Quotation Of The Day: Tea Party Idiocy Edition

Conor Friedersdorf does the honors:

Tea Partiers should nevertheless understand that, fairly or unfairly, they're saddled with a reputation for unusual recklessness. Voters aren't sure whether they can be trusted to govern. That's why their behavior in the debt-ceiling standoff is so idiotic. Paul and Amash, whose principled stands [on drones, civil liberties, and opposing war in Syria] I frequently cheer, and Senator Ted Cruz, whose phony affect makes me mistrust him, could demonstrate themselves to be staunch fiscal conservatives and fight for small government in any number of ways. They could embark upon any number of long-term strategies for reforming public policy in line with their beliefs. Among all the fights they could pick, why choose the debt-ceiling?

Stupid, stupid, stupid! 

A refusal to raise the debt ceiling isn't a conscientious stand on a matter of principle, like religious liberty or due process or preventing the deaths of innocents. This particular stand will do nothing to solve America's fiscal problems or to persuade the public that small-government solutions are preferable. The very best scenario, if you're a fiscal conservative, is for the debt ceiling to be raised after President Obama concedes some significant decrease in spending,  . . . If the debt ceiling isn't raised, the threat of which is the only Tea Party leverage, it could cause significant harm to the country's fiscal standing, putting the United States even deeper in the hole.

Quotation Of The Day: Conservative Advice Tea Partiers Will Likely Ignore

I may disagree with John Podhoretz, but no one should question his intellect. I fear conservatives will ignore his advice and analogy:

Meanwhile, Boehner is basically the face of the US Congress in the eyes of the public. John Boehner is also the effective head of the Republican Party. And the US Congress is viewed favorably by . . . 11 percent of Americans. 

Eleven percent.

When I interact with these conservatives, they say they don’t care about the GOP; what they care about are conservative ideas.

They’re right not to assign special glory or power to a political organization and to hold ideas above party. But here’s the condundrum: There is only one electoral vehicle for conservative ideas in the United States — the Republican Party.

It’s one thing to refuse to waste your time buffing and polishing the vehicle so that it looks nice and pretty; that’s what political hacks do, and ideologues have every right to disdain such frippery.

But if, in the guise of making the vehicle function better, you muck up the engine, smash the windshield, put the wrong tires on it and pour antifreeze in the gas tank, you are impeding its forward movement. You’re ruining it, not repairing it.

It may not have been a very good vehicle in the first place, and you may think it couldn’t drive worse, but oh man, could it ever. And it’s the only one you’ve got.

What's Conservative About Shutting Down The Government Or Defaulting To Repeal Obamacare?

Conservatives claim they respect the Constitution as framed by America's founders. Further, I can remember former President George W. Bush repeating "I trust the American people" as if the sentence were an incantation against all evil.

On ABC's This Week Matt Dowd, former George W. Bush political strategist, points out that contemporary politicians seem to have trust issues:

Well first I want to say after watching your interview with the Foreign Minister of Iran. It's somewhat amazing and ironic that more reasonable and enlightenment is coming out of the Middle East than is coming out of Washington D.C. these days. With everything that's happened with Syria and the chemical weapons and all that, it's like we're now in a situation where we have to look at ourselves and say, why isn't our own act in order?

One of the biggest problems that's going on I think in this country today, this government shutdown, which everybody knows is a bad idea and ultimately will be bad for the Republicans and they only hope it's only temporarily bad.

That is that way is, there's a large part of both parties that refuses to accept what actually is going on. So they don't, if they don't like the result of an election, they contest the election. If they don't like the result of a legislative something passing the Senate, passing the House, signed by the president, which is the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare, we actually have a situation, we should accept it.

I have some disagreements with it. I think there's great parts of it. I think there's great parts of it. I think there's some parts of it that could be problematic. But it is the law and we should accept it. But part of the problem is in our politics today is that we refuse to accept our institutions, our legislation and our elections

If Republicans want to repeal the Affordable Care Act aka Obamacare, a law that has been upheld by the Supreme Court,  there's a simple constitutional way to do it. Win the White House in 2016.

Republicans have gerrymandered themselves a House Majority until 2022. Even if Democrats retain a Senate majority in 2016, that number will not be filibuster proof. With a Republican in the White House, any tea party Republican competent enough to get elected to either the U.S. House or Senate will be able chip away at Obamacare until it's gone.

