had jeopardized its chance to win Senate seats in Republican-leaning states such as Nevada and Kentucky and potentially in Colorado, where tea-party favorite Ken Buck has surged ahead of Lt. Gov. Jane Norton in their primary battle.

Bennett warned that such candidates are stealing attention from top GOP recruits such as Mike Castle in Delaware and John Hoeven in North Dakota, both of whom are favored to win seats held by Democrats. Nor are they helping the Republican Party to resolve its deeper identity problems, he said.

"That's my concern, that at the moment there is not a cohesive Republican strategy of this is what we're going to do," Bennett told the AP. "And certainly among the tea-party types there's clearly no strategy of this is what we're going to do."

Democrats are hopeful that voters will focus on the potential consequences of tea-party proposals as they decide whether to hand over control of Congress to Republicans. Democratic Party officials said their easiest target, given the recent economic meltdown, is the push to privatize Social Security. A recent NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll found that 48 percent of voters were "very uncomfortable" with the idea of private retirement accounts, while another 18 percent had reservations.

In Nevada, when state Sen. Joe Heck told a local reporter that he was open to a limited and voluntary version of Social Security privatization, his Democratic opponent, Rep. Dina Titus, declared he had endorsed "Sharron Angle and her radical agenda." The Senate candidate has said she wants to phase out Social Security and Medicare as government programs.

Democrats also are trying to tarnish Ron Johnson, a DeMint-endorsed businessman who is backed by tea-party groups and establishment Republicans in his bid take on Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.). When Paul raised his caucus idea, Democrats put the question to Johnson.

"The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is asking Tea Partier Ron Johnson to tell Wisconsin voters if he would join Rand Paul's 'tea party caucus,' " read a DSCC statement released Thursday. Johnson's campaign did not respond to The Post's request for comment.

The teabaggers claim their main motivation is not racism-- although if you've spent time at a teabagger rally you know that for most of the participants it's almost entirely about angry, primitive, barely disguised racism-- but about how Congress voted for the Wall Street bailouts. Yet few of them seem to recall that the big no-strings-attached Wall Street bailout happened before the 2008 election, was proposed by Bush and pushed through both Houses of Congress by... Republicans! In the Senate 34 Republican followed Bush and McCain to help the bill pass 74-25. GOP stalwarts like Mitch McConnell (R-KY), John Thune (R-SD), John Ensign (R-NV), Richard Burr (R-NC), Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Tom Coburn (R-OK, yes the same guy who Rand Paul expects to help him for the Senate Teabagger Caucus), John Cornyn (R-TX), Jon Kyl (R-AZ), and Orrin Hatch (R-UT), to name a few, all voted for the bailout. Today teabaggers are campaigning for Burr, even though his Democratic opponent, North Carolina Secretary of State Elaine Marshall, is on the record as having said she would never have voted for the bailout without real protections for consumers and small businesses. Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold did vote NO, but his state's crazed teabaggers are getting behind some corrupt multimillionaire who knows how to pander to them, though few doubt he would have voted in favor of the bailout-- which would have served his personal financial interests, the same way he supports and has defended BP without disclosing that he owns hundreds of thousands of dollars in BP stock.

In the House, the bill was defeated-- and then Wall Street shills and bailout advocates John Boehner (R-OH), Paul Ryan (R-WI), Roy Blunt (R-MO), John Boozman (R-AR), Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), Mark Kirk (R-IL), Zach Wamp (R-TN), Mike Castle (R-DE), and Mary Fallin (R-OK) went to work twisting the arms of reluctant Republicans to vote for it-- after Bush made it even worse the following week. And it passed with 91 Republican votes. And the teabaggers, who claim this is their #1 issue, are trying to make the bill's architect, John Boehner, Speaker of the House, and pushing for it's biggest GOP cheer-leader, Paul Ryan, to be in contention for the presidency and support bailout voters Blunt, Kirk, Boozman, and Castle for Senate openings and Hoekstra, Wamp and Fallin for governorships.

Another bailout champion, Joe Wilson (R-SC), is deemed by his boorish behavior at the State of the Union racist enough to become a teabagger demi-god even though he voted for the bailout and his Democratic opponent, Rob Miller, opposed it. Similarly teabaggers are supporting re-election bids by Ken Calvert (R-CA), Dan Lungren (R-CA), Wally Herger (R-CA), David Dreier (R-CA), John Campbell (R-CA), Pat Tiberi (R-OH), and Charlie Dent (R-PA), even though each was a no-strings-attached bailout supporter-- each with campaign coffers stuffed with Wall Street bribes-- and each has a Democratic opponent who opposed the bailout!