After the caucus's first weekly meeting, Rep. Michele Bachmann stressed that the group was intended to be 'a listening ear to the tea party and nothing more.' | John Shinkle/POLITICO Tea party vs. Tea Party Caucus

To anxious Republicans trying to channel grass-roots conservatism, the Congressional Tea Party Caucus is part of the solution. To many in the tea party, the caucus seems like part of the problem.

Instead of embracing the caucus and its 49 House members, many tea party activists see it as yet another effort by the GOP to hijack their movement — and symptomatic of a party establishment that, they say, is condescending and out of step with their brand of conservatism.


At a news conference after the caucus’s first weekly meeting July 21, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), flanked by about a dozen tea party activists, stressed that it was not an effort to control or speak for the movement but, rather, to be “a listening ear to the tea party and nothing more.”

Yet since her hasty formation of the caucus in the days before that meeting, the e-mail listservs, blogs and conference calls that constitute the tea party movement’s nervous system have buzzed with criticism of the caucus.

“I do not particularly like the very ones who need to be held accountable to be co-opting the tea party brand,” wrote the well-regarded tea party blogger Melissa Clouthier. “Ultimately, I worry it destroys the tea party — which started out as a nonpartisan group.”

Tea partiers “ought to be leery of establishment Republicans and the formation of a Congressional Tea Party Caucus,” asserted a post on the conservative Examiner website, advising activists that “if an opportunity like getting a foothold in the corridors of Washington seems too good to be true, it probably is.”

And some tea party allies in Washington also are skeptical. Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) warned that the caucus may be seen as trying to “co-opt” the movement and questioned the motivations of its members, while some of his colleagues have kept their distance for fear of being branded as extremists.

“I’m 100 percent pro-tea party, but this is not the right thing to do,” said Chaffetz, who declined to join the caucus.

“Structure and formality are the exact opposite of what the tea party is, and if there is an attempt to put structure and formality around it, or to co-opt it by Washington, D.C., it’s going to take away from the free-flowing nature of the true tea party movement,” Chaffetz told POLITICO. “If any one person tries to become the head of it, it will lose its way.”

Some of those same sentiments were aired a couple of days before the caucus’s first meeting on a conference call of coordinators of the influential umbrella group Tea Party Patriots during a debate about whether the group’s leaders should participate in the meeting.

“There was skepticism that this was possibly a move to speak for the tea party or to take advantage of the tea party,” said Mark Meckler, a national coordinator for Tea Party Patriots, which includes more than 2,500 local tea party groups.

Ultimately, a majority of the organizers on the call agreed that representatives from Tea Party Patriots should attend the caucus meeting. Five of the dozen tea party activists who participated in the closed-door caucus meeting with 24 caucus members, and then appeared together at the post-caucus news conference, counted themselves as members of the Patriots.

The idea, according to Meckler, was partly “to make sure that people didn’t think they could speak for the movement. There was a healthy dose of skepticism and distance.”

It didn’t help when one House member, whom neither Meckler nor others interviewed for this story would identify, said he felt he was taking a political risk by affiliating with the caucus and the movement.

That struck a lot of activists as “fairly patronizing,” said Andrew Ian Dodge, the Patriots state coordinator for Maine, who did not attend the conference but did participate the next day in a Patriots conference call at which Meckler and another attendee recounted the unnamed member’s trepidation.

“How is this a risk for the politicians?” said Dodge. “The tea party movement is made up of very engaged, well-informed, intelligent people. It should be the politicians’ pleasure to meet with us.”

The member in question should be asked to leave the caucus, as should “a few others based upon their previous voting habits,” asserted Katrina Pierson, a Dallas Tea Party Patriots organizer who attended the meeting.

“If the tea party can stay in front of the caucus by vetting these members and monitoring their votes,” she said, “it will be a good tool to hold these members accountable when liberal legislation is presented.”

Already, tea party activists have cried foul over one caucus member’s vote this month for the Democratic legislation overhauling financial regulations.

Pointing out that North Carolina Rep. Walter Jones was one of only three Republicans to support the bill, a writer on the influential Red State blog asserted “his membership on the Tea Party Caucus tells me they’ll take just about anybody. Kinda defeats the purpose, does it not?”

Bachmann has also come under tea party fire of late for her support of a pair of GOP congressional candidates opposed by tea partiers.

Meanwhile, Democrats delightedly find themselves with a new target and have eagerly seized on the caucus, which has no official legislative role and hasn’t indicated it will produce policy papers, as their main piece of evidence in a new effort to link congressional Republicans to extremist elements.

Noting that National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Pete Sessions and House Republican Conference Chairman Mike Pence joined the caucus, Democrats have sought to tie congressional Republicans to such hard-line tea party positions as abolishing the departments of Education and Energy and repealing health care reform.

“The Republican Party agenda has become the tea party agenda, and vice versa,” said Democratic National Committee Chairman Tim Kaine at a news conference last week rolling out the effort.

Bachmann’s staff declined to make her available for an interview. But her spokesman Dave Dziok said, “What Democratic leadership doesn’t seem to understand is that the tea party isn’t a political party; it’s a set of ideas shared by the overwhelming majority of Americans.”

And Dziok said the GOP “would be smart to rally around the principles being promoted by the tea party and mainstream America, and that’s fiscal responsibility, limited government and a strict adherence to the Constitution.”

In Bachmann’s remarks at the post-caucus news conference, though, she seemed acutely aware of prospective Democratic and tea party criticisms, as well as the possibility of touching off more tea party infighting by appearing to endorse a specific group such as the Patriots.

“We are not taking the tea party and controlling it from Washington, D.C.,” she said, asserting that the caucus is not partisan and explaining that one Democrat had expressed potential interest in joining. “We are also not here to vouch for the tea party or to vouch for any tea party organizations or to vouch for any individual people or actions, or billboards or signs or anything of the tea party,” she said.

Bachmann has, in fact, invited Amy Kremer, the chairwoman of the Tea Party Express, a group locked in a bitter feud with the Patriots, to speak to a caucus meeting after the August congressional recess.

“It is a sign that they are paying attention to us,” said Kremer, a former Patriots leader whose split with the group prompted a lawsuit. But, Kremer quickly added, “it is important that people realize that they do not speak on behalf of the movement.”

And at the second caucus meeting last Wednesday — the final meeting before the summer recess — the caucus was addressed for a full hour by Kevin Jackson, a tea party activist who has focused on bringing more minorities into the movement and who has worked with the Tea Party Express (whose former chairman Mark Williams was widely criticized within the tea party movement for a racially offensive attack on the NAACP).

Jackson said the proof of the caucus’s significance will be in whether its members’ votes, endorsements and other actions truly reflect the small government principles of the tea party movement.

“As we go through a few election cycles, I think you’re going to see a lot more compatibility between what the tea party wants and what the Republican Party wants,” he said. “And I think the caucus is going to be a sounding board for that process.”