we are going live to the u.s. house, members are coming in to start the next session of the 113 congress. now live to the floor of the u.s. house. the speaker pro tempore: this being the day fixed, pursuant to the 20th amendment to the constitution for the meeting of the second session of the 113th congress, the house will be in order. the chair lays before the house a communication from the speaker. the clerk: the speaker's room, washington, d.c., january 3,

2014. i hereby appoint the honorable luke messer to act as speaker pro tempore on this day. signed, john a. boehner, speaker of the house of representatives. the speaker pro tempore: the prayer will be offered by our chaplain, father conroy. we lain conroy: loving god, give you thanks for giving us another year. we give you thanks, also, for e first session of the 113th congress and your sustaining us with your presence, wisdom, patience and love. we ask that the efforts of the first session might prove fruitful and the benefits redowneding to our nation and its people. we ask as well your forgiveness for the smallness of actions on some occasions and the inability to work together when so many were adversely affected.

we know that this is not what you wish for us, not what the american people wish for our nation and not what the members of this people's house have been elected for. we ask now your blessing on each member of congress that they might be their bestselves and representing not only their constituents but also the entire american citizenry. they have taken oaths to do so, give them the strength and the izz dom to fulfill -- wisdom to fulfill those oaths. the important business of this nation has been done in the past and will be done in the upcoming second session. may the work to be done be inspired by the wisdom of prophets and the love of saintly people. may all that we do be done for your greater honor and glory.

men. the speaker pro tempore: the chair will lead the house in the pledge of allegiance. i invite both those here on the house floor and those in the house gallery to join me in that pledge. i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under god, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. pursuant to section 7 h an of house resolution -- 7-a of house resolution 48, no organizational or legislative business will be conducted on this day. messages requiring action will be laid before the house on a subsequent day. bills and resolutions introduced today will receive a number but will not be referred to committee or noted in the record until a subsequent day. executive communications,

memorials and petitions likewise will be referred and numbered on a subsequent day. pursuant to section 7-c of house resolution 438, the house stands adjourned until 2:00 p.m. on tuesday, january 7, 2014. >> news from across the street at the supreme court. toldbama administration the supreme court that a group

of colorado nuns does not need a special judgment against the health care law because of contraception up because it can exempt itself from the requirement. the administration asked soto mayor to lift her order which you put into place on january -- on december 31. judge soto mayor court now rule uns'request. you can see the rest of the story in today's "washington post." university advocacy affairs will hear from jack the american university at 1:45 eastern on c-

span. join us later for a conversation with amity shlaes. here's a brief look. >> the single thing that coolidge did is when he left office the budget was low worse than when he came in. that is the story for us now. how did he do that? 3%?economy grew more than unemployment was below 5%? the budget was balanced due to his own parsimony? how could he get the budget go lower? how did that help the economy? a lot, because he got the government out of the way. >> do you remember how big the budget was? >> the way he counted it was and that itlion,

would be less than 5% of the economy. grail, his holy grail, and the reason this book is so long is because the middle section is about his effort with another new englander, general taxes.o cut the always tweaked them and you will see a photo somewhere had.o lion cubs he he said you cannot just cut taxes. you have to cut budget, and those lion cubs were named budget bureau and tax reduction. >> a portion of our conversation with amity shlaes. you can see the entire interview today at 7:00.

later tonight, more from our first ladies series. rosalynn carter, first ladies, influence and image begins tonight at 9:00 eastern on c- span. is interesting to sit here and talk about how the republican party is less unified than the democratic party. history,ink about this it is an interesting time because for the first time in recent years we are seeing a republican party is facing with the struggles that the democratic party has faced 20 or 30 year ago. >> the interplay of what it can do in it the context all matters, more than the underlying scandal itself when it comes to these comebacks. especially if you are running in a context in which you can present yourself as an abused -- part of an abused group, abused

