Bring Back the Tea Party

Six months into Joe Biden’s presidency, the opposition to his sweeping agenda is practically nonexistent.

Rick Santelli’s 2009 rant against government bailouts on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange is widely seen as one of the triggers for the development of the Tea Party in the early months of the Obama administration. The movement gained steam as Democrats passed a massive economic-stimulus package and rammed through Obamacare. After propelling Republicans to take over Congress, it set up high-stakes standoffs over the size and scope of government and fidelity to the Constitution that came to define the Obama era.

The cynical take on the Tea Party movement was that all the talk about returning to constitutional principles and shrinking government was disingenuous and would disappear the moment a Republican became president. This had been the traditional pattern as Republicans went soft on controlling spending during the Reagan years only to retake Congress on a small government platform in 1994, and then as so-called compassionate conservatives abandoned fiscal restraint during the Bush era only for Tea Party Republicans to revolt under Obama. The cynics proved correct insofar as Republicans stopped claiming to care about debt and deficits when Donald Trump was in the White House. However, the chain ended there. To put a fine point on it, were the Biden era to have followed the previous pattern, his presidency would have triggered a return to Republican demands for fiscal responsibility and warnings about the unsustainable debt. But there is currently no sign of this happening.