Until then, the tea party House members need to remember that in 2012 the American people elected Barack Obama, returned the Democrats to a majority in the Senate, and gave more votes to House Democrats than House Republicans.

Of course, it's possible that all of the talk about trusting the American people and respecting original intent is just talk.

How Is The Tea Party Like Othello?

Answer:  Both "will as tenderly be led by the nose /As asses are." (Othello, Act I, sc 3, ln 401-02)

For evidence about how the villain Iago leads Othello, read the play.  For evidence about how the Tea Party Allows itself to be lead, reference it's response to the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act  (CISPA), legislation that Gizmodo calls the "worst privacy disaster our country has ever faced."

Erik Kain reports on some math.

“The complete roll call shows 206 Republicans voting for the bill, 28 against,” writes reason’s Tim Cavanaugh. “Democrats went 42 to 140 in the opposite direction.”

Of these Republicans, “47 of the 66 members of the House Tea Party Caucus” also supported the bill, notes Patrick Cahalan.

“For those tricky with the math,” Cahalan continues, “this means 88% of the overall GOP members (casting a vote) voted yea, 23% of the Dems (casting a vote) voted yea, and 71% of the Tea Party (casting a vote) voted yea (Paul and Pence didn’t cast a vote).”

Kain adds that

TechDirt’s Leigh Breadon points out that under the final version of CISPA the, “government would be able to search information it collects under CISPA for the purposes of investigating American citizens with complete immunity from all privacy protections as long as they can claim someone committed a “cybersecurity crime”. Basically it says the 4th Amendment does not apply online, at all.”

The Fourth Amendment, for the Tea Party readers who believe that the Constitutional amendment numbering system goes 2, 10, and then that one about prohibition that got repealed, reads

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

What could cause freedom loving, card carrying Tea Party members to support the "the worst privacy disaster" the United States has ever faced and remove 4th Amendment protections from any online activity?  Kain succinctly illustrates the ring that was placed in the Tea Party's nose:

One important thing to glean from this, especially when held up in contrast with the defeat of SOPA and PIPA, two bills aimed at combating online piracy, is that once you tack the word “security” onto a bill it becomes far more toxic to oppose.

The Tea Party may be the small government wing of the Republican Party, but when it comes to national security suddenly limiting the state becomes far less critical. If SOPA had been billed as a cybersecurity law, it may have found a great deal more support in congress, and had a better time resisting internet backlash. For opponents of anti-piracy laws, this is an important thing to bear in mind.

That's it?  The word "security" means that Tea Party folk can willingly be lead around by the nose? I know being protected from unreasonable search and seizure doesn't have the same rhetorical shock value as losing the freedom to use a loud speaker to say a prayer when hanging up a print of the 10 Commandments on a courtroom wall while wearing clothes that allow one to conceal one's gun fashionably.  And President Obama has threatened to veto it, so it's probably good legislation, not a threat to freedom like Obamacare, the legislation that requires people to buy health insurance and allows parents to keep their child on a policy until the child turns 26.  Still, eviscerating the Fourth Amendment should evoke outrage not support from 88% of a caucus that claims to love freedom.

If big boy bloggers' concern and my sarcasm aren't enough to prompt concern, Conor Friedersdorf provides a little recent history.

Critics of CISPA are right to be wary, for all of the aforementioned reasons specific to the legislation -- but also because of the abysmal record that government and industry have amassed lately. The Bush Administration engaged in illegal warrantless wiretapping for years. All the while, the National Security Agency collaborated with America's major telecommunications companies. AT&T gave government officials unsupervised access to all data flowing through major hubs, including email messages, phone calls, web-browsing data, and private network traffic.

When the NSA program was finally revealed, Bush Administration officials weren't prosecuted and jailed. In fact, Thomas Drake, an NSA whistleblower who complained about a separate warrantless surveillance project, was prosecuted by both the Bush and the Obama Administrations.

He concludes,

Before the Bush Administration's illegal spying, it was easy to imagine that the legal penalties for exceeding the bounds of the law would be one check on government officials and corporate leaders tempted to abuse their access to data. We now know that when national security is invoked, these people are treated as if they're above the law. If legal violations aren't going to be punished after the fact, it's prudent for concerned citizens to push for even more elaborate preemptive safeguards.

