by Matt Kibbe
Now it was “security” concerns and a mysterious package down the hall that forced the evacuation of all of us from the Kennedy Caucus Room that afternoon. There’s just one problem with this account. It’s not true. In addition to Borowski’s video, Ben Howe at RedState quickly posted a meticulous accounting of the facts, times, and e-mails of what actually happened. E-mails from Schumer’s staff belie the USCP’s claim that “a suspicious package” made them do it. An hour before the event was scheduled to begin, the aforementioned Rules staffer Lynden Armstrong sent an e-mail to a Lee staffer, time-stamped 1:03 p.m.: “Please call me ASAP or meet down at SR-325 about the Tea Party Budget Hearing that is scheduled at 2:00pm. There are two problems with this and that is they are simulating a hearing which isn’t allowed and the Rules Committee has determined events of this nature are political and not allowed.”7
Two minutes later, the Lee staffer responded by e-mail: “This was an event to get input from some Utahns and others about the Debt.”8 Five minutes after that, Lee’s staff replies, “Lynden I will be there in 10 minutes.”9 Armstrong doesn’t wait, but instead responds, “Ok. At this point, we have to pull the plug on the event.”10
During the next twenty minutes, Senator Lee confronts the two Rules Committee staffers in the corridor outside the Kennedy Caucus room (as shown in the Borowski video). Then, in an e-mail time-stamped at 1:31 p.m., the Capitol police broadcast the following message to all Senate staff:
The U.S. Capitol Police are responding to a suspicious package in Room 326 of the Russell Senate Office Building. All staff and other personnel are directed to avoid this area until further notice.11
At this point, frustrated, but graciously concerned about his hundreds of guests, Senator Lee decided to relocate the meeting rather than make a stink. His staff began searching for an off-campus meeting place. At 2:08 p.m. a follow-up e-mail from the Capitol police declared that the “investigation of the suspicious package in Room 326” has concluded and that “all tests are negative and the area is now open.”12
Was the “suspicious package” just a bizarre coincidence? Perhaps. But the USCP account is clearly not accurate. The e-mail evidence alone makes clear when the decision to “pull the plug” on the Tea Party meeting was made and why. We weren’t evacuated for safety reasons by the Capitol police; we were evicted for political reasons by the thought police. Why, then, did the Capitol police feel a need to make sure an inaccurate version of events got into the New York Times? What motivated them to “correct” the story soon after it had appeared online? At whose behest? Such palace intrigue raises serious questions. Is it the regular practice of congressional staffers and other government employees to manipulate media stories and misrepresent the facts?
One thing is for certain. If Julie Borowski had not captured the bouncers from the Senate Rules Committee red-handed in the act of evicting Senator Lee and his guests, the “history” of what happened that day would have been rewritten forever. If Michelle Malkin and Ben Howe had not reported on events in real time, digging up the facts and doing the type of investigative journalism that gets all the sources out in the open—reported—the version of the “truth” that came out would have conveniently protected Senator Schumer and his staff from the light of day. As it turns out, we are no longer dependent on one authoritative source for news. We are wholly independent of the old information monopolies, in fact.
WHOSE RULES?
IS IT PARANOIA IF THEY REALLY ARE OUT TO GET YOU? IT WAS CLEAR TO those present that the powers-that-be conspired to block outside voices from disrupting business as usual inside the marble walls of the Russell Senate Office Building. But our experience that Thursday was no watershed. They didn’t stop us. We simply relocated down the street, beyond the purview of Senate authority, at Hillsdale College’s Kirby Center—a move that Senator Lee, in a nice turn of phrase, dubbed the “walk of freedom.” But the experience is emblematic of the extent to which those in power will go to protect their station. It seems obvious that the Beltway establishment views any citizen seeking fiscal responsibility and an adult approach to making unlimited budgetary demands fit within scarce means as a hostile threat to be ignored, derided, demonized, and, when necessary, expelled from the building.
