The Tea Party

It’s called the Tea Party, but you’ll never see it on a ballot. It’s an amorphous movement favoring small government, gun rights and tax cuts and it’s been a force in U.S. politics since it helped Republicans win the House in 2010. Its political skills and outside money mobilized a strain of discontented conservatives that has pulled the Republican Party to the right. At the same time, its anti-incumbent fervor, aversion to any compromise with Democrats and organizational savvy has bedeviled Republican Party leaders.

While the Republican’s likely nominee for president, Donald Trump, doesn’t share Tea Party views on issues like cutting government benefits, he did choose an early Tea Party supporter, Indiana Governor Mike Pence, as his vice presidential running mate. Some Tea Party bloggers still found fault with Pence’s record on free trade and immigration. The movement has a history of turning on Republicans. It was behind the primary election defeat of House majority leader Eric Cantor in June 2014 after he voted to raise the debt ceiling. Then the group’s Congressional sympathizers, organized under the Freedom Caucus, rebelled against John Boehner, the man they’d helped make House speaker in 2010, because he wasn’t sufficiently aggressive in his dealings with House Democrats and President Barack Obama. Boehner resigned as speaker in September 2015. While the Tea Party calls itself “a spontaneous force” and touts support from small donors, significant factions are bankrolled by millionaires and billionaires. Its core beliefs tend to lean toward libertarian strains. Various factions don’t always agree with one another, particularly on issues like immigration. Many in the movement hold positions that overlap with the religious right, though Tea Party groups are more likely to quote the U.S. Constitution than the Bible.