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11:30 p.m. update: After tea party-aligned legislators ground the work of the Texas House to a halt as a key legislative deadline approached at midnight, Rep. Drew Springer gave an emotional speech imploring his colleagues to move forward so the House could vote on a bill expanding access to stem cell treatment that he believes could help his wife, who uses a wheelchair.

It does some remarkable things, Springer, a Muenster Republican, said through tears while giving a personal privilege speech on adult stem cell treatments. It might give somebody like my wife a chance to walk.

Springers campaign website says: During the time Drew and Lydia were dating, some twenty-three years ago, Lydia was involved in a diving accident and has used a wheelchair since that time. Her ability not to let it slow her down has been a source of strength and inspiration to Drew.

His speech momentarily freed up the gridlock, allowing House Bill 810 by Rep. Tan Parker, R-Flower Mound, to pass. The bill was named Charlies Law after former Rep. Charlie Howard, who died recently after a years-long battle with cancer.

But after the vote, the tea party-aligned Freedom Caucus went back to obstructing the work of the House as a protest to the leadership of Speaker Joe Straus, R-San Antonio, whom they view as insufficiently conservative.

Original story: A group of tea party-aligned Texas House members said Thursday night that they plan to defeat an entire agenda of routine bills scheduled to be approved Friday in retaliation for the House leadership casting aside bills favored by the more conservative members.

The Freedom Caucus, as the group began calling itself this year, said it will kill other members bills by submitting a petition to remove them from the Consent Calendar, the agenda for routine bills that are usually approved without significant debate.

Under the House rules, five members can request that a bill be removed from that calendar, requiring it to be debated and adopted like a regular bill. Because key legislative deadlines pass Thursday and Friday, pulling the measures from the agenda Friday will effectively kill them. Capitol observers have taken to calling the impending bill slaughter the Mothers Day Massacre.

The Freedom Caucus decided to pursue the maneuver after learning that some bills it authored have been left off Fridays calendar.

This is another shot, another direct shot, at the conservative members of this House, said Rep. Jeff Leach, R-Plano.

Throughout the legislative session, members of the caucus have been pulling bills from the expedited agenda, enraging their colleagues in both parties and slowing the work of the House.

Leach, however, said that when Freedom Caucus members mess with bills on the calendar, it is for policy reasons, but when the House leadership fails to advance the Freedom Caucus legislation, it is due to politics.

For the Freedom Caucus and for the conservative members of the House, its always been about policy, 100 percent of the time, he said. Whats happened to us has been personal retribution.

High-ranking Republican Rep. Dennis Bonnen, who is often enlisted to broker agreements between the leadership and far-right wing of the party, objected to the caucus characterization of the House leadership not being conservative enough, noting high-profile bills that have already passed.

So sanctuary cities is not a conservative issue for them? A balanced budget with $1 billion less than the current budget is not a conservative issue for them? Bonnen said.

Still, Bonnen said, the caucus has the right to hold up Fridays agenda.

They have the right within the rules to use the rules however they think it will give them an advantage, said Bonnen, who chairs the Ways and Means Committee.

Administration Committee Chairman Charlie Geren, R-Fort Worth, also objected to the caucus calling the House leadership insufficiently conservative For them to mischaracterize something is not unusual and said it had the right to kill the bills on the consent agenda.

As long as theyre following the rules, they can do what they need to do, he said.

Geren said he personally wasnt worried about the Friday agenda defeated.

I dont send bills to the Local and Consent Calendar Committee, he said. Its just too easy to get knocked off.

Continued here:
Rep. Springer's tearful stem cell speech breaks tea party obstruction - Austin American-Statesman

COLUMBUS Five-year-old Cora Owens adjusted the pink feather boa around her neck before carrying on a conversation with others seated at her table.

Her sister Faith Owens, 3, was too busy nibbling on a cookie to join the chat.

Both girls were dressed to the nines in dresses, hats and a touch of makeup for a fancy afternoon of tea on Saturday.

About 40 children and their parents visited Lavender Thyme in downtown Columbus for the tea party. The young guests were invited to bring along stuffed animals and dolls to join them.

The event served childrens tea, a special type suited for young taste buds sold at the store inside Pioneer Plaza, along with sliced strawberries, petit fours, mints and cookies.

