When President Obama, in his State of the Union speech,  proposed to recover a “financial responsibility fee” — a bank tax — from big Wall Street firms, Republicans scowled while Democrats cheered. And Republicans have accused him of lying when he warned that the Supreme Court’s latest decision would open the political process to mega-corporations and their foreign owners.

On both counts, the politics and policy are subject to reasonable disagreement — but more important is what both issues say about the character of the Republican Party at a time when its leaders are counting on the “conservative populism” of the “tea party” movement to revive its fortunes.

Nonpartisan observers believe that Obama is correct regarding the possibility of unchecked foreign influence in American political campaigns.

With the corporate campaign expenditure ban now being declared unconstitutional, domestic corporations controlled by foreign governments or other foreign entities are free to spend money to elect or defeat federal candidates,” said J. Gerald Hebert, who heads  the Campaign Legal Center in Washington. Fred Wertheimer of Democracy 21 explained why that is true, despite existing legal prohibitions against any contribution or expenditure by a “foreign national” to influence elections.

The statute defines a foreign corporation as any firm “organized under the laws of or having its principal place of business in a foreign nation.” So a company organized in Germany or headquartered in China would still be subject to the existing ban on donations.

“But there are domestic corporations … which are and can be controlled by foreign interests,” Wertheimer noted. Until the Supreme Court overturned the ban on corporate spending, those foreign-controlled companies were subject to the same restrictions as American-owned firms. By striking down that prohibition, the court’s Republican majority freed any foreign-controlled domestic company to spend its funds directly to influence our elections.

Some founders of the “tea party” movement found this development disturbing — and that may be why the Republicans reacted so angrily when the president mentioned it. The same may be said of the new tax on big banks, which Republicans have vowed to reject even though it is designed to recoup the costs of the bailout that was so unpopular among their “populist” constituents.

Again, the facts are simple enough. The legislation that established the Troubled Assets Relief Program required the president to claw back the program’s billions of dollars through a dedicated tax. As designed by the Obama economic team, that tax falls solely on the largest financial firms and penalizes them according to the degree of leveraged risk they have taken on. Its designation as a “responsibility fee” recognizes that the economic and social costs of the recession must be charged to those companies and their irresponsible (and sometimes illegal) practices.

Again, the Republican response is anything but populist. An array of the party’s elected officials parroted the arguments articulated by bankers: They’ve already paid back the money! They’re going to pass the tax on to their consumers! And a recession is no time to raise taxes anyway!

The more Republicans claim to change, the more they remain the same. The more they wrap themselves in dubious populism, the more they will defend the wealthy and powerful, without respect to national sovereignty and the national interest.