The Tea Party is a prime example of people who have forgotten the mistakes of history so they are doomed to repeat them.  In this case, they are willing to trade essential liberty for "security," a trade that will leave them neither free nor secure.

UPDATE: Carter has posted a a link to an on-line petition in the comments.  Demand Progress allows one to send an quick message to senators.

Gingrich, The Tea Party, And Civil Liberties

I'm beginning to hate Conor Friedersdorf; not only is he far younger than I am, he writes better than I do.  This analysis is spot on:

Ron Paul supporting Tea Partiers would be the first to bail from a coalition that reshaped itself around Gingrich. In Reason magazine, Jacob Sullum runs through some of Gingrich's appalling positions on civil liberties: that the War on Terrorism somehow makes null certain rights to free speech and due process; that the government should stop the construction of a mosque until the day when Saudi Arabia permits churches and synagogues to be built; the proposal to escalate the War on Drugs by executing drug smugglers; support for warrantless wiretaps; and extreme hostility toward the co-equal judicial branch. It's true that only a small subset of Tea Party voters actually care about civil liberties with any kind of consistency, but Gingrich will alienate them.

Tea Party vs. Occupy Wall Street Scorecard

Blogging at The Duck of Minerva, one of the best blog titles ever, Dan Nexon produces this scorecard comparing the Tea Party to Occupy Wall Street.

(HT Andrew Sullivan)

Jon Stewart Showing Republicans To Be Uniters Not Dividers: Hypocrisy Edition

Senator Thune appears briefly in this montage.  I don't remember John Thune worrying about the unity of the nation when Tea Party stalwarts were calling me a fascist because I teach.  This clip is an instant Stewart classic.
                       

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Are The Tea Party And Wall Street Two Sides Of The Same Coin?

Andrew Sullivan points to this James Sinclair post and chart.

Sinclair posits the following:

He concludes,

Yeah, I'm oversimplifying, but only a little. The greatest threat to our economy is neither corporations nor the government. The greatest threat to our economy is both of them working together. There are currently two sizable coalitions of angry citizens that are almost on the same page about that, and they're too busy insulting each other to notice.

Sinclair is probably right in the main; I would offer two small additions.  First, these divisions have been exacerbated by the Republicans' recent actions.  Second, there will be no reconciliation between the Tea Party and the Left until social issues like abortion and generational issues like Social Security can be de-politicized. (I know de-politicized may not be a word, but you get my drift.)

I Ask 20 Political Questions (Part 1)

For the Tea Party

1. You claim that your founding principle is love of freedom and states rights.  Where were you when the Patriot Act, the biggest legislative threat to individual liberty of the 20th Century was passed?  I heard no outcry then.  The same question goes for NCLB which threatens states rights in the same way the Patriot Act threatens political liberty.

2. If you reach your goal of reducing the federal government to the level that it was before the Civil War, what's your plan to deal with corporate power? 

3. Have you forgotten that corporations performed the actions that lead to the Great Recession?  You do remember that we now live in a world where some corporations are now too big to fail?  Does it ever scare you that that fact probably means corporations' success may be as toxic to the common person as their failure was?

4. Why are your leaders such jerks?  I'm thinking about Eric Cantor in particular, but a large number of your national spokespeople remind me of drunken louts sitting in fine restaurants and ruining the meals of other patrons through boorish behavior.

5. Have you read Animal Farm?  You do realize that the allegory applies not only to the Soviet Union but to any group that claims to provide political salvation.  The symbolic pigs who take over any movement eventually become the corrupt men that they expel from the metaphoric farm paradise.  You do know that?  Are you taking any steps to try to prevent that from happening to your movement should you achieve success?

For the Democrats

6. You claim that Republicans and Tea Party members are anti-science and anti-intellectual.  In short, you claim they are foolish, but they cleaned your political clocks in the debt ceiling fight.  If I may paraphrase Obi Wan Kenobi, who's the bigger fool, the fool or the fool who loses political fights with the fool?

7. President Obama, you do realize that the ends don't justify the means, don't you?  Do you understand that driving a dictator from power doesn't justify ignoring the Constitution or the War Powers Act?

8.  On the subject of Libya, do you remember what happened to your predecessor when he hung out the "Mission Accomplished" banner a wee bit early?  Can you avoid that mistake even though you couldn't avoid the temptation to not follow the Constitution?

