The 2012 election and the government shutdown of 2013

Although Tea Party candidate Ted Cruz coasted to an easy victory in his race for a U.S. Senate seat in Texas, that result was far from typical for both the Tea Party and the Republicans in the November 2012 elections. Rep. Todd Akin, a member of the House Tea Party caucus, scuttled his bid for a vulnerable U.S. Senate seat in Missouri when he stated that cases of “legitimate rape” very rarely result in pregnancy. Tea Party support enabled Richard Mourdock to defeat six-term incumbent Richard Lugar in the Republican primary for the U.S. Senate in Indiana, but Mourdock did irreversible damage to his own campaign when he stated that pregnancy as a result of rape was “something that God intended to happen.” First-term Tea Party representatives such as Florida’s Allen West and Joe Walsh of Illinois were turned out in their reelection bids, and Tea Party icon Michele Bachmann narrowly survived a Democratic challenge for her U.S. congressional seat in Minnesota. In Massachusetts, Sen. Scott Brown, who had alienated some of his Tea Party supporters by crossing party lines to vote with Democrats on a variety of issues, was defeated by Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren. In an election where it was widely believed that Republicans had a reasonable chance of winning control of the Senate, they ultimately ceded small but significant gains to the Democrats in both houses of Congress.

In December 2012 DeMint, one of the most visible faces of the Tea Party in the U.S. Senate, stepped down to become president of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. Some analysts opined that the Tea Party appeared to be a spent force, and in February 2013 Republican strategist Karl Rove founded the Conservative Victory Project, a super political action committee (PAC) whose stated goal was to intervene at the primary stage and prevent the nomination of weak or unelectable candidates. Tea Party groups immediately criticized Rove—whose other super PACs had spent $175 million in the 2012 election cycle to little effect—for attempting to thwart what they considered to be the wishes of the conservative base. As the divide between the Republican establishment and the Tea Party threatened to become an irreparable breach, a scandal involving the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) quickly brought the two groups back together.

In May 2013 the IRS revealed that it had targeted for additional scrutiny conservative groups that had applied for tax-exempt status as 501(c)(4) nonprofit social welfare organizations. The 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission had spurred politically affiliated groups representing a wide range of ideological viewpoints to seek 501(c)(4) status, which allowed them to preserve the anonymity of their donors. Because groups with 501(c)(4) status were prohibited from making the promotion of a particular candidate or political viewpoint their primary activity, IRS workers attempted to ascertain the degree of political involvement of certain applicants. In some cases, this involved invasive questions about donor activity and excessively burdensome delays on a final determination of tax-exempt status. Most notably, roughly one-third of the 300 organizations flagged for additional review contained the words “Tea Party,” “Patriots,” or “9/12” in their names. Although a review of the case by the Treasury Department’s inspector general did not uncover overt political bias, many within the Tea Party felt that their worst suspicions of the government had been confirmed, and the scandal served to reinvigorate a movement that had struggled to regain its footing in the wake of the 2012 elections.

Later in 2013, Tea Party members in the House and the Senate demonstrated their influence when they used the threat of a government shutdown as a bargaining tool in their ongoing campaign against the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). The health care law, known colloquially as Obamacare, was Obama’s signature legislative achievement, and, since its passage in 2010, Republicans in the House had voted more than 40 times to repeal, defund, or delay it. DeMint used his position at the Heritage Foundation to direct the campaign, and he embarked on a cross-country speaking tour during the August congressional recess to bolster support for it. Throughout September the Republican-led House parried with the Democratic-led Senate. The Senate rejected numerous bills that proposed funding the government at the expense of the PPACA, and Cruz delivered a 21-hour address against the PPACA on the floor of the Senate (for procedural reasons, the speech did not technically qualify as a filibuster).

With Congress unable to agree on a continuing resolution to fund the federal government, those parts of the government deemed nonessential were shut down on October 1, the start of the fiscal year, and some 800,000 federal workers were furloughed. House Republicans sponsored a series of bills that would have funded select federal agencies, but Obama refused to discuss anything short of a full reopening of the government. Business leaders, traditionally strong supporters of the Republican Party, vocally criticized the Tea Party and the tactics that led to the shutdown. More than 250 chambers of commerce and trade associations signed an open letter advocating the funding of the government. As the shutdown entered its third week, the Treasury Department approached the limit of its borrowing power (the so-called debt ceiling); on October 17 the United States would risk defaulting on its debts.

Trying to navigate between the White House and Senate on the left and Tea Party representatives and the Heritage Foundation’s PAC on the right, House Speaker John Boehner was unable to craft a compromise bill to reopen the government and raise the debt ceiling. As the October 17 deadline neared, the rating agency Fitch threatened to downgrade the U.S. credit rating, and attention shifted to the Senate, where Minority Leader McConnell and Majority Leader Reid agreed on a measure to fund the government through January 15, 2014, and to raise the debt ceiling through February 7. Boehner brought the bill passed by the Senate to a vote in the House, where it easily passed, drawing support from 87 Republicans as well as all 198 voting Democrats in the chamber. In the early morning hours of October 17, Obama signed the bill, which authorized the creation of a committee to deal with long-term budget issues but made no significant concessions to Tea Party demands.