The Tea Party movement that sprang to life ten years ago and led to big Republican election victories in 2010 and 2014 has become notably more muted in the Trump era. That's led some former leaders in the movement to declare it has run its course, with many Tea Partiers morphing into the Trump movement. The latest to question the livelihood of the movement was Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, expressing his anger after the Senate passed a massive new two-year budget deal that raises federal spending and suspends the debt ceiling. "Where are all the fiscal conservatives, what happened to the Tea Party movement?" asked Paul.
While some Tea Partiers may have moved on, it turns out many others are still here. Dale Huls, president of the Clear Lake Tea Party, tells KTRH the group is still alive and well, albeit with a broader focus. "We in the Tea Party have evolved way past just the taxed enough already movement that we were ten years ago," he says. "We are into many aspects of liberty that we are fighting for, with the budget being one of the big ones...but we're also focused on pro-life issues, Second Amendment issues, corruption in our government, inaction in Congress."
Likewise, Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, states emphatically that the Tea Party is not dead. "We are up against 100 years of progressivism in our country, and none of us ever thought we were going to overturn a century of progressivism with one decade of working toward constitutionally limited government," she tells KTRH. "We knew this was a long fight and there would be wins and losses. This (budget) vote is a loss, but it doesn't mean we're dead and it doesn't mean we give up and go away."