Whether or not Lisa Murkowski Lisa Ann MurkowskiGOP senators pan debate: 'S---show,' 'awful,' 'embarrassment' Schumer rips Trump, GOP over debate: 'How are you not embarrassed?' Romney calls first Trump-Biden debate 'an embarrassment' MORE manages to rage against reality as successfully as South Carolina segregationist Strom Thurmond, who last won a write-in contest, it is Joe Miller who has pointed the way to the millennium. He holds a lantern in the cold Alaskan twilight, but most of the rest of the Tea Party was co-opted the moment it started being called a Tea Party. The original ideas hatched and awakened simultaneously in 37 states after NH state rep Dan Itse proposed a Jeffersonian states-rights defense against federal overreach. But it might have been better had he never done that Glenn Beck interview. A maturing framework for this will, as Texas Gov. Rick Perry said recently, take governors, not Congress or a President. But it will take longer.

Perry has written a book about this. Fed Up: Our Fight to Save America from Washington is described as a polemic that casts federal policies as a "legitimate threat to America's continued leadership in the free world."



“It is the governors from both parties who must lead this fight,” Perry told the Dallas Morning News.



As always, change will be driven by economics, not speeches, particularly when the realization begins to dawn that the well of healthy agrarian states in the center of the country is now being asked to support the welfare states on the edge. The NY times asks this weekend, “Can NY and CA be saved?” Not with the recidivist politicos they just elected. Look to John Thune John Randolph ThuneSenate passes spending bill to avert shutdown hours before deadline The Hill's Morning Report - Fight night: Trump, Biden hurl insults in nasty debate Meeting Trump Supreme Court pick a bridge too far for some Democrats MORE and Kristi Noem of South Dakota; look to Joe Miller in the longer term; they would be better as governors. Look to South Dakota and Alaska as rising karma and NY and CA as receding. But for now, consider Tea Party only a harbinger, like the nullification crisis of 1832, and a warning.



Miller brings to the political process the animal spirits of a MacKenzie River husky, the kind that is half wolf. While the new Congress will be the familiar fad diet, possibly with the always popular government shutdown number thrown in; get thin quick, then get fat again. It is inherent in the process — the abstraction — of detached, centralized government. A “30-year-plan”? Are you kidding? We can’t see beyond Tuesday and we borrow to get to Tuesday. We have become like Konrad Lorenz’s trained geese who blindly follow anyone who taps their shell, then become compelled to gluttony when they lose the bearings of their natural lives. By losing our first attachment to state, to region, to the place we belong on the earth, we, like the “Survivor” candidates, lose our bearings on the earth itself: Like Lorenz’s geese we lose our Mother.



Michael Boldin of the 10th Amendment Center was there at the beginning. In September, he gave a speech in Fort Worth, Texas, and said there are a few core beliefs that guide him in everything he does. They should be retrieved from the detritus of the Tea Party, perhaps as an anthem. They are:



Rights are not “granted” to us by the government — they are ours by our very nature, by our birthright.



ALL just political authority is derived from the people — and government exists solely with our consent!



We the people of the several states created the federal government — not the other way around!



The 10th Amendment defines the total scope of federal power as being that which has been delegated by the people to the federal government in the Constitution — and nothing more.



The People of each State have the sole and exclusive right and power to govern themselves in all areas not delegated to their government.



A Government without limits IS A TYRANNY!



When Congress enacts laws and regulations that are not made in Pursuance of the powers enumerated in the Constitution, the People are not bound to obey them.





Visit Mr. Quigley's website at http://quigleyblog.blogspot.com.