I’ve come to a cross roads, and I believe many of you are with me. I no longer have faith that members of the Grand Old Party can represent me as a classical liberal or more specifically as a Conservative-Libertarian, and neither do I believe the majority of the members of the party share true forms of those ideologies.

This feeling began developing after the 2010 election when several friends and colleagues of mine and I developed ConservativeCongress.com to assess every single candidate self-proclaimed to be running as a conservative in the entire country. Thousands of unpaid and thankless hours were put into the project by myself and my friends. I myself put in roughly 2,000 to 3,000 hours alone. Then I watched as various state Tea Party groups and supposedly conservative minding groups signed off on the status quo. I became sick as state after state sent D.C. main stays and beltway insiders back to flap their gums about conservative principles while we all watched continuous compromise and a lack of any leadership with the House at their disposal.

The final blow personally for me was when I watched a man take my home district who had not lived in his home state in 18 years and also did not even own property in the state in which he was running for office. I’ve had the great privilege in my lifetime to travel extensively and live in various areas of our great nation. I remember very clearly living abroad in Australia some seven years ago and then upon returning spending the next four years moving around for graduate school and work. When I made it back home I hardly recognized the place in which I grew up. Everything had changed.

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Since the modern tea party movement began February 27th, 2009, leftist ideologues in both political parties have tried to halt the movement. Their tactics are as predictable as they are weak. Their weapon? Name-calling.

Why must the supposed elites in the progressive movement resort to such childish methods like name-calling to counter opposing political views? There are only two reasons. Either they are over-educated/under-smart or their political ideology is indefensible. After nearly three years of redistributing income, Stimulus bills, Cash for Clunkers, $1.6 billion annual deficits, and raising the debt ceiling a gargantuan $2 trillion, I submit the answer is obvious.

Tea party members have been called names like astroturf, right-wing extremists, evil mongers, teabaggers (by our own President), liars, baby killers, greedy and, of course, racist. None of these names has resulted in slowing down the movement. Quite the contrary, the silly names from our political opponents illustrate the weakness of their ideological position and embolden the tea party to lengthen our stride. But what is our great sin in the eyes of these elitist liberals by which we are labeled with such vitriol? Exercising our First Amendment rights to peacefully protest and electing political leaders to…horrors!… represent our views!

Every week, American citizens calling for fiscal responsibility are called new names by those who ridiculously support continued trillion dollar deficits and the borrowing/printing of $.44 on each federal dollar spent. Like all loyal foot soldiers, liberals immediately fall in line armed with the latest ad hominem and attack those in the tea party movement.

The current name du jour of the tea party is “terrorist.” No less than the Vice President of the United States, Joe Biden, referred to American citizens who identify with tea party principles as such. However, Biden’s use of “terrorist” is not to be confused with oft-misunderstood Muslim extremists who explode themselves and kill innocent victims. Those would be, according to leftist elites, freedom fighters. The real terrorists are Americans who disagree with raising our debt limit for the 11th time in recent history from the current $14 trillion to nearly $17 trillion and giving President Obama and his friends a $2 trillion plus spending spree before the election next November. How evil can we teabaggers…oops…terrorists be?

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No matter what happens on November 2^nd, 2010 will be the year that conservatives won.  Patriotic conservatives of all flavors, have risen up in extraordinary ways, in every corner of the country.  It appears all but certain that Speaker Nancy Pelosi will be dethroned. Dick Morris even predicts as many as 100 new Republican Congressmen giving many people really high expectations for the new Congress.

Others fear that for all their trouble from organizing, holding rallies and knocking on doors, they will only replace the leftist Democrats with RINO Republicans who will squander the victory.  Will we get Speaker Boehner, or a fresh new conservative leader who will truly take a big stick to big government.   A closer look at the numbers should give conservatives reason to be really excited and also a cause for continued resolve.

If you want a conservative Congress, you have to ask yourself just what kind of conservative are you after.  Drew Kurlowski, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Missouri who studies voting behavior and partisanship, referred me to a dataset popular with political science academics called DW-Nominate.  It is a tremendous resource that meticulously compiles the voting records of the Congress going back to the 1st Congress.  If you want to know who George Washington’s favorite conservative was, this is your site.  Moreover, they settled on a definition of “conservative” that is tremendously useful.  Move over “fiscal conservative” and “social conservative” and make room for (limited) “government intervention in the economy”.  Let’s call it L’GIE.  So who are the liggies?

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Despite what Congress and the current administration would have the people believe, the inconvenient truth is that fiscal conservatives are the dead center of American politics. Amidst accusations of extremism, Americans are responding to a message of limited government, fiscal responsibility, and less taxation. In a recent interview, FreedomWorks chairman Dick Armey said this:

“This is the broad center of American politics. Look at the polling data, Right now, the Tea Party polls higher than the Republicans and the Democrats, and it is becoming increasingly clear to the electorate out there and they’re expressing their understanding… we have a Democrat majority in Congress and a President that’s on the liberal fringe, and we are in the center.”

Despite differing messages on various social agendas and battles over the role of government in our everyday lives, most Americans understand the necessity of fiscal responsibility – which is even more apparent in the midst of a struggling economy. As the government battles “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” and takes on country-altering legislation in the form of Cap and Trade and the Health Care reform bill, unemployment sky rockets and Congress raises the debt ceiling yet again.

Americans are concerned with jobs. They are concerned with Federal spending. The President’s State of the Union proposal to place a spending freeze on an already swollen base line is not convincing them – only 9% believe that it will reduce the deficit significantly.

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