Presidents and Populism: The Tea Party Movement
In the period that followed the election of Barack Obama in 2008, a very strong conservative movement known as the Tea Party movement developed mainly within the Republican Party. Members of this movement were angry that, while the U.S. national debt and federal budget deficit had grown significantly, this had not let to the betterment of the life of average Americans. Tea Party supporters combined elements of libertarian, populist, and conservative activism. Critics of the movement said that it has an unspoken element of racism at its core, a reaction to the election of the first African-American president. Others saw a disconnect between how on the one hand, the Tea Party complained that things needed to get better for the common working man, while at the same time opposing universal health care. According to various polls, over 10 percent of Americans identify as part of the movement.
The movement takes its name from the Boston Tea Party of December 16, 1773, an event that contributed to the American Revolution, in which colonists threw British imported tea into the waters of Boston harbor in a protest against taxation by the British government without political representation for the American colonists.
The Tea Party does not have a formal structure or hierarchy, and therefore this allows each autonomous group to set its own priorities and goals. As a consequence, goals among these groups in different regions often conflict, and priorities often differ between groups. Tea Party argue that this is in fact a strength rather than a weakness, because this decentralization makes it impossible for the Tea Party to be corrupted and co-opted by outside entities. Many groups focus on economic issues and on limited government. The Tea Party generally focuses on a significant reduction in the size and scope of the government. However many groups advocate for social issues such as abortion, gun control, prayer in schools, and illegal immigration.
Common topics of protest by Tea Party members include:
1. Limiting the size of the federal government
2. Reducing government spending and lowering the national debt
3. Opposition to tax increases
4. Opposing costly government programs such as Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, cap and trade environmental regulations, health care reform such as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act
5. Opposition to amnesty for illegal immigrants
Many of these goals have their genesis in Newt Gingrich's "Contract from America", a legislative agenda released by the Republican Party during the 1994 midterm elections.
The Tea Party movement is composed of a loose affiliation of national and local groups that determine their own platforms and agendas without central leadership. Although some within the movement consider it to be a grassroots political phenomenon, the presence of corporate-funded activity within the movement exists. Polls show that most Tea Party members consider themselves to be Republicans and the movement's supporters have tended to endorse Republican candidates, as members of that party are more likely to endorse Tea Party positions. Some commentators charge that the movement is not a new political group but simply a re-branding of traditional Republican candidates and policies. Prominent Republican politicians such as Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, or Ted Cruz have enjoyed the support of these groups and in July 2010, Bachmann formed the Tea Party Congressional Caucus. However, the caucus has been defunct since July 2012. Many Tea Party activists were skeptical of the caucus, seeing it as an effort by the Republican Party to hijack the movement.
In 1984, David H. Koch and his brother Charles G. Koch of Koch Industries founded Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE), a conservative political group. Its self-described mission was "to fight for less government, lower taxes, and less regulation." Congressman Ron Paul was appointed as the first chairman of the organization. In 2002, a Tea Party website was designed and published by the CSE at web address www.usteaparty.com, but the site did not get much attention. In 2003, Dick Armey became the chairman of CSE after retiring from Congress. In 2004 CSE split into FreedomWorks, an advocacy group, and the Americans for Prosperity Foundation. Dick Armey stayed as chairman of FreedomWorks, while David Koch stayed as Chairman of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation. The two organizations were the main organizers of the September 2009 Taxpayer March on Washington, also known as the "9/12 Tea Party".
The Tea Party movement gained momentum with Ron Paul's 2008 presidential primary campaign. Paul said that its origin was on December 16, 2007, when supporters held a 24-hour record breaking, "moneybomb" fundraising event on the 234th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. Paul has been called the "intellectual godfather" of the movement because many in the Tea Party agree with Dr. Paul's long-held beliefs.
The Koch brothers were essential in funding and strengthening the movement, through groups such as Americans for Prosperity. Their involvement has caused the movement's critics, such as former Vice-President Al Gore, to argue that the Tea Party is manipulated by the Kochs and others "to promote corporate profit at the expense of the public good."
Early protests organized by local groups targeted the Bush administration's Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 and the Obama administration's economic stimulus package the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and healthcare reform legislation. The bailouts of banks by the Bush and Obama administrations led to increased support for the Tea Party.
