“I think the Tea Party is dying out”: Harry Reid

By Mr. Curmudgeon

Senate Majority Leader Harry “The Crypt-Keeper” Reid engaged in a little wishful thinking during an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press. “I hope that the Tea Party doesn’t have an influence in this next year that they had in the previous year, because it has been really bad for this country.”

Harry was speaking of the big stink that arose during the debt ceiling debate. Harry fondly remembered the good old days when he and establishment Republicans engaged in “the art of working together, building consensus, compromise.” You know – the kind of collegial cooperation that gave us a financial collapse, bailouts, stimulus and high unemployment. Good times … good times …

And Harry fondly recalled the days when little things like, say, raising the nation’s debt ceiling “used to happen matter-of-factly.”

But many Tea Party Republicans crashed that cozy Washington spending party in 2011 and used their considerable weight to point out the absurdity of increasing a debt we will never pay back, and continuing to spend on stimulus that doesn’t work. After all, Obama and Nancy Pelosi spent $1 trillion on stimulus to no avail … unless you count the happily crazed university lab monkeys provided cocaine thanks to government stimulus.

“I think the Tea Party is dying out as the economy is getting better slowly,” Harry told Meet the Press. “And that’s why the agenda I’m moving forward on, I hope with some cooperation from the Republicans this time, is to do something about creating jobs.” And Harry said that will occur under his (shovel-ready no doubt) highway bill.

Last month, Greg Sargent of the Washington Post bemoaned all the Tea Party’s objecting. “Reality says that Republicans aren’t going to shut down several agencies, aren’t going to repeal the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), aren’t going to defund Planned Parenthood and aren’t going to do a lot of other things that they campaigned on. Not when Democrats still have a majority in the Senate and not while Barack Obama is in the White House.”

And that’s the point behind all that Tea Party objecting. You see, when every call by the Tea Party for reasonable cuts in federal spending is met with shrill screams from Democrats and compromising establishment Republicans, it only reinforces the Tea Party’s call for real change in Washington.

While Harry was sweating under the hot television studio lights, an ABC/Wall Street Journal Poll flashed on the screen: 66% of the American people object to the job Congress is doing in Washington.

And this coming November, their objections will put Harry in the Senate minority so he “doesn’t have an influence” in 2013” that he “had in the previous year, because it has been really bad for this country.”