Decrying the Republican Party’s ineffectiveness in choosing a speaker of the House of Representatives, Fox News journalist and The Five co-host Juan Williams wrote in an op-ed that members of the Tea Party and House Freedom Caucus should quit the GOP and form a new party.
“The Tea Party activists need to make it official and petition to form their own political party. Heritage Action, the Senate Conservative Fund and right-wing talk radio can lead the Tea Party faithful to the exit,” said Williams.
He added, “The time has come for the members of the Freedom Caucus to act boldly and forfeit the ‘R’ after their names – along with all the money and the political infrastructure that come with it.”
Williams wrote that a “political divorce” would be “the quickest path to a return to health for the [Republican] party.”
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To Williams, the political declines of Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor, and Kevin McCarthy, who were marketed as Republican “young guns” in 2010 before they “went from being the great conservative hope of the party to insufficiently conservative targets for hard-right political retribution,” are symptoms of an irreconcilable division in the party that hurts its chances in upcoming elections. He claimed that there is an “increasing ideological distance between the GOP and the Tea Party over the last few years.”
The Fox News political analyst suggested that the formation of a third party by Tea Party faithful and House Freedom Caucus members, which he dubbed the “Freedom Party,” could lead the U.S. to a future in which it has a European-style coalition government. He said that Sen. Ted Cruz should lead the new party “instead of undercutting mainstream Republicans.”
Williams said that the “status quo” of division and infighting “needs to be disrupted in a big way” before the House votes on raising the debt ceiling or reauthorizing the Highway Trust Fund so that conservatives and libertarians do not interfere with or draw out the process in a way that he feels might attract negative media attention and hurt GOP candidates’ at the polls.
“Once the Freedom Caucus and its supporters are allowed to compete, rise and fall as an autonomous political party, the happier everyone will be and the more functional the government will become,” he said. “[Leaving the Republican Party] will liberate Tea Party politicians from the mainstream GOP’s willingness to make political deals with Democrats. And it will allow far right conservatives to form their own agenda and elevate their own leaders.“