Linda Sutton, owner of Lavender Thyme gift shop, set up the event using pieces from her own collection of decorative tea cups and kettles to serve the guests.

I do tea parties with my grandkids and I thought it would be fun, she said.

She and other adults served the children. Hats, boas and necklaces were handed out for the guests to wear as they enjoyed sipping tea and their light snacks.

A fashion show was also part of the day. Children dressed in clothing from the store before sashaying along a makeshift catwalk.

Participants were able to keep the clothes they modeled.

See the article here:
Children's tea party a fancy affair | Local | columbustelegram.com - Columbus Telegram

By Vanessa Williamson and Theda Skocpol By Vanessa Williamson and Theda Skocpol May 11

The next four years are likely to see a lot of activism on both left and right. Observers and activists have compared the contemporary resistance to President Trump to the tea party movement that opposed President Barack Obama eight years ago. Already, activists on the left have had some success using tea party tactics, turning the repeal of the Affordable Care Act from a presumed certainty into a drawn-out battle.

How much more is there to learn from the tea party?

We studied the tea party movement as it happened, documenting the movement at its grass roots, in the conservative media, and at the elite levels, and demonstrating how these forces combined to push the Republican Party to the right. Based on our research, here are four lessons that todays activists might learn from the experience of the tea party.

1. Engage in state elections and party politics.

About 900 grass-roots tea party groups were active in 2009 and 2010. Many of these local activists were very politically sophisticated. Tea party groups followed local politics closely, and their members showed up at school boards, town meetings, and state legislature hearings when issues they cared about were up for debate. Even when activists held very inaccurate views of actual policies for instance, believing that the Affordable Care Act contained death panels they knew how to navigate our political institutions to have a real impact on policymaking.

[Why did Trump win? More whites and fewer blacks actually voted.]

This is particularly relevant for activists on the left, who sometimes suffer from the opposite problem: a high level of policy knowledge with a naive vision of politics. In recent years, Democrats have tended to focus on the federal government and especially the presidency, neglecting the state and local races that have huge effects on whether and how policies get implemented.

This is one reason liberals have been losing. After the November elections last year, the Republican Party had control of 32 state legislatures (they had veto-proof majorities in 17 of these) and 33 governorships an almost unprecedented level of dominance at the state level. Republican state level control limited the impact of the 2008 Democratic wins at the national level. As of Jan. 1, 19 states had chosen not to adopt the Medicaid expansion that would have brought health-care coverage to millions of their citizens.

The tea party activists we met had a pragmatic relationship with the Republican Party. Tea party activists were mostly very conservative Republicans, and were often disgusted by their own politicians compromises. However, that disgust did not turn tea party members away from the party; instead, it strengthened their motivation to engage in party processes. For example, some tea party activists became precinct captains. Others involved themselves in sleepy local Republican Party meetings and quickly came to dominate those committees. This gave them far more power over local Republican officials than they had as individual voters.

Of course, tea party activists were voters, too. Occasionally a tea party-infused Republican primary cost the activists a seat or two, when the Republican candidate was too far out of the mainstream to win in a general election. But tea party activists did not only organize on behalf of ideologically pure conservatives. They were ready to campaign and to vote for candidates, like Scott Brown in Massachusetts, who were far from their ideal legislator but vastly more conservative than their Democratic opponents.

What this suggests for activists is that power comes from engaging with the political process at all levels. States power will matter in the Trump era on everything from environmental regulation to immigration enforcement. The major political parties are institutions through which activists can assert themselves.

2. Prioritize policies that build power.

When the tea party-fueled Republican Party came to power, state legislators focused on priorities that make them more likely to continue to be in power in the future. For instance, 20Republican-controlled legislatures have passed legislation since 2010 that is likely to lower voting by traditional Democratic constituencies such as young people, African Americans and Latinos. Seven states have passed laws sharply limiting union activity.

These measures fit with the symbolic and ideological commitments of the Republican Party, but they are also clever strategic moves. Crippling unions and reducing minority turnout are bad for the Democrats, who rely on these constituencies. Similarly, efforts to defund Planned Parenthood appeal to social conservatives opposed to family planning. They also undercut a powerful player in Democratic Party politics.

