Officially, the Tea Party no longer exists in the USA. But their policies and even more so their political style continue to shape the Republicans. And that continues to cause problems for part of the party.
Last Thursday, Kevin McCarthy took the bench in the US House of Representatives for the last time. It was only at the beginning of the year that the Republican was elected chairman after 15 attempts – and was overthrown again just nine months later by a group of right-wing hardliners. Because he made a deal with the Democrats to prevent the US from defaulting.
Now the Californian is quitting after 17 years in Congress and is giving his future ex-colleagues the following advice: “Don’t be afraid if you believe that your philosophy will bring people more freedom. Don’t be afraid that you could lose your job because of it .”
Too mainstream
For political scientist Christopher Borrick from Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania, McCarthy’s downfall is an example of the influence of an inner-party group that actually no longer exists: the Tea Party movement.
For some of the insurgent Republicans, McCarthy was simply too mainstream, too much part of the system. And that’s why they targeted him: “This approach, this dynamic, was a big part of the Tea Party, and is still very much alive among the Republicans!”
Rebellion against Obama
A look back to February 2009: It was the time of the financial and debt crisis in the USA – and the birth of the Tea Party movement. On the TV channel CNBC, financial expert Rick Santelli rails against the Obama administration’s billion-dollar rescue packages at the expense of taxpayers.
If the founding fathers could experience that, they would turn in their graves, Santelli complains: “That’s why we’re thinking about holding our Tea Party here in Chicago in July!”
Santelli’s angry speech goes viral. Tea Party chapters formed across the country. Their goal is lower taxes and spending, less government and fewer rules. But what was really new, says Professor Borrick, was her political style:
It’s this disruptive, destructive politics. This idea that the institutions, the processes, the elites, the system is so flawed that we will do anything to change it. And to stop.
Its success was based on the success of the Tea Party movement: former President Donald Trump
This resonates with voters
With their campaigns against so-called RINOS (“Republicans In Name Only”), i.e. Republicans who were not populist enough for them, the Tea Party was successful with voters: Thanks to them, the Republicans won the majority in the House of Representatives in 2010 back, four years later also in the Senate.
And in 2013, their blockade caused the first budget standstill in almost 20 years. Political scientist Borrick believes that even the election of Donald Trump in 2016 would not have been possible without the Tea Party: “These changes in American politics brought about by the Tea Party certainly created an environment that was much more open to the kind of politics that Trump then initiated.”
Trump’s MAGA movement takes over the legacy
With Trump’s election, the Tea Party largely merged with his MAGA (“Make America great again”) movement, which dominates the Republican Party today. And more relentlessly than the Tea Party movement itself managed to do, says Colin Seeberger from the liberal think tank Center for American Progress, referring to the expulsion of Kevin McCarthy:
In the early years of the Tea Party, such tactics were practiced by only a small group of lawmakers. But what we’re seeing today, with the extreme MAGA Republicans, is that the entire caucus is joining them.
2023 has shown that the legacy of the Tea Party undermines the functioning of democratic institutions, says political scientist Borrick. And that is what is currently making agreements on a budget and aid for Ukraine so difficult.
Julia Kastein, ARD Washington, tagesschau, December 15, 2023 6:49 p.m