On February 18, 2009, when the Obama administration announced the Homeowners Affordability and Stability Plan, an economic recovery plan to help home owners avoid foreclosure by refinance mortgages, CNBC business news editor Rick Santelli criticized the Plan in a live broadcast from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. He said that those plans were "promoting bad behavior" by "subsidizing losers' mortgages". He suggested holding a tea party for traders to gather and dump the derivatives in the Chicago River on July 1. “President Obama, are you listening?” he asked. Santelli's "rant" became a viral video. Many credit Santelli's remarks with giving the movement its momentum. A "Nationwide Chicago Tea Party" protest was coordinated across more than 40 different cities for February 27, 2009, leading to the first national modern Tea Party protest. Fox News promoted these events on air and sent speakers to them. These included then-host Glenn Beck.
In the 2010 midterm elections, The New York Times identified 138 candidates for Congress with significant Tea Party support. All of them were running as Republicans, with 129 running for the House and 9 for the Senate. A poll commissioned by the Wall Street Journal and NBC News in mid October showed 35% of likely voters were Tea-party supporters, and they favored the Republicans by 84% to 10%. Overall, 32% of the candidates that were backed by the Tea Party or who identified themselves as a Tea Party member won election. Tea Party supported candidates won 5 of 10 Senate races contested, and 40 of 130 House races contested.
Tea Party candidates were less successful in the 2012 election, winning four of 16 Senate races contested, and losing approximately 20% of the seats in the House that had been gained in 2010. Tea Party Caucus founder Michele Bachmann was re-elected to the House by a narrow margin. In June 2014, Tea Party favorite Dave Brat unseated the sitting GOP House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. Brat had previously been known as an economist and a professor at Randolph–Macon College, running a grassroots conservative campaign that called for greater fiscal restraint.
In November 2014, Tim Scott became the first African-American member of the U.S. Senate from the South since the reconstruction era, winning the South Carolina seat formerly held by Jim DeMint in a special election. Scott's election is cited in support of the argument that the Tea Party is neither racist nor sexist. In the 2014 elections in Texas, the Tea Party made large gains, with numerous Tea Party favorites being elected into office, including Dan Patrick as Lieutenant Governor. In the 2015 Kentucky gubernatorial election, Matt Bevin, a Tea Party favorite who challenged Mitch McConnell in the Republican primary in the 2014 Kentucky Senate election, won with over 52% of the vote, despite fears that he was too extreme for the state. Bevin is just the second Republican in 44 years to be Governor of Kentucky.
In May 2013, the Associated Press and The New York Times reported that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) flagged Tea Party groups and other conservative groups for review of their applications for tax-exempt status during the 2012 election. This led to triggered multiple investigations. Some Tea Party groups were asked for donor lists, a violation of IRS policy. Groups were also asked for details about family members and about their postings on social networking sites. Lois Lerner, head of the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt groups, later apologized on behalf of the IRS. She stated, "That was wrong. That was absolutely incorrect, it was insensitive and it was inappropriate." Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, rejected the apology as insufficient, and called for “ironclad guarantees from the I.R.S. that it will adopt significant protocols to ensure this kind of harassment of groups that have a constitutional right to express their own views never happens again.” The resulting Senate subcommittee report ultimately found there had been “no bias”, though Republican committee members filed a dissenting report. After a two-year investigation, the Justice Department announced in October 2015 that "We found no evidence that any IRS official acted based on political, discriminatory, corrupt, or other inappropriate motives that would support a criminal prosecution."
President Donald Trump praised the Tea Party movement throughout his 2016 campaign. In a campaign event held in August 2015, he told a Tea Party gathering in Nashville, "The tea party people are incredible people. These are people who work hard and love the country and they get beat up all the time by the media." In a January 2016 CNN poll at the beginning of the 2016 Republican primary, Trump led all Republican candidates modestly among self-identified Tea Party voters with 37 percent supporting Trump and 34 percent supporting Ted Cruz. National Tea Party movement co-founder and leader Michael Johns endorsed Trump immediately after Trump's June 2015 announcement of his candidacy. Tea Party Patriots, a national Tea Party organization, endorsed Cruz in the presidential primary.
Tea Party activities have declined since 2010. The number of Tea Party chapters across the country slipped from about 1,000 to 600 between 2009 and 2012. Most Tea Party organizations have shifted away from national demonstrations to local issues. The Tea Party's involvement in the 2012 GOP presidential primaries was minimal, owing to divisions over whom to endorse as well as lack of enthusiasm for all the candidates. However, the selection of Paul Ryan as Mitt Romney's vice-presidential running mate, increased Romney's support among the group.
Though the Tea Party has had a large influence on the Republican Party, it also has its critics within the party. Speaker of the House John Boehner condemned many Tea Party politicians for their behavior during the 2013 U.S. debt ceiling crisis. He said, "I think they're misleading their followers. They're pushing our members in places where they don't want to be, and frankly I just think that they've lost all credibility." In a 2013 survey, 20% of self-identified Republicans stated that they considered themselves as part of the Tea Party movement.