by the system. you can play that quite well, and whether that is the case or whether it is roy moore in alabama, who used the 10 commandments under mercy, in terms of an attack on christian conservatives, that is very much the case. >> this weekend, the state of the national parties and a look scandals andcal the politics of recovery. saturday at 10:00 eastern. span2, "bookn c- tv." span3, a look back at the impeachment of president william jefferson clinton. ituniversity of akron hosted

seventh state of the parties conference. this panel focused on the history and future of the tea party and its effect on the republican party. this discussion is about 90 minutes. >> hello. hello, everybody. i am the local reporter for the "akron beacon-journal," which is the newspaper here in town and i know john well. he was quoted on the front page in a story that i wrote looking at how poorly incumbents did in yesterday's election. we had 18 incumbents who lost in our county. that was quite a few. i am happy to be here. the tea party is definitely an interesting issue, and i plan to start out with a joke, but none of the reporters in the newsroom could agree on anything being funny or not funny, so i will not start with that. [laughter]

with that i will introduce our first panelists here. the plan is to have brief presentations from each of them, and then we will open up for questions. i know that you will have some good ones. first we have ronald rappaport from the college of william and mary. they wrote about the tea party and the 2012 elections. >> i am ron rappaport from the college of william and mary. i am the second shortest person in this trio. you know walt stone. this project really comes out of our interest in understanding the tea party at both the mass level and at the activist

level. we were struck by what we felt was sort of a gap in the -- there has been little done at the activist level study. most has been going around to different rallies or serving people in a haphazard way. our concern was in having parallel samples of tea party supporters in the mass public as well as republican non-tea party supporters and tea party supporters at the activist level. this study is based really on these two sets of surveys. there are many common questions, that is one of the real strengths but we are able to compare them activists to the

mass base. one of our mass survey -- our mass survey is based on this survey -- on a survey. based on 1000 respondents, 700 of them were people who in the 2010 study they did had rated the tea party very positively in 300 had not done so. the survey was done in december 2011 at the beginning of the pre-primary. our lead sample is based on a survey of freedom works supporters. freedom works is a tea party group which as we found out is the largest tea party membership group in the country. we have a survey of 12,000 of them, which was a nice -- and we did that in december of 2011 and we followed that up in march,

april, 2013, re-surveying 2600 of them. there is very little bias even though the response rate was around 25% or so. this project was undertaken with walt stone and with meredith who will present it. meredith has been involved since she was a sophomore at william and mary. she graduated in may. she is with the education advisory board after a stint as an intern where she was the resident expert on the tea party for the pew center for people in the press. meredith is going to take this and go with it and make it sound far more intelligent than i could. >> thanks. to give you an idea of what is coming, we will look at divisions within the local party and then we will compare rank- and-file republicans to tea

party activists using that freedom works sample. once again looking at issues and political style. finally, we look at the response of the tea party to the 2012 elections, including perceptions of why romney lost, change over time and willingness to time and willingness to compromise, and evaluation of the republican party and its leaders. we begin by examining the actual conflict between tea party republicans and non-tea party republicans focusing on issues, positions, and priority using the sample. this first slide shows the percentage of respondents taking the most conservative positions various issues. here we see striking differences between tea party republicans and non-tea party republicans. for example, 76% of tea party republicans took the most conservative positions on abolishing the department of education, whereas 10% of non- tea party republicans did so.

also, 95% of tea party republicans took the most conservative positions on repealing obamacare, compared with only 59% of non-tea party republicans. next we are looking at the top priority issue of respondents. we see striking differences between tea party republicans and non-tea party republicans in the mass sample. in fact, you can see that with the two issues, repealing obamacare and shrinking government, almost 40% of tea party republicans chose either one of those issues as their top priorities while less than 5% of non-tea party republicans did so. so now we are going to turn to political style. we asked respondents to agree or disagree with the statement when we feel strongly about political issues, we should not be willing to compromise, and we found that 23% of tea party republicans said that they strongly agree

with the statement versus only 4% when you combine strongly agree and do agree. when you combine the responses, that difference is even greater. agree, and only 32% of non-tea party republicans saying so. this is not surprising. when we consider that recent role of the tea party with the government shutdown. we will turn to the freedom works sample. this figure shows the percentage of respondents taking the most conservative positions on issues but we are looking at tea party republicans from the sample and freedom works tea party activists. we would expect activists to be slightly more extreme or even dramatically more extreme than just regular supporters.

