Agenda of the Tea Party movement

The Tea Party movement is an American political movement that advocates a version of originalism in interpreting the Constitution. Internal sources define it as advocating a "strict adherence to the Constitution," shrinking U.S. government, changing the tax code, reducing
spending as well as the U.S. national debt and budget deficits. partly libertarian and partly populist, and has sponsored protests and supported political candidates since 2009.
Tea Party protests, such as the Taxpayer March on Washington in September 2009, have attracted hundreds of thousands of participants. The Tea Party movement was instrumental during the 2010 Congressional elections, leading to the Democrats losing 63 seats and control of the House of Representatives. Principal components of the movement include Tea Party Express, FreedomWorks and Tea Party Patriots, with a total of over 300,000 members.
However, the Tea Party movement also includes hundreds of organizations on the grassroots level, each with its own size, influence, and priorities. The movement is highly factionalized, with no clear leadership or centralized structure. It is not uncommon for different groups affiliating themselves with the movement to adopt disparate stances with respect to a given issue. The Tea Party contains a welter of oftentimes conflicting Agendas ... Yet within this confusing constellation of ideas and viewpoints, there is a relatively stable ideological core to the Tea Party. This core is particularly evident when one focuses on the vision of the Constitution regularly professed by movement leaders, activists, and supporters.
They have formed Super PACs to support candidates who share their goals, and have opposed many mainstream Republican candidates. After being signed into law, the Tea Party led efforts to challenge the Affordable Care Act in the Supreme Court and legislatively at both state and federal levels. They have also mobilized locally against the United Nations Agenda 21. They have protested the IRS for its treatment of groups with "tea party" in their names.
The Tea Party movement is part conservative and part libertarian, but the larger national groups have avoided involvement with conservative social, religious and family-values issues. National Tea Party organizations like the Tea Party Patriots, Tea Party Express, and FreedomWorks are focused on economic issues. The movement is split on the question of changing immigration laws. Smaller Tea Party groups like Glenn Beck's 9/12 Tea Parties, the Iowa Tea Party and Delaware Patriot groups focus more on social issues such as abortion, gun control, prayer in schools, and unlawful immigration.
Contract from America
The Contract from America was a highly publicized pronouncement that was influenced by the earlier Contract with America of the Republican Party. Among the goals expressed in the Contract from America were requiring the constitutionality of every new law to be identified by Congress, rejecting "cap and trade" emissions trading, repealing the new health care law, demanding a balanced federal budget, and simplifying the tax system. Though the Tea Partiers' statement met with some support in the Republican Party, it was not broadly embraced, while the Republican Party subsequently promulgated its own Pledge to America. Tea Party-endorsed candidates in the 2010 elections who signed the Contract from America included Utah's Mike Lee, Nevada's Sharron Angle, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), and Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC).
Views on the Constitution
A variety of studies examining the positions advocated by the groups associated with the Tea Party movement on the Constitution have been published. Much of the agenda of the Tea Party movement, such as its opposition to big government, high taxes and deficit spending, and its support for controls on immigration, has been explored with respect to the movement's corresponding stance on the Constitution.
In order to achieve its goals, many groups advocate an originalist adherence to the Constitution, coupled with educational outreach to encourage members to internalize the principles of the Tea Party's interpretation of the Constitution. The movement also focuses on the Constitution in election campaigns, and has sought to mobilize members in state-based campaigns seeking the enactment of state laws to nullify federal laws and regulations. The constitutionalist agenda of the Tea Party movement also targets several Amendments for repeal, in addition to supporting the enactment of the Balanced Budget Amendment, which would sharply limit deficit spending, and a proposed Repeal Amendment enabling a two-thirds majority of states to repeal federal laws, with the stated aim of restoring the constitutionally defined balance between federal and state power.
Foley also observed that Tea Party reactions to several specific legislative initiatives, such as the Affordable Care Act, are based on the Tea Party's perception of the constitutionality of those initiatives. Schmidt states that the movement's approach to the constitution embodies an effort to mobilize their tenets in "tangible political action."
Kate Zernike, a national correspondent for The New York Times who has devoted much of her career to covering the Tea Party movement, wrote: It could be hard to define a Tea Party agenda; to some extent it depended on where you were. In the Northeast, groups mobilized against high taxes; in the Southwest, illegal immigration. Some Tea Partiers were clearer about what they didn't want than what they did. But the shared ideology — whether for young libertarians who came to the movement through Ron Paul or older 9/12ers who came to it through Glenn Beck — was the belief that a strict interpretation of the Constitution was the solution to government grown wild. By getting back to what the founders intended, they believed they could right what was wrong with the country. Where in the Constitution, they asked, does it say that the federal government was supposed to run banks? Or car companies? Where does it say that people have to purchase health insurance? Was it so much to ask that officials honor the document they swear an oath to uphold?
Rebecca E. Zietlow, law professor at the University of Toledo College of Law, characterizes the Tea Party's constitutional position as a combination of two schools of thought: “originalism”, and “popular constitutionalism”. Tea Party activists have invoked the Constitution as the foundation of their conservative political philosophy. These activists are engaged in “popular originalism,” using popular constitutionalism — constitutional interpretation outside of the courts — to invoke originalism as interpretive method.
Historians and political scientists have also weighed in on the agenda of the Tea Party movement in relation to the Constitution. Ronald Formisano, a history professor at the University of Kentucky, described the Tea Party movement’s overall orientation to the Constitution as "constitutional originalism." Theda Skocpol, a political science professor at Harvard University, discussed goals the Tea Party movement has sought to achieve through proposed amendments and other measures vis-à-vis the Constitution.
Just like other political actors, past and present, Tea Partiers stretch the limits of the Constitution, use it selectively, and push for amendments. ... Some parts of the Constitution are lauded over others.
Other academic analysis
Political psychologist Jonathan Haidt has argued that in contradiction to their own claim, typical Tea Party members don’t care more for liberty than the average American. He finds that their main passion rather is for a type of government fairness where people are rewarded for good deeds, and suffer when they make bad choices. Haidt sees this as a karma notion of fairness, which he contrasts with a liberal notion of fairness, which is more focused on equality of outcome. Tea Party members are thus skeptical about many welfare programs, which they think take away the effect of bad life choices and the incentive for hard work, and opposed to high taxes, which they believe take away the rewards for hard work.

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