Several polls have been conducted on the demographics of the movement. These tend to show that Tea Party supporters are more likely to be white, male, married, older than 45, regularly attending religious services, conservative, and to be more wealthy and have more education. Three main groups provide guidance and organization for Tea Party protests: FreedomWorks, dontGO, and Americans for Prosperity.
On April 29, 2009, President Obama commented on the Tea Party protests during a townhall meeting in Arnold, Missouri. He said "Let's not play games and pretend that the reason is because of the recovery act, because that's just a fraction of the overall problem that we've got." Then on April 15, 2010, Obama he noted that there had been 25 different tax cuts over the past year, including tax cuts for 95% of working Americans and he said, "So I've been a little amused over the last couple of days where people have been having these rallies about taxes. You would think they would be saying thank you. That's what you'd think." On September 20, 2010, at a townhall discussion sponsored by CNBC, Obama said healthy skepticism about government and spending was good, but he challenged the Tea Party movement to get specific about how they would cut government debt and spending: "And so the challenge, I think, for the Tea Party movement is to identify specifically what would you do. It's not enough just to say, get control of spending. I think it's important for you to say, I'm willing to cut veterans' benefits, or I'm willing to cut Medicare or Social Security benefits, or I'm willing to see these taxes go up. What you can't do—which is what I've been hearing a lot from the other side—is say we're going to control government spending, we're going to propose $4 trillion of additional tax cuts, and that magically somehow things are going to work."
The final round of debate before voting on the health care bill was marked with threats of violence to a number of Democratic lawmakers across the country. On March 22, 2010, a Lynchburg, Virginia Tea Party organizer and the Danville, Virginia Tea Party Chairman both posted the home address of Representative Tom Perriello's brother, mistakenly believing it was the Congressman's address, on their websites, and encouraged readers to "drop by" to express their anger against Representative Perriello's vote in favor of the healthcare bill. The following day, after smelling gas in his house, a severed gas line that connected to a propane tank was discovered on Perriello's brother's screened-in porch. Local police and FBI investigators determined that it was intentionally cut as an act of vandalism. A Tea Party website issued a response saying the Tea Party member's action of posting the address "was not requested, sanctioned or endorsed by the Lynchburg Tea Party".
The future of the Tea Party movement is unclear now, given that the candidate they supported in the last election has now been elected president. History has shown that it is easier to oppose than it is to govern. It remains to be seen whether this movement will find satisfaction in the current government, whether it will turn on the present administration or whether its electoral success will be the beginning of its demise.
The movement takes its name from the Boston Tea Party of December 16, 1773, an event that contributed to the American Revolution, in which colonists threw British imported tea into the waters of Boston harbor in a protest against taxation by the British government without political representation for the American colonists.
The Tea Party does not have a formal structure or hierarchy, and therefore this allows each autonomous group to set its own priorities and goals. As a consequence, goals among these groups in different regions often conflict, and priorities often differ between groups. Tea Party argue that this is in fact a strength rather than a weakness, because this decentralization makes it impossible for the Tea Party to be corrupted and co-opted by outside entities. Many groups focus on economic issues and on limited government. The Tea Party generally focuses on a significant reduction in the size and scope of the government. However many groups advocate for social issues such as abortion, gun control, prayer in schools, and illegal immigration.
Common topics of protest by Tea Party members include:
1. Limiting the size of the federal government
2. Reducing government spending and lowering the national debt
3. Opposition to tax increases
4. Opposing costly government programs such as Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, cap and trade environmental regulations, health care reform such as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act
5. Opposition to amnesty for illegal immigrants
Many of these goals have their genesis in Newt Gingrich's "Contract from America", a legislative agenda released by the Republican Party during the 1994 midterm elections.
The Tea Party movement is composed of a loose affiliation of national and local groups that determine their own platforms and agendas without central leadership. Although some within the movement consider it to be a grassroots political phenomenon, the presence of corporate-funded activity within the movement exists. Polls show that most Tea Party members consider themselves to be Republicans and the movement's supporters have tended to endorse Republican candidates, as members of that party are more likely to endorse Tea Party positions. Some commentators charge that the movement is not a new political group but simply a re-branding of traditional Republican candidates and policies. Prominent Republican politicians such as Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, or Ted Cruz have enjoyed the support of these groups and in July 2010, Bachmann formed the Tea Party Congressional Caucus. However, the caucus has been defunct since July 2012. Many Tea Party activists were skeptical of the caucus, seeing it as an effort by the Republican Party to hijack the movement.
