Odor in the court

Have you noticed something sneaky lately about the Tea Party - at least locally?

Notice that just about everything they've done this year is through the court system. They realize it's tough for them to win at the polls, so they go judge shopping to try to win favorable rulings.

You don't see elected officials such as Arnold Simpson or Dennis Keene stomping around and trying to close down the library. Who's going to elect candidates who run against the library? The Tea Party is political poison. Even followers of Jeff Kidwell - who regularly speaks to Tea Party gatherings - go to great lengths to deny that Kidwell has anything to do with the Tea Party.

The Tea Party couldn't elect anyone who'd shut down the library. So they sued.

The Tea Party can't get a redistricting map that pleases them passed by elected officials. So they sued.

The Tea Party can't get Kentucky's elected governor (who won by 20 percentage points) to scuttle health care reform. So they sued.

Reminds me of the political ad in the last decade where actors portraying slick lawyers kept saying, "You can sue!" With the Tea Party, it's always sue, sue, sue!

The Tea Party relies on an undemocratic model to get its way. Whenever their candidates are rejected at the polls, they march into court in the hopes they can find a friendly judge who'll set the big, mean libs straight. Local teabaggers file so many of these preposterous lawsuits that you know they're being bankrolled by some larger organization.

Maddeningly, if the Tea Party wins in its absurd bid to redraw the state legislative boundaries themselves, it wouldn't be the first time something like this has happened. A user of another website says that in Illinois in the '90s, the Democrats and the Republicans each submitted their own redistricting map to a court. Instead of finding a compromise, the judge was a partisan hack who ruled that the state had to adopt the Republican map without changing a damn thing.

All of this highlights the idea that the Tea Party usually can't win in a free and fair election, so they have to rig things in their favor. That's why you see not only extreme gerrymandering but also efforts to split states' electoral votes to favor the Republicans, while there's no parallel instance that would favor the Democrats, let alone the Greens. It's why you also see unconstitutional new voter ID laws popping up. If you can't win fair and square, just rig the election in plain sight or find a judge who'll order things done the way you want. That's the Tea Party way.