A Tea Party

The Tea Party movement is a fragmented movement of anti big government protesters named after the Boston Tea Party, a 1773 protest by citizens in Boston, Massachusetts against the British government, and an historic event that served as a precursor to the American Revolution in 1776. Indeed, some of today’s tea party members compare themselves to the patriots of 1776 and America’s Founding Fathers.
But what does the 21 century Tea Party stand for? The Mission Statement of the Tea Party Patriots, which bills itself as the “Official Home of the American Tea Party Movement”, reads as follows:

The impetus for the Tea Party movement is excessive government spending and taxation. Our mission is to attract, educate, organize, and mobilize our fellow citizens to secure public policy consistent with our three core values of Fiscal Responsibility, Constitutionally Limited Government and Free Markets.

Even in light of the recent for-profit National Tea Party Convention at which some speakers were actually paid to address the audience, the reality is that there is not one, unified Tea Party.
The current focus of Tea Party attention, to the extent the movement can be collectively identified from among the many so-called Tea Party organizations; seems to be their effort to pressure Democratic members of the House of Representatives to vote against President Obama’s historic and long-overdue healthcare overhaul legislation as passed by the Senate last year. They are reportedly hoping to meet with 50 Democratic members of the House of Representatives by the end of March in an effort to kill the bill. They’re going to have to act fast though as it is widely anticipated that Congress will vote on the bill this week before President Obama leaves for a trip to Asia – a trip he has postponed in order to lobby members of Congress on the vote.