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The Water Cooler Title: 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.
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