In 1984, David H. Koch and his brother Charles G. Koch of Koch Industries founded Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE), a conservative political group. Its self-described mission was "to fight for less government, lower taxes, and less regulation." Congressman Ron Paul was appointed as the first chairman of the organization. In 2002, a Tea Party website was designed and published by the CSE at web address www.usteaparty.com, but the site did not get much attention. In 2003, Dick Armey became the chairman of CSE after retiring from Congress. In 2004 CSE split into FreedomWorks, an advocacy group, and the Americans for Prosperity Foundation. Dick Armey stayed as chairman of FreedomWorks, while David Koch stayed as Chairman of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation. The two organizations were the main organizers of the September 2009 Taxpayer March on Washington, also known as the "9/12 Tea Party".
The Tea Party movement gained momentum with Ron Paul's 2008 presidential primary campaign. Paul said that its origin was on December 16, 2007, when supporters held a 24-hour record breaking, "moneybomb" fundraising event on the 234th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. Paul has been called the "intellectual godfather" of the movement because many in the Tea Party agree with Dr. Paul's long-held beliefs.
The Koch brothers were essential in funding and strengthening the movement, through groups such as Americans for Prosperity. Their involvement has caused the movement's critics, such as former Vice-President Al Gore, to argue that the Tea Party is manipulated by the Kochs and others "to promote corporate profit at the expense of the public good."
Early protests organized by local groups targeted the Bush administration's Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 and the Obama administration's economic stimulus package the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and healthcare reform legislation. The bailouts of banks by the Bush and Obama administrations led to increased support for the Tea Party.
On February 18, 2009, when the Obama administration announced the Homeowners Affordability and Stability Plan, an economic recovery plan to help home owners avoid foreclosure by refinance mortgages, CNBC business news editor Rick Santelli criticized the Plan in a live broadcast from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. He said that those plans were "promoting bad behavior" by "subsidizing losers' mortgages". He suggested holding a tea party for traders to gather and dump the derivatives in the Chicago River on July 1. “President Obama, are you listening?” he asked. Santelli's "rant" became a viral video. Many credit Santelli's remarks with giving the movement its momentum. A "Nationwide Chicago Tea Party" protest was coordinated across more than 40 different cities for February 27, 2009, leading to the first national modern Tea Party protest. Fox News promoted these events on air and sent speakers to them. These included then-host Glenn Beck.
In the 2010 midterm elections, The New York Times identified 138 candidates for Congress with significant Tea Party support. All of them were running as Republicans, with 129 running for the House and 9 for the Senate. A poll commissioned by the Wall Street Journal and NBC News in mid October showed 35% of likely voters were Tea-party supporters, and they favored the Republicans by 84% to 10%. Overall, 32% of the candidates that were backed by the Tea Party or who identified themselves as a Tea Party member won election. Tea Party supported candidates won 5 of 10 Senate races contested, and 40 of 130 House races contested.
Tea Party candidates were less successful in the 2012 election, winning four of 16 Senate races contested, and losing approximately 20% of the seats in the House that had been gained in 2010. Tea Party Caucus founder Michele Bachmann was re-elected to the House by a narrow margin. In June 2014, Tea Party favorite Dave Brat unseated the sitting GOP House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. Brat had previously been known as an economist and a professor at Randolph–Macon College, running a grassroots conservative campaign that called for greater fiscal restraint.
In November 2014, Tim Scott became the first African-American member of the U.S. Senate from the South since the reconstruction era, winning the South Carolina seat formerly held by Jim DeMint in a special election. Scott's election is cited in support of the argument that the Tea Party is neither racist nor sexist. In the 2014 elections in Texas, the Tea Party made large gains, with numerous Tea Party favorites being elected into office, including Dan Patrick as Lieutenant Governor. In the 2015 Kentucky gubernatorial election, Matt Bevin, a Tea Party favorite who challenged Mitch McConnell in the Republican primary in the 2014 Kentucky Senate election, won with over 52% of the vote, despite fears that he was too extreme for the state. Bevin is just the second Republican in 44 years to be Governor of Kentucky.