This is a pattern that can be documented over and over again since the emergence of the Tea Party and its massive grassroots uprising against our fiscally lascivious government. On September 12, 2009, more than one million people showed up for the Taxpayer March on Washington in Washington, D.C., gathering in Freedom Plaza and marching all the way to the U.S. Capitol’s steps. It was—by orders of magnitude—the largest gathering of limited-government activists in our nation’s history, the size of which caught FreedomWorks and the U.S. Capitol Police, the District of Columbia Police, and the National Park Service all by surprise. It was logistical chaos, as you might imagine.
Despite being in possession of an agreed-upon plan and the proper permits, FreedomWorks’ Brendan Steinhauser was directed by the National Park Service to start the march itself several hours earlier than planned because the sheer size of the crowd had shut down the streets surrounding Freedom Plaza. “It’s time. You have to go now,” ordered National Park Police Sergeant Stephanie Clarke. She probably made the right call, and Steinhauser started directing people to move east down Pennsylvania Avenue. The crowd was so large, the New York Times reported that the “magnitude of the rally took the authorities by surprise.” All seven lanes of the 1.2 miles of Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House to the Capitol were filled with a constant stream of marchers for more than three hours. The article went on to note that the “sea of protesters” were not an angry mob, but “expressed their views without a hint of rage.”13 Many marchers were frustrated that they had missed the scheduled beginning, but it was the right thing to do, so we all just rolled with it. Fortunately the march was captured by a rooftop security camera. That video was an instant hit on YouTube, providing objective evidence of the size of the crowd, to counter many of the reports filed that day by the mainstream media.
At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, the gathering crowd was so overwhelming that security and safety personnel could not pass on the streets that surrounded the east front of the Capitol. The whole Capitol expanse was shut down with a happy mass of freedom-loving humanity. And yet the Capitol police refused to let the crowd set foot on the National Mall from Third to Sixth streets, Northwest—open, unused space that could have eased the congestion and allowed for a safer experience for everyone involved.
Why would they do that? To what end if not to prevent a better picture—a more iconic image of an iconic day—from being taken of the size of the crowd. If you look at the panoramic photo taken by activist Michael Beck from the top of the Capitol steps that day, you can see that the crowds were packed all the way from Independence Avenue to Constitution Avenue, while the open space on the Mall went empty and unused. A few days later, an informed source told me that then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi had issued the order: Not a single Tea Partier would be permitted to set foot on that section of the National Mall. Really? Did the Speaker herself—arguably the single most powerful Member of Congress and second only to the vice president in the presidential line of succession—really take time out of her busy day to impede this peaceful gathering of her fellow citizens? We will probably never know for sure. Regardless of who gave the illogical command, hundreds of thousands of Americans, while standing on what is widely referred to as “the People’s space,” were denied their right to peacefully petition their government for a redress of grievances. It seems that the political establishment’s adherence to the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution is up for circumstantial interpretation depending on who’s doing the talking.
One can’t help but wonder about the blatant double standard of those who blocked the marchers that day. Though it has grown into something much more than a protest movement, the Tea Party first arose in early 2009 as just that: a cry of protest from an
alarmed citizenry. It wasn’t easy. From day one, Tea Partiers struggled to get the permission, the approvals, and the permits to allow them to protest against big government. Many government officials went so far as to insist on a demonstration of proper insurance to cover the cost of any property damage. For example, a planned Tea Party in the Park to be held in Cape Coral, Florida, on April 1, 2009, was blocked by city bureaucrats who insisted that, because the event was likely to attract more than 500 people, no permit would be granted unless volunteers obtained liability insurance for the event. “WINK News spoke to the director of parks for Cape Coral. He says that even now if [Lynn Rosko, the initial organizer] is willing to get insurance for the event he’ll likely re-authorize it.”14 Because of the onerous requirement, the protest was temporarily canceled. Rosko understandably felt she could not bear that financial risk alone. The event went on as planned after Mary Rakovich, with help from a FreedomWorks-provided insurance policy, picked up the ball and charged past the city’s bureaucratic roadblocks. Obviously the city knew that a disparate group of citizens could not possibly purchase an insurance policy just to exercise their First Amendment rights.
