Tea Party

TAMPA, Fla. - Defeated Republican presidential candidates Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain told a Tea Party Unity rally here Sunday night that the conservative movement they championed in the primary election season has lost none of its power and will be fully engaged in the fall campaign to defeat President Obama. Bachmann told the rally of about 1,200 tea party activists gathered at the River Church  that they had “already won” by forcing the Republican Party to adhere closely to the activists' goals of small government and reduced taxes.

In an afterword appended to the White House diaries he published this week, former President Carter muses, "It may be difficult for some younger readers to realize how much the Washington political scene has changed in the last 30 years. " Carter points out that the congressional bipartisanship on which he relied for his considerable number of legislative achievements no longer exists and that the "pernicious effects of partisanship have not been limited to Washington; American citizens have also become more polarized in their beliefs.

WASHINGTON -- When Republican leaders in Congress started talking about revisiting the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees citizenship to anyone born in the United States, the discussion appeared to many to be election season maneuvering. South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham said he was hearing from constituents who wanted Republicans to take a tough stance against illegal immigration. House Minority Leader John A. Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell proposed a congressional hearing on the matter.

A Maryland congressman has opened an investigation of a group that has tried to remove thousands of voters from registration rolls across the nation in advance of the presidential election. The inquiry by Rep. Elijah E. Cummings , a Democrat, is being started a week after Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) urged the Justice Department to enforce voting rights laws, citing a Los Angeles Times article detailing attempts by an Ohio offshoot of the group, True the Vote, to strike hundreds of students and others from voting rolls.

PHOENIX — Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer has signed bills approving 11 new special license plates, including one to commemorate the "tea party" and send donations toward the movement. Brewer, a Republican, acted on the license plate bills late Thursday without commenting. Spokesman Matt Benson declined to make any immediate comment Friday. The tea party plate would feature the "Don't Tread On Me" slogan, rattlesnake emblem and yellow background of the historic Gadsden flag, which the movement has adopted.

Before there was a " tea party," there was the crew of arch-conservative budget hawks that took over this staid Midwestern suburb ? the group that critics call the Gang of Four. It's a nickname that the core members ? a contractor, a former hog farmer, a sheriff's deputy and a libertarian economist ? have adopted with good humor as they've carried out their own revolution in this one-restaurant hamlet of 10,200 people, deposing what they considered to be a profligate Republican regime and dramatically scaling back government.

When Rick Perry dug in his boot heels at Wednesday night's debate and insisted -- in defiance of mainstream scientific belief -- that global warming was an unproven theory, longtime watchers of the Texas governor said that was simply Perry being Perry. Give no quarter. Assay no doubt. Never back down. But a new survey suggests that, despite what the fellows with their lab coats and climate data might say, the move was not bad politics. When it comes to global warming, the poll by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication finds a stark difference in opinion among Democrats, independents and even most Republicans as opposed to the "tea party" faithful -- the most conservative of conservative voters, whom Perry is courting in his bid for the GOP nomination.

President Obama is linking the tea party movement with the Occupy Wall Street protests, saying they both speak to the belief of some Americans that they are "separated from government. " In an interview with ABC News' Jake Tapper, Obama said he and other leaders need to let those associated with both movements know that "we understand their struggles and we are on their side. "We're at a critical moment in this country where if we can regain some of the values that helped build this country, that people, I think, long for, when they feel that everybody gets a fair shake but we're also asking a fair share from everybody, if we can go back to that, then I think a lot of that anger, that frustration dissipates," the president said, according to excerpts released by the network.

WASHINGTON - In the tea party rebuke to President Obama's vision of the state of the union - and some in his own party - Republican Sen. Rand Paul laid out a deeply conservative alternative that includes cutting corporate taxes in half and slashing trillions in federal spending. Paul, the freshman from Kentucky contemplating his own run for president, staked out some sharp differences from the president, including on the spending cuts due to begin March 1. In his speech, Obama called these so-called sequester cuts a “really bad idea” that will slow the economic recovery and devastate social programs.

Richard Mourdock has defeated longtime Indiana Sen. Richard Lugar in the Republican primary, according to an Associated Press projection, ending the career of one of the Senate's most pragmatic politicians and casting a cloud over GOP  efforts to win control of the chamber. Mourdock, who is currently serving as Indiana state treasurer, campaigned as a conservative alternative to Lugar. He became a darling of the tea party movement after he launched a legal challenge to the terms of the Obama administration's bailout of Chrysler.