"The People should never rise, without doing something to be remembered — something notable And striking."

"Last Night 3 Cargoes of Bohea Tea were emptied into the Sea. This Morning a Man of War sails. This is the most magnificent Movement of all. There is a Dignity, a Majesty, a Sublimity, in this last Effort of the Patriots, that I greatly admire. The People should never rise, without doing something to be remembered — something notable And striking. This Destruction of the Tea is so bold, so daring, so firm, intrepid and inflexible, and it must have so important Consequences, and so lasting, that I cant but consider it as an Epocha in History."

So wrote John Adams in his diary.

Today is the 240th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party.

"Challenged by Tea Party, Veteran Mississippi Senator Decides to Run for Seventh Term."

A NYT headline about Thad Cochran, a 76-year-old Republican who's been in the Senate since 1978.

Who's more senior than Cochran? Here's a list of the current Senators in order of seniority. Cochran is 4th on the list.

I'm not impressed by this kind of stature, this excessive holding on to one's position of power, even into old age. The headline hints that the Tea Party challenges are disrespectful or disruptive.

The article has a ludicrous correction: "An earlier version of this article stated incorrectly the age of Senator Thad Cochran, as well as the number of the term he is seeking. He will be 76 on Saturday; he is not 76." His birthday is tomorrow, and we're not supposed to say he's 76? He is not 76. Correction! Good lord. Did the demand for a correction come from his office? What a nice showing of inane vanity and out-of-touchness. Grow up. You're 76.

Mr. Cochran, who has raised less than $1 million for his re-election, had been thought to be leaning toward retirement. But Mississippi Republicans said they believed [a challenge from Chris McDaniel, 41, a state senator aligned with the Tea Party] and pleas from powerful figures across the state that Mr. Cochran seek another term prompted the senator to mount what will probably be his final campaign....

So maybe it's not Cochran after all but "powerful figures" who are pushing him, using him, but for what? Is this a way to weaken the Tea Party? 

Chuck Schumer says both left- and right-wing blogs are too vicious and negative but the difference is: Left-wing blogs "have less credibility and less clout."

Excerpts from his interview with TNR's Isaac Chotiner:

CS: [One] thing the Tea Party does is threaten their fellow Republicans. They actually threaten them. If you punched in—I used to do this—“Marco Rubio” when we were doing immigration reform, nine out of ten hard-right blogs were negative on him: attack after attack after attack....

[T]here are some on the far left who just have a visceral hatred of Wall Street. It’s counterproductive.

IC: ... Is this a problem for your party?

CS: You don’t want to go after them for the sake of going after them. The left-wing blogs want you to be completely and always anti–Wall Street. It’s not the right way to be.

IC: So are the left-wing blogs as bad as the Tea Party ones in this case?

CS: Left-wing blogs are the mirror image. They just have less credibility and less clout.

ADDED: Kos bites back:

Left-wing blogs had credibility when they were helping Schumer's DSCC win control of the Senate. Now that we're criticizing Wall Street? No credibility! And we're just like the Tea Party, having cost Democrats a half-dozen seats and the Senate majority in the last couple of years.

Oh, you mean we haven't pushed the Democratic Party outside of the national mainstream? Weird, then. On the other hand, it wasn't bloggers trying to save Sen. Scott Brown's hide in 2012, like good ol' Chuck:

There is a good little story. [Looks to aide] I can tell this. I went to Scott Brown and said, “If you give us the sixtieth vote for the Citizens United rollback, we won’t go after you.”

If it was up to Schumer, he would've traded an entire Senate seat for one meaningless cloture vote on a bill that would've died a quick death in the House. God knows his Wall Street benefactors would've been thrilled at that!

From my perspective, intra-party relations have never been better. It seems odd that Schumer is trying to start an internecine war at this very moment, particularly with a tough 2014 up ahead. And as the number three Democrat in the Senate, his words carry outsized weight. But it's clear that the Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party is feeling the heat from its resurgent populist wing: the Warrens, Baldwins, Browns and Merkleys.

Republicans are locked in their own bloody civil war. Schumer (and his Third Way allies) may have just signaled that we may be in for some bloodshed of our own. In fact, he appears eager to lead Wall Street's counter attack.

"One way or another, the filibuster of judicial nominees must end. The Senate must do what is good, what is right, what is reasonable and what is honorable."

