Tea Party Takeover

Tea Party claims to have taken over Utah GOP

After going to a Bob Bennett campaign event last night, I think this is probably true. Which is really unfortunate for Utah. I came away with the impression that the people at the meeting were so ANGRY, and nothing Bennett could say was going to placate them. These were the issues that took up most of the time at the meeting.

1. People were questioning the constitutionality of Congress having any role in the banking system. I think Bennett did a great job answering this question by pointing out that even among the original writers of the Constitution there was disagreement about the constitutionality of a national banking system, but eventually a majority of them were in favor of it. It seemed to me that the people holding up their little Constitution booklets have a very simplistic understanding of the Constitution. Of course the Constitution is incredibly important, and I think it's obvious to most people that Bennett respects the Constitution and tries to follow it in his voting record. But I think the original writers of the Constitution understood that the Constitution wasn't going to be enough to govern a country all by itself. Which is why they set up a system where people could amend the constitution of a large majority of legislators and states were in favor of it. And they set up the Supreme Court to judge the constitutionality of laws that would come out of Congress. Just because someone doesn't interpret the Constitution in the same way you might doesn't mean that they are a traitor to the Constitution.

2. People were complaining that Senator Bennett didn't even read the bills that he was voting on. I really appreciated Senator Bennett's forthrightness in admitting that no, he doesn't read the bills in their entirety, and no, he's not going to promise to read every bill that he has to vote on in the future. That doesn't mean that he won't understand what's in the bill, but he doesn't have the time to read every single bill. People were still really upset and didn't seem to grasp the physical impossibility of a single person reading every word of every bill. They argued that they read all the way through their mortgage and that's only affecting them, so Senator Bennett should absolutely be reading all of these bills that affect the entire country. These numbers are from a few years ago, but there's an analysis here of how many pages that would actually be. In the 19995-1996 session the average bill was 19.1 pages long, and I'm sure they've grown since then. In 2005-2006 there were 10,670 bills introduced and 2,674 passed. I think anyone who knows anything about an organization knows that the leader shouldn't be doing the grunt work that can be done by somebody else, but should be focusing on building consensus and listening to their constituents and all the other activities that a U.S. Senator is involved in. Yes, the system is probably broken, bills are too long, staffers can add things to bills without the senator knowing about it, but I don't think we should be taking that out on Bob Bennett. And insisting that he read every word of the bill is ridiculous.


People are so frustrated with government, which is understandable, but if they think kicking out Bob Bennett and electing one of the other candidates is going to make things better they are in for a big surprise. Of course Mike Lee or Cherilyn Eagar can promise to go in there and repeal ObamaCare and "take back our country" and everything else, but the truth is that they are only one senator in a legislative body of 100. Anything they accomplish has to be done through building consensus with other senators and knowing the ins and outs of the legislative process.
And the only candidate in a good position to do that is Bob Bennett. He has spent years working his way up to senior positions in different committees so he can influence the process. If we kick him out, we get someone who's on the very bottom of some obscure sub-committees. Most of the time they'll be talking to an empty room, most senators just make their statement and leave, and our new senator from Utah will be speaking last. It will take us years before we get back to the point where Utah has the political influence it has right now.