In order to return power to the people, the Tea Party wants to force our representatives to return to the people. That's right. We want to kick Congress out of Washington, D.C.
In the context of the Second American Revolution, there's no longer any need for every member of Congress to be in the Capitol building to participate in debate or to cast a vote.
Instead, we propose a system in which senators and representatives live and work most of the time in their home districts and travel to Washington, D.C., only infrequently--at most once or twice a year. Think of the money we tax payers would save just alone in feeding those 535 people per year, not to mention the cost of their weekly or bi-monthly travel junkets.
The technology exists to allow everything that a representative currently does in Washington to be done equally well from his or her home district. There's no need for a twenty-first-century legislature to be constrained by eighteenth-century technology.
If tens of millions of Americans can telecommunicate, there's no reason why members of Congress can't attend committee and subcommittee meetings by videoconference. And in a world where we entrust the security of our bank accounts to small plastic cards and four-digit PINs, congressional votes can surely be taken over the Internet.
Instituting a virtual Congress will have a variety of benefits. First, senators and representatives will be able to spend more time in the communities they represent. They'll be surrounded by skeptical constituents, rather than fawning supplicants. And they'll continually have to justify any political decision they make that's contrary to the will of the voters. In the recent past, we've seen cowardly lawmakers do everything in their power short of joining the federal Witness Protection Program to avoid listening to us.
In 2003, Texas Democratic state legislators fled to Oklahoma to prevent the legislature from voting on a redistricting plan that they opposed, and on which they were going to be outvoted. In 2011, Indiana Democratic state legislators fled the state to Illinois, to prevent the legislature from reaching a quorum to vote on legislation unfavorable to public employee unions (who, not coincidentally, happened to be some of their biggest donors). And, most famously, also in 2011, a group of fourteen Wisconsin Democratic legislators fled the state (also to Illinois) to avoid a legislative quorum for a vote on newly elected governor Walker's Budget Repair Plan, also opposed by the public employee unions. All of these legislators, fleeing their states to prevent legislature from enacting the will of the people as expressed by duly elected representatives, represent a disturbing trend.
And in the summer of 2009, as the Tea Party movement was really coming to a boil, Democratic lawmakers avoided constituents outraged at their support of obamacare by....simply avoiding their constituents. Members of Congress eschewed traditional town-hall-style meetings for carefully planned and scripted photo-ops with no question-and-answer sessions, afraid that Tea Partiers with flip cameras would expose their hypocrisy on YouTube for all the world to see.
Excerpts "Tea Party Patriots"
ps: Looks to me like its not just Rush Limbaugh, but the Tea Party itself who are on the cutting edge of societal evolution.