this is not the case here. these two groups look very similar. there is little to no difference between them. this is true when we look at the top priority issues. once again, the group looks very similar. there is the exception that the percentage of a group whose top priority was to shrink government was at 17% from the tea party republicans, whereas it is 31% of the freedom works supporters. and so we have shown the divisions in the republican party really exist between the non-tea party republicans and tea party republicans as opposed to the tea party republicans and the tea party activists. now turning to the 2012 election and the tea party's negativity toward the republican party, we would expect to see after any major election that the party that loses is pointing fingers at people and the reasons why

-- how they can avoid that in the next major election and 2012 was no exception. in fact a report was commissioned that blamed third- party groups such as the tea party and the republican lack of appeal to minorities, use, and women along with other reasons for the 2012 losses. we surveyed freedomworks activists. these are the percentage of tea party freedomworks respondents ranking each of these reasons as very important as a cause of the romney-ryan loss. 54% of respondents ranked romney as being too moderate as an important reason for the loss compared with only 5% of respondents who thought romney was too conservative.

when you add up all the reasons why romney lost such as the lack of minority outreach and the association with the tea party, only 52% of respondents selected any of those four items which is still less than 54% of respondents who said that romney was too moderate. so looking again at the question about political style and compromise, we find that in december 2011, 32% of freedom work respondents agreed that they should not compromise, but in the spring this percentage increased to 45%. now we look at the decline in ratings of the republican party and john boehner over the same time from 2011 through 2013. we can see that significantly more tea party activists who rated the republican party and boehner below average in 2013 as as compared with 2011.

boehner's below-average ratings more than doubled to 57% in 2013 compared to 27% in 2011. in this slide we show a factor analysis of republican congressional leaders and candidates using the freedomworks data. this resulted in two factors. one was an establishment factor and the other was a tea party factor. those numbers that you see in parentheses are the net favorability ratings where the red dots represent a net negative rating and the green dots represent a net positive reading. you can see that we find the republican party along with republican congressional leaders such as boehner and cantor. in addition, most of these people in the upper left-hand corner have negative ratings.

in the lower right-hand corner we found the tea party and the tea party candidates such as mike lee ted cruz who were low on the establishment factor and high in tea party factor. they had very high net favorability ratings. what might be most interesting is in the middle we find ryan and rubio who have net favorability ratings at least 81% for each of them. and they have almost as high favorability ratings as the tea party candidates in the lower right-hand corner. we would expect rubio and ryan to be in a really good position for the 2012 election at least when we are looking at tea party supporters. although we see that the tea party is very negative toward the republican party and its candidates, we find that they

were still very active for romney in 2012. as you can see, regardless of who they supported in the primary, they still rallied around romney and were very active for his campaign. you can see that first bar, 86% of tea party supporters who supported romney in the primary were active for his campaign in the general election. you compare that with supporters who preferred perry and 75% were active for romney. the one outlier might be ron paul on the very end. a majority of his supporters ended up doing activities for the romney campaign. we looked at the data from 2008 and this can be said the same. true as well that tea party supporters who preferred a candidate other than mccain were still extremely active for him in the general election.

as you can see, there is still a lot of unresolved conflict within the republican party. the government shutdown is one recent example. looking forward to 2016 we expect to see tea party supporters similarly active in the primaries, supporting a candidate who might not be all that electable or have a chance of gaining the nomination, but are in alignment with their issue priorities. once the republican nominee is chosen, most tea party supporters will likely rallied behind that candidate and be very active. that is more due to the antipathy toward the republican party. that's all. >> thank you. next we will have peter francia and jonathan morris from east carolina in diversity. they will talk about their they will talk about their paper "the divided republicans."