9. South Dakota Democrats, you do realize that Will Rogers was joking when he said that he wasn't part of any organized party; he was a Democrat?  You do understand that if you're going to defeat Noem who is going to get at least two-thirds of the West River vote, you need to get a really strong candidate?

For Republicans

10.  You don't want to close tax loopholes that favor corporations or let the Bush tax cuts for the rich expire, but you seem willing to let the payroll tax break expire at the end of the this year.  Why are you willing to end tax breaks for the common people but not the rich?

All answers need to be done in complete sentences.  Neatness counts.  Part 2 will be assigned later in the week.

Rick Perry As A Caricature

At Madville Times, Troy Jones posted the following comment at 8:57 am on August 15.

I sense fear in the liberal extremist wing and they are lashing out.

Look, there are conservatives who are as you describe hyperbolicly above but Rick Perry isn’t one of them. And, there might be legitimate “attacks” against Perry you can make from your liberal perspective.

But, what you are doing is attacking a caricature you have created to embody those you most disagree with little accurate description of Perry.

Less than 12 hours later, Rick Perry said the following about the Federal Reserve Chairperson Ben Bernanke:

“Printing more money to play politics at this particular time in American history is almost treacherous — or treasonous in my opinion,”

 Article III Section 3 says,

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.

Perry also said,

“If this guy prints more money between now and the election,” Perry said Monday at a campaign function in Iowa, “I don’t know what y’all would do to him in Iowa, but we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas."

"Printing more money to play politics at this particular time in American history is almost treacherous — or treasonous, in my opinion," he added.

Is it a caricature to say that Perry considers monetary policy he opposes equates to waging war against the United States and that he apparently wants to do physical harm to a man doing a job that George W. Bush appointed him to do?

Ron Paul doesn't like the Fed either, but he suggests that the United States

dismiss the $1.6 trillion payment owed by the Treasury to the Federal Reserve. The American government (and citizens) incurred this “debt” through a crafty bit of sleight of hand on the part of the Federal Reserve, a cabal of men determined to make our freedom disappear. Paul justifies this seemingly radical response by reminding Americans that the debt owed to the Federal Reserve isn’t real and that it was created by that organization “out of thin air.”

Two weeks ago, Paul's statement seemed a bit extreme.  Now it seems tame compared to Perry's statement.

The most frightening part about Perry's statement is the fact that he stands by the statement.

“Look, I’m just passionate about the issue,” Mr. Perry said, as aides hustled him away from a lunch with business leaders in Dubuque. “We stand by what we said.

I don't think it's caricature to call Perry stubborn and to wonder if the country should give the powers of the Patriot Act to a person who makes statements like these and refuses to back down .

Further, I worry about the attributing criminal behavior to political acts.  Last week Politico reported that a Texas Congressman wants to impeach President Obama.

Impeaching President Barack Obama “needs to happen,” Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Texas) told a local tea party group, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported Tuesday.

Burgess spoke, the paper said, in response to an attendee’s suggestion that the GOP-controlled House use impeachment to stop Obama from “pushing his agenda.”

“It needs to happen, and I agree with you it would tie things up,” Burgess reportedly responded. “No question about that.”

When the Star-Telegram’s reporter asked Burgess about the comment, he said the House needs to do what it can to stop the president.

“We need to tie things up,” Burgess said. “The longer we allow the damage to continue unchecked, the worse things are going to be for us.”

Again, it doesn't seem to be a caricature to point out that Perry is using the same tactics as some of the more vocal and extreme members of the Tea Party.

I will admit that caricatures of Perry exist.  Jon Stewart does a good one.

                       

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Minor Musings From A Road Trip

Last evening, I needed to take road trip that began shortly after 8 pm and ended around 2:45 am.  Since my passengers slept after midnight, I had a bit too much time to myself and had a few recollections and committed some bumper sticker philosophizing.

At some point I noted that during the early 1980s I met people who had the same beliefs as Tea Party members now hold.  The biggest difference between those people and the current Tea Partiers is tone and volume. I now hear pompous anger; in the 1980s, I heard sincerity and reflection.

I also came to the conclusion that it's more Biblical to start a home church than it's American to start a home school.

I wondered if more fundamentalist Christians would accept the arguments about climate change if they had been told that they were right when they claim God gave humans dominion over the whole world and sent humanity out to subdue it, but there's a huge difference between subduing and destroying.  We have reached the point where we are destroying.

