In response to Michael Belding’s Sept. 16 opinion column “Tea party has yet to learn participation,” several of his claims must be refuted.

First, the tea party did not simply begin with the inauguration of President Barack Obama. Instead the movement began largely with public resistance to several federal laws, including the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. All of these give massive amounts of power to the federal government and hopelessly inflate an already incompetent bureaucracy, not to mention rely on the federal government to solve problems it’s largely responsible for creating in the first place.

Belding also claims today’s tea party is nothing like the tea party that became the American Revolution, and that the Boston Tea Party and the Revolutionary War were about taxation without representation, but the current tea party has elected representatives. He thus claims the original tea party was fighting for the right to participate in their government, but the modern movement only pursues its own private considerations of interest. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

The peoples’ ability to participate in our government is becoming less prevalent year by year. Politicians shamelessly lie about their platforms, undermining the ability to elect the best candidate; they pass bills without reading them, betraying their commitment to represent us and continuously fail to judge legislation based on its constitutionality, but rather what they think they and/or unelected judges who support it can get away with. What’s happening is many Americans, including but not limited to the tea partiers, are finally starting to wake up and realize our Congress and our presidents are hardly representing us.

The tea party is not a homogeneous group of people who believe all the same things, let alone in one political party that believes there should be no taxation or no government involvement in anything. It is a group of people who understand that both constitutionally, and logistically speaking, what the federal government controls is wildly disproportionate to both what the state governments and the people themselves control. It is a group of people who understand what the Constitution means, what it was understood to mean by the majority of those who voted to ratify it, not what a modern judge or politician wants to make it mean, playing semantics games to fit an agenda.

Today’s tea party is a lot like the tea party that became a pivotal event on the American colonies’ road to revolution. It remains to be seen if and how much anything will change, but the tea party’s participation in government is, at this point, undeniable.