On Sunday, I wrote a short post on “Newt Gingrich and the Tea Party”. The main point of that post was that the people liking what they hear from Mr. Gingrich on the campaign trail today should be sure to look at the whole package, and Mr. Gingrich’s whole career, before signing up to support him.
What I want to make sure of, however, is that nobody takes my post to be a criticism of the people in the Tea Party (or Tea Parties). The Tea Partiers have been good for American politics. The rebirth of the idea of the Constitution as a limit on government power owes a lot to the Tea Party. Conservatives (some of us) have been pushing this idea for years, but for a long time, too many people saw the Constitution as little more than the Miranda warning and keeping prayer out of schools. It was Tea Partiers who really helped restore the idea of the Constitution to its proper place as the people’s check on the power of government.
As a conservative who believes in the importance of process and procedure, how could I not appreciate people who talk about the Constitution as a principled limitation on what government can do – and who mean it?
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