Despite such onerous requirements, we all did what was required. Every local Tea Party group raised and spent the dollars required to comply with the rules. For the 9/12 march in 2009, I was tasked with raising a total of $500,000 to fund the portable toilets, health services, security fencing, and other infrastructure required to keep the permits. Much of that money was raised online, one portable toilet at a time. Lefty bloggers had great fun mocking our efforts to provide proper sanitation, with the far-left blog the Democratic underground posting the funding request from FreedomWorks, emphasizing in bold letters: “There are fundamental things we need to have like more portable restrooms to accommodate a crowd like we are expecting and they cost $185 a piece.” “You will know them by their trail of port-o-potties,” sneered one commenter.
Only later, with the emergence of Occupy Wall Street, would we discover that this mocking attitude toward tending to proper sanitation was a structural deficit with the progressive mind-set. I’m not suggesting that anyone liked the unhealthy squalor that Occupy encampments became; it was simply someone else’s problem to tend to. For the contemporary Left, many of the things that we need to function, including bathrooms, are taken as given; it’s someone else’s responsibility. Bathrooms, like good jobs, wealth, food, and prosperity, are simply assumed to exist, there to be redistributed by smart, compassionate planners, or General Assemblies.
Two years after the 9/12 march, when Occupy Wall Street appeared, there were no such logistical roadblocks to their protests. Without ever acquiring permits, they proceeded to occupy both public and private spaces. The cost to taxpayers—for extra police and crowd control, for sanitation, for the substantial damage to both public and private property—has been staggering. In November 2011, a survey by Associated Press estimated that the cost to taxpayers of the Occupy encampments totaled $13 million, according to figures from government agencies in eighteen of the hardest-hit cities across the country. The AP survey was not intended to be comprehensive and did not estimate damage to private property, including smashed windows. The biggest tab was racked up by taxpayers in New York City, at $7 million so far. “In Oakland,” the AP reports, “where protesters temporarily forced the shutdown of a major port, the city has spent more than $2.4 million responding to the protests. The cash-strapped city, which had to close a $58 million budget gap this year, was already facing an uphill battle when Occupy Oakland began Oct. 10.”15
In Virginia, members of the Richmond Tea Party watched as Occupy protesters were allowed, gratis, to protest in the same park that they had been required by the city to pay to gather in, to the tune of $8,500. Frustrated by the blatant double standard applied by Mayor Dwight Jones, a left-wing Democrat, the Tea Partiers sued the city for reimbursement. Instead of cash back, they were immediately hit with a tax audit from the city.16 According to Patrik Jonsson of the Christian Science Monitor:
Tea party activists have noted instances of public solidarity with the Occupy protests that suggest different free-speech standards based on political affiliation. Such solidarity has been expressed by mayors like [Antonio] Villaraigosa in Los Angeles and Dwight Jones in Richmond. Tea party activists say they’ve paid their way and followed the law. . . . By some estimates, Richmond taxpayers paid $7,000 to supply the Occupy protesters with portable toilets and other services during the two weeks they camped at Kanawha Plaza.17
Justice, according to Adam Smith, the Founding Fathers, and every Tea Partier I have ever met, means treating everyone exactly like everyone else under the laws of the land. Colleen Owens, a local Tea Party activist, told the Christian Science Monitor that everyone should be treated the same. So imagine her frustration: “We challenged the mayor’s unequal treatment between groups, and he responds with even more unequal treatment.”