"This filibuster is nothing less than a formula for tyranny by the minority," said the Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Republican of Tennessee, in a speech to the Federalist Society in November 2004.

In 2003, the Senate Rules Committee had had a plan to "gradually lower the threshold for filibusters against judicial nominees until a simple majority would allow a final vote."

Senator Trent Lott, the Mississippi Republican who is chairman of the Rules Committee, has been among the Republicans who have also suggested that the Republicans try to win a change by seeking a ruling from the chairman, a position that a Republican would hold, that filibusters against executive nominations are unconstitutional. A favorable ruling would require just a majority to uphold.

Some Republicans have been reluctant to try that maneuver. They call it the nuclear option, because it could come back to haunt them if they are in the minority. Democrats have also threatened to tie up the Senate in knots if they lose their right to filibuster in that manner.

"To implement it would make the last Congress look like a bipartisan tea party," Senator Charles E. Schumer, the New York Democrat who is on the Judiciary Committee, said. "For the sake of country and some degree of comity, I would hope and pray that the majority leader would not take away the Senate's time-honored, 200-year-old tradition."

Ha ha. Great old quotes. I especially love the expression "tea party."

Who knew, back then, how much things would flip in the next decade, including the connotations of "tea party"?

Here's what Schumer said yesterday when the Democrats, by simple majority vote, abolished the filibuster for presidential nominees: "The age-old rules of the Senate are being used to paralyze us.... The public is asking – is begging – us to act."

Here's another old article on the Democrats intense opposition to what they just did. This one is from 2005:

"This is the most radical notion we've heard...," Senator Reid said.... "...

Senator Charles E. Schumer... "The nuclear option is really like making the Senate a banana republic," he said.

And here's a NYT editorial in April 2003 recommending that Democrats filibuster judicial nominees:

Filibustering [Priscilla] Owen's confirmation would send the Bush administration two important messages: the president must stop packing the courts with ideologues, and he must show more respect for the Senate's role....

It is not by chance that the Senate is being asked to confirm someone with these views. The White House has culled the legal profession to find nominees with aggressive conservative agendas....

The filibuster is not a tool to be used lightly. But the Senate has been right to use it against the nomination of Miguel Estrada, who is hiding his views on legal issues. It should do the same to stop the once-rejected Judge Owen, and tell extreme conservatives in the Bush administration to stop trying to hijack the federal judiciary.

Obviously, today's Republicans take the same tone over Obama's nominees — they are extreme and aggressive in their liberal agendas.

Here's another NYT editorial, this one from 2005:

Republicans seem determined to change the rules so Democrats will no longer be able to stop judicial nominations with the threat of a filibuster. If they're acting out of frustration, it's understandable....

But the sense that there are certain rules that all must play by, whether to their advantage or not, is something that cannot be restored. Senators need only to look at the House to see what politics looks like when the only law is to win at any cost.

The Senate, of all places, should be sensitive to the fact that this large and diverse country has never believed in government by an unrestrained majority rule. Its composition is a repudiation of the very idea that the largest number of votes always wins out.....

A decade ago, this page expressed support for tactics that would have gone even further than the "nuclear option" in eliminating the power of the filibuster. 

That is, the NYT had favored eliminating the filibuster during the Clinton administration, but somehow, with Bush as President, they could see that they were wrong.

We hope acknowledging our own error may remind some wavering Republican senators that someday they, too, will be on the other side and in need of all the protections the Senate rules can provide.

And when that day comes, will the NYT see that seeing that they were wrong was itself wrong? Well, here's today's editorial in the NYT, "Democracy Returns to the Senate." Too funny.

In these the last days of Obama as a religion, the WaPo writes of the "dwindling faith in his competence and in many of the personal attributes that have buoyed him in the past."

Oh, the language of the once-true believers is so careful! And yet you can still see that it was a religion, kind of a religion. There was faith, but it's dwindling. It was faith in his competence and in many of the personal attributes. And our faith buoyed him. We kept him aloft in the heavens and — this is a report on a poll — in the polls.

On three measures of leadership and empathy that have been tested repeatedly in Post-ABC polls, Obama now is underwater on all three for the first time. Half or more now say he is not a strong leader, does not understand the problems of “people like you,” and is not honest and trustworthy. Perceptions of the president as a strong leader have dropped 15 points since January, and over the past year the percentage of registered voters who say he is not honest and trustworthy has increased 12 points....