In May 2013, the Associated Press and The New York Times reported that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) flagged Tea Party groups and other conservative groups for review of their applications for tax-exempt status during the 2012 election. This led to triggered multiple investigations. Some Tea Party groups were asked for donor lists, a violation of IRS policy. Groups were also asked for details about family members and about their postings on social networking sites. Lois Lerner, head of the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt groups, later apologized on behalf of the IRS. She stated, "That was wrong. That was absolutely incorrect, it was insensitive and it was inappropriate." Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, rejected the apology as insufficient, and called for “ironclad guarantees from the I.R.S. that it will adopt significant protocols to ensure this kind of harassment of groups that have a constitutional right to express their own views never happens again.” The resulting Senate subcommittee report ultimately found there had been “no bias”, though Republican committee members filed a dissenting report. After a two-year investigation, the Justice Department announced in October 2015 that "We found no evidence that any IRS official acted based on political, discriminatory, corrupt, or other inappropriate motives that would support a criminal prosecution."
President Donald Trump praised the Tea Party movement throughout his 2016 campaign. In a campaign event held in August 2015, he told a Tea Party gathering in Nashville, "The tea party people are incredible people. These are people who work hard and love the country and they get beat up all the time by the media." In a January 2016 CNN poll at the beginning of the 2016 Republican primary, Trump led all Republican candidates modestly among self-identified Tea Party voters with 37 percent supporting Trump and 34 percent supporting Ted Cruz. National Tea Party movement co-founder and leader Michael Johns endorsed Trump immediately after Trump's June 2015 announcement of his candidacy. Tea Party Patriots, a national Tea Party organization, endorsed Cruz in the presidential primary.
Tea Party activities have declined since 2010. The number of Tea Party chapters across the country slipped from about 1,000 to 600 between 2009 and 2012. Most Tea Party organizations have shifted away from national demonstrations to local issues. The Tea Party's involvement in the 2012 GOP presidential primaries was minimal, owing to divisions over whom to endorse as well as lack of enthusiasm for all the candidates. However, the selection of Paul Ryan as Mitt Romney's vice-presidential running mate, increased Romney's support among the group.
Though the Tea Party has had a large influence on the Republican Party, it also has its critics within the party. Speaker of the House John Boehner condemned many Tea Party politicians for their behavior during the 2013 U.S. debt ceiling crisis. He said, "I think they're misleading their followers. They're pushing our members in places where they don't want to be, and frankly I just think that they've lost all credibility." In a 2013 survey, 20% of self-identified Republicans stated that they considered themselves as part of the Tea Party movement.
Several polls have been conducted on the demographics of the movement. These tend to show that Tea Party supporters are more likely to be white, male, married, older than 45, regularly attending religious services, conservative, and to be more wealthy and have more education. Three main groups provide guidance and organization for Tea Party protests: FreedomWorks, dontGO, and Americans for Prosperity.
On April 29, 2009, President Obama commented on the Tea Party protests during a townhall meeting in Arnold, Missouri. He said "Let's not play games and pretend that the reason is because of the recovery act, because that's just a fraction of the overall problem that we've got." Then on April 15, 2010, Obama he noted that there had been 25 different tax cuts over the past year, including tax cuts for 95% of working Americans and he said, "So I've been a little amused over the last couple of days where people have been having these rallies about taxes. You would think they would be saying thank you. That's what you'd think." On September 20, 2010, at a townhall discussion sponsored by CNBC, Obama said healthy skepticism about government and spending was good, but he challenged the Tea Party movement to get specific about how they would cut government debt and spending: "And so the challenge, I think, for the Tea Party movement is to identify specifically what would you do. It's not enough just to say, get control of spending. I think it's important for you to say, I'm willing to cut veterans' benefits, or I'm willing to cut Medicare or Social Security benefits, or I'm willing to see these taxes go up. What you can't do—which is what I've been hearing a lot from the other side—is say we're going to control government spending, we're going to propose $4 trillion of additional tax cuts, and that magically somehow things are going to work."
The final round of debate before voting on the health care bill was marked with threats of violence to a number of Democratic lawmakers across the country. On March 22, 2010, a Lynchburg, Virginia Tea Party organizer and the Danville, Virginia Tea Party Chairman both posted the home address of Representative Tom Perriello's brother, mistakenly believing it was the Congressman's address, on their websites, and encouraged readers to "drop by" to express their anger against Representative Perriello's vote in favor of the healthcare bill. The following day, after smelling gas in his house, a severed gas line that connected to a propane tank was discovered on Perriello's brother's screened-in porch. Local police and FBI investigators determined that it was intentionally cut as an act of vandalism. A Tea Party website issued a response saying the Tea Party member's action of posting the address "was not requested, sanctioned or endorsed by the Lynchburg Tea Party".
The future of the Tea Party movement is unclear now, given that the candidate they supported in the last election has now been elected president. History has shown that it is easier to oppose than it is to govern. It remains to be seen whether this movement will find satisfaction in the current government, whether it will turn on the present administration or whether its electoral success will be the beginning of its demise.