>> let me begin by thanking john green and everyone here at the university of akron. staff has been wonderful. i certainly speak for my co- author. this is one of the most stimulating academic conferences that you get to attend, so we are pleased to be here. you can see by the title of our paper, it is a little bit of overlap with the previous paper. it is always nice to see and you will get a chance to see this in a minute. even though we have used different data sets and looked at some slightly different questions, some of our conclusions are very similar. let's jump ahead, then. so we are primarily again

interested in intraparty divisions. the divide between tea party republicans and establishment republicans has come into full public view recently. any time a political party loses an election, there is a little bit of that soul-searching that we all hear about. and so republicans were talking about what went wrong in 2012. there was the defeat, not only at the presidential level, but indiana and missouri, those looked like easy victories at least for time and they turned into defeats. what do we get, we get karl rove who makes an announcement in 2013 that his super pac, american crossroads, was going to support the conservative victory project. and for the purpose of the conservative victory project was to get involved in republican primaries and try to oust tea party republicans who were seen as costing the republicans some of those easy victories that i talked about.

that was followed up with tea party darling who needs no introduction, sarah palin, funding, "of these experts who keeps losing elections and keep getting rehired and getting millions, if they feel that strong about who gets to run in this party, then they should buck up or stay in the truck." i am sure you all remember that. karl rove was not going to stay silent. he came back shortly after that in an interview and said that he would serve out his term and he would not leave office midterm. you got to see the spat between karl rove and sarah palin, an illustration of these growing divisions between the tea party wing and what we might call the establishment wing. in fact, it prompted this question.

was the dispute illustrative of a larger civil war within the gop? not a term i am using, that is a term that a whole bunch of headlines have used. you pick up "the new york times," they described this as a civil war within the republican party. we think this is an interesting question because previous accounts of parties have long described republicans a bit differently. republicans if you go back to the 1980's, freeman did a study and talked about the culture of the two major parties and talked about how the republican party was one and had a culture of being closed, quiet, and consensual. if you look into the 1990's, another study describes the

party as one that has a homogeneous membership. william mayer wrote a book, "the divided democrats," an important book and one we were thinking about when we were doing this research. even more recently, "the divided democrats" book, howard dean when he was running for president, which is within the last 10 years, he said that he represented the democratic wing of the democratic party. that is a reference to this ideological split between the moderate democrats and more liberal faction of the political party. it is the democrats who have been long divided. in light of the recent developments where we have been talking about republican divisions more so perhaps of the democratic visions we wanted to ask a few questions. our republicans pacific league tea party and establishment republicans, if they are divided, how deep are the divisions and what other issues divide the gop factions?

also how divided are republicans compared to democrats? do tea party republicans go out and grab political information from different sources than establishment republicans? i will get into some of those numbers in a minute. we were primarily interested in that question because we wanted to begin to try and answer if there are divisions, are they just fleeting, are they going to go away? is this is a temporary blip on the map, or are these divisions likely to persist? and so there is this literature out there that says when you only hear like-minded ideas, all the time, when you live in this echo chamber, your ideas get reinforced and people begin to he come more polarized. by looking at media sources we were hoping to project that perhaps if there are divisions, they would persist if there are

these divisions in media sources so that is the second thing. final question which i think was probably the most challenging part of the project which was we wanted to specifically look at social media as well. social media, the reason we wanted to focus on that specific question was that the tea party has made really effective use, according to some accounts, of social media. so we were curious to see if the comments made on social media venues like twitter were significantly different between establishment republicans and your tea party republicans, and that required getting twitter data and doing some content analysis. my co-author will talk about that in a minute. to get at the first two questions, we looked at the 2012 studies, and to give you a sense of what we were using as our definitions, tea party