Also interesting, but not specifically about Obama:

Forty-three percent say the Republican Party is too conservative, compared with 36 percent who say its views are just right. For Democrats, 46 percent say the party’s views are too liberal and 41 percent say they are about right.

So more people think the Democrats are too liberal than think the Republicans are too conservative. But the "about right" percent is 5 points higher for Democrats than for Republicans. Unless more people have no opinion of Republicans than of Democrats, that must mean more people think Republicans are too liberal than think Democrats are too conservative.

Ratings for the tea party movement are quite similar to those of the Republican Party. But in the aftermath of the partial federal government shutdown, a majority say they oppose the movement for the second time in two months. And more than four in 10 say the movement has too much influence on the GOP, while only 25 percent say its influence is about right.

Does that mean that about 35% would like the Tea Party to have more influence — and 60% say the Tea Party should have as much or more influence than it has now? Considering that Democrats were being polled here too, that sounds like an amazing amount of support for the Tea Party.

ADDED: I'm addressing the form of expression in the article, but I realize that I can click through to the details. 17% think Republicans are too liberal and 10% think Democrats are too conservative.And 21% think the Tea Party has too little influence in the Republican Party. 11% have no opinion. So 46% think the Tea Party has either the right amount of influence or should have more. Only 43% think it has too much.

AND: Here's the detailed view on the Tea Party question. Among Republicans, 40% say "about the right amount" and 26% say "too little," for a total of 66% percent positive. 26% say too much. Among Democrats, 59% say too much. Interestingly, among the 18 to 39 year-old group, 47% say right amount or too little, and 39% say too much. It's the oldest group — 65 and older — that is most antagonistic to the Tea Party. 50% say too much, and the combined too little and right amount group is 39%.

BUT: Here's the detailed view on the question of whether people support or oppose the Tea Party, and there you see clear opposition in the 18 to 39 year-old group.

"The Republican Party would not mind at all if the takeaway in Virginia was it was a Terry McAuliffe landslide against the Tea Party."

"I'm not exaggerating," says Rush Limbaugh.

McAuliffe or Cuccinelli — do you care?

They're voting in Virginia today. But do you care?

What's it to you?
	It's a referendum on Obamacare, so I want Cuccinelli to win.
	It's a referendum on Obamacare, so I want McAuliffe to win.
	It's a referendum on the Tea Party, and I want the Tea Party to gain strength.
	It's a referendum on the Tea Party, which I want to fail because I'm a liberal.
	It's a referendum on the Tea Party and I hope it loses so the GOP can get back on a mainstream track
	This is a race for governor of Virginia, nothing more, and McAuliffe is the better man.
	This is a race for governor of Virginia, nothing more, and Cuccinelli is the better man.
pollcode.com free polls

"[T]here is a growing sense within the Republican political intelligentsia that Christie and only Christie is positioned to solve the major problems that will face the party in 2016."

And: "Christie is increasingly seen as the one candidate who might be able to bridge the divide between the establishment and the tea party that is in the process of ripping the party apart."

Chris Cillizza says as he ranks Christie first among the GOP's possible candidates for 2016.

I interpret those 2 quoted sentences to mean the same thing, which is making 2 inferences:

1. "increasingly seen" = increasingly seen by the Republican political intelligentsia. (It's the intelligentsia that do all the seeing and sensing that matters to pundits like Cillizza.)

2. "the major problems that will face the party in 2016" = "the divide between the establishment and the tea party that is in the process of ripping the party apart." (The tea party is the problem from the perspective of the intelligentsia, right?)

(Also in the ranking: Wisconsin's Scott Walker comes in at #4, up from #7, and the other Wisconsinite, Paul Ryan has fallen from #4 to #9.)

After 21 hours, Ted Cruz is cut off by Harry Reid, who says "I don't think we learned anything new, but it has been a big waste of time."

Reid portrays what Cruz did as the notion that "any day that government is hurt is a good day" and calls that notion Tea Party and "the new anarchy."

"Reading Brooks’s laments about Snowden and 'the fraying of the social fabric,' I found myself thinking about Norman Rockwell..."

"... if not in the same way Brooks might. (In 2008, after what he saw as a rhetorical triumph by Sarah Palin, Brooks wrote, 'Somewhere in heaven Norman Rockwell is smiling.') The image that came to mind was one of the panels from Rockwell’s 'Four Freedoms' series: the one on freedom of speech, in which a man stands up at what looks like a town meeting. He might be about twenty-nine. He is wearing a work jacket, so maybe he’s a high-school drop-out. There are better dressed people in the hall. And they are listening to him."

Writes Amy Davidson in The New Yorker, with the sentimentality that Rockwell haters loathe about Rockwell. Here's the referenced Rockwell painting:



I was going to snark that there's no way that guy is 29, but then I asked Meade, "How old does this guy look," and he said, "29." And, "That's what guys who work on the farm look like when they're 29."

Then I tried my other idea: "How do we know he's not a communist, dressed that way to trick the naively idealistic Norman-Rockwell-loving folks of that small town? He's dressed like a folksinger. He could be Pete Seeger." And Meade said: "You can tell by that greasy dirt on his jacket. That guy does real work."

We talked about the difference between this idealized farmer — with his real dirt, in a real place, with real people — and Edward Snowden — who operated within computer networks and evanesced into Asia. But it's 2013, and maybe that Rockwell character does need to be a man detached from the American soil, floating out there in unmediated space. And yet — as Meade said — "He's Tea Party."

"I am not here as a serf or vassal. I am not begging my lords for mercy."

"I’m a born free American woman, wife, mother and citizen. And I’m telling my government that you’ve forgotten your place. It’s not your responsibility to look out for my well-being, and to monitor my speech. It’s not your right to assert an agenda. Your post, the post that you occupy, exists to preserve American liberty. You’ve sworn to perform that duty. And you have faltered."

Becky Gerritson of the Wetumpka Tea Party, testifying today before the House Ways and Means Committee about abuse by the IRS.

"A White House can powerfully shape other perceptions... For years the administration has conducted a concerted campaign to demonize Fox News..."

"... delegitimizing it as a news organization, even urging its ostracism," writes Charles Krauthammer.

Then (surprise!) its own Justice Department takes the unprecedented step of naming a Fox reporter as a co-conspirator in a leak case — when no reporter has ever been prosecuted for merely soliciting information — in order to invade his and Fox’s private and journalistic communications.

No one goes to jail for creating such a climate of intolerance. Nor is it a crime to incessantly claim that those who offer this president opposition and push-back — Republicans, tea partyers, Fox News, whoever dares resist the sycophantic thrill-up-my-leg media adulation — do so only for “politics,” power and pure partisanship, while the Dear Leader devotes himself exclusively to the nation, the middle class, the good and just.

The climate theory of Obama's responsibility. You don't need to actually connect anything to the President. You just show how he created a climate, and the underlings responded accordingly, as he can be said to know and intend that they would.

If you want to needle those who don't like this theory, you could call them climate skeptics.

The figurative use of the world "climate" goes back as far as 1661, according to the (unlinkable) Oxford English Dictionary.

1661   J. Glanvill Vanity of Dogmatizing xxiii. 227   The larger Souls, that have travail'd the divers Climates of Opinions, are more cautious in their resolves....
1765   L. Sterne Life Tristram Shandy VIII. i. 2   In this clear climate of fantasy and perspiration, where every idea, sensible and insensible, gets vent....
1860   F. D. Huntington Christian Believing & Living vi. 105   Every moral climate here is more or less tainted, and grows pestilential if we linger in it too long....
2004   H. Kennedy Just Law (2005) xiii. 272   It is crucial that a climate of suspicion does not develop which creates reservations amongst citizens about voluntarily submitting to DNA intelligence screens.

Watch out for anthropogenic climate change! 

"I get that there are some of my conservative brethren don’t agree that the tea party should protest tomorrow."

"They’re afraid that it will disrupt a winning narrative: the IRS targeting a vast array of American citizens based on political beliefs and religion. They’re afraid that the sight of tea partiers shouting slogans and waving Gadsden flags at IRS offices will provide the media squirrel the left needs to pivot."

Writes Dana Loesch (via Instapundit).

What a strange paradox it would be if finding out about the outrageous suppression of the Tea Party led it into self-suppression! It should be invigorated. Let's see how well they do it tomorrow.

