First meeting set for local Tea Party

Geoffrey Lewen, Robbinsville
   At 7 p.m. Oct. 5, all are invited to the first meeting of the Robbinsville Tea Party, to be held at the Robbinsville library.
   The Tea Parties are nonpartisan, and dedicated to restoring the constitutional limits on the federal government. A smaller government, funded only to the extent necessary to fulfill its constitutional obligations, means lower taxes and a return to state sovereignty and renewed individual liberties.
   Much of the national media has tried to marginalize the Tea Parties, mostly on social issues. For decades, the political ruling class in Washington has used social issues to divide the American people, and we have forgotten that most of these problems are not the purview of the federal government. The founders were careful to restrict federal intrusion into social problems, delegating them by default to the states and people through the 10th Amendment. And with good reason: the question of “granularity” is paramount to the solution of many problems facing America. How can federal law apply just as equally to the prairies of North Dakota as to the tenements of Harlem? When the federal government tries to manage social issues we get bills with thousands of pages that no one reads, taking years to develop additional thousands of pages of regulations to enforce.
   How have we come to this place, where state legislatures have less stature than the Congress? The states created the federal government in 1787, but the relationship between the states and federal government has been almost totally inverted. We have gradually ceded so much power to the federal government that we hardly noticed that “big government” has been telling us how to run our schools and businesses, and picking winners and losers through complicated regulations, tax policies and earmarks. This redistribution of wealth is a bipartisan problem, with offenders on both sides of the aisle.
   Therefore, a primary goal of the Tea Parties is to roll back the federal government, thereby restoring much of the state sovereignty and personal liberty we have lost over the last century or so.
   ”Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government; …whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they maybe relied on to set them to rights.” So wrote Thomas Jefferson to Richard Price in 1789. The unconstitutional expansion of federal power has attracted our notice; now it’s time to set things to rights.
Geoffrey Lewen
Robbinsville 