The Third Party

The United States system, from the very beginnings of our partisan Republic under President Washington, has tended to be run by two parties. The first two were the Democratic Republicans, who tended to follow Jefferson and the Federalists, who tended to follow Alexander Hamilton and helped our second President, John Adams (but not enough to get him re-elected for a second term).

Some years I read a lot about this in a very good book entitled American Aurora: A Democratic-Republican Returns. The book's author, Richard N. Rosenfeld edits together excerpts from the Philadelphia Aurora, a newspaper that was published by Benjamin Franklin's grandson, Benjamin Bache, and later by William Duane, this newspaper was certainly not on the side of President Washington and absolutely dead set against John Adams and Alexander Hamilton. You also read articles from the opposing newspapers of that era, offering rebuttals and supporting their side. The book is listed by Amazon as "out of print, which is a real shame. People should be reading it now to better understand the rise of "faux news" as the Murdoch empire promulgates it. Another parallel was the pressure on the Press of that era to make enough money to survive. The Philadelphia Aurora received printing jobs from the Democratic-Republicans, while opposing newspapers, such as the Gazette of the United States received printing jobs from the Federalists. Were it not for the extra money earned from printing everything from official documents for the United States to commissioned pamphlets, these newspapers would have failed.

Today, we have a government that has tended to create a two-party system. When Jefferson won his first election, most of the states had decided on a winner-take-all system for electors (because they opposed Adams) and this continues to this day, denying third parties the Presidency with regularity. And, in Congress, since the end of Reconstruction, there have been a total of 31 U.S. Senators, 111 Representatives, and 22 Governors that weren't affiliated with a major party. That's not a lot since the 1870s.

But today, we have a third party that is involved in affairs in the House of Representatives and is also a threat to Republican members of Congress. It's the Tea Party. The Tea Party has its own sources of funding. And they have their own grass roots movements. But they're acting, not like a loyal segment of the Republican Party, they're acting mostly on their own. And they're refusing to cooperate with Speaker Boehner's agenda, for the most part.

Here is how the Republicans can stop this:

They can declare the Tea Party not loyal and not Republican, refusing to allow their candidates to run against Republicans in primaries. After all, registered Democrats cannot run against Republicans in primaries, so why should Tea Party candidates? This keeps Republican seats safe from primary challenges and takes the fear away from them.

And Speaker Boehner can declare his Republicans capable of dealing with either of the two smaller parties in the House of Representatives. So if the Tea Party freshmen won't back him, he'll just cross the aisle and compromise with the Democrats. Either way, he leads. Either way, he wins. And since the Tea Party cannot run against him or any Republican candidate in a primary, they're able to campaign as the center movement in America. Not lefties like Democrats, not hard-line Nazis like the Tea Party.

For too long, the Press has not seen the Tea Party for what it is. It is its own entity. It is not Republican and it is not Democrat. And one thing I have noted is that the Tea Party platform favors something that only one other political party in the United States has ever favored: The complete dismemberment of American government. The party that favors dismantling our government, along with the Tea Party is the Communist Party—though after the fall of the Soviet Union, I have to wonder if they still have any members left.

So I would invite Speaker Boehner to see the Tea Party as their own thing and not caucus with them. He can do more and win more by compromising with the larger, Democratic, Party and push this radical group into the corner, where they belong.