So the Tea Party was the only chance this nation had at maintaining its AAA rating.

But the political establishment, knowing they look silly and are losing ground daily in the eyes of ordinary Americans, are desperate to shift the blame to the only organization that deserves none. They are terrified of us, because we represent an enormous group of engaged and principled Americans actively pushing for real fiscal responsibility, regardless of the political ramifications. They know their only chance at continuing to grow government and spend America into an economic black hole is to discredit the powerful nationwide movement fully committed to stopping them.

This entire story is screaming for a Voices of the Tea Party e-book. Simply describing the events from start to finish of how the debt ceiling was raised in 2011 will illustrate everything wrong with Washington and everything right with the Tea Party movement—a movement convincing the nation it’s finally time to return to America’s founding principles and shift the power from We the Government back to We the People.

Jon Wakefield is a leader of the Richmond, Virginia Tea Party

In Washington these days, there’s no oxygen  left in the room to debate anything other than the faux debt ceiling issue.  As the “deadline” draws near next week, every minute of talking head time on the cable networks is focused on the game of chicken being played between the competing plans offered by the Democratic and Republican leadership. Both plans are ineffective at dealing with our chronic spending and debt problems. Nonetheless, the debt ceiling appears to be occupying every minute of waking time in the days of the dinosaurs of political leadership currently responsible for resolving the issue.

But the key actors in this little farce remind me more of characters in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland than political leaders of vision and courage:

The contemporary version of Alice in Wonderland we see playing out before us in the halls of power in Washington has added a third member to the Tweedle cast. Let me introduce the actors now performing their roles in our nation’s capital:

Tweedle-dee has set forward a “debt reduction plan” that will cut a grand total of $6 billion from our $1.7 trillion deficit next year.  That’s less than one half of one percent of the annual deficit. There’s no debt reduction in this plan.

Tweedle-dum wants to increase taxes and refuses to cut spending in any meaningful way.

Tweedle-none has no plan other than to step up to a microphone and petulantly complain about Tweedle-dee’s plan.

These three characters are suitable for a child’s nursery rhyme, but their ascension to posts of political leadership in our republic is a sad commenatary on just how little attention the American electorate has paid to the electoral process for the past several decades.

The good news is that this all began to change in November, 2010.

The pathetic display of leadership currently offered by Tweedle-dee, Tweedle-dum, and Tweedle-none merely re-enforces the importance of common sense citizens engaging in the electoral process more heavily in November 2012. All three of these leaders are currently in their positions of power because the voters of the United States have put them there.  We can, and should, remove them all in November, 2012.

But let’s be honest about this mess.

Complaining that this sophomoric trio are doing the wrong thing simply shifts the blame from our shoulders to theirs.  They’re behaving exactly as we should expect them to behave.

Tweedle-dee is behaving like the establishment Republican he is. He’s simply following the time honored Republican traditions of Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon, and George W. Bush.

Tweedle-dum is behaving like the partisan Democratic hack he is. He’s simply pandering to the special interest groups to which he owes his election.

And Tweedle-none is behaving like the hollow and brittle redistributionist ideologue he is. He’s simply out of his league, incapable of doing anything other than deliver the same monologue again and again.

In the next election, it’s time for constititutional conservatives like us to throw the whole lot of them out, and replace them with common sense people who think and act like we do.  The mechanics of how this transformation can come about is a worthy topic for the next e-book in the Voices of the Tea Party series.

Michael Patrick Leahy is the editor of the Voices of the Tea Party e-book series and co-founder of Top Conservatives on Twitter and the Nationwide Tea Party Coalition. His new  e-book, I, Light Bulb: A Death Row Testimonial, was published earlier this week. His new book, Covenant of Liberty, will be published by Broadside Books in spring, 2012. He can be reached on Twitter at @michaelpleahy .

In November 2010, the Tea Party flooded voting booths across the nation and delivered a historic victory for the Republican Party. While many Tea Partiers (including me) are independents—and some even are Democrats—we largely supported the GOP as our only immediate chance to restore some semblance of sanity to this nation’s fiscal policies.

So far they’ve delivered on virtually nothing, including in the House where they are the significant majority.* But with the debt ceiling issue they now have a unique opportunity to finally force significant and unavoidable spending cuts. Democrats–including and especially President Obama–are desperate to get the ceiling raised so they can continue to spend our nation toward an economic catastrophe, but this can’t happen without the approval of the House.

We empowered Republicans for this moment. But they’re sending signals that they may fold (again) and raise the debt ceiling, despite the public’s overwhelming opposition, without including any real spending cuts in the deal. If they take that course and miss this historic opportunity to start to pull us back from the black hole before it’s too late (the Cut, Cap, and Balance approach is a good start), I believe we’ll finally see an organized third party movement begin in America.