[This is what Americans will really dislike about the House Trumpcare bill]

Right-leaning activists are likely to continue in this vein. Democrats could also prioritize policies that will help build political power for the future. These could include voting reforms that ease the registration process, and social policies with benefits that are easier for voters to recognize and therefore easier to campaign on.

3. Use civic experience and invest in building relationships with fellow activists.

The most memorable organized actions of tea party activists were their big colorful marches. However, it isnt marches that make political engagement last in the long term. As Hahrie Hans research on effective political activism reveals, you cannot just mobilize people for one-off big events and expect to build a movement. Instead, successful movements organize activists in interdependent networks that work together and make decisions together, creating many leaders rather than just a few. This style of organization means investing in personal relationships between activists.

At local tea party meetings, there was always time for socializing, so people got to know one another. The demographics of the tea party helped them they tended to be older people, retirees and small-business people with flexible schedules, and some stay-at-home moms. It also helped that many tea party members had a lot of civic experience to draw from years of church socials and PTA meetings so they knew how to organize a meeting, get volunteers signed up for a committee and set up the kind of structures that keep activists engaged over time.

The tea partys lesson here is that not every event should be a march or policy lecture. Social connections are crucial to effective political organization.

4. Look further afield for inspiration.

Though the movement substantially shifted the Republican Party rightward, the tactics of the tea party should not be the limit of any activists political repertoire. At the grass-roots level, the local tea party groups that were so prominent early in the Obama administration went into decline soon after the 2010 midterm elections. We found that about a third of those local groups had disappeared within a year.

But U.S. history does provide examples of civic organizations that lasted not just a few years, but decades, and created tremendous social and political change. There is also a great deal to learn from movements that have not succeeded, such asa national movement for gun control. Activists of all political stripes can and should draw lessons from recent movements, but also the long history of U.S.political organizing.

Vanessa Williamson is a fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution and author of the new book Read My Lips: Why Americans Are Proud to Pay Taxes.

Theda Skocpol is the Victor S. Thomas professor of government and sociology at Harvard University and director of theScholars Strategy Network.

Go here to see the original:
Analysis | What can (or should) activists learn from the tea party? - Washington Post

When Central Valley Congressman Jeff Denham this weekfaced a crowd of voters furious with his vote to killthe Affordable Care Act, he like many Republicans around the country might have wondered where all the energized protesters came from.

At least somewereinspired by Ezra Levin and Leah Greenberg, two 30-year-old former congressional staffers who founded Indivisible, an anti-Trump group.In the last five months, a how-to-resist-Trump guide publishedby the D.C.husband-and-wife duo has gone viral and blossomed into a bona fide grass-roots movement. But even as Indivisiblehas energized activists around the country and added a shot of drama to town hall meetings, its also ruffled feathers, including those of some liberal Bay Area politicians.

Levin and Greenberg arehoping to spark a progressive version of the Tea Party movement, in which conservative protesters hounded members of Congress for supporting former President Barack Obamas signature health care law. The two had seen the power of the Tea Party firsthand: Greenberg worked for former Congressman Tom Perriello, a Virginia Democrat who lost his seat in the 2010 Republican wave.

We know what works,Levin, who talks quickly and has a face full of freckles, said during a recent interviewin the Bay Area. Putting aside their racism and their violence, the Tea Party was smart on strategy.

Along with friends who had worked in Congress, Levin and Greenberg wrote up a Google Doc distilling what they had learned about advocacy. Their advice: Go to congressional town hall meetings, pressure your representatives to publicly oppose President Donald Trump and his agenda, and keep calling them and showing up at their office until they agree to speak out against the president.

Every single member of Congress cares more about their own re-election than they care about anything that the Trump administration wants to get done, Levin said.

Levin tweeted the document which he says still had a lot of typosfrom his personal account to 650 followers on Dec. 14.

Within a few days, the guide racked up hundreds of thousands of views and wasshared by prominent politicos such as RobertReich, the former secretary of labor, and George Takei, the Star Trek actor andTrump critic. It was way more exposure than we ever expected to get, Greenberg said.

So Levin and Greenberg built a website and encouraged people to make their own groups. Its not very formal with a few clicks, anyone can create an Indivisible group in their own town or neighborhood, and invite other people to events. So far, there are at least two groups in every congressional district in the country, andmore than 900 groups in California. Activists around the country have followed the guides advice, packing town hall meetings and haranguing members of Congress.

Its attracted people likeEmily Morris, 27, a San Mateo woman who works for a nonprofit and was never politically involved before she joined Indivisible San Franciscoin January. The election turned my world completely upside down, she said.

Morris said meetingother outragedDemocrats energized her. Indivisible was this kind of antidote to despair, she said.

Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a longtime political analyst at the University of Southern California, said Indivisible was smart to demand town hall meetings as a tool to put pressure on representatives.

We didnt used to have town hall meetings, she said. They are being demanded by constituents now, to great effect.

She notedthat a desire for ideological purity from Tea Party activists led to several 2010 Senate races in which conservative nominees lost races that moderate Republicans likely would have won.

Levin said it was important for members of Congress to oppose Trump at every turn. While some Democratshadtalked aboutcutting deals with Trump on an infrastructure bill, for example if you dont resist, youre going to have a Muslim refugee ban, and you might build a few roads, hesaid.

Indivisibles activities havent gone over well with congressional Republicans. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Huntington Beach, called members of the groupenemies of American self-government and democracy after protesters with Indivisible got into a scuffle with his staff members in February.

Though the protesters think of themselves as idealists, they engaged in political thuggery, pure and simple, Rohrabacher said.

Indivisible groups have also put pressure on Democrats and liberals. In February, the Indivisible East Bay group requested a meeting with California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, and held an Oakland event with an empty chair to represent her when she couldnt make it. Members of the group also showed up at a fundraiser she held in Los Angeles.

Finally, Feinstein agreed to hold public town halls. In two meetings in San Francisco and Los Angeles last month, hundreds of people showed up, booing, jeering and grilling her on why she wasnt doing more to oppose Trump.

In Contra Costa County, members of Indivisible once arrived unannounced at Rep. Mark DeSaulniers district office and demanded to meet with him even though he was in Washington at the time.

DeSaulnier, D-Concord, said in a recent interview that he thought the Indivisible guide unfairly portrayed members of Congress as Pavlovs dog or shameless scum.Still, DeSaulnier said hes enjoyed meetingswith local Indivisible members. Im really pleasantly surprised and really happy that they want to stay engaged in a way that is constructive and respectful, hesaid.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-San Jose, had never heard of Indivisible when a group of 50 members metwith her earlier this year. Now shes seeingthe busiest town hall meetings of her 22-year congressional career, she said.

None of these people Ive ever seen before in Democratic Party politics, Lofgren said. They want to do something.

The biggest challenge now for Indivisible is how to keep people energized for the long haul. The group has been sending its members training documents, like scripts for phone callswith Republicans who voted to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, or a briefing on why groups should demand an independent investigation into Russian influence over U.S. elections.

Levin and Greenberg have quit their day jobs to work on Indivisible full-time and hired 16 other staff members with funding from donations. Going forward, theyre planning to endorse specific congressional candidates. But they say theyll let the local grass-roots groups lead the movement.

As they wrapped up an interview in a San Jose coffee shop, the guy at the next table Andre Davitoria, a 25-year-old recent grad witha man bun leaned over to say hed overheard their conversation with a reporter.

Noting that hed just signed up to do phone calls for his local Indivisible group, he asked Levin: Can I shake your hand?

Go here to see the original:
Meet the founders of anti-Trump group Indivisible - The Mercury News - The Mercury News

BBC News

Royals host tea party for children of killed soldiers BBC News Prince Harry and the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge became children's entertainers while hosting a party for the families of servicemen and women killed while serving their country. Among those at Buckingham Palace were the widow and son of Fusilier ... 'The Palace gardens have not seen this much fun, ever': Royals throw huge tea party for bereaved military childrenTelegraph.co.uk Kate chooses an elegant cream dress for children's Palace tea partyhellomagazine.com Young Royals Host Tea Party at Buckingham PalaceForexTV.com Evening Standard -ITV News -Mirror.co.uk all 48 news articles »

Original post:
Royals host tea party for children of killed soldiers - BBC News