The tea party movement is not seeking a junior partnership with the Republican Party. It is aiming for a hostile takeover. The movement has blossomed into a powerful social phenomenon because it is leaderless—not directed by any one mind, political party or parochial agenda.
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FreedomWorks
Matt Kibbe, president of FreedomWorks, is optimistic that conservatives can win the House, and perhaps the Senate, in November. “Politically the elections will be a repeat of 1994 but it will be fundamentally different because these [tea party] folks are organised and are in all 50 states so it’s sustainable after the election,” he says.
The Tea Party Patriots, a national umbrella organization for hundreds of local tea party groups around the country, joined today with the National Taxpayers Union, FreedomWorks, and Americans for Tax Reform, three of the nation’s most prominent free-market advocacy groups, to announce the upcoming April 15 launch of the “Contract from America,” a grassroots legislative agenda for 2010 and beyond. Originally proposed by Ryan Hecker, a Houston Tea Party activist and National Coordinator for the project’s chief organizing group Tea Party Patriots, the Contract is a different kind of agenda for our federal lawmakers: unlike the Contract with America from the 1990s, every plank of the Contract from America was proposed and voted on by everyday citizens.
A question hovering around the tea party movement has been: will it hurt Republicans at the polls in November, generating third-party candidates and sucking votes away from the GOP? I don’t know the answer to this question for sure, but I do know this: top Tea Party organizers are not interested in supporting third-party candidates, or in forming official Tea Party political parties in states, which means it’s unlikely we’ll see an organized movement to form Tea Parties and make trouble in GOP-stronghold districts.
Outrage was what he was feeling about the Bush administration’s plan to bail out banks when he thought up the Contract from America in December 2008. In contrast to Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America, the new contract would bubble up from the grass roots, setting forth principles that politicians would be asked to embrace. Now, tens of thousands of activists have voted on what they consider the top 10 principles.
While 2009 was known as the year of the first Taxpayer March on Washington, 2010 is shaping up to be the year of the Contract FROM America.
On Thursday, limited government activists will take the next step in their quest to take America back as the Contract’s top twenty agenda items are unveiled. The Contract was [...]
Speaking to reporters in the lobby of the Renaissance hotel — wearing a cowboy hat, leather boots and toting an iPhone — Armey said that the “small government, grass-roots conservative movement” is distrusting of Republicans, too, and that GOP candidates have work to do to win over the group’s members. Republicans need to “walk among” the conservative grassroots to win big this year, he told POLITICO, echoing his speech to House Republicans.
Ryan Hecker, a lawyer and Tea Party activist, had an easy sell. His idea, fleshed out over four months, was to produce an election manifesto along the lines of the Contract with America launched by Republicans shortly before the 1994 elections, or the 1961 Sharon statement drafted by Young Americans for Freedom. First, Tea Party activists — and anyone else who was interested — would submit ideas at www.ContractFromAmerica.com
