The Tea Party Caucus: It’s Baaack!
Source: The New York Times
For the better part of a year, the country has survived, somehow, without a House Tea Party Caucus. A group that once boiled with anti-government furor went dormant last summer as the Tea Party’s popularity plummeted and its leader, Michele Bachmann, struggled to get re-elected. Ten caucus members lost their jobs in November. The sniping about the House Republican leadership — not to mention President Obama — quieted down, and so did the tweets championing Barry Goldwater’s still-radioactive support of extremism.
(The caucus also brought us gems like this one, from the caucus’s Twitter stream last July: “This week’s featured Member is @RepToddAkin. Click here to learn more about him: http://tiny.cc/00o6gw #tcot #TeaParty.” Hint: don’t bother to click.)
But on Thursday the caucus is holding a reception to “relaunch” itself, according to Roll Call—a cause for celebration if you’re a connoisseur of Republican disorder. It’s been ages since caucus-members sponsored a “birther” bill, reminding the public of the racism and nativism that swirls around the extreme right. It’s been ages since Ms. Bachmann and others fought against raising the debt ceiling, and practically cheered for the government default that would result. (They promised that it would not be a catastrophe because the White House could easily prioritize which debts to pay off.) And it’s been years since the caucus issued a budget to the right of Paul Ryan’s — and to the right of the very conservative Republican Study Committee — advocating unimaginable cuts that would make the current sequester seem like a liberal fantasy.
House Republican leaders can’t be happy about this development. They’ve been desperately trying to rebrand their party, making it more palatable to suburban voters who were turned off by the caucus’s “you lie!” stridency. The immigration bill now inching through Congress is one fruit of that effort, but Tea Party Caucus members have promised to rip it apart or severely water it down once it reaches the House.
The right-wing undermining of House leaders was also evident on Wednesday, when Majority Leader Eric Cantor pulled a bill that would have moved money from the prevention fund in the health care reform law to high-risk insurance pools. Mr. Cantor wanted to show that that the law was deeply flawed but that his party still cared about poor people with pre-existing conditions. House conservatives, however, want only to repeal the health-care law, and refused to vote for any bill that merely made adjustments to it.
The Tea Party, or what remains of it, has no interest in rebranding, and even the presence of a smaller, less influential caucus will exert an ideological tug on less radical Republicans. On Wednesday, in fact, the House Ways and Means Committee approved a bill that would, once again, prioritize the nation’s debt in the event of a default when the debt ceiling expires this summer. Mainstream voters who might have thought the Republican Party had left all that behind should think again.
Read more: http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/25/the-tea-party-caucus-its-baaack/
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I hate what they stand for, but love the way they go about trying to get it! 
