All three Congressmen did show. Along with roughly 200 men and women, of all races, eager to overturn the trillion dollar boondoggle known as Obamacare.
Like I mentioned, it was my first meeting with King Street Patriots. I’ve been putting their events on the calendar but always found something closer to home to attend. Most of the meetings were at their “office”, which I pictured as some kind of hole in the wall that would hold four people, eight if you double stacked them. So I wasn’t prepared at all for what I found, although I certainly should have been considering that the group is co-founded by Catherine Engelbrecht and Melissa Herrera Lynn Lasher.
What I found was a huge storefront in a strip center next Demeris Bar-B-Que in the Northwest Shopping Center on Hempstead Hwy. They had maps and strategy brainstorming sessions hanging on the walls, along with a list of funding needs (complete with a Sharpie to sign up!). I counted a 148 folding chairs before the place was overflowing, with people standing along the walls, in the back, in the hall, and outside at a set of double doors that had to be opened for people to hear. I hope the fire marshall isn’t reading this!
Catherine was the emcee for the event and she is really good at it. I first heard her speak at the NHTPP meeting at the Sam Houston Race Track when the Tea Party Express bus rolled through town. She has a bundle of energy and gets quite animated, keeping the crowd interested. When she first took the mic, she said that the plan was for the Congressmen to sit around in an Oprah like setting, answering questions and talking amongst themselves. Due to the size of the crowd, they had to drop that format and Catherine asked each of the men a question from a list that was turned in by audience members prior to the start.
The focus of the meeting was health care and Catherine wanted each man to tell the attendees how such a monstrosity was passed given that 60{997ab4c1e65fa660c64e6dfea23d436a73c89d6254ad3ae72f887cf583448986} of the country was against it. Each of them mentioned Nancy Pelosi, backroom deals, committee assignments, retiring Congressmen promised jobs in the Obama administration, etc. They also reiterated the need to continue fighting, with Rep. Poe declaring that the bill was unconstitutional and would be defeated in court. I thought he was being a bit optimistic on that but you have to consider the audience. Rep. Brady thinks that part of the Democratic strategy relies upon the short term memory that Americans have in politics, hoping that all of this will be forgotten by November.
One of the oddest things to hear was Rep. Olson talking up spending federal money on the space program and people cheering moments after they’d cheered at the prospect of defeating spending federal money on healthcare. It reminded me of the time Rep. Gene Green asked for a show of hands in his town hall meeting of people that were on Medicare and 80{997ab4c1e65fa660c64e6dfea23d436a73c89d6254ad3ae72f887cf583448986} of the room raised their hands.
Rep. Olson stated that the job loss in Clear Lake could be as high as 20,000 and talked about a backroom deal made between President Obama and the Democratic representative from Florida that represents the Kennedy Space Center. He said for us to watch President Obama’s speech on Tax Day, April 15th and see if he mentions expansion or new programs for that location. He joked that the President wouldn’t want to be in D.C. on that date.
All in all, it was a good meeting and should keep hope alive for a while yet. Numerous candidates/politicians attended:
- Jared Woodfill
- Paul Simpson
- Marc Brown
- Danny Dexter
- Alice O’Neil (in runoff with James Lombardino)
- Toni Lawrence
- Fernando Herrera (running against Jessica Farrar)
- John Faulk
- Bill Walker (running against John Whitmire)
- Sarah Davis (running against Ellen Cohen)
- Don Smyth
- Stan Stanart
- Sheri Y. Dean
- David Smith (Libertarian running against Ted Poe)
- Steve Susman (Libertarian running against Pete Olson)
- Bruce West (Libertarian that doesn’t trust me – running against Kevin Brady)
Note to politicians – in a standing room only crowd, it really would be nice if you stood in the back or on the sides and let the elderly women (and men) sit in a chair. I won’t name names but you know who you are. Same goes for able bodied young men (and women) – where have our manners gone?
The reason for the title is that I think Tea Parties 1.0 have just about worn out their welcome. Catherine and Melissa have put together a force here that could be around for some time, if they can continue to fund it. From what I saw, they are budgeting their annual overhead to be around $65k, which could fund a lot of down ballot candidates. They dropped the “Tea Party” name and went back to Paul Revere’s time, focusing on these five areas:
- freedom
- capitalism
- American Exceptionalism
- Constitutional Governance
- Civic Duty
Learn more about King Street Patriots at their website: KingStreetPatriots.org
To be honest, this is something that the Republican Party should be doing. I’m quite sure that Jared Woodfill was thinking the same thing as he sat in the room this night. Hopefully, it will spur him to rethink and reorganize the HCRP if he survives the runoff. I think that you can still do the high-dollar functions such as the Karl Rove book signing/speech tonight (quite a coup for Mr. Woodfill) and still have weekly functions such as this around the county.
A few pictures:
