Now, a long-simmering ideological disagreement between the Republican Party and these political upstarts has burst into a full-blown political feud, with newly-elected Tea Partiers intent to change the Washington status quo while their supporters back home try to unseat long-serving Senate and House Republicans.
The split between these two right-wing political camps widened earlier this month when Michele Bachmann, a Minnesota Republican who chairs a caucus of US Representatives aligned with the Tea Party, was given an opportunity to respond on national television to President Barack Obama’s “State of the Union” address.
Traditionally, the “official” opposition party – Republicans, in this instance – is offered the opportunity to respond to the president’s speech. However, Bachmann’s rebuttal – a harshly-worded attack on, among other things, Obama’s healthcare reform program and his economic stimulus — confused many TV viewers, who moments earlier had just viewed a more conciliatory rebuttal offered by Paul Ryan, a Republican congressman from Wisconsin.
John Boehner, the Republican speaker of the house, was non-committal when asked the next day if Bachmann’s rebuttal had created divisions within the Republican Party. “Well, I think all members of the House and the Senate responded to the speech in many forms,” Boehner said blandly, adding pointedly he had not watched her TV address.
Washington bureaucracies that have heretofore enjoyed decades of support from both political parties are now under assaulted from the Tea Party. Rand Paul, a Republican swept into the US Senate last November by the Kentucky Tea Party, has introduced a bill that would virtually eliminate two Federal departments – Education and Energy – and impose across-the-board spending cuts for all government agencies, including the Pentagon.
“Most of official Washington thinks [these measures] are way too dramatic, but, guess what – it’s not enough,” Paul recently told reporters.
Paul, whose father Ron is a Republican representative from Texas who made an unsuccessful bid in 2008 for the White House, also credits the Tea Party for “convincing” President Obama to propose a two-year salary freeze for government workers and to promise to veto any congressional bill that contains earmarks.
“People asked whether we would be co-opted by Washington,” Paul said. “I think we are co-opting Washington…The president of the United States has been co-opted by the Tea Party.”
In states pivotal to victory in the 2012 presidential race, Tea Partiers are now taking steps to remove veteran Republicans who, say the activists, are not conservative enough. In Indiana, 70 Tea Party groups have announced that they intend to unseat Richard Lugar, who has served in the US Senate since 1977. Other long-serving senate Republicans targeted by the Tea Party are Maine’s Olympia Snow and Utah’s Orrin Hatch.
The political maneuvering, barely two years before the 2012 elections, are part of a strategy to ensure selected Tea Party candidates will prevail over Republican incumbents in primary votes leading up to general election. The early actions also reveal a broader definition of who the Tea Party considers an “ideal conservative”: While Snow freely acknowledges that she is a moderate Republican, Lugar and Hatch are unabashedly conservative and universally regarded as such.
Lugar speculates that moves by the Tea Party to unseat him are largely motivated by anger “about how things have turned out” in Washington. Lugar says that the Tea Party is always declaring its opposition to “big government, but they are not able to articulate all the specifics.”
