Jonathan Mahler, Columnist

Tea Party Aims Chop at Braves' Stadium

Make yourselves useful, Tea Party! Go forth and get angry about publicly financed stadiums!Â

December 18, 2013 at 3:27 PM UTC

Jonathan Mahler is a sports columnist for Bloomberg View. He is the author of the best-selling "Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning," the basis for the eight-part ESPN mini-series. He also wrote "The Challenge," the winner of the 2009 Scribes Book Award, and "Death Comes to Happy Valley." A longtime contributor to the New York Times Magazine and the Times Book Review, Mahler has written for numerous other publications including the Washington Post, Slate, the New Republic and New York magazine. He lives in New York.

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The Tea Party is coming to the rescue! Seriously. Last month, when the Atlanta Braves announced their intention to abandon Turner Field for a new, publicly subsidized stadium in Cobb County, we were all wondering what America's favorite "populist movement" would have to say. A local government committing hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to a project without a referendum? This was tailor-made for them to go absolutely bananas. And, of course, Cobb County is Tea Party country -- the birthplace of Newt Gingrich's presidential bid and home base of two of its most stalwart members, Republican Representatives Tom Price and Phil Gingrey.

On the other hand, when the County Commission passed the plan for the $672 million stadium on a 4-1 vote, the holdout was a lone Democratic commissioner. (Business as usual: When isn't a highly profitable professional sports team bamboozling a local government into spending millions in tax dollars on a new stadium?)