There obviously are ways to do it badly. Instapundit warns tea partiers to look out for infiltrators. (Expose them!) And Loesch says:

I don’t want to see a single sign about Obama. I don’t want to see a single sign about Biden. Or FLOTUS. Or vacations. Or anything other than the overreaching power of big government. No signs on anything other than this malicious and criminal behavior was perpetuated by a government too big to be held accountable. It was carried out behind a [veil] of purposeful complexity.

So she's saying whatever you do, don't follow Saul Alinsky's Rule 11:

Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it. Don’t try to attack abstract corporations or bureaucracies. Identify a responsible individual. Ignore attempts to shift or spread the blame.

Loesch's rule is: Don't identify a responsible individual. Don't make it personal. Attack the abstraction.

"For months, the Tea Party cases sat on the desk of a lone specialist, who used 'political sounding' criteria — words like 'patriots,' 'we the people' — as a way to search efficiently..."

"... through the flood of applications for groups that might not quality for exemptions, according to the I.R.S. inspector general. 'Triage,' the agency’s acting chief described it."

The NYT looks into the "understaffed Cincinnati outpost" of the IRS based on "interviews with current and former employees and with lawyers who dealt with them, along with a review of I.R.S. documents" and portrays them as confused and "alienated from the broader I.R.S. culture."

Rebooting the Tea Party.

The outrageous persecution of the Tea Party is an opportunity.

Take some advice, Tea Party people:



The Tea Party has been demonized in the last few years. Crazy, violent, racist, stupid... whatever.

Let's see how well these people leverage the persecution experience into a new image.

I suspect they will have a hard time. Why would they know how to exploit a serious crisis like the masters? They were victimized, but can they be the new victims that everyone wants to embrace?

"'It was pretty much a proctology exam through your earlobe,' said Karen L. Kenney, the coordinator for the San Fernando Valley Patriots..."

"... a tea party group in Southern California that was sent an IRS questionnaire with more than 100 questions on it.... Some groups, including several interviewed by The Washington Post, were asked to provide names of donors or membership lists, which experts say the IRS cannot legally do."

The San Fernando group first submitted its application for nonprofit status in the fall of 2010, which was after the IRS’s Cincinnati-based “determination unit” had implemented its politically charged screening criteria. The group wrote the agency a $400 check to fast-track the process, but 19 months went by before the group heard anything, Kenney said.

So they stole $400 from this group! How many other $400s were pocketed on false pretenses?

That’s when the long list of questions arrived. Kenney said the group sent back a four-inch, seven-pound stack of documents before deciding that enough was enough. The group decided the questions were far too intrusive and could result in individual supporters being targeted.

“We couldn’t sic the IRS on our members,” Kenney said....

This is reminiscent of the way the state of Alabama treated the NAACP back in the 1950s!

That was the Supreme Court's landmark case on the freedom-of-speech-based right of association. Ironically, the IRS behavior has been explained as a response to another Supreme Court free-speech case, Citizens United. From the first link above (which goes to the WaPo article "Groups that sought tax-exempt status say IRS dealings were a nightmare") :

Lois G. Lerner, who heads the IRS’s tax-exemption division, described the targeting campaign as a misguided attempt to deal with a wave of applications after the 2010 Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which allowed corporations and labor unions to spend unlimited sums on politics.

How many times did Obama say that he was looking for ways to get around Citizens United? How hard did he try to equate "Citizens United" with evil corporations and the money's unfair effect on politics? And here his administration was going after grass-roots groups who were organizing not to lobby for corporate welfare, but to express ideas about limited government and the meaning of the Constitution!

"I was just a stay-at-home mother. I was pregnant with another baby, and I wanted to do what was right. My Tea Party group was becoming really large..."

"... and I couldn't run the money and the donations through my bank account. I was advised the IRS would come after you for that."

So I started calling other groups and I thought I would file and create an organization, and here they were all getting targeted by the IRS, and I got scared....

"Send us your Facebook pages, your Twitter pages," and I said, "Does that include personal pages?" and they said, "Everything."  They wanted to know your personal relationships with politicians and political parties. And I asked, "What would happen if I don't send this to you?" and they said, they made an insinuation like, "Look, it can be considered perjury if you omit things from the IRS."  I'm a pregnant stay-at-home mother on one income, I thought, "Oh, my goodness, I'm not doing anything." I stopped.

