Tea-partiers today's Anti-Federalists?

The states-rights, neo-secessionist, small-government ideologues who seem to have taken over the Republican Party might have a coherent political philosophy. But their views align less with the constitutional framers than with their opponents, the Antifederalists.

(An Opinion piece in the Christian Science Monitor, not usually lumped a a liberal rag sheet...except in the comment mode of this article)

One of the drums that the tea party beats again and again is that the Founders favored limited government because they thought the power of taxation was an essential tool of despotism. They argue that our current government, with its large and growing debt and with its tendency toward what some conservatives see as socialism, violates the small-government Constitution created by the Founders.

So concerned are the newly elected tea party members in Congress that they have threatened to bring the government to a standstill in the next couple of months by voting against a bill to raise the US debt ceiling, which caps the amount of money that the federal government is allowed to borrow.

With increasing frequency since budget deficits started soaring under George W. Bush, Congress has repeatedly raised the debt ceiling to avoid default and the temporary shut-down of the federal government, both of which threaten serious long-term economic consequences. But tea party proponents have argued that the debt must be contained as a first engagement in a longer battle to lower taxes, diminish federal expenditures, and return the federal government to the size and purpose intended by the Founders.

Tea partiers are today's Antifederalists

This argument is instructive, but not quite in the way that tea partiers imagine. Though the tea party’s philosophy is clear enough, it obscures a telling irony: Even though tea partiers appeal to the Constitution to support their position, they often sound more like Antifederalist opponents of the Constitution than the Constitution’s supporters.

This is because the original vision of the Constitution did not seek to keep the national government small and in its place, as the tea partiers claim. The Constitution sought, instead, to strengthen the national government in order to solve the problem of federal taxation.

That problem arose directly out of the War for Independence. After the American Revolution, the United States assumed the debts that state governments had incurred during the war. But, under the Articles of Confederation, the federal government had to go cap in hand to the states in order to ask for financial support.

This left the national government paralyzed, since states had, in the words of the Antifederalist William Grayson, “a disinclination to pay money” to the federal government.

This balance of power toward the states threatened to undermine the union of liberty for which the American Revolution was fought. To remedy the situation, the Federalist supporters of the new Constitution aimed to create a national government of enough power that it could levy so-called direct taxes, without the prior consent of the states, in order to support the national purposes that had created a national debt....

http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2011/0210/Would-today-s-tea-party-have-opposed-the-US-Constitution