GOP Scalded by Tea

Republicans soon might wish the Tea Party had never started.

On Saturday, three-term Republican Sen. Bob Bennett failed to get enough votes to compete in the Utah GOP primary on June 22. Why? He just wasn’t conservative enough for a party increasingly driven by the fringe right.

“He’s a moderate, and I don't want a moderate,” delegate Pam Wilson told Politico. “I don’t want somebody on the fence. I want someone completely on the right. I get the rhetoric in Washington that he’s a conservative. I don’t care. I want a conservative who I think is a conservative.”

Utah’s Republican primary voters will choose between Tim Bridgewater and Mike Lee. Both advocate revoking citizenship rights for children of undocumented workers born in the United States, shutting down the Department of Education and moving to a highly regressive “flat tax” or "fair tax."

Utah isn’t the only state where the Republican Party is being hijacked:

·         In Kentucky, Tea Party activists have lined up behind the Senate candidacy of Rand Paul, son of Texas Congressman Ron Paul. Paul – who opposes the 1964 Civil Rights Act, wants an electric fence on our nation’s borders and wants to abolish the Department of Education – is  leading establishment Republican pick Trey Grayson in recent polls. Kentucky’s primary election is May 18.

·         In Maine, delegates to the state’s GOP convention decided to dump the party’s platform in favor of one that’s Tea Party approved. According to the Maine Politics blog, the new platform is a mixture of “right-wing fringe policies, libertarian buzzwords and outright conspiracy theories.” It added that “Dan Billings, who has served as an attorney for the Maine GOP, called the new platform ‘wack job pablum’ and ‘nutcase stuff.’”