Texas tea party: the birth and evolution of a movement – Houston Chronicle

Senator Konni Burton (R-Colleyville) watches nominees get approval despite her vote of no on the UT Board of Regents before the Senate for confirmation on March 11, 2015.

Senator Konni Burton (R-Colleyville) watches nominees get approval...

AUSTIN - Nine years ago, fresh off a term as a Smith County commissioner in northeast Texas, JoAnn Fleming drove to Dallas for a "boot camp" with other like-minded conservatives.

It wasn't on the radar of the public or most of the Texas political establishment. But many now consider it a key event in the birth of the tea party movement.

The goal was to examine how government works - and how they could force changes to make officials more accountable.

Also on the agenda: how to get their point across, voter to voter.

"Konni Burton was there, as were a lot of other people whose names would become familiar to a lot of Texans in the years to come," Fleming said, referring to the Republican who went on to become a state senator from Colleyville. "I had thought that once I was through with elected office, I'd take two years off to become a normal person again. Obviously, I didn't."

Within weeks, she said, the tea party movement in Texas was born.

It was a seed that quickly blossomed on the national stage with calls from grass-roots activists to cut federal spending, taxes and the size of government, and reduce the federal deficit. The movement burgeoned just as Democrat Barack Obama was moving into the White House.

Back in Texas, the tea party emerged as a decentralized movement that slowly expanded its focus to state government in Austin, even as a few Texas elected officials including then-Gov. Rick Perry joined their ranks to help bash federal overreach and the wasteful bureaucracy in D.C.

Now, with Republicans firmly in charge in both capitals, Texas' tea party activists are shifting their focus to the next phase in their evolution: as a political movement that is now an established insider power player at the Capitol, despite its historic outsider bravado.

Tea party caucuses have grown ranks in both the state House and Senate - the Freedom and Liberty caucuses, they are called - and Burton is now a senator in the chamber where staunch GOP conservatives are in charge, starting with the presiding officer, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick.

'Coalition approach'

The next step for the tea party will be played out front and center in the special legislative session that begins Tuesday. Gov. Greg Abbott, who formally announced his re-election bid Friday, has set a 20-issue agenda - much of it tailor-made for tea party regulars - that will pit the strongly conservative Senate against the more moderate House over controversial issues such as the bathroom bill, property-tax reforms, school-choice for special-needs children and how to better finance public schools.

"We are moving from solely a tea party effort to a coalition approach because we have common ground with a lot of other organizations on other issues," said Fleming, who is executive director of Grassroots America - We The People, a tea party group. "People in the tea party movement have been asking for some time how we can get help to effect change, and the answer is that it takes time to build trust and build coalitions. That's where we are now."

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In recent months, even during the regular legislative session that ended in May, tea party groups from around Texas partnered with local pro-business groups, toll-road opponents, medical organizations, mainstream Republican groups and immigration-reform organizations, to push for the passage or defeat of legislation, both in Austin and in Washington. With the special session just days away from its start, the coalition supporting passage of many - if not all - of Abbott's agenda has grown to more than 60 groups.

'Natural progression'

At a June 26 summit meeting in Dallas, 121 leaders representing 59 organizations met to discuss the special session - including members of the State Republican Executive Committee, GOP county chairs and conservative organizations - and plan their lobbying strategy.

That promises to put additional pressure on the Texas House, where Speaker Joe Straus has publicly compared some of the items to horse manure and suggested that a number may not get approval in the House. Ten of the 20 bills were approved by the Senate during the regular legislative session, and Patrick predicted on Thursday that the rest will easily pass his chamber - likely very soon after the 30-day special session begins.

"This is no longer solely a tea party effort," said Del Carothers, a Georgetown rancher who has been active with several Texas tea party groups since 2011.

"We have grown way past where we started out. Once you get a civics lesson on how our government actually operates, you know it has to change to be responsive to the people. And you know that if you really care about citizen-driven government and freedom, which is what the Founding Fathers intended, you have to be involved and make that happen," he said.

"If you sit around on your ass, government will run your life and they'll waste your money."

Mark Jones, a Rice University political scientist who has studied the rise of the tea party as a political force, said the increasing clout of the activists should come as no surprise in Red State Texas.

"The tea party movement had been building for some time, and it took off in Texas when Gov. Perry gave his Tax Day speech in 2009 and went from being a pragmatic centrist to straddling the tea party line," he said. "The next natural progression is for these groups to start exerting their influence in who is elected and to expand their clout by building coalitions with other groups. That's what's happening now."

In Texas, where many legislative seats are filled by the candidate who wins the Republican primary, tea party candidates often win. Perhaps their biggest surprise was the 2013 election of Ted Cruz over Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst for a U.S. Senate seat.

"In the special session, where all the items are of a conservative nature, the hiding places will be gone for Republicans who want to say they're conservative but not vote that way," said Dale Huls, with the Clear Lake Tea Party near Houston. "The best vote some of them can make may be the one not taken, especially in the House, because if they vote against our issues we're going to be watching everything they're doing.

"This is put up or shut up time."

For Republicans who refuse to support the tea party agenda, Huls and other activists said the coalition of groups wants them censured by the Republican Party of Texas. Even before the special session begins, a deeply divided Republican Party of Bexar County passed a resolution on Monday calling for "a change in leadership in the Texas House" - a surprising move considering that Speaker Straus, a target of tea party anger on many issues, is from San Antonio.

'Everybody can win'

Despite the predictions that the tea party influence could push much of Abbott's more controversial agenda items, including the bathroom and property-tax reform bills, to pass during the special session, when they failed during the regular session, House leaders privately say they think that is unlikely. That's because most of the controversial bills will simply not have enough support from Republicans and Democrats to pass in as strident a form as the Senate wants, said one House committee chairman.

"The agenda for the special session is part of an election campaign," said longtime Austin political consultant Bill Miller. "It's set up perfectly so that if not everything the tea party wants is passed, the governor can say well I tried. Re-elect me, and we'll get it done next year. Dan Patrick can say the Senate passed everything, and Joe Straus can say it was the will of the House, and the Senate and the House are much different chambers.

"Everybody can win."

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Texas tea party: the birth and evolution of a movement - Houston Chronicle