Judson Phillips, founder of Tea Party Nation, said 15 years after the Tax Day Tea Party, the movement’s effect on fiscal responsibility, limited government, and free markets in federal politics has been “an abject failure.”
“The Tea Party movement was an abject failure. There’s just no other way to put it. Look at where we are today. When the Tea Party movement started, it was triggered by Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package. Today, that’s a rounding error. The deficit was $10 billion when Obama took over in January 2009. Today, it’s $34 trillion. It’s going up by a trillion dollars every hundred days, and that rate is accelerating,” Phillips explained on Monday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
Phillips (pictured above) added that while the movement “brought the Republican Party back to life,” Republican lawmakers “didn’t do anything” when they were granted the opportunity to hold the majority in the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate.
“We brought the Republican Party back to life. They had nothing after John McCain was wiped out in 2008. What were the thanks the GOP gave us? We got them a majority in the House in 2010, and they did nothing. They refused to do anything. We got the most liberal Republican nominee in the history of the party in 2012, Mitt Romney, who could have just as easily fit in as a Democrat. Then, in 2014, we got [Republicans] in the Senate. What did they do? They made sure their lobbyists got their projects funded. They funded a few other things, but did they cut spending? Absolutely not,” Phillips said.
In regards to the 2024 election, Phillips said the U.S. is “past the point of no return,” adding that if former President Donald Trump wins the election, his presidency would simply be “buying time” before there is a “complete economic meltdown.”
“Now, I hate to say, but the 2024 election doesn’t matter at this point because we’re past the point of no return,” Phillips said. “The only question is when, not if, there’s a complete economic meltdown and collapse. It’s coming. Even if Trump wins this fall, all he does is buy us time. The Democrats, if they get back in, if they keep control, they accelerate the process.”
“The Tea Party movement, had the Republicans listened to us in 2009, we could have averted this, but now we’re past that point. That’s why I say the Tea Party movement was a failure,” Phillips added.
Despite host Leahy’s and all-star panelist Crom Carmichael’s optimism that the national debt would be addressed during a Trump presidency, Phillips said he doesn’t see “anything good happening with the debt.”
“If you look at the history of the Republicans, when did they ever cut spending? The answer is, they didn’t. If you look at Trump, his attitude towards debt is that of a businessman, not as someone who’s looking at the government. He thinks debt is good because, if he gets overwhelmed with debt, he can bankrupt it. Guess what? We can’t bankrupt the national debt of the United States. The Constitution prohibits that. Trump didn’t veto any spending bills because they spent too much in his first term, and past performance is the best basis of future work. I’m sorry, I’m just not optimistic here,” Phillips said.
In 2009, a number of events took place throughout the year as part of the national Tea Party movement.
The first coordinated day of action took place on February 27, 2009, in Chicago and cities across the nation. This was days after CNBC’s Rick Santelli delivered live remarks from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, in which he opposed the Homeowners Affordability and Stability Plan and called for a Chicago Tea Party.
The Tea Party’s demonstration in Nashville on February 27, 2009, organized by Phillips and other activists, drew a crowd of around 600 people to Legislative Plaza.
On Tax Day 2009, approximately 750 Tea Party demonstrations took place across the country, making it the movement’s largest single day of action. The Tea Party’s Nashville demonstration on Tax Day in 2009 drew 10,000 people.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
