Tea party supports what type of government

The standoff over the issue led to a government shutdown the public largely blamed on congressional Republicans. Story highlights For better or worse, the tea party movement has made a difference Who heard of Ted Cruz or sequestration back in ? Protesting patriots or political obstructionists? Mainstream Republicans are pushing back.

Five years ago, not many people knew of Ted Cruz or sequestration or had seen a tricorne hat. Today, all are familiar in the political arena because of the tea party movement that emerged in For better or worse, the coming together of frustrated conservatives fearing American ruin due to rising debt has altered the national discussion to raise the profile of people and policies previously relegated to the right-wing fringe.

Republicans fear tea party challengers in primaries. Democrats complain about the tea party caucus. The fiscal conversation focuses on reducing deficits and even reforming entitlement programs that make up the social safety net.

More Videos IRS controversy revives tea party Never in the past or so years have so many worn tricorne hats and other Revolutionary War-era garb to make their political point.

At protests and rallies that began in February to spawn the tea party movement, the overwhelmingly white, middle-aged and older participants dressed the part of past patriots protesting against taxation without representation.

They also adopted the Gadsen flag of the the 18th Century -- a coiled snake warning "Don't tread on me. It reflected the movement's link to the Boston Tea Party of that helped launch the War of Independence, while some note that the word "tea" in the label is a backronym for "taxed enough already. Top tea party group celebrates five years. Such romanticism ignores the private funding from big conservative donors, such as the billionaire Koch brothers, that helped amalgamate scattered local organizations into a more coherent movement with national focus.

Bachmann, Tea Party against 'Obamacare' Daily headlines scream with Republican rage over President Barack Obama's signature health care reforms that passed in with zero GOP votes. Tea party zealots as well as mainstream Republicans and independents also disliked the auto industry bailouts and financial sector rescue started under the previous administration of Republican President George W.

That anger helped Obama and Democrats win big in Meanwhile, a similar dynamic prevailed in Indiana, where Republicans gained complete legislative control after a takeover of the House in the election. What it may have done is change the tenor of debate and the rhetoric. Meanwhile, many Tea Party supporters have focused more on national politics, either in Congress or in the Republican presidential race, than on the nitty-gritty work of influencing legislatures state by state.

Tea Party or not, anyone who has long wanted to enact good-government conservative reforms in Alabama would have been very pleased with this legislative session.

Perhaps most important, the Tea Party, as a self-styled grassroots movement, has tended to encourage decentralized and locally autonomous leadership.

As a result, state Tea Party groups have not taken a cookie-cutter approach to influencing legislation. Based on interviews with several dozen political observers and participants in a range of states, State Legislatures magazine found that while Tea Party activists agreed on a low-tax, small-government agenda, activists in the movement—and the legislators who won their support—actually pursued a wide range of issues.

Some worked inside the system, others outside it. In short, local Resistance groups have not been as densely clustered in liberal Democratic voting strongholds as local Tea Parties have been clustered in conservative GOP strongholds. Although both types of groups were organized pretty much everywhere across the country, Tea Parties achieved their strongest presence in very conservative GOP areas, whereas local Resistance groups operate more evenly across the partisan landscape.

These findings matter because, as citizen-initiated groups, both Tea Parties and Resistance groups have created popular clout on behalf of values, policy priorities, and styles of politics that are at times quite different from those favored by professionally managed national Tea Party and Resistance-aligned organizations. In the Tea Party, the most resourceful donor-funded and professionally staffed operations—such as FreedomWorks, Americans for Prosperity, Tea Party Express, and Tea Party Patriots—have always pushed ultra-free-market priorities such as defunding social programs, weakening business and environmental regulations, curbing labor unions and regulatory protections for workers, and—above all—slashing tax rates for the wealthy and big businesses.

More often than not, grassroots Tea Party groups and activists also back such goals, but maybe not with great passion—and sometimes local Tea Party people speak disparagingly about the likes of Koch network operatives. Local Tea Party participants often care most about restricting immigration and using government to enforceconservative Christian authority andfamily ideals. Elite and grassroots political styles also diverge. Like other free-market advocates, elite Tea Party organizations are willing to advance policy goals via legislative bargaining and inside lobbying, bolstered by occasional televised protests or orchestrated campaigns where individuals on email lists are asked to contact legislators.

In contrast, grassroots Tea Partiers are more inclined to mount angry protests and decry any governing compromises. They demand that aligned advocates and GOPers take hard stands to advance right-wing ethnocultural as well as free-market priorities—and because Tea Parties are densely organized in the most conservative districts, such pressures hit already very conservative GOP solons and candidates the hardest.

In the Resistance, tensions also exist between advocacy professionals and grassroots groups, but they have less to do with values or policy goals than with differences between places and age groups. Most national Resistance organizations are headquartered in big cities and liberal states and are run by paid professionals who tend to be racially and ethnically diverse college graduates in their late twenties to early forties.

In contrast, grassroots groups exist in communities of all sizes and partisan compositions, and their volunteer leaders and devoted participants are mostly older white women who might be and sometimes actually are the mothers or grandmothers of the youthful metropolitan advocates.

Resistance groups often do quite different things depending on the partisan lean of their districts. Unlike in the Tea Party, elite advocates in the Resistance are the ones less prone to compromise. Moralistic in outlook, youthful Resistance professionals spend lots of time networking with each other in Washington, D. Resistance advocates often bash congressional Democrats for accepting governing compromises on morally charged issues like immigrant rights or police reform; and these advocates also hope to remake the party by endorsing leftist primary challengers to officeholders deemed overly moderate.

Grassroots Resistance groups, in contrast, focus as much on local and state issues and elections as on national controversies and often willingly back moderate candidates and officeholders, if those are the only kinds of Democrats likely to prevail in their areas.

The intra-movement tensions just described in broad brush have waxed and waned. During the first two years of the Tea Party and the Resistance, all participants pushed in the same directions against the presidents and Congresses they reviled. After pivotal midterms in and , though, internal tensions grew, creating new cross-pressures for aligned party politicians.

From early , Tea Party advocates and grassroots activists denounced and fought against everything the Obama Administration and congressional Democrats did—pushing Republicans to oppose economic recovery measures, labor protections, and efforts to fight global warming.

In recurrent and protracted battles through March , when the Affordable Care Act was signed into law, all Tea Party players found it easy to push together against this measure, by lobbying the congressional GOP, mounting public demonstrations, and harrying Democratic representatives at their town hall meetings with constituents.

In an eerie way, a similar interplay between congressional and movement politics played out in reverse during This time, professional advocates and grassroots groups in the burgeoning Resistance waged nine months of protests, media efforts, and lobbying campaigns to keep congressional Republicans from repealing the Affordable Care Act. Again, Resistance players had various reasons for engagement.

Most national advocates and some grassroots participants would have preferred to push for Medicare for All rather than wage a rear-guard effort to save Obamacare, but a shared fight against the first big move to reverse the Obama legacy by a hated President and GOP Congress overrode disagreements about how to expand health-care coverage.

In the end, Congress came one vote short of repealing Obamacare, and Resistance forces claimed that their coordinated pressures on senators in Arizona, Maine, and Alaska contributed to this victory.

In this phase, we see telling differences as well as continuing parallels. In the cycle, both Tea Party Express and FreedomWorks endorsed and provided support to somewhat different sets of Republican candidates—some engaging in primaries, others sticking to the general election. In the primary many national Resistance organizations did the same from their end. Indivisible leaders joined some other advocates to back primary challenges by left-progressives, but most local groups and national organizations such as Swing Left kept the focus on helping Democrats beat Republicans in November.

Perhaps even more important, the opposition movements inspired record numbers of new candidacies. In the crucial fights to flip control of the House of Representatives, the cycle saw a surge of conservative GOP contenders, many touting Tea Party ties, and the cycle brought an even higher surge of Resistance-aligned Democratic contenders, disproportionately female and more racially and ethnically diverse than earlier candidate cohorts.

Of course, not all new contenders won, but many did. In November , Republicans netted six governorships and state legislative seats, and also reduced the Democratic Senate majority and flipped 63 House seats to install a new GOP speaker. Eight years later, Democrats buoyed by the Resistance also scored major advances despite needing to win more votes for every seat in highly gerrymandered state legislative and congressional districts.

In , Democrats netted seven new governorships and state legislative seats. While Democrats lost Senate seats up in conservative states, they nevertheless gained 41 House seats, enough to take control. Grassroots Tea Parties and Resistance groups may have played somewhat different roles in the and midterms.

Although local Tea Party groups sometimes endorsed conservative candidates and convened candidate forums, as far as we can tell local Tea Party members usually did not mount big voter registration or get-out-the-vote efforts. Because older U. In fact, although Republicans turned out at greater rates in than they had in , overall voter participation in was relatively low, as it typically is for midterms.

Because just Leading into , Resistance groups focused doggedly on boosting voter turnout. Often in cooperation with labor unions, local party candidates and committees, and groups representing African Americans and Latinos, local and national organizations scrambled to register voters and persuade neighbors and coworkers to support Democrats running for local, state, and congressional offices.

In early , our research team used an online questionnaire to collect information from the leaders of Resistance groups operating in 49 of 67 Pennsylvania counties. Similar reports from many states suggest that Resistance volunteers similarly went door to door for weeks leading into the special elections and the midterms. Their efforts surely contributed to an unusually elevated turnout of If there had been no Tea Party or Resistance at all, would the two parties have done just as well in and ?

One key study found that GOP candidates did better in districts with greater numbers of individual grassroots activists who had signed up on national Tea Party websites, including the FreedomWorks site.

Analogous studies have not been done to parse any similar impact from activists who signed up with, say, MoveOn or other national Resistance organizations engaged in the election. Interestingly, our counts of actual local Tea Party groups in and Resistance groups in suggest that both types were associated with boosting turnout and flipping control of the House of Representatives.

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Tea Party Members. The Tea Party's Economic Platform. Tea Party Policies. Tea Party History. How the Party Came to Power.