Where is the Tea Party when you need them?

Where is the Tea Party on immigration? Where is the Tea Party on bank regulation?

The group that prides itself on stopping government overreach, and the party that claims to be about restoring balance in favor of average citizens is nowhere to be seen on these two issues.

Why aren't they out there? Aren't these two issues right in their wheelhouse? If they want to prove that they're an independent group - as opposed to the militant wing of the Republican party - then they need to get in front of this. Republicans voted as a bloc to stop debate on reforming the bak practices that led to the collapse of 2008. And Arizona's Republican governor signed legislation that requires American citizens to show their papers when stopped by police.

If this isn't an example of exactly what the Tea Party purports to be against, then I don't know what is.

Eugene Robinson/Washington Post
Where was the Tea Party crowd? Isn't the whole premise of the Tea Party movement that overreaching government poses a grave threat to individual freedom? It seems to me that a law allowing individuals to be detained and interrogated on a whim -- and requiring legal residents to carry identification documents, as in a police state -- would send the Tea Partyers into apoplexy. Or is there some kind of exception if the people whose freedoms are being taken away happen to have brown skin and might speak Spanish?

Even Joe Scarborough is against the Arizona law.

"...It does offend me when one out of every three citizens in the state of Arizona are Hispanics, and you have now put a target on the back of one out of three citizens, who, if they're walking their dog around a neighborhood, if they're walking their child to school, and they're an American citizen, or a legal, legal immigrant -- to now put a target on their back, and make them think that every time they walk out of their door they may have to prove something. I will tell you, that is un-American. It is unacceptable and it is un-American.

- Joe Scarborough via Benen

Of course, maybe the Tea Party are hypocritical racists.