Tea Party Leader: Walker’s Victory Has ‘Huge’ Implications

Tea Party Patriots founder Jenny Beth Martin tells Newsmax that Tuesday’s decisive victory for Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker will have “huge” implications on the November presidential election.

“It’s a victory for the tea party but more importantly it’s a victory for representative democracy,” she declared in an exclusive interview on Tuesday. “The voters of Wisconsin have said that they’re not going to allow the forces of chaos to disrupt their system and continue to allow the governing in their state to be at a screeching halt.”

Martin, co-author of the book, “Tea Party Patriots: The Second American Revolution,” believes that Walker’s election sets the stage for voters to choose “fiscal responsibility” and “constitutionally limited government” though her organization refrains from endorsing specific candidates.

“I think that the election in November is an election about whether we’re going to continue to have our representative democracy and our constitutional form of government, or if we’re going to a different type of government,” she explained, noting her hope that Walker’s victory also sends a message to other elected officials around the U.S.

“What it shows is that when there’s an elected official who promises to do something with the fiscal problems that are facing our country right now — and actually have the backbone to address the problems that we’re facing — the voters are not going to abandon them,” she asserted. “I hope that that sends a message to other elected officials that it’s time to start looking our problems square in the eye, and finding solutions for them.
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Martin acknowledges that proponents of large government will work even harder based on the results of the Wisconsin election. “It will do a bit to energize the opposition because they realize that their job is going to be much more difficult between now and November,” she conceded.

“I think that the election in November is an election about whether we’re going to continue to have our representative democracy and our constitutional form of government, or if we’re going to a different type of government,” Martin insisted.

Her organization has had nearly 150 volunteers on the ground in Wisconsin for the past three weeks, while other volunteers made phone calls to potential voters from outside the state. “We’ve gone door to door, knocking on doors and talking to people about the recall and about representative democracy,” according to Martin.

“We’ve not been promoting any particular candidate. We’ve been here based on our issues. And we’ve also had people from around the country making phone calls into Wisconsin talking about those same issues,” she said.

Martin added that Wisconsin voters also sent a message regarding the recall process itself, which has only been invoked three times in the case of U.S. governors with Walker being the first to survive such an election.

“The key to his victory in large part is that voters here in Wisconsin understand that when you elect somebody to office they have a term to serve, and even if you don’t like . . . the policies that the person is enacting, you know that you have the opportunity to change that at the end of their term,” she explained.