Tea Party Script Written In Washington

HuffPost
Posted: 09-24-10

An extensive review of GOP campaign literature, floor speeches and public statements reveals that Republican candidates and officeholders routinely use GOP talking points verbatim in their speeches and campaign literature, while passing off the language as their own personal views.

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The most flagrant violations come from an unlikely corner: A dozen members of the House Tea Party Caucus have made word-for-word use of GOP talking points, presenting them as statements of their own. These self-styled renegade Republicans are, quite literally, reading from a script written in Washington. The source of that script is usually GOP.gov, the website of Republicans in Congress.

One can hear Republican lawmakers read from the script verbatim on the floor of both the House -- Joe Pitts (R-Pa.) -- and the Senate -- Orrin Hatch (R-Utah). "Middle-class families and small businesses are making sacrifices when it comes to their own budget, yet Washington continues to spend trillions of taxpayer dollars on bailouts and other government programs," said Pitts, drawing straight from a set of GOP talking points. "The spending in this budget is so massive that independent estimates suggest roughly 250,000 new federal bureaucrats may be needed to spend it all," said Hatch, quoting a different talking point from the same handout.

Only a week after Joe Pitts made his comment about Obama's budget on the House floor, Rep. Mike Coffman told members the exact same thing. "Middle class families and small businesses are making sacrifices when it comes to their own budgets, yet Washington continues to spend trillions of taxpayers' dollars on bailouts and other government programs," Coffman told a C-SPAN audience on March 25, 2009.

The same day Rep. Gus Bilirakis (R-Fla.) used that same talking point on the House floor, but gave it a personal twist: "Families and small businesses across Florida are making sacrifices when it comes to their own budgets, yet Washington continues to spend trillions of dollars on bailouts, takeovers and pet projects." He also posted the statement to his House website.

(More here.)

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