Tea Party protests


The Tea Party protests were a series of protests throughout the United States that began in early 2009. The protests were part of the larger political Tea Party movement. Most Tea Party activities have since been focused on opposing efforts of the Obama administration, and on recruiting, nominating, and supporting candidates for state and national elections.
The name "Tea Party" is a reference to the Boston Tea Party, whose principal aim was to protest taxation without representation. Tea Party protests evoked images, slogans and themes from the American Revolution, such as tri-corner hats and yellow Gadsden "Don't Tread on Me" flags. The letters T-E-A have been used by some protesters to form the backronym "Taxed Enough Already".
Commentators promoted Tax Day events on various blogs, Twitter, and Facebook, while the Fox News Channel regularly featured televised programming leading into and promoting various protest activities. 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 their promoters.

List of events

Among other events, protests were held on:
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. It was part of Tax Day protests held throughout the 1990s and earlier. The libertarian theme of the "tea party" protest has also been used by Republican Congressman Ron Paul and his supporters during fundraising events in the primaries of the 2008 presidential campaign to emphasize fiscal conservatism, which they later claimed laid the groundwork for the modern-day Tea Party movement. In late 2008, Young Americans for Liberty, with the endorsement of Rep. Paul, organized a protest called the Binghamton Tea Party for January 24 of the following year where participants dressing in Native American costumes and dumping soft drinks into New York's Susquehanna River, as a protest of former NY Governor David Paterson's proposed 18% tax increase on soda. As home mortgage foreclosures increased, and details of the 2009 stimulus legislation became known, more organized protests began to emerge.

"Porkulus" protests and "First Tea Party" claims

The dominant theme seen at some of the earliest anti-stimulus protests was "pork" rather than tea. The term "porkulus" was coined by radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh on his January 27, 2009, broadcast, in reference to both the 2009 stimulus bill, which had been introduced to the House of Representatives the day before, as well as to pork-barrel spending and earmarks. The term proved very popular with conservative politicians and commentators, 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, activist Mary Rakovich was the organizer of a February 10 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." Rakovich, along with six to ten others, protested outside a townhall meeting featuring President Obama and Florida governor Charlie Crist. 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'". Regarding the role Freedomworks played in the demonstration, Rakovich acknowledged they were involved "right from the start," and said that in her 2 hour training session, she was taught how to attract more supporters and was specifically advised not to focus on President Obama.
New York Times journalist Kate Zernike reports that some within the Tea Party credit Seattle blogger and conservative activist Keli Carender with organizing the first Tea Party on February 16, 2009. An 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, a few days before Rick Santelli used the phrase "Tea Party" in what has been characterized as a "rant" broadcast from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.
Carender contacted conservative author and Fox News contributor Michelle Malkin in order to gain her support and publicize the 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, 2009. Malkin encouraged her readers to stage similar events in Denver on the following day where President Obama was scheduled to sign the stimulus bill into law.
A protest at the Denver Capitol Building was already scheduled to coincide with the bill signing. Malkin reported that it was organized by the conservative advocacy group Americans for Prosperity and spearheaded by the conservative activist group Independence Institute, as well as former Republican representative and presidential candidate Tom Tancredo. Another protest organized by local conservative talk radio station KFYI was held in suburban Phoenix, Arizona, on February 18, and brought 500 protesters. 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. By February 20, Malkin was using her nationally syndicated column in an attempt to present these three protests as a movement to her fellow conservatives, continuing to call for more. "There's something in the air", she wrote, "It's the smell of roasted pork."

Birth of the national Tea Party movement

On February 19, 2009, 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 as "promoting bad behavior" by "subsidizing losers' mortgages", and raised the possibility of putting together a "Chicago Tea Party in July". A number of the traders and 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". Santelli's remarks "set the fuse to the modern anti-Obama Tea Party movement", according to journalist Lee Fang.
The following day after Santelli's comments from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, 50 national conservative leaders, including Michael Johns, Amy Kremer and Jenny Beth Martin, participated in a conference call that gave birth to the national Tea Party movement. In response to Santelli, websites such as ChicagoTeaParty.com, registered in August 2008 by Chicago radio producer Zack Christenson, were live within twelve hours. About 10 hours after Santelli's remarks, reTeaParty.com was bought to coordinate Tea Parties scheduled for the 4th of July and within two weeks was reported to be receiving 11,000 visitors a day. However, on the contrary, many scholars are reluctant to label Santelli's remarks the "spark" of the Tea Party considering that a "Tea Party" protest had taken place 3 days before in Seattle, Washington In fact, this had led many opponents of the Tea Party to define this movement as "astroturfed," but it seems as if Santelli's comments did not "fall on deaf ears" considering that, "the top 50 counties in foreclosure rates played host to over 910 Tea Party protests, about one-sixth of the total"
Also on February 19, Young Americans for Liberty NY State Chairman Trevor Leach created a Facebook page called "The Capitalist Chicago Tea Party – Rick's Revolution", in response to Santelli's call for a national Tea Party. According to The Huffington Post, a Facebook page was developed on February 20 calling for Tea Party protests across the country. Eric Odom of the conservative activist group FreedomWorks was one of the group administrators, and it was created by Phil Kerpen from the conservative advocacy organization Americans for Prosperity. Soon, the "Nationwide Chicago Tea Party" protests were coordinated across over 40 different cities for February 27, 2009, establishing the first national modern Tea Party protest.

Protests

Tax Day events

April 15, 2009 is said to have been the day that had the largest number of tea party demonstrations reportedly in more than 750 cities. Estimates of protesters and locations varied. 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." Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, estimated that at least 268,000 attended in over 200 cities. Statistician Nate Silver, manager of FiveThirtyEight.com, has said that a cumulative crowd size estimate from credible sources was of 311,460 attendees in 346 cities, which accounted for all capitols and major cities little noticeable or no reliable media coverage in other protests could have contributed to a lower number of attendees and locations. The largest event, in Atlanta, drew between an estimated 7,000 to 15,000 protesters. Some of the gatherings drew only dozens.
On April 15, 2009, a 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 Secret Service brought out a bomb-detecting robot, which determined the package was not a threat. Approximately one thousand people had demonstrated, several waved placards saying "Stop Big Government" and "Taxation is Piracy".