republicans, it is based on two questions. you have the party i.d. questions. anyone who is self-identified republican or an independent who leaned republican, we included the leaners. if anyone wants to know why, i will be happy to explain. it is pretty much in agreement that leaners should be included. the establishment republicans were self-identified or those republican leaners, but they were neutral or opposed to the tea party. for purposes of comparison we add two democratic categories, very similar to the republicans, self-identified or independents who leaned democrat, moderate democrats, the same thing. we used the ideology question to

break them apart. if you are liberal to extremely liberal than you were in that category. if you were slightly liberal or moderate you are in that category. we had the pure independents. let's get to the results. if you look at the first question, there are the standard seven-point scale questions that the nes has looked at for quite a while. we looked at all of them. i will not show you every single one, but we did look at every single ones, so i picked the most interesting for time reasons. you can see that it is the tea party republicans who answer in the most extreme categories. 31% in the one category and if you add the one and two, you are looking at 68%. the most extreme categories. it was eye-popping to see that that many fell into the most extreme category. it is interesting when compared against the establishment republican category. democrats are a bit divided as well. if you look at certainly the six category and you would add the six and seven, there are some

divisions, but the republican divisions do stand out. this was one that we thought was fascinating. nes asked for seven-point question about whether the government should provide assistance to african-americans and on the seven point african- americans, should help themselves. that is amazing when we saw that. 51% answered in the most extreme category at number seven versus 36% of the establishment republicans. we were really amazed to see if you add the six and the seven together, you're talking about a huge number of tea party republicans. if you look at the health care law, this is unbelievable, right? not that terribly surprising given that there was so much frustration from the tea party rank and file over the health care law. on the 2010 health care law, 70% of tea party republicans fall in that most extreme category. by comparison again, the

establishment republicans, only 35%. i do not mean to be glossing over the democratic members, but since that is not our focus i am going to focus on the republicans. the democrats have some healthy divisions as well. to be crystal clear here, we are not arguing that democrats are not divided, too but the republicans are very much divided as well. on the environment, you can see again some divisions but i put this one up to show you that the democrats, there is quite a bit of division in the extreme category. if you go to the number one on the seven point scale which is the most liberal response, a lot of liberal democrats in that category, a much smaller percentage. if you look at the number seven, no regulation at all, 18% of tea party republicans versus only 4% of establishment republicans. again, pretty big difference is there. you look at other questions, president obama's handling of the economy. i could give you the establishment republican numbers.

i wanted to give you the tea party numbers here just to make the point. in the disapprove strongly, the most extreme category you can get, 92% disapprove strongly of his job is resident. 93% disapprove of his handling of the economy. 90% disapprove strongly of his handling of health care. 87% disapprove strongly of his handling of foreign relations. even on the afghanistan war you might think maybe there could be some disagreement. 63% disapprove strongly on that particular question. almost across the board on all the obama questions, we had a whole bunch of feeling thermometer questions. obama, 16 from the tea party on that zero to 100 scale, zero being the coolest and 100 being the warmest. you can see very low ratings. this number stood out so i had to put this one up. michelle obama, for crying out

loud, a 28 from tea party republicans. even the first lady who is not even controversial, she cannot even break 30 with the tea party republicans, and that compares to 45 for those establishment republicans. tea party republicans were, however, favorable toward mitt romney. 77. paul ryan at 79. even george w. bush, 72. more favorable than the establishment republicans. this is consistent with the last paper. when they had to rally about their candidate, the feeling thermometer questions indicate that perhaps they did that. whether those divisions will persist is when we look at the media question, so let's turn it over to jay morris. >> it is clear there is a division on several issue positions and on how tea party versus establishment republicans view certain candidates, certain issues.

do they get their news from different sources? we already know through the research on partisan media that democrats, republicans, liberals, conservatives get their news from different sources in today's fragmented media environment. when you look here just at tea party versus establishment republicans and where they get their news regularly, we can look at these several shows from fox news. we can see a dramatic difference. in tea party members versus establishment republicans, and whether or not they watch these fox news programs and these are four of several fox news programs. the division is clear there. talk radio, nobody is surprised, i don't think. look at the bottom. one part about the democrats, the democrats also have their divisions. i am surprised that there is

