Although we all vote mostly Republican, this is a strong example as to why, for the last half dozen years or so, Seth, Wolf and I have been registering Independent.

Multiple high-ranking Republicans announced that they were willing to raise taxes as part of a deal to avoid the “fiscal cliff,” breaking the pledges they had made to Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform. Said Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC) on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos:

I agree with Grover, we shouldn’t raise rates, but I think Grover is wrong when it comes to we can’t cap deductions and buy down debt. What do you do with the money? I want to buy down debt and cut rates to create jobs, but I will violate the pledge, long story short, for the good of the country, only if Democrats will do entitlement reform.

Graham did say he would not vote to raise tax rates, but that he would vote to cap deductions. “If you cap deductions around the $30,000, $40,000 range, you can raise $1 trillion in revenue, and the people who lose their deductions are the upper-income Americans,” said Graham.

Graham wasn’t the only Republican to backtrack on his pledge not to raise taxes today. Rep. Peter King (R-NY) said he’d vote, too, to cap deductions on NBC’s Meet the Press. “I agree entirely with Saxby Chambliss. A pledge you signed 20 years ago, 18 years ago, is for that Congress,” King stated. “The world has changed and the economic situation is different.”

The Republican Party’s elected politicians still aren’t listening.

Even when they had the majority in both the House and the Senate, they allowed the liberal-run Democrats to push us continually to the left so that they found themselves facing harder choices down the road when it came to extricating us from the bitter fruits of lefty legislation. Then, rather than work harder to find a solution, they simply cave to the Democrats.

Was the birth of the Tea Party all for naught? Were no messages received and understood by the GOP?

Apparently not!