Chicago-Kent College of Law Scholarly Commons @ IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law All Faculty Scholarship Faculty Scholarship 3-2011 The Tea Party and the Constitution Christopher W. Schmidt IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.kentlaw.iit.edu/fac_schol Part of the Constitutional Law Commons, and the Legal History Commons Recommended Citation Christopher W. Schmidt, The Tea Party and the Constitution, (2011). Available at: https://scholarship.kentlaw.iit.edu/fac_schol/546 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Scholarship at Scholarly Commons @ IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law. It has been accepted for inclusion in All Faculty Scholarship by an authorized administrator of Scholarly Commons @ IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law. For more information, please contact
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[email protected]. 3.18.11 THE TEA PARTY AND THE CONSTITUTION Christopher W. Schmidt * ABSTRACT This Article considers the Tea Party as a constitutional movement. I explore the Tea Party’s ambitious effort to transform the role of the Constitution in American life, examining both the substance of the Tea Party’s constitutional claims and the tactics movement leaders have embraced for advancing these claims. No major social movement in modern American history has so explicitly tied its reform agenda to the Constitution. From the time when the Tea Party burst onto the American political scene in early 2009, its supporters claimed in no uncertain terms that much recent federal government action overstepped constitutionally defined limitations. A belief that the Constitution establishes clear boundaries on federal power is at the core of the Tea Party’s constitutional vision.