DON’T WALK ON THE GRASS
EVEN MORE OUTRAGEOUS IS THE DOUBLE STANDARD IMPOSED BY THE United States Park Police in Freedom Plaza and McPherson Square in downtown Washington, D.C., two public spaces that have become permanent Occupy encampments. The Park Police were so accommodating, in fact, that many protesters migrated south to D.C. from Zuccotti Park in the heart of Wall Street, New York City. “As officials shut down Occupy encampments across the country,” reports the Washington Post, “protesters streamed into the District, eager to join the movement in the nation’s capital, which has so far enjoyed protection from supportive local and national police.”18
Congressman Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, suspects a politically motivated double standard is at play. In a letter to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, dated December 12, 2011, Issa argues that “this situation raises questions about why those decisions were made, who participated in making them, and whether political judgments played a role in not enforcing the law.”19
At issue is the fact that the park police, blatantly it seems, ignored the law, which prohibits overnight camping in the parks. “But the National Park Service, which is in charge of McPherson Square, has applied the most liberal interpretation of rules against overnight camping, and officials instead consider the makeshift tent city a ‘24-hour vigil,’” reports CNN. “A handwritten bulletin board maintained by the protesters Monday noted it is ‘Day 93’ of the demonstration there.”20
So the Interior Department of the Obama administration now defines ninety-three days of camping as “a 24-hour vigil.” And we wonder why they can’t balance the budget.
Speaking of the budget, the real agenda here may be to stimulate the economy by destroying the newly restored McPherson Square, which was resodded and refurbished, at a cost to taxpayers of over $400,000, as part of the Obama administration’s failed economic stimulus bill. As I will discuss in the next chapter, the logic of Keynesian economics upon which that $768 billion legislation is built argues that any expenditure by government during times of economic downturn is good because it will stimulate new “aggregate demand.” How the money is spent is not particularly important to the theory.
So, how many jobs will Occupy Wall Street “create or save” simply by destroying the sod in public and private spaces? Only Obamanomics can answer this question. Back here on terra firma, regular grassroots Americans know that trampled turf is a net loss to taxpayers totaling that same $400,000, and that restimulating the economy will cost us another $400,000. That’s jobs and wealth destroyed, never to be reimbursed by the Occupiers.
FILTHY-RICH ONE-PERCENTERS
NANCY PELOSI, WHO LOST HER JOB AS SPEAKER IN THE 2010 TEA Party wave election, once actually referred to Tea Partiers as “un-American” and “astroturf.”21,22 But she has celebrated Occupy Wall Street with unrestrained zeal and fully embraced its particular brand of civil disobedience. “God bless them for their spontaneity,” said Pelosi on October 6, 2011. “It’s independent people coming (together), it’s young, it’s spontaneous, it’s
focused, and it’s going to be effective.”23
The irony, as they say, is thick. Pelosi and her husband, Paul, are superwealthy—card-carrying members of the Occupy-reviled “one percent.” “House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Ca) saw her net worth rise 62 percent last year, cementing her status as one of the wealthiest members of Congress,” according to The Hill newspaper. “Pelosi was worth at least $35.2 million in the 2010 calendar year, according to a financial disclosure report released Wednesday. She reported a minimum of $43.4 million in assets and about $8.2 million in liabilities. For 2009, Pelosi reported a minimum net worth of $21.7 million.”24 This massive wealth comes from her husband’s investment firm, Financial Leasing Services. “The bulk of the Pelosis’ money comes from investments in stocks and real estate,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Their holdings include “Microsoft, AT&T, Cisco Systems, Disney, Johnson & Johnson and a variety of tech stocks.”25
Why would the former Speaker, a filthy-rich One-Percenter, celebrate Occupy Wall Street? Surely, the Tea Party can be equally characterized as “independent people coming together.” They too are focused and effective. What’s up with that? It may seem hypocritical for Pelosi to stand with Occupy Wall Street. (It is.) It may seem like a blatant double standard to revile Tea Partiers and then embrace OWS. (It is.) But it is predictably consistent, too. There is a pattern to the madness. If you want to increase accountability, reduce costs, and rein in the power of Washington, the political elites will attempt to block you at every turn. Your efforts will be greeted with abject hostility. You will be scorned, kicked out of the halls of power. You may even get audited. But if you want to grow the confiscatory power of government, the political establishment will applaud you, defend your First Amendment rights as sacrosanct, and bend over backward to accommodate even your worst behavior.