7% of tea party republicans who listen to "all things considered." >> it is worse for "the new york times," so we put up more number so if you want some we have got them. >> we looked at new media as well. because of the advent of social networking platforms has allowed the rank-and-file members of the tea party to express themselves, the era of one-way mass media is over. that allows the tea party to voice their opinion. how did the tea party -- how did they make their views known in the twitterverse? facebook is already passé, as my

students tell me. we wanted to look at tweets from conservative-leaning posters. so we did a content analysis, about a 250,000 tweets with the following hash tags that you see at the bottom. from october 1 through october 24, we searched every tweet that mentioned the terms. that got us to a manageable quarter million. we looked at the sample we had over time. you can see that our content

analysis, which is looking at positive versus negative ratio in terms of the comments made on an individual tweet, you can see that the top line is the positive and negative ratio for mitt romney and the bottom is barack obama. the mentions of either one of these candidates. you can see that barack obama does not vary too much. it is much lower than that romney. you can see with a positive comments, the positive sentiments spiked. after that first debate, you can see that conservative leaning twitter posters, they were excited. and they were posting positive things and it dropped off but you can see it spike again with the debates. we are not interested in the overall trend of how conservative posters posted. we wanted to look at tea party versus gop and here is where our findings overlap with that of the previous discussion. if you look in the far right

column, the ratio of positive to negative tweets, tea party versus gop, they were equally as negative toward barack obama. it did not matter if you hash tagged gop or teaparty. same thing with mitt romney. exactly same thing, the positive to negative ratio. positive statements to negative statements. if you look at this now you can see a bit of a division. tea party members were more critical of both parties compared to establishment republicans. what does that mean? it means we have a divided republican party when you look at issue positions and attitudes toward the candidates comparing tea partiers to establishment republicans. media habits clearly differ. we did not show you all our

findings, but fox and talk radio, it is clear. at the end, in the month of october at least, in 2012, when it came to posts on twitter, the posters for the tea party, the gop, the people who hashtagged the tea party and gop, they rallied around their candidate. maybe more significantly, they rallied against the opposition. that is what we show here. divided in some ways, the rally effect at the end is still there. thank you. >> thank you. next we will have william miller from flagler college and i call john burton from ohio university, discussing "who needs enemies?" >> thanks. we always appreciate the state

of the parties conference. it is interesting to point out that if we go back to the 2009 state of the parties, i remember one conversation about the tea party. it was at lunch and it was not very kind. it was much more of a they will have these nice little rallies and dress up and be gone in a few months. a few months later we started to see the idea that robert boatwright talked about, of individual elected officials being primaried within their own party and the effect that could have. what we are going to talk about today is a little bit different than looking at actually speaking with activists or tracking money back to causes. instead, we want to discuss the intellectual history of the tea party and how what we're seeing today and hearing about today is not necessarily new to the conservative discourse, but it is being presented in a new way with a little more organization than previously. and again, focusing on the fact that when the tea party came into existence, it was using the

acronym taxed enough already. it was an economic movement. that implied if the economy improves the tea party would disappear. they are not the johnny one note but have found a consistent theme that allows them to apply the same principles to issues that are not directly economically related. so what we want to do first of all is place the tea party into the intellectual history of american conservatism, focusing on modern beliefs and looking at how what we see became cemented under reagan has only altered since. illustrating the idea of this unifying concept of constitutional liberty, allowing us to talk about the economy, abortion, and drones and be using kind of the same language amongst the same in the to bring that to

