Tea Partyism and the Media

I was watching This Week with George Stephanopolous today and it occurred to me that the mainstream media is ill-equipped to report on the Tea Party movement. I say this because one of Stephanopolous's guests was Louie Gohmert, GOP Representative from Texas and Tea Party booster. He made a couple of statements that were breathtaking in their scope and racialism, while at the same time revealing a routine, almost mundane, disconnect from reality.

His first statement was a defense of the Tea Party idea--publicly advocated by Ted Cruz* and Marco Rubio--that the Congress should shut down the government unless it withdraws funding for Obamacare. He said:

Even though we're one half of a legislative body--from which no spending occurs unless we agree--that is a position that allows us to force others to adhere to the constitution. We don't have to wait for the Supreme Court, we can force that. And we can say you are going to abide by the constitution whether the Supreme Court gets it wrong or right.

One of the most fundamental tenants of our form of government is legislative review, a principle established in 1803 (1803!) by the Supreme Court decision Marbury v. Madison. According to this principle, the Supreme Court is the final arbiter of the constitutionality of laws, including direct acts of Congress. Apparently, the current Tea Party position, as advocated by Rep. Gohmert, is to ignore over two-hundred years of precedent on this matter and assign the role of constitutional guardianship to a faction of the right of the right that seems to currently control one branch of government. This is not only radical in the sense that it would overturn a fundamental aspect of our governing tradition, it is also anti-democratic. The far-right of the right in this country does not get to unilaterally make policy for the entire country.

Gohmert's second claim was about Obamacare. He said:

What about the poor guy out there making $14,000. He is going to pay extra income tax if he can't cannot afford to pay the several thousand dollars for an Obamacare policy?

If the consequences were not so severe, it would be almost amusing that the harshest critics of Obamacare really have very little understanding of the law they despise beyond words or reason. A single person making $14,000 a year would be at 122% of the official poverty level. Obamacare has two ways of dealing with this individual.

First, Medicaid expansion would cover this person's medical bills fully. He wouldn't have to purchase private insurance at all. So in this case it would cost him not "several thousand dollars", but zero.

Second, if he is unfortunate enough to live in a state controlled by the GOP, then he may very well not be able to take advantage of the Medicaid expansion because many GOP-controlled states have refused to implement this provision of Obamacare (this was one of the consequences of the Supreme Court's favorable decision on the constitutionality of Obamacare). In this case, he would be required to purchase health insurance on the state exchanges. However, because of his low income that purchase would be heavily subsidized by the government. His out-of-pocket expense would be minimal. If you were an adult non-smoker making $14,000 a year then the government would subsidize 91% of the cost of your health insurance leaving you with a annual bill of, again, not "several thousand dollars", but $280. Of course, this hypothetical citizen could instead choose to pay the $695 income tax penalty as Gohmert suggests and have no health insurance at all, but that would be, well, insane.

What is interesting about all of this is not so much that there is a faction in American politics that has such views. The country has always been burdened by cranks and extremists. What interests me is how poorly the mainstream media is equipped to deal with this phenomenon. This episode of This Week in which Gohmert made these outrageous claims offers a clear example of the media's ineptitude. No one on the panel challenged Gomert's false claims about Obamacare nor his insurrectionist claims about the limits of Tea Party power. This is despite the fact that the panel included a Democratic Congressman and a Democratic consultant. They were simply incapable of pointing out for the benefit of the viewers how misinformed and radical Gohmert's views were. Perhaps it was out of a desire for comity; or, perhaps it was because they were--at least in the case of Obamacare--themselves poorly informed about the law's provisions. I honestly don't know.

I do know that The Daily Show--to name one good example of nontraditional media-- would have somehow been able to do what the Washington media establishment was in this case incapable of doing, which is to expose Gohmert and his ideological allies for what they are.

* Ted Cruz is a senator from Texas who assumed the seat of Kay Bailey Hutchinson. Add Rick Perry to the mix, and Texas seems to be a current hotbed for extreme right wing activism.