Armey: Tea Party Movement to Overtake GOP

The tea party movement will revolutionize the GOP – and the nation’s political landscape in the process, says former House Majority Leader Dick Armey.

Armey, now the chairman of FreedomWorks, and FreedomWorks President Matt Kibbe predicted in an exclusive Newsmax.TV interview that America's 1 million-plus tea partyers will reform the GOP and remake it into a force serving the cause of liberty rather than breaking away and forming a third party.

As a result, the GOP will beat the Democrats instead of being “a Democratic Party echo chamber” that pushes the same policies, says Armey, who co-authored the book “Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto” with Kibbe. The book details the tea party movement’s past, present and future.

“There’s been a real wave of tea party victories in Republican primaries where you’ve seen tax-and-spend Republicans being replaced by real fiscally conservatives,” Kibbe told Newsmax.TV. “That suggests to me there is going to be not just a lot of Republican victories on Nov. 2, but a real shift in the center of gravity and the focus of this new majority.

“I happen to think the Republicans are going to at least pick up [a majority of seats in] the House, and maybe the Senate.”

The tea party movement confounds Democrats because it lacks someone like billionaire George Soros behind the scenes pulling the strings, and because voters from all walks of life participate in it, Kibbe and Armey say.

“The fact of the matter is this tea party movement ̶ these folks who put the idea of liberty, Constitution of the United States, free markets ahead of other forms of public meddling by powerful governments ̶ have a number of people who they have come to trust and respect,” Armey says. “Sarah Palin’s one of them; certainly [South Carolina Sen.] Jim DeMint is probably the officeholder of greatest respect; and I think they have a lot of respect for FreedomWorks.

“I like to think they like me a little bit, too. There is no doubt about how they feel about these folks because they’ve stayed consistently loyal to the central principles and ideals that are governing all of our motives in this big, broad-based, grass-roots movement in this war against big government in this country.”

The size of government has had a negative impact on the economy because it has put more than $2 trillion of private capital on the sidelines, and that will only be made worse by allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire at the end of this year, Armey says.

“If you want to stimulate the economy, give the private sector the signal that government will not take away your profits and will not regulate your behavior, so feel free to invest,” Armey says. “That’s a better stimulus than you could ever get from the government.”

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