the forefront of american politics. also to show you the strategic position of traditionalism and libertarianism in the gop, the movement that is competing with the more pragmatic wing of the republican party and pretty much every battle that comes through for congress. the major claim being that the intellectual history and strategic position of the tea party movement is going to allow it to have an enduring place in american politics as long as it does not self-destruct. if we look at the reagan coalition and the republican party and what he was able to do, he was able to bring three rather diverse groups together again, obviously focusing on the christian conservatives, the free market, and also the more republican leaning pragmatists, moderate in their views but willing to negotiate and compromise as necessary to advance their causes. what we will start by arguing is this is what we see today. this morning at the first panel,

we talked about rand paul and how some identify him as a libertarian, some identify him as a traditionalist, and at the end of the day what we say is that there is a middle ground where he can be both and still fit into the overall picture of the tea party. it is not simply the reagan era times. we have seen some alterations to this design. beginning with the decline of pragmatism. whether through polarization, redistricting, whatever cause you want to attribute it to, the modern republican party appears to be less pragmatic. we see more ted cruzes and rick perrys than john boehners and mitch mcconnells. the moderation we used to see is being replaced and as a direct result the middling area become smaller and smaller which impacts republican and national policy.

most importantly, the traditionalists and -- have grown closer together. there's more opportunities for this bridge, especially during the reagan administration. that alters not only the political discourse but outcomes, especially for today's modern republican party. with that in mind, there are really four ways that these three groups can cooperate in order to achieve their ultimate goals. the first being the idea of a supremacy-inferiority split. there are not willing to say, you have control over issue. you are in charge. there is much more give-and-take than that. secondly you could have a simple split. the idea of we agree to disagree, something we are not seeing within those two camps. you can leave it ambiguous. this is an argument where activists kind of fudge the differences between themselves and reality it is not there.

we argue that we have a pattern of mutual reinforcement between traditionalists and libertarians, that they are not necessarily aware is occurring. that reinforcement centers itself on the concept of constitutional liberty. we can talk about divergent issues that do not have a common tea party economic thread, but at the same time builds off each other in a way that allows for a spirited discussion. this gives two examples. libertarian defensive traditionalism, ron paul. stephen fincher. linking the economic libertarianism and the traditionalists values to reinforce one another in

different ways but ultimately making the same sense of an argument. we argue that these contours still come from a reagan-style conservatism. starting and building with the idea that we have families and markets having a symbiotic relationship. the idea being that a good upbringing will lead to good workers, good workers will lead to the ability to raise a family, that family will lead to a good upbringing. at the same time we still recognize that government has a place at the margins. most of the time we want it to get out of the way from a reagan conservative-era stance. the power to tax and incur debt needs to be limited. obviously a discussion we have had recently. families should be left largely free to follow their dreams. ultimately, what we want from government is to protect security and liberty, including religious liberty, and not tell individual citizens what to do. again, the idea of

constitutional liberty and mutual reinforcement. this is a strategic situation. we have traditionalists who revere old-style politics. it is the christian conservative base. we have libertarians who want privacy of choice in social and economic matters. we have the pragmatists that understand that politics is the art of the possible, who are willing to strike bargains and deals to get things done. now we have a couple of different policy issues that kind of illustrate where we can see traditionalists and libertarians coming together and having an impact on pragmatic republicans. we will start by looking at obamacare. an issue that -- wow, it does not like me. an issue where we see all three sectors of the modern conservative movement in agreement. it starts with we don't like obama, we don't like obamacare.

you want to dig deeper, traditionalists have concerns with obamacare related to birth control. for libertarians, you have government intervening on something they believe the free market can do better. for the pragmatists, obamacare is simply a mess. fiscal responsibility much along the same way. you can go to benghazi where you have these groups in agreement. it brings them together in a way they otherwise would not. the key point with these is on these type of issues where you see the pragmatists, the libertarians, and the traditionalists in agreement. the tea party is having a minimal impact because their

voice is one amongst many. it becomes a unified republican issue. we can start as traditionalism as the outlier. same-sex marriage. this is an important issue for christian conservatives, that they are willing to fight for and unwilling to compromise on. libertarians can argue that it is not an important issue or government does not have the right to regulate marriage. pragmatists view it as a bargaining chip. is not necessarily a quid pro quo, but something where they may be willing to make necessary arrangements like passing it off to states in order to assure they win in other issues. you want to look at libertarianism as the outlier, look at the drone debate. we look at it internationally, drones are great. they're less costly. there is less loss of life. we allege we can have more targeted killings that we would have through conventional means. for traditionalists, we protect american pilots.

