Yesterday’s announcement of the abrupt closure and dissolution of FreedomWorks by its board of directors is the closest thing we will get to a formal date of death for the Tea Party movement, which in truth has been dead since Donald Trump descended the escalator at Trump Tower in June 2015. Trump did for the Republican establishment what it couldn’t do on its own in killing the Tea Party and its demands for small, constitutional government.

The results are in: Democrat Mary Peltola has defeated former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin in their House race, a loss that could mark the end of Palin’s political career. The fact that a Democrat won in Alaska, a state that has gone Republican in every presidential election since President Lyndon Johnson’s landslide 1964 defeat against Sen. Barry Goldwater won’t sit well with GOP party elders.

Sen. Todd Young warned the few dozen conservatives gathered this month in the basement of a sushi restaurant that their activism could be the only thing to stop Congress from spending trillions of dollars of tax money.

“You flooding the zone with your concerns will amplify for members just how serious they are,” the Indiana Republican said.

Being told what to do by epidemiologists and officials wielding SCIENCE as their authority has been enough to bring Tea Party–era liberty back in vogue.

It’s 2009 again, or feels like it.

That was when spontaneous, grassroots protests against overweening government sprang up and were widely derided in the media as dangerous and wrong-headed.

The protesters then were inveighing against Obamacare; the protesters now are striking out against the coronavirus lockdowns.

The Tea Party movement is an American fiscally conservative political movement within the Republican Party.

The idea of a “decade in review” article at the end of 2019 is a bit of “fake news.” Technically, the current decade does not end until December 31, 2020.

In that spirit, it is worth looking back at the past ten years through the “fake news” lens. These were years in which the mainstream media used false allegations and biased reporting to suppress conservative voices; they were also the first years in which, thanks to Andrew Breitbart, we began to resist them.

Political movements often run out of gas, but rarely do they stomp on the brakes and shift in rapid reverse. This month marks the ninth anniversary of the virtual Tea Party takeover of Congress. In 2010, more than 40 Tea Party Republicans were elected to the House promising to, among other things, lower national debt, reduce the power of the federal government, and support an originalist interpretation of the Constitution. Now the Tea Party is essentially over, the movement degraded by its own hypocrisy.

For all the talk of a Tea Party of the left, the true power in the House revealed its face last week — the Mighty Moderates.
The failure of House liberals to attach strict conditions to billions of dollars in emergency border aid requested by President Trump highlighted the outsize power of about two dozen centrist Democrats, mainly from Republican-leaning districts, who are asserting themselves to pull the chamber to the right.