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The Tea Party protests are a series of nationally-coordinated protests across the United States beginning in early 2009.[1][2][3][4] Some participants say the protests are part of a larger, anti-tax[3] Tea Party movement. Among other events, protests have been held on:
The name "Tea Party" is a reference to the Boston Tea Party, whose principal aim was to protest taxation without representation[7]. The protests have sought to evoke images, slogans and themes from the American Revolution[6][8][9]. The letters T-E-A have been used by some protesters to form the backronym "Taxed Enough Already"[10].
Commentators promoted Tax Day events on blogs, Twitter, and Facebook, while the Fox News Channel regularly featured televised programming leading into and promoting various protest activities.[11][12] Reaction to the tea parties included counter-protests expressing support for the Obama administration, and dismissive or mocking media coverage of both the events and its promoters.[12][13][14]
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The theme of the Boston Tea Party, an iconic event of American history, has long been used by anti-tax protesters with libertarian and conservative viewpoints.[15][16][17][18][19] It was part of Tax Day protests held throughout the 1990s and earlier.[20][21][22] The libertarian theme of the "tea party" protest was previously used by Republican Congressman Ron Paul and his supporters as a fundraising event during the primaries of the 2008 presidential campaign to emphasize Paul's fiscal conservatism, which they later claimed laid the groundwork for the modern-day Tea Party movement.[23][24][25][26] As home mortgage foreclosures increased, and details of the 2009 stimulus bill became known, including the provision for the AIG executive bonuses, organized protests began to emerge.[27][28][29]
On January 19, 2009, Graham Makohoniuk, a portfolio manager for an investment firm[30] posted a casual invitation on the market-ticker.org forums to "Mail a tea bag to congress and to senate".[31] The idea quickly caught on with others on the forum, some of whom reported being attracted to the inexpensive, easy way to reach "everyone that voted for the bailout." [32]
Forum moderator, Stephanie Jasky helped organize the group and "get it to go viral."[33] Jasky is also the founder and director of FedUpUSA - a fiscally conservative, non-partisan activist group that describes themselves as "a group of investors" who sprung out of the market-ticker.org forums.[34] The group had previously held DC protests in 2008.[35][36] On January 19, 2009, Jasky had posted a formal invitation "to a commemorative tea party."[37] She suggested they all send tea bags on the same day (February 1, 2009) in a coordinated effort.[33]
The founder of market-ticker.org, Karl Denninger (stock trader and former CEO),[38] published his own write-up on the proposed protest, titled "Tea Party February 1st?," which was posted in direct response to President Obama's innauguration occurring on the same day, and railed against the bailouts, the US national debt and "the fraud and abuse in our banking and financial system" which included the predatory lending practices currently at the center of the home mortgage foreclosure crisis.[39] Karl Denninger, who helped form FedUpUSA in the wake of the March 2008 Federal Reserve bail out of Bear Sterns, had been a guest on both Glenn Beck and CNBC Reports.[40][41] By February 1, the idea had spread among conservative and libertarian-oriented blogs, forums, websites and through a viral email campaign.[42]
On February 11, talk radio host and Fox Business Network personality Dave Ramsey appeared on Fox and Friends, waving tea bags and saying "It's time for a Tea Party." [29] He was on the show criticizing the newly confirmed Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, who that morning had outlined his plan to use the $300 billion or so dollars remaining in the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds. He intended to use $50 billion for foreclosure mitigation and use the rest to help fund private investors to buy toxic assets from banks.[43]
The dominant theme seen at some of the earliest anti-stimulus protests was "pork" rather than tea.[44] The term "porkulus" was coined by radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh on his January 27, 2009, broadcast[45] in reference to both the 2009 "stimulus" bill, which was just introduced to the House of Representatives the day before, as well as to pork barrel spending and earmarks[46]. This proved very popular with conservative politicians and commentators[47], who began to unify in opposition against stimulus spending after the 2008 General Election.
