GOP & Tea Party Leaders Denounce Violence, Defends Anger

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Tea Partiers Condemn Harassment & Violence


Tea party organizers across the country are condemning the harassment and threats of violence against House Democrats who voted in favor of the health care overhaul that passed the House Sunday.

Though individual tea partiers – and many Republicans — have distanced themselves from the threats and deemed them unaffiliated with the movement, the condemnations mark a more forceful response and indicate a keen awareness of the damage that being linked to them could do to the tea party brand. There hasn't been any hard evidence that the reported harassment is linked to the tea party movement, but Democrats have tried to draw the link between the harassment and the sometimes-inflammatory rhetoric that tea partiers and Republicans deployed in opposing the health care overhaul.

The organizers of some major Florida tea party groups, for instance, on Thursday morning released an open letter to Congress and President Barack Obama declaring they “stand in stark opposition to any person using derogatory characterizations, threats of violence, or disparaging terms toward members of Congress or the President.”

The letter calls the tea parties “a peaceful movement” and says its leaders denounce “all forms of violence” and “support all efforts to bring [any perpetrators] to justice and have encouraged full cooperation within our movement and have asked for the same from the members of Congress who have laid such claims.”

The letter is signed by leaders of two statewide tea party coalitions, the state chapter of the Washington-based FreedomWorks and local and regional tea party groups in Tampa, Orlando, Miami, Deerfield Beach and Viera, among others.

Brendan Steinhauser, who helps organize local tea parties around the country for FreedomWorks, issued a statement Thursday declaring “Political violence is both immoral and ineffective, and will only set the movement back.” He said he is "reminding all grassroots leaders that it's important to focus our efforts on peaceful, political efforts like protests, office visits, letters, petitions and of course, voting.”

However, he also urged caution in attributing violence or threats of violence to tea party activists.

“We must remember that the folks committing these acts are small in number, extreme in their methods and not yet proven to be members of our movement,” he said. “But we must be diligent in denouncing all acts of political violence and racism, when they occur.”

A coalition of Colorado tea party groups expressed similar sentiments in a Thursday morning press release.

The release said “Tea party and similar groups across Colorado are saddened tonight to hear of threats made upon Democratic lawmakers in response to the passing their recent health insurance reform legislation, specifically … Rep. Betsy Markey,” a Colorado Democrat.

Markey’s office notified police it received a phone call Saturday in which the caller told a staffer "You better hope I don't run into you in a dark alley with a club, a knife or a gun."

The Colorado tea party release emphasizes “it does not appear that these threats stemmed from those within Colorado's tea party movement.” But it adds “organizers and members alike are firmly denouncing any acts of intimidation or threat. Statewide, Tea Party leadership has encouraged disappointed members to get involved in the political process rather than dwell on the passage of the health care bill.”

The release quotes Northern Colorado Tea Party director Lesley Hollywood saying "although many are frustrated by the passage of such controversial legislation, threats are absolutely not acceptable in any form, to any lawmaker, of any party."

Hollywood, a member of a statewide tea party leadership team, added: “I can assure you that myself and my colleagues will take immediate action if any of these allegations are discovered to be connected to our organizations. At this time, our internal investigations have not revealed any correlation between the threats and the Tea Party.”

And Toby Marie Walker, co-founder of the 5,000-member Waco, Texas Tea Party, as well as Mark Skoda, organizer of the Memphis, Tenn., Tea Party and a leader in an umbrella group called the Nationwide Tea Party Coalition, said Thursday morning that their respective groups were drafting statement that will condemn the violence.

Walker emphasized “we do not condone” offensive “language, racial slurs or other poor behavior,” adding “we discourage it and will have (perpetrators) removed from our events.”

The tea party movement is a sprawling and decentralized loosely aligned network of local, regional and state groups that is deeply suspicious of authority – including efforts to develop a more cohesive structure for their own movement. That both makes self-policing efforts difficult, and also makes it tricky to determine which threats came from folks associated with the movement. But it’s undeniable that threats of violence and allegations of harassment have hit a fever pitch since the health care overhaul passed the House Sunday.

Rep. Tom Perriello’s (D-Va.) brother’s address was posted online and he later had his gas lines cut, prompting an FBI investigation. Local police are keeping an eye on Perriello's brother's home.

Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) has gotten threatening faxes, phone calls and death threats. House Rules Committee Chairwoman Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) received a messaged saying that snipers were being deployed to kill those members who voted yes for health care.

Rep. Dennis Cardoza (D-Calif.) said he has gotten threats, as has Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.).

Rep. Steve Driehaus (D-Ohio), whose family was put in a newspaper advertisement last week, had his address posted on the Internet, urging a protest. He has received threats.

Rep. Russ Carnahan (D-Mo.) Sunday night had a coffin placed on his lawn during a prayer vigil.

Some members are moving their spouses out of their district while they are legislating in Washington, Rep. Phil Hare (D-Ill.) told POLITICO Wednesday. And the FBI and Capitol Police met with Democrats Wednesday afternoon, urging them to report all incidents of harassment. The Capitol Police said they would do security assessments of members' homes and district offices.

Tea party organizers have struggled in recent months to clamp down on fringe elements that have sprung up around – and sometimes within – the movement, including white supremacists and conspiracy theorists who believe that the government played a role in the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks (“truthers”) or that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States and is therefore ineligible to be president (“birthers”).

And tea party leaders quickly denounced slurs reportedly directed at House Democrats during Washington rallies before Sunday’s vote, pointing out they were not representative of most tea partiers and urging protesters to stay focused on the movement’s core issues of limited government and taxation. Others pushed back against the reports and suggested either that reporters and lawmakers had fabricated them from whole cloth, or that the epithets were yelled by tea party opponents who had infiltrated the crowds in an effort to taint them. Some even asked for apologies from Democrats who seized on the reports to criticize all the tea party protesters.

But tea party leaders are concerned that the reported slurs and threats – covered aggressively by media they see as biased against them – could dampen efforts to broaden the movement’s appeal among independent and swing voters in the 2010 midterm congressional elections.

And some grumble that the mainstream media seems all too eager to gloss over sometimes violent extremism on the left.

“Our entire movement has been smeared by the Democrats and the leftist media that averted their eyes from leftist violence at anti-globalization rallies, anti-war demonstrations, outside the RNC and at other events,” said FreedomWorks’ Steinhauser. “There is a double standard when it comes to covering how extremist elements on the left and the right behave.”


Sources: MSNBC, Politico