Before she went to sleep, my wife mentioned  this NPR interview with Ryan Lizza, author of this New Yorker article about Michele Bachmann's rise to prominence.

During the interview, Lizza lists Francis Schaeffer, Nancy Pearcey, and John Eidsmoe  as authors who have influenced Bachmann.  I have not read anything by Pearcey or Eidsmoe, but I did read Francis Schaeffer's A Christian Manifesto in the early 1980s.  As Lizza points out, Schaeffer and Pearcey believe that Christian faith should dominate believer's lives and worldviews.

"Michele Bachmann has mentioned Pearcey's book [Total Truth] as one that was important to her," . . . . "[The book] is in line with the Schaeffer-ite view of taking your Christian faith and making sure that it permeates all parts of your life. The key thing here is Christians should not just be go-to-church-on-Sunday Christians. Their religion should permeate all aspects of life."

It's not too difficult develop that principle when the Bible contains injunctions like Romans 12: 1-2.

¹I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.

 ²And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.

The Bible says faith should affect philosophy.  It also says I should start losing lots of weight.  I can understand why Christians who believe in absolutes would take issue with ideas like these presented by Stanley Fish.  I have no clue why people who hold that view can ally themselves with Ayn Rand's followers.

Can the London Riots Happen Here?

This paragraph and quotation from this Andrew Sullivan post interests and disconcerts me.

And the use of social media and nifty little bikes reveals the criminal opportunism here. But even Mary Riddell in the Telegraph sees the background of austerity, accelerating social inequality and the bleakness of the economic future as part of the context:

It is no coincidence that the worst violence London has seen in many decades takes place against the backdrop of a global economy poised for freefall. The causes of recession set out by J K Galbraith in his book, The Great Crash 1929, were as follows: bad income distribution, a business sector engaged in “corporate larceny”, a weak banking structure and an import/export imbalance. [emphasis mine]

The bolded phrasing perfectly describes the United States's economic situation over the past decade.  Further, we are living in era that seems to prize and reward belligerence over competence.  This Frum Forum post compares Mitch Daniels and Chris Christie to make the point.

While talk radio is urging Chris Christie to enter the race, it is demanding that Mitch Daniels exit. The Indiana governor drew accolades from many for his CPAC performance — but Rush Limbaugh and other talkers have blasted him for his talk of a truce on social issues and his decision not to insert a brand-new right-to-work initiative at the top of his agenda.

Why is Chris Christie the heartthrob of the radio right, while Daniels is suddenly an intolerable RINO? Christie is not more conservative than Daniels, and arguably even less so. Christie told the Newark Star-Ledger that while personally pro-life, he won’t use his office to “shove that down people’s throats.” He supports New Jersey’s restrictive gun laws.  And like Daniels, he has decided it’s tough enough to face his public-sector unions that he does not need to start an unrelated fight over right-to-work with private-sector unions. Yet the most acid-tongued of all right-wing commentators, Ann Coulter, has championed a Christie candidacy, asserting that if he declines to run, “Romney will be our nominee and we’ll lose.”

The difference is this: talk radio is not much interested in the substance of a politician’s views or the reasons for decisions. Talk radio wants a confrontational style, and unlike the soft-spoken Daniels, the fierce Christie meets the test. The rule seems to be: it’s OK to be a Republican moderate – provided you are belligerent enough about it. [emphasis mine]

Apparently, belligerence is not enough.  This Eli Lehrer Frum Forum post illustrates that Eric Cantor gets rewarded for being a jerk.

I’m not the first to make this comment, but the current debt limit debate shows what the Tea Party movement (which I once basically supported) really values: being a jerk. Speaker Boehner has a close-to-perfect voting record on conservative issues, is not terribly warm in person (heck, Newt comes across better) and has proposed a good, tough spending cut plan. But he has also demonstrated a modicum of willingness to work with the president and appears to want to bring the debt ceiling crisis to a close.

Eric Cantor—who may well become speaker before the end of the year—does not disagree with Boehner on any major issue including the debt plan but, unlike Boehner, Cantor is basically a jerk who is willing to work against his own Speaker, the President, the financial interests that have traditionally supported his party and, indeed, just about everyone else so long as it keeps him in the media. I’m disgusted.

