Apr 2, 2012 4 min read

In January of 2010, when a mini-army of Tea Party-backed politicians were sworn-in, we were all told they’d save the country from being thrown headlong onto the trash heap of history.

I didn’t believe it then. I don’t believe it now, either.

Candidates who’d campaigned on the promise of protecting state and federal dollars by keeping them out of the hands of wildly free-spending Democrats, have, instead, busied themselves with matters that have little to do with fiscal matters. It’s been a clever political bait and switch.

There’ve been lots of new laws passed across the country that have dealt with abortions, Planned Parenthood, contraceptives and even voting rights. All of these issues have been advanced by Republicans. Many have had Tea Party-supported public officials at the heart of them. None of them have dealt strictly with deficits or the national debt.

In Florida, one of the more vocal disciples of Tea Party politics, Rep. Allen West, is at it again. Last July, he called his Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Shultz, “vile, despicable and cowardly,” only because she disagreed with his stand on Medicare. West is back with a new rant.

I’d call it vile, despicable and cowardly, but I’m not a Republican.

He’s questioning the Americans with Disabilities rules that will go into effect this month, that’ll require hotels, resorts and swim clubs to install fixed lifts. This, by the way, has nothing to do with the federal budget. West finds the rules, well, “insidious.” As in, “This is another example of the bureaucratic nanny-state not considering the economic ramifications of its insidious regulatory policies.”

Insidious? West must be ignorant of the fact that 19 percent of the civilian, non-institutional population of the country has some form of disability.

He claims that some hotels and resorts in South Florida will go out of business because of the heavy hand of the U.S. government. He’s too Tea Partied-up to recognize the need to make public accommodations available to as many citizens as possible.

“With such a short amount of time given to implement the new regulations, many hotels will be forced to shut down their pools, this could be devastating to the Florida tourism season,” West claims.

If West had, at least, bothered to read the regulations, he would have known they went into effect last spring. Implementation of them was even given nearly a one-month extension from March until April. That way, businesses will be prevented from facing $50,000 fines by spending the $10,000 to come into compliance.

Meanwhile, there are 16 states with laws on the books that will now require voter ID’S. Do these state legislatures (and governors) feel that America’s non-problem of supposed voter fraud is more important than its long history of voter suppression?

Wisconsin has already had two judges rule its new voter ID law unconstitutional. In Maine last fall, voters killed a law that would have prevented voting-day registrations.

An effort by Maine’s Secretary of State, Charlie Summers, to prove that 200 college students had fraudulently voted, fell flat when he couldn’t find any who’d done that.

They did find one case of a non-citizen who had voted fraudulently. That’s one person out of 1,053,390 voters.

But Maine still moved forward with a voter ID law — until they killed it, because some legislators realized it would have been, as they say, a solution in search of a problem.

In Pennsylvania, there’s a new voter ID law, even after the Senate State Government Committee Chairman (a Republican) Charles McIlhinney has said he’d seen no proof that people are casting illegal ballots.

I’m sort of longing for the days when Tea Party Republicans grandstanded about our president, with his supposed ties to the Kremlin and Islam, and that he’s really planning to burn the whole darned country in effigy.

Phantom voter fraud and laws to prevent it do nothing but highlight the fact that the only wrong votes that were cast were for the people who wrote those laws.

Edward A. Owens is a three-time Emmy Award winner and 20-year veteran of television news. Email him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net