Competing claims have emerged over which protest was actually the first to organize. According to FreedomWorks state and federal campaigns director Brendan Steinhauser[48][49], activist Mary Rakovich[50] was the organizer of a February 10, 2009 protest in Fort Myers, Florida, calling it the "first protest of President Obama's administration that we know of. It was the first protest of what became the tea party movement."[51] Rakovich, along with six to 10 others, protested outside a townhall meeting featuring President Barack Obama and Florida governor Charlie Crist [52]. Interviewed by a local reporter, Rakovich explained that she "thinks the government is wasting way too much money helping people receive high definition TV signals" and that "Obama promotes socialism, although 'he doesn't call it that'"[52]. She was invited to appear in front of a national audience on Neil Cavuto's Fox News Channel program Your World[53]. Regarding the role Freedomworks played in the demonstration, Rakovich acknowledged they were involved "Right from the start,"[54] and said that in her 2 1/2 hour training session, she was taught how to attract more supporters and was specifically advised not to focus on President Obama.[55]
However, though it was not the first protest of the Obama administration or of the stimulus, New York Times reporter Kate Zernike[56], reports that some within the Tea Party credit Seattle blogger and conservative activist Keri Carender with organizing the first Tea Party on February 16, 2009. Another article, written by Chris Good of The Atlantic, credits Carender as "one of the first" Tea Party organizers.
Carendar organized what she called A "Porkulus Protest" on President’s Day, before, as she says, "Rick Santelli’s rant!" referring to the CNBC reporter who called for protests after the announcement of the AIG executive bonuses in the face of increasing home mortgage foreclosures. Carender said, "Without any support from a national movement, without any support from any official in my city, I just got fed up and planned it." Carender said 120 people participated. "Which is amazing for the bluest of blue cities I live in, and on only four days notice!! This was due to me spending the entire four days calling and emailing every person, think tank, policy center, university professors (that were sympathetic), etc. in town, and not stopping until the day came." Carender held a second protest on February 27, 2009 which she claims was the first Tea Party. "We more than doubled our attendance at this one, and that is very much due to the fact that I had collected email addresses at the first one and was able to tell a couple hundred people at once about the second rally."[57][58]
Carender contacted conservative author and Fox News contributor, Michelle Malkin in order to gain her support and publicize her event. Malkin promoted the protest in several posts on her blog, saying that "There should be one of these in every town in America," and that she would be supplying the crowd with a meal of pulled pork. The protest was held in Seattle on Presidents Day, February 16, the day before President Obama signed the stimulus bill into law[59]. Malkin encouraged her readers to stage similar events in Denver on February 17 where President Obama planned to sign the stimulus bill into law.
A protest at the Denver Capitol Building was already in the works, which Michelle Malkin reports was organized by the conservative advocacy group, Americans for Prosperity, and spearheaded by conservative activist group, Independence Institute as well as former Republican Representative and presidential candidate, Tom Tancredo.[60][61][62] Another protest, organized by a local conservative talk radio station KFYI was held in suburban Phoenix, Arizona, on February 18, and brought 500 protesters[63]. KFYI organized the protest in reaction to Obama's visit to the local high school to hold his first public talk on elements of the stimulus bill.[64] By February 20, Michelle Malkin was using her nationally-syndicated column to attempt to present these three protests as a movement to her fellow conservatives, and continued to call for more.[65] "There's something in the air," she wrote, "It's the smell of roasted pork."
On February 19, 2009,[47] in a broadcast from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, CNBC Business News Network editor Rick Santelli loudly criticized the government plan to refinance mortgages, which had just been announced the day before, as "promoting bad behavior" by "subsidizing losers' mortgages" and raised the possibility of putting together a "Chicago Tea Party in July"[66][67]. A number of the stock brokers around him cheered on his proposal, to the apparent amusement of the hosts in the studio. It was called "the rant heard round the world"[68] and quickly went viral after it received a big "red siren headline" on the popular conservative blog, drudgereport.com.[69] According to The New Yorker writer Ben McGrath[70] and New York Times reporter Kate Zernike[71], this is where the movement was first inspired to coalesce under the collective banner of "Tea Party." By the next day, guests on Fox News had already begun to mention this new "Tea Party." [72]
In response to Santelli, websites such as ChicagoTeaParty.com, registered in August 2008 by Chicago radio producer Zack Christenson, were live within twelve hours.[8] About 10 hours after Santelli's remarks, reTeaParty.com was bought to coordinate Tea Parties scheduled for July 4, and as of March 4, was reported to be receiving 11,000 visitors a day.[8]
According to The Huffington Post, a Facebook page was developed on February 20 calling for Tea Party protests across the country.[42] Group administrators included Eric Odom of the conservative activist group FreedomWorks, and the group was created by Phil Kerpen from the conservative advocacy organization Americans for Prosperity -- the same group credited for the Denver "porkulus" protest as well as Mary Rakovich's early February 10 protest. Soon, the "Nationwide Chicago Tea Party" protest was coordinated across over 40 different cities for February 27, 2009, thus establishing the first national modern Tea Party protest.[73][74]
