Tea Party movement

• 1. Introduction

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  The Tea Party movement announced itself to the country on the 19th of February 2009, when a CNBC business news editor named Rick Santelli stepped onto the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and let loose what would become one of the most consequential rants in recent American political history. He accused the Obama administration's new mortgage relief plan of "promoting bad behavior" by "subsidizing losers' mortgages". Then he suggested holding a tea party for traders to dump derivatives in the Chicago River on July 1. The floor traders around him cheered. Within roughly ten hours, a website called reTeaParty.com was registered to coordinate protests nationwide.

  What followed was something American politics had not seen in decades: a loosely organized, sometimes chaotic, ideologically varied mass movement that would reshape the Republican Party, fuel a historic wave election, and eventually dissolve into the political mainstream it had set out to challenge. Where did it actually come from? Who funded it? What did it want? And what happened to it in the end?

• 2. Before the Rant

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  Ron Paul's 2008 presidential primary campaign is where Fox News commentator Juan Williams and others trace the Tea Party's true origins. Paul himself has said that the movement's birth came on the 16th of December 2007, when his supporters staged a 24-hour fundraising event on the 234th anniversary of the original Boston Tea Party. Writing for Slate, journalist Dave Weigel agreed, arguing that the first modern Tea Party events occurred in December 2007, long before Barack Obama took office.

  The institutional groundwork stretched back even further. In 1984, David H. Koch and Charles G. Koch of Koch Industries founded Citizens for a Sound Economy, a conservative political group with a stated mission of fighting for less government, lower taxes, and less regulation. Ron Paul himself was appointed as the organization's first chairman. By 2002, Citizens for a Sound Economy had published a Tea Party website at usteaparty.com, describing a national online event for Americans who felt taxes were too high. The site did not catch on at the time.

  In 2004, Citizens for a Sound Economy split into two organizations: FreedomWorks, focused on 501(c)(4) advocacy, and the Americans for Prosperity Foundation. Dick Armey, who had retired from Congress the previous year to chair Citizens for a Sound Economy, remained at FreedomWorks. David Koch became chairman of Americans for Prosperity. Both groups would become central players when the moment finally arrived in 2009.

• 3. The First Sparks

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  Seattle blogger Keli Carender organized what she called a "Porkulus Protest" on Presidents Day, the 16th of February 2009 - one day before President Obama signed the stimulus bill. She reported 120 people attended, and she had done it entirely through personal outreach over four days, calling think tanks, university professors, and policy centers. "I just got fed up and planned it," she said. Conservative author and Fox News contributor Michelle Malkin publicized the rally on her blog the day before, and the Colorado branch of Americans for Prosperity held its own protest the following day.

  On the 20th of February 2009, the Nationwide Tea Party Coalition helped launch the movement through a conference call attended by around 50 conservative activists. That same week, the group Americans for Prosperity registered the domain name TaxDayTeaParty.com and launched a website calling for protests against Obama. Websites including ChicagoTeaParty.com, which had been registered in August 2008 by a radio producer for a conservative talk show host, went live within 12 hours of Santelli's remarks.

  A "Nationwide Chicago Tea Party" protest was coordinated across more than 40 cities for the 27th of February 2009, establishing the first national modern Tea Party protest. Fox News called many of the 2009 protests "FNC Tax Day Tea Parties" and promoted them on air, sending speakers including then-host Glenn Beck, though Fox later discouraged him from attending subsequent events.

• 4. The Agenda and Its Contradictions

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  Reducing the size and scope of the federal government sat at the center of Tea Party demands, but the movement had no single uniform agenda. Its decentralized structure, with no formal hierarchy and each autonomous group setting its own priorities, meant that goals often conflicted and priorities differed sharply between chapters. Many organizers treated this as a feature rather than a flaw, arguing that decentralization protected the movement from being co-opted by outside interests.

  Constitutional amendments drew specific attention: some within the movement targeted the 16th Amendment, which permits an income tax, and the 17th Amendment, which requires popular election of senators, for full or partial repeal. There was also support for a proposed Repeal Amendment that would allow a two-thirds majority of states to override federal laws, and a Balanced Budget Amendment to limit deficit spending.

  The Contract from America, created by conservative activist Ryan Hecker with help from Dick Armey of FreedomWorks, attempted to impose some order. One thousand agenda ideas were narrowed to twenty-one non-social issues; participants then voted online to produce a ten-point platform. The Contract met with some GOP support but was not broadly embraced by Republican leadership, which issued its own rival document called the Pledge to America.

