This week, the MS Tea Party issued their first ever report card evaluating the new Mississippi executive and legislative leadership on what the organization sees as their key issues. Such a ‘report card’ is nothing new but it does highlight the youth behind the movement.
BIPEC has for many years been able to craft a scoring system for how legislators vote on key pro-business items. It’s scoring is transparent and generally accepted; legislators, almost regardless of their political stripe, care about the ‘BIPEC score’. BIPEC as we’ve documented in the past has moved mountains in the legislature and at the ballot box.
The Tea Party’s report card seemed to be an awkward misstep down a similar path.
The Tea Party issued a press release outlining their grades (A-F) on issues such as the state budget, being pro-life, fighting illegal immigration, education, voter ID, energy, families and children, jobs, and the economy.
One thing’s real clear . . . the folks in charge of writing the report card don’t seem to like Lt. Governor Tate Reeves. With a landslide win in 2011, it would be hard to say that the Mississippi electorate holds any ill will toward Reeves upon which the Tea Party could somehow capitalize, but that didn’t seem to deter the report card graders.
There wasn’t a great deal of detail in their report card in terms of how they graded the House, the Speaker, the Senate and the Lt.Governor. There was some anecdotal logic, but it was objectively pretty thin as opposed to the BIPEC report card which boils down their scoring to specific votes.
For instance, the House, the Senate and the Lt. Governor got an F for the state budget, which is still in process and not yet finalized. The Speaker of the House did not receive a grade on the budget. On ‘Economy’, the House got a B and the Lt. Governor received an F; the Senate and the Speaker received no grades. On ‘Jobs’, Reeves got an F; no one else received a grade.
Certainly many of the Tea Party positions are laudable, but to have influence on policy, you’ve got to have influence at the ballot box; having an ‘our way or the highway’ mentality simply will not translate well into legislative influence. And while all conservative groups are striving to make a difference and seeking to have their voice heard, the Tea Party’s demonstrable history of coordinated influence at the ballot box is anecdotal at best to this point.
At the end of the day, it remains difficult to figure out what it is exactly that the Tea Party is trying to actually get done politically and who is going to help them do it; without a vision people perish but without hands and feet carrying out that vision, no difference will be made.
The Tea Party has accomplished a lot and has the potential to do great things, but ultimately it needs to figure out what it wants to be as it matures. Calling out the Lieutenant Governor in a relatively disorganized and uninformed fashion is probably not going to pay a whole lot of political dividends for the Tea Party of Mississippi going forward if they truly want to have a seat at the table in the legislative process. Don’t cut off your nose to spite your face.
This may sound harsh and irritate some of our readers, but the sooner the Tea Party recognizes the disconnect and honestly addresses the issue, the better the entire conservative cause will be both in Mississippi and around the nation.
