Have fun in Los Angeles, Vikings! Don't forget to Skype!

I have to admit that I don’t have a dog in this Vikings stadium fight. I’m only a casual football fan at best and I’ve never had an emotional attachment to the Vikings. When my friends and family-members were devastated by four Super Bowl defeats as a kid, I shrugged. When Favre threw that interception in New Orleans, I laughed. It’s just not my thing.

And as for the stadium itself, I tend to be against this sort of hostage-taking situation in general, with billionaire owners demanding sports palaces from the taxpayers at little expense to themselves. But as a resident of Baja Minnesota, this story is pretty much moot to me. If Minnesotans feel that building a football stadium that will be used eight or ten times a year is an appropriate use of their tax money, well, that’s no skin off my teeth.

It seems, though, that the stadium is on life support, all but killed by the Tea Party and far right elements in the GOP in the state House of Representatives. It’s not that the House members didn’t approve a stadium bill—they did. But it’s not what the Vikings wanted nor agreed to, and it’s loaded with so many poison pills that it’s highly unlikely the Vikings and the NFL will go along with it. They killed the stadium without making it look like they killed the stadium.

This isn’t mean to be an obituary for the Vikings because there is still hope they can survive. The Senate could revive the original bill and pass it as written, then hope that language survives a conference committee and the House leadership persuades enough of its members to forget about whatever positions they took on Monday  and give it a thumb’s up in a second vote. But anybody who’s paid even a little attention to politics the last two years knows the Tea Party doesn’t compromise and it doesn’t change its vote. Ron Paul is more likely to endorse Barack Obama.

There’s also the chance the Vikings decide that 50-plus years of history and a huge and hugely passionate fan base in the Upper Midwest aren’t worth abandoning and cancel the moving vans, choosing instead to work with whatever sausage comes out of the legislature. But anyone who’s watched stadium/arena politics knows that’s about as likely as the Tea Party having a change of heart.

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, you have to admire the Tea Party folks for sticking to their guns and doing what they promised to do when elected, which was to cut spending, cut taxes, and get the government out of business they didn’t think it belonged in. And if they can’t do that, they stop the legislative wheels from turning and effectively shut government down. And that’s exactly what they did. Governments don’t belong in the stadium business, they argue, and so they killed the stadium.  Inelegantly, of course. The far right will never be known for its sophistication and nuance. But they lived up their campaign promises, and for that you have to give them credit.

More amusing to me, though, was the anguished tone of Vikings fans wailing and gnashing their teeth on the Twitters about the House debate. Clearly, these are not people who have spent much time paying attention to politics. The horse trading, the debate, the grandstanding, the over the top rhetoric, the death-by-amendment process must have been like watching a Czech movie without subtitles.  This is how it gets done, people. This is how the legislative sausage is made. Behold democracy, in all its ugly glory.

I wonder how many Vikings fans who voted for Tea Party candidates in the last election are surprised by this. They shouldn’t be. They wanted government off their backs, they wanted their taxes cut, they wanted freedom and liberty. They wanted to stick it to liberals and moderate weenies and the Big Money that they believe controls the government. In the stadium debate, they got exactly what they voted for.

So there’s now a reasonably high probability the Vikings will decamp for Los Angeles after next season, following the Lakers west from Minneapolis, although the Lakers weren’t a big deal because the NBA was kind of a joke in the 1960s and so nobody cared that they left, except Sid Hartman. This leaves Vikings fans with little recourse but to keep calling their legislators and hope some political leader can pull a rabbit from a purple helmet. It will likely be futile. The Tea Party’s mode of operation is forward, no compromise, never reconsider, never give it a second thought, because to do so is selling out. It sticks to its guns and its campaign promises for good or ill, and if you don’t like that, then you’re just another political enemy.