  Foreign policy presented its own internal split. Historian Walter Russell Mead, writing in Foreign Affairs in 2011, identified two main trends: one following Ron Paul's Jeffersonian preference for avoiding foreign military involvement, and another following Sarah Palin's more assertive approach to maintaining American primacy abroad. Both camps shared what Mead described as a distaste for "liberal internationalism", and Tea Party-affiliated lawmakers in both the House and Senate showed willingness to cut foreign aid.

• 5. Money and Astroturf

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  Journalist Jane Mayer argued in The New Yorker in August 2010 that brothers David H. Koch and Charles G. Koch and Koch Industries provided financial support to organizations that became part of the Tea Party movement through Americans for Prosperity. A Koch Industries spokesperson responded that same year saying no funding from Koch companies, the Koch foundation, or either brother was provided specifically to support the tea parties.

  A study published in the journal Tobacco Control in 2013 concluded that organizations within the movement were connected with nonprofits that the tobacco industry and other corporate interests had funded, including Citizens for a Sound Economy. Al Gore cited the study and traced a line back to a 1971 memo from tobacco lawyer Lewis F. Powell, Jr., who had advocated increased corporate political power.

  The question of whether the movement was truly grassroots or largely astroturfed became a recurring debate. An October 2010 Washington Post canvass of local Tea Party organizers found 87 percent saying dissatisfaction with mainstream Republican Party leaders was an important factor in the support the movement received. Conservative political strategist Tim Phillips, head of Americans for Prosperity, remarked that the Republican Party was "too disorganized and unsure of itself to pull this off." Some observers landed in between, describing the movement's grassroots element as "amplified by the right-wing media" and supported by elite funding.

  Campaign finance attorney Paul H. Jossey later argued that the movement, which had begun as an "organic, policy-driven grass-roots movement", was ultimately "drained of its vitality and resources by national political action committees that dunned the movement's true believers endlessly for money to support its candidates and causes."

• 6. Electoral Rise and Decline

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  The 2010 midterm elections showed what the movement could accomplish when fully mobilized. The New York Times identified 138 congressional candidates with significant Tea Party support, all of them Republicans, and a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll in mid-October showed 35 percent of likely voters were Tea Party supporters, who favored Republicans by 84 percent to 10 percent. Republicans gained 63 House seats and took control of the chamber. Overall, 32 percent of Tea Party-backed candidates won election that year.

  Dean Murray, a Long Island businessman, is believed to be the first Tea Party-affiliated candidate elected to office, winning a special election for a New York State Assembly seat in February 2010. In June 2014, Tea Party favorite Dave Brat, an economist and professor at Randolph-Macon College who ran on Milton Friedman-based viewpoints, unseated sitting House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, a result that sent reverberations through the Republican establishment.

  The 2012 elections marked a turning point. Tea Party candidates won four of 16 Senate races and lost approximately 20 percent of the House seats gained in 2010. Harvard professor Theda Skocpol noted that the number of Tea Party chapters nationally slipped from about 1,000 to 600 between 2009 and 2012, though she described that survival rate as still strong. Chapters shifted emphasis from national demonstrations to local policy mechanics and candidate recruitment.

  By the time of the 2016 election, Politico wrote that the Tea Party had essentially died, attributing the decline in part to the movement's ideas being absorbed by the mainstream Republican Party. In a January 2016 CNN poll, Trump led among self-identified Tea Party voters with 37 percent, compared to 34 percent for Ted Cruz. Jenny Beth Martin, a Tea Party leader, stated after Trump's election that "the values and principles that gave rise to the tea party movement in 2009 are finally gaining the top seat of power in the White House."

• 7. IRS Scrutiny and Fallout

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  In May 2013, the Associated Press and The New York Times reported that the Internal Revenue Service had flagged Tea Party groups and other conservative organizations for heightened review of their applications for tax-exempt status during the 2012 election cycle. Lois Lerner, head of the IRS division overseeing tax-exempt groups, apologized and stated plainly: "That was wrong. That was absolutely incorrect, it was insensitive and it was inappropriate."

  Some groups were asked for donor lists, which the IRS's own policy typically prohibits. Others were asked for details about family members and social media activity. Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, rejected the apology as insufficient and demanded ironclad guarantees against future harassment. IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman, testifying before Congress in March 2012, had denied that groups were being targeted for their political views.

  The resulting Senate subcommittee report found no bias, though Republican members filed a dissenting report. The Treasury inspector general for tax administration found that 18 percent of conservative groups flagged had no evidence of political activity. A Justice Department investigation concluded 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."

  On the 25th of October 2017, the Trump administration settled a consent order in the case Linchpins of Liberty v. United States, with the IRS consenting to express its "sincere apology" for screening applications based on names or policy positions and subjecting them to heightened scrutiny and inordinate delays. That same month, the Treasury Department's inspector general reported that the IRS had also targeted liberal groups, flagging organizations whose names included terms like "Progressive" and "Occupy."