April 15, 2009 was the date of the largest number of tea parties, with demonstrations reported to be occurring in more than 750 cities.[75] Estimates of numbers of protesters varied by location and source. The Christian Science Monitor reported on the difficulties of calculating a cumulative turnout and said some estimates state that over half a million Americans participated in the protests, noting, "experts say the counting itself often becomes politicized as authorities, organizers, and attendees often come up with dramatically different counts.".[76][76][77] Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, estimated that at least 268,000 attended in over 200 cities.[78] Statistician Nate Silver, manager of fivethirtyeight.com, has stated that the largest protests were in capitals and large cities while many others had little or no reliable media coverage and were thus not included in his estimate. He reported cumulative crowd size from credible sources to be an estimated 311,460 for 346 cities and on April 16, 2009 stated "essentially all major cities and state capitals should now be accounted for."[79] The largest event, in Atlanta, Georgia, drew an estimated 7,000[80] to 15,000 people.[79][81] Some of the gatherings drew only dozens.[76]
An April 15, 2009 Tea Party protest outside the White House was moved after a box of tea bags was hurled over the White House fence. Police sealed off the area and evacuated some people. The United States Secret Service brought out a bomb-detecting robot, which determined the package was not a threat.[82] Approximately a thousand people had demonstrated, several waved placards saying "Stop Big Government," "What Would Jefferson Do," and "Taxation is Piracy".[5]
According to an April 20, 2009 Rasmussen poll, 51% of Americans polled viewed the protests favorably and 32% of these viewed them "very favorably." About one in four people polled knew someone who had attended a Tea Party protest.[83] Those results, however, stand in contrast to a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey in March found that 62% said that they approved how Obama is handling tax policy.[77] An April USA Today/Gallup also found that a majority of Americans favor the expansion of government economic intervention, at least for now.[5]
After April 15, 2009 Tea Party rallies continued in various locales around the nation. Many of these events were focused on opposition to state or local taxes and spending, rather than with national issues. Late April saw Tea Parties in Annapolis, Maryland, White Plains, New York,[84] Jackson, Tennessee,[85] and Monroe, Washington.[86] In May, there were six more Tea Party events in Tennessee[87], New York,[88] Idaho,[89] Ohio,[90] Nevada,[91] and North Carolina.[92] During June, 2009 another dozen events were held in North Carolina,[93] California,[94] Rhode Island,[95] Texas,[96] Ohio,[97] Michigan,[98] Montana,[99] Florida,[100] New York,[101] and Washington[102] state. On June 29, 2009 in Nashville, Tennessee, four thousand people rallied against new emissions trading (cap and trade) energy and universal health care legislation in Congress.[103]
A number of Tea Party protests were held the weekend of July 4, 2009, coinciding with American Independence Day.[104][105] "The rally followed a national effort that drew thousands of activists to Tea Party events across the country on April 15, 2009 when income taxes are due".[106]
On July 17, 2009 there were additional Tea Party protests around the nation organized by a group called Tea Party Patriots, this time against President Obama's proposed health care reform bill that they labeled socialized medicine.[107]
On September 12, 2009, Tea Party protests were held in various cities around the nation. In Washington, D.C., Tea Party protests gathered to march from Freedom Plaza to the United States Capitol. Estimates of the number of attendees varied, from "tens of thousands"[108] to "in excess of 75,000".[109][110] A rally organizer asserted that one local ABC News station had reported attendance of over one million, but he retracted the statement after ABC News denied making any such report.[111]
The march was reported as the largest conservative protest ever held in Washington, D.C., as well as the largest demonstration against President Obama's administration to date.[112][113]
On February 4, 2010, the first Tea Party national convention was held in Nashville, attended by 600 people[114]. The convention received broad media coverage as former GOP Vice Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin was the featured speaker. The former Alaska governor was criticized[115][116] for receiving as much as $100,000 to address the convention [117]
The New York Times reported on August 8, 2009 that organizations opposed to the health care reform legislation were urging opponents to be disruptive. It noted that the Tea Party Patriots web site circulated a memo instructing them to "Pack the hall. Yell out and challenge the Rep’s statements early. Get him off his prepared script and agenda. Stand up and shout and sit right back down."[118] The memo continued, "The Rep [representative] should be made to feel that a majority, and if not, a significant portion of at least the audience, opposes the socialist agenda of Washington."[119]
Some Tea party organizers have stated that they look to Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals for inspiration. Protesters have also appropriated left-wing imagery; the logo for the 9/12 March on Washington featured a raised fist design that was intended to resemble those used by pro-labor, anti-war, and black power movements of the 1960s. In addition, the slogan "Keep Your Laws Off My Body", usually associated with pro-choice activists, has been seen on signs at tea parties.[120]
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