How the GOP Establishment Is Co-Opting the Freshman Tea Party Class

By Constance Dogood

New from Broadside Books' Voices of the Tea Party. In this first-hand account of the perils of Washington, Constance Dogood, an average American who became an early leader of the Tea Party movement, describes the methods used by the Republican Establishment to co-opt the Freshman members of Congress. Called "the Tea Party Class" because they were propelled into office by a wave of Tea Party support, these 63 new Republican members of Congress face a daunting challenge in the 112th Congress. On the one hand, they need to honor the promises they made to the tea partiers in their districts who helped elect them. On the other hand, they need to learn the ropes of Washington without unnecessarily alienating the Republican Establishment so long entrenched in and around the corridors of power. Constance concludes that the House of Representatives would be well advised to ditch the century old hierarchical party leadership structure and look to the Tea Party movement itself for a superior model of organizing to return the country to its constitutional roots.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 31, 2011
• ISBN: 9780062112606

Constance Dogood

Constance Dogood is a Tea Party leader who now works on staff for a newly elected Republican member of Congress.

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About Voices of the Tea Party

Voices of the Tea Party is a real-time collaborative forum for Tea Partiers around the country that delivers in-depth information on tactics, strategy, and policy from on-the-ground activists through the use of inexpensive and easy to download e-books. The series will serve the vibrant online community of everyday Americans who launched and continue to drive the Tea Party movement, by taking their collaborative discussions to a much higher level. Tea Party supporters around the country will now be able to instantly access best practices that have succeeded elsewhere, hear the stories of others in the movement, and learn from Tea Partiers with specific policy ideas and expertise. Perhaps more important, they will be able to engage with other thought leaders by submitting their own e-book proposals for possible inclusion in the series. (Please see our website for details: broadsidebooks.net.) Readers and writers alike can thereby join the important national discussion within this ever-expanding community of citizen-activists who have dedicated themselves to securing the movement’s core values of constitutionally limited government, fiscal responsibility, and free markets.

Series editor Michael Patrick Leahy has been one of the driving forces of the Tea Party movement from its inception. He’s a co-founder of the Nationwide Tea Party Coalition, which sponsored the very first national Tea Party demonstrations; the February 27, 2009, Nationwide Chicago Tea Party; and the April 15, 2009, Tax Day Tea Party. He is also the author of The Ideological Origins of the Tea Party Movement, to be published by Broadside Books in January 2012. His website is http://www.michaelpatrickleahy.com.

How the GOP Establishment Is Co-opting the Freshman Tea Party Class

Along with a handful of activists brought together on Twitter, I participated in the exciting launch of the Tea Party movement in my small town in February 2009. I had no prior political experience, but I understood Twitter, Facebook, free phone conferencing, and all the other tools we scrappy grassroots defenders of the Constitution used to turn this country around through our participation in the political process.

From the beginning, a core group of a few hundred online activists had a vision of returning the House of Representatives to conservative control in 2010. There was no road map laid out before us to accomplish this goal.

The Washington pundits scoffed. Yet we knew it could be done. Not because we were the greatest