Why didn't Romney... why didn't the Republicans... root out these Obama scandals before the last election?

Why wasn't the opposition party oppositional enough? Where was the supervision? Why did Romney crumple mid-attack in the second debate? Where was the vigilance? Where was the vigor? Where was the outrage? The American people were deprived of a fair election, and the Republicans — who presumably wanted to get the President's hands off the machinery of power — didn't see what was being done or they didn't want to talk about it or — to voice the last and paranoid-sounding option — they were complicit.

Here's a list — to be lengthened — of things that might have happened:

1. The President's machinations were so devious and brilliant and that it was just too hard for the Republicans to uncover them in time to enlighten the voters.

2. The Republicans had good reason to believe that the American people resisted thinking ill of the famously likeable President and so they pursued campaign strategies that allowed people to maintain this treasured belief. Their idea was: He's a nice guy but it would be good to switch to this other person who's also nice and will do an even better job. That's lame, we can see in retrospect, but it was the decision at the time.

3. The Democrats' theme was the meanness of Republicans, and muckracking and mudslinging would have risked reinforcing that theme. It seemed like a better bet to stay clean, especially once the scrappier candidates — Gingrich and Santorum — lost out to the gentlemanly Romney.

4. Obama's prime target was the Tea Party (which had crushed him in the 2010 midterms), and the establishment Republicans were at odds with the Tea Party movement. I'm not saying I believe this, but sober reflection tells us we need to redraw the line between paranoia and vigilance. The theory is that establishment Republicans appreciated the suppression of the Tea Party.

NYT's Gail Collins endeavors to take down Ted Cruz.

This is about Cruz's recent colloquy with Dianne Feinstein. Excerpts:

Later, Feinstein would tell CNN that she felt Cruz was being “somewhat arrogant,” which seemed like an understatement. Even in an age of political polarization, there apparently is still an unwritten rule against calling someone “a stupendously irritating twit” on national TV....

Do you think, people, that this [incessant self-reference] is a key to the stupendous impact the Tea Party continues to have on Congress, even now that it’s proved itself to be a loser when it comes to elections? If you combine a lack of a sense of humor with an absence of humility and then stir in a cup of self-righteousness, you are definitely not working on a recipe for cooperative achievement.

I want to make 5 points, briefly.

1. Somebody get Gail Collins a thesaurus. For "stupendous," try "astonishing." It's got that huffy, aghast tone you seem to be looking for. I know, "stupendous" is tempting because it gives the feeling that you're calling your target stupid, but when you find something "stupendous," you're actually confessing to stupor on your own part, and literally, if you are in a stupor, you are stupid.

2. This woman-defending-woman column ends with a recipe metaphor. Is that good gender politics? It resonates with what I think is Collins's effort to make us see this interplay between 2 U.S. Senators in terms of a man patronizing a woman.

3. Cruz's questions were about the security of our constitutional rights: Why did humor belong in that recipe?

4. Where was this "self-righteousness"? Collins's evidence is that Cruz used the phrases “My... point is," "in my opinion," “I would point out," and "In my view." This phobia about first-person-singular pronouns is silly. It's used against Obama all the time. What does Collins think of all those right-wing bloggers who will inform you about how many times Obama says "I" in a given speech? I'll bet she thinks it's... stupid. I certainly do.

5. Cruz also referred to his role as counsel in Heller (the Supreme Court's biggest 2d Amendment case) — another thing Collins considered self-referential and self-righteous. But Collins began her column building up Dianne Feinstein's stature because of her encounter with the fatally wounded Harvey Milk and George Moscone many years ago. Does personal experience lend weight to political opinion or not? Feinstein said: "I walked in, I saw people shot. I’ve looked at bodies that have been shot with these weapons. I’ve seen the bullets that implode." That's at least as self-referential and self-righteous as Cruz's statement that he was not "unfamiliar" with Heller given that he worked on the case.

ADDED: "A recipe for cooperative achievement." Who ordered the cooperative achievement? At the gun control restaurant, Cruz folds the menu and sips his ice water.

"What America needs is not Robin Hood but Adam Smith."

Rand Paul delivers the SOTU response from the Tea Party.