Monday, October 07, 2013

Are Some GOP Business Interests Out to Kill the Tea Party?


While the greed driven billionaire Koch brothers continue to fund some of the most extreme elements of the Tea Party and ultra far right in the GOP, some business interests are finally waking up to the fact that destroying the federal government and eliminating all government regulations may not, in fact, be in their best interests.  Some seemingly now want to recruit candidates to run against GOP Tea Party extremists.  If they proceed with this plan, it will result in an epic civil war with the lunatic and largely Christofascist party grass roots.   A piece in the Washington Post looks at this hopeful development.  Here are highlights:

Nearly three years after a band of renegade congressmen brought the tea party insurgency to Washington, there are early rumblings of a political backlash in some of their districts.

But within Grand Rapids’ powerful business establishment, patience is running low with Amash’s ideological agenda and tactics. Some business leaders are recruiting a Republican primary challenger who they hope will serve the old-fashioned way — by working the inside game and playing nice to gain influence and solve problems for the district. They are tired of tea party governance, as exemplified by the budget fight that led to the shutdown and threatens a first-ever U.S. credit default.

Similar efforts are underway in at least three other districts — one in the moneyed Detroit suburbs and the others in North Carolina and Tennessee

The races mark a notable shift in a party in which most primary challenges in recent years have come from the right.

The notion that there might be some energy from the radical center, the people whose positions in the conservative mainstream are more center-right but who are just furious about the dysfunctionality of government — that’s different.”

“It’s people popping up organically in these districts,” LaTourette said. “The traditional governing wing of the Republican Party is fed up with this dysfunction, this ‘no’ to everything, this refusal to engage the other side to find solutions.”

Here in Amash’s Grand Rapids district, several well-known executives who are said to have promised their support to Ellis did not respond to requests for interviews. But Katie Packer Gage, a former senior aide to Romney and a Michigan GOP operative, said, “The business community in Grand Rapids has been completely disenchanted with Amash.”

Frankly, I fear that this belated awakening to the need to kill the Frankenstein monster that has been created may be a case of too little, too late.  Killing the GOP as a major party may yet be the only real solution.

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