Arlen Specter Quotes
Beating the tea party gang is more important than who does the beating.
Specter, Arlen. Life Among the Cannibals: A Political Career, a Tea Party Uprising, and the End of Governing As We Know It. Thomas Dunne Books, 2012.
Actually, it was the Tea Party members of the Republican Party whose unprecedented willingness to risk the full faith and credit of the United States when the majority of the Republican legislators and almost all the Democrats were not, who held the required Debt Ceiling Increase hostage to getting their legislative way. But in this particular debate and legislation the Democrats gained nothing except that the anger of the American People was much greater against the Republicans than the Democrats, many of whose usual supporters thought that the Democrats had been totally intimidated by the Tea Party.
The historian was comparing Obama to other historical presidents who either had a majority of both Houses of Congress or had an opposition party that was generally quite cooperative and willing to compromise for the sake of running the country smoothly. At this point in time there was a Tea Party wing of the Republican that was particularly negative and obstructionist. They tended to threaten and intimidate the main stream Republicans who used the filibuster to block legislation the majority of Senators had voted for more times than all the other Congresses in American history. And that was only in Obamas first 6 years.
The Tea Party Republican faction was opposed to government doing much of anything other than Defense and Foreign Policy. The regular Republicans saw a much more extensive and robust role of government though few did so to the same extent as Abraham Lincoln and the other founders of the Republican Party, and Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower the Republicans following in the Alexander Hamilton tradition.
He was discussing how to move the Republican Party to the extreme right. on a 2010 interview with Political Vindication Radio, and extreme California Radio Talk Show. Six years later he became Donald Trump’s Campaign CEO and after Trump won, he became the President’s Chief Policy Advisor. He was much closer to “taking it over”—the Republican Party.
Arlen Specter was an American lawyer, author, and politician who served as a United States Senator from Pennsylvania from 1981 to 2011. Specter was a Democrat from 1951 to 1965, then a Republican from 1965 until 2009, when he switched back to the Democratic Party. First elected in 1980, he represented Pennsylvania in the U.S. Senate for 30 years.
