A House Divided? The War Within The Tea Party Movement Heats Up

The Tea Party movement is often seen by outsiders as one big monolithic force, especially by its detractors (who occasionally use nastier words than “monolithic” to describe it). But lately, there has been a mounting civil war between two rival factions of Tea Partiers.

One big bone of contention: the GOP’s growing involvement with the movement.

The two main parties here are the Tea Party Patriots, the older group of the two, and the Tea Party Express, which was founded by GOP consultants, including Sal Russo and Joe Wierzbecki. The Patriots accuse the Express of being a GOP front organization; the Express accuses the Patriots of being too disorganized to accomplish anything. Now, tensions seem to be coming to a head as one TPPer who did work with the TPE, Amy Kremer, is being sued by the TPP.

From TPMMuckraker (emphasis added):

Emails obtained by TPMmuckraker detail how a rogue faction of Tea Party Patriots is lashing out at the board for going ahead with the suit against Kremer, and challenging the board’s financial management, triggering a state of acrimony that appears serious enough to threaten the upstart movement’s ability to continue to mount an effective grassroots challenge to the Obama agenda — just days after the House passed the health-care-reform bill that the Tea Partiers view as socialism.

In an email to fellow TPPers sent Wednesday, Gerald Merits called the lawsuit “the single most insane act of self destruction I have witnessed since this country elected Obama,” and asked “how much donor money is being spent of (sic) suing Amy?”

For the rest of the day, the email list was consumed with charges and counter charges. In response to Merits, Josh Parker, a supporter of the board, wrote: “Amy created a situation where TPP couldn’t do anything BUT sue her, then she goes on with her poor me crap. She brings this on herself and all the rest of us.”

One side note: it’s odd how the unapologetically left-wing Talking Points Memo has become a small clearinghouse for internal dirt from the right. Last month, the Scozzafava campaign (remember the Scozzafava campaign?) tried to portray The Weekly Standard‘s John McCormack as a nut by leaking their correspondence to TPM; it backfired. Politico also reported on the internal struggle yesterday, but TPMMuckraker has a treasure trove of internal e-mails that underscore the depth of the feud. Given that their style is typically to extensively cover a few topics at a time, the odds are pretty good that if there’s more discord, they’ll find it and publish it.