there is famous quote about six months ago -- it does not matter how many innocent pakistanis die, the american pilot will be home for dinner. for the libertarians we still have a problem. this is unnecessary interference in international areas. we do not need to be there. domestically we heard the argument. this was rand paul's filibuster. even for domestic security purposes, we could turn these groups towards us. we look at where the traditionalists and libertarians unite and oppose the pragmatists. i will speak to both the shutdown and the debt ceiling in the same vein. the pragmatic republicans, the mitch mcconnells and john boehners, understood that the defaulting on our loans was not going to be a positive solution .

they were willing to make the compromise to prevent that. as opposed to traditionalists who are upset with where funding is going, libertarians who felt we simply overspend for the sake of overspending. they were unified in their fight against the pragmatist against this which ultimately led to the shutdown. without that voice going against them it could have been accomplished far earlier. the central point this all comes back to is, obviously if you go to november 2012, we had tons of media reports that the tea party was dead, and also had media reports this morning that say the tea party is dead. is the tea party going to become their own party? no. that is not their stated goal or intention. they're still having an impact, even as the media -- the tea party operative they are saying

that at least we beat a rino in a primary. this will be one of many headlines looking back in 2012. on the summary piece, what we argue is that it strategically places things in the republican party and has the possibility to cause headaches forward. we can argue far longer. if we go back to the 1960's, the idea of explicit racism within the republican party was rebuffed and told this won't work going forward. even for the tea party today if there is an argument made or a question asked, they have a response of some kind. it may not always be the strongest response, but they know what lines of attack are coming and what they stand for and believe in. that is the intellectual history. the simple idea that the tea party is not dead.

if you look at the reports from this week, we can see where there are arguments to be made that the tea party is suffering. you look at the alabama house race where the chamber of commerce through an $240,000 over the last two weeks. it prevented a tea party house member from entering the house. you can look at colorado where the koch brothers have been throwing $300,000 into school board races. you can with the virginia gubernatorial race. you can look at new jersey building on the data presented before. you have chris christie was no means classified as a tea party republican having no problem getting elected. what it really comes to, to some extent, is an idea behind -- the idea they cannot create their

own party and be successful. as a third-party they will never have the power they need to get elected on their own. they can remake the party in which they reside. that is what they are obviously attempting to do. if you think about it, if you have the libertarians and the traditionalists oppose, republican influence as a whole ultimately suffers. at the same time, if you have an issue where the libertarians and the traditionalists are sharing sentiments and arguments against republican pragmatists, they have a big chance to have an significant impact moving forward. the pragmatists are beginning to realize that they can't necessarily win without some minimal tea party support. at the same time, the tea partiers are realizing they're not as relevant as they would like to be without some support from the pragmatists. >> ok, thank you very much. our last presenter will be john berg.

>> i really do talk about the tea party so i'm not out of place here. i want to think john green and janet and the whole staff for putting on this great conference. i have not come the last couple of times and it is great to be back. i wish i could find a way to get a longer view of akron outside this building. i will take the stratospheric view of this. i'm happy to see this data, but i'm not using that kind of thing. i have been looking at -- i have to go fast. here's how i see it. right now, we have intense party polarization. it is based on extreme disagreement on many issues.

yet i think there are several important issues, issues that are important not just objectively, but to voters, that are kept out of the party debates. at least out of the presidential level. time for may be passed by now, but during obama's first term, there were two noble prizes in economics. a former cabinet member who said, we need to stop worrying about the deficit and spend more money. we are the stimulus twice as big as what we had heard a lot of