I’m not arguing for or against that here, I’m simply stating what I believe will happen. I’ve heard enough Tea Partiers in my home state of Virginia already pushing for a third party—and seen similar interest across the country—that I believe it to be a real possibility. If that happens, the Republican Party will be decimated, and they will have only themselves to blame.

With that in mind, I’d like to see a Voices of the Tea Party e-book describe the mechanics involved in (a) creating a third party and (b) using the existing party structures to take over one or both (as the Big-Government advocates started to do a century ago). The former is a long, complex process, while the latter is actually much easier than many people realize and is the reason the Tea Party has taken that approach so far. But because our members are so distraught with the total lack of principled leadership in the existing parties and many are ready to start a new one, it would be helpful if they understood exactly what’s involved so they can determine if that’s truly the best approach or if it would be better to stay the course and advance our cause through the existing parties.

* Obviously a huge part of the problem is that whatever fiscally conservative legislation they may pass will either fail in the Senate or be vetoed anyway. But that shouldn’t stop them from passing it and forcing politicians to go on record as voting for either fiscal responsibility or fiscal ruin.

Jon Wakefield is a leader of the Richmond, Virginia Tea Party.

America is a highly polarized nation.

We hear that all the time, but is it accurate? Last week, The Daily Caller reported on a Sachs/Mason-Dixon poll that showed 65% of America supports a balanced budget amendment, while only 27% oppose it.

That’s not highly polarized.

The Hill conducted a poll on raising the debt ceiling (which just suffered a massive defeat in the U.S. House), and found a nearly identical split at 62-27% opposed the measure, including 64% of independents and a plurality of Democrats. Want more? Gallup conducted a similar poll and found the split to be 47-19% against raising the debt ceiling.

That’s not highly polarized.

CBS News conducted a poll on cutting spending vs. raising taxes to reduce the federal deficit and found that 77% of Americans prefer cutting spending, while only 9% want taxes raised.*

That’s not only not highly polarized, it’s almost totally unified.

What do all these issues—a balanced budget, a frozen debt ceiling, reduced spending, and low taxes—have in common? They are straightforward applications of the core Tea Party principles of constitutionally limited government and fiscal responsibility.

These polls aren’t anomalies and they aren’t the only issues that the American public agrees with us on. I continue to be struck by just how much they are with us on issue after issue. Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising, though, considering that conservatives outnumber liberals in America by a 2-1 margin (according to Gallup). And this has been the case for a long time. An e-book that catalogs the broad support across all political demographics for basic Tea Party policies would make an excellent addition to the Voices of the Tea Party series.

President Obama and his allies often call Tea Partiers fringe (when they’re feeling magnanimous enough to refrain from calling us by a sexual slur), but when even significant numbers of regular Democrats are supporting basic Tea Party ideology—whether they know it or not—it’s hard to argue that our movement isn’t mainstream. It is President Obama and his allies—who support a severely unbalanced budget, hiking the debt ceiling by well over $2 trillion, raising taxes, and blowing up record spending even more—who are on the fringe of every major issue facing the nation today.

*The specifics of what to cut is where Americans disagree. We will ultimately need to find common ground and work together, but for now the Tea Party can confidently claim that we have handily won the argument that Federal Government is too big and needs substantial cuts.

Jon Wakefield is a leader of the Richmond, Virginia  Tea Party

Earlier in this space, Jon Friesch and Scott Boston addressed the merits of a Tea Party alternative to the Paul Ryan budget as an appropriate topic for a Voices e-book. I would like to follow up on that theme, by suggesting that the broader topic of fiscal responsibility as it relates to debt ceilings is also a worthy e-book topic.

A striking aspect of 18th Century dwellings are the low ceilings found in most homes of the period. Why were they built this way?  In one word: pragmatism.  To build structures with wasted space overhead was impractical (i.e. they were harder to heat and keep warm).  This kind of pragmatism is seemingly absent in the lexicon of our contemporary legislatures.

In the coming weeks, the Congress will debate the merits of raising the debt ceiling. Those of us in the Tea Party movement can imagine the incredulity with which the Founders would have viewed our current circumstance–A $14 trillion national debt, a $1.7 trillion annual deficit, and no end in sight to the citizens and corporations with their hands out for more federal dollars.

George Washington exhibited his pragmatism when he told Congress “No pecuniary consideration is more urgent than the regular redemption and discharge of the public debt; on none can delay be more injurious, or an economy of time more valuable.”

Today, our Congress is in need of guidance such as Washington’s to realize fiscal sobriety. It is up to the sovereign people of the Republic to remind Congress to lower the debt ceiling beyond what is being proposed. Visualizing the structures of the Founders may help keep this goal in view.  The ceilings in their homes were low; they also kept their debt ceiling low.

Jon Wallace is the founder of the Rutland, Vermont Tea Party.