Cantor apparently is proud of jerk bona fides or stubborn.  From this Talking Points Memo post,

Will S&P's controversial decision to downgrade the country's bond rating -- and its explicit citation of GOP intransigence on tax revenue -- be enough to break the Republicans' broad opposition to tax increases in future deficit reduction legislation?

Not if House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) can help it.

In a Monday memo to the House GOP caucus, he candidly acknowledged that S&P faulted the party's unyielding stance on tax revenues for the downgrade. But he encourages members not to erase this bright line.

"Over the next several months, there will be tremendous pressure on Congress to prove that S&P's analysis of the inability of the political parties to bridge our differences is wrong," Cantor wrote. " In short, there will be pressure to compromise on tax increases. We will be told that there is no other way forward. I respectfully disagree.... I firmly believe we can find bipartisan agreement on savings from mandatory programs that can be agreed to without tax increases. I believe this is what we must demand from the Joint Committee as it begins its work."

In other words, House Republicans should unite against a plan that isn't dominated by Medicare cuts and contains no tax increases. There are 240 House Republicans, and during the debt limit fight, they followed Cantor's lead on this score.

Finally, there's this remarkable big lie that otherizes an entire political movement from Tea Party Nation CEO Judson Phillips.

"I will tell you ladies and gentlemen, I detest and despise everything the left stands for. How anybody can endorse and embrace an ideology that has killed a billion people in the last century is beyond me," (HT Andrew Sullivan)

Combine income disparity, belligerence, hubristic intransigence, and dangerous hyperbole, and one has a recipe for disaster.  I'm not predicting riots, but it seems as if the seeds of violent social unrest are being sown.

If The Tea Party Is Serious, . . . .

They should let Republicans raise the debt limit, but most sane people are telling them that.  I'm not going to waste a post repeating something they won't listen to.

If they're really serious about shrinking the intrusive nature of government, this Wall Street Journal article gives them a place to start putting their indignation to righteous use.

Gary Fields and John Emshwiller, the article's authors, quote an America Bar Association report that asserts

"the amount of individual citizen behavior now potentially subject to federal criminal control has increased in astonishing proportions in the last few decades."

Among the federal laws are injunctions that mandate that

"Unauthorized use of the Smokey Bear image could land an offender in prison. So can unauthorized use of the slogan "Give a Hoot, Don't Pollute."

Who does the federal government think it is?  Even Disney doesn't go that far.

On a far more serious note, federal laws ignore long accepted safeguards.

Some of these new federal statutes don't require prosecutors to prove criminal intent, eroding a bedrock principle in English and American law. The absence of this provision, known as mens rea, makes prosecution easier, critics argue.

A study last year by the Heritage Foundation and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers analyzed scores of proposed and enacted new laws for nonviolent crimes in the 109th Congress of 2005 and 2006. It found of the 36 new crimes created, a quarter had no mens rea requirement and nearly 40% more had only a "weak" one.

One of the results is an alarming rise in the federal prison population.

With the growing number of federal crimes, the number of people sentenced to federal prison has risen nearly threefold over the past 30 years to 83,000 annually. The U.S. population grew only about 36% in that period. The total federal prison population, over 200,000, grew more than eightfold—twice the growth rate of the state prison population, now at 2 million, according the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Tougher federal drug laws account for about 30% of people sentenced, a decline from over 40% two decades ago. The proportion of people sentenced for most other crimes, such as firearms possession, fraud and other non-violent offenses, has doubled in the past 20 years.

Maintaining prisons is far from cheap. 

In 2006, $68,747,203,000 was spent on corrections. "The average annual operating cost per state inmate in 2001 was $22,650, or $62.05 per day; among facilities operated by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, it was $22,632 per inmate, or $62.01 per day."

Housing the approximately 500,000 people in jail awaiting trial who cannot afford bail costs $9 billion a year. Most jail inmates are petty, nonviolent offenders. Twenty years ago most nonviolent defendants were released on their own recognizance (trusted to show up at trial). Now most are given bail, and most pay a bail bondsman to afford it. 62% of local jail inmates are awaiting trial.

I realize that changing some of these federal laws will not have a major effect on the deficit, but there should be some savings.  Something tells me that the Tea Party won't do much about protecting  citizens from this form of government overreach.  I guess I'll stick to drinking Diet Dew.