Tea Party irks new members with tactic to promote its event

A Tea Party tactic to pressure new lawmakers not to attend a privately sponsored orientation event in D.C. this weekend was unwarranted, according to frustrated incoming GOP House members.

Competing freshmen lawmaker orientation events over the weekend prompted the Tea Party leaders recently to encourage their followers to bombard newly elected GOP House members with the message that they must attend a Tea Party-sponsored event for local organizers instead of a separate orientation offered at the same time by the conservative Claremont Institute.

But incoming members say they never received an invitation to participate in the Tea Party Patriots event held in the Ronald Reagan building in Washington, D.C., on Sunday.

“Nobody received any type of (invitation), it was just ‘this is what’s happening, please don’t go here,’ but I’m a big boy and I can choose where I need to go and where I need to be,” incoming Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) said in an interview on Sunday afternoon before heading into a meeting at the Capitol Hill Club, a Republican unofficial headquarters in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol, with members of his freshmen class.

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Tea Party irks new members with tactic to promote its event

There’s a lot I want to say, but if I say it, I’m going to anger many in the TEA Party.

Oh what the heck, it never stopped me before.

This is the kind of organizational genius the TEA Party is noted for. Send out a HUGE email campaign to try and persuade someone to say or do something the TEA Party wants said or done, and then the TEA Party forgets to let the concerned persons they want to influence know what’s going on, or fails to send them an invitation.

Grass-roots disorganization at it’s finest.

“I didn’t know it was happening until I started getting inundated with emails and (messages) filling up my voicemail,” West’s colleague told The Hill.

Most TEA Party members hold Allen West in very high regard. Do ANY of you doubt his word?

One irate incoming member told The Hill that the Tea Party tactic to release personal contact information of the new class was “extremely counterproductive and, in all honesty, an incredible violation of privacy.”

I have to take issue with this ‘One irate incoming member‘ that for some odd reason, remains unnamed. Once you became OUR elected official, you gave up that right to privacy. You work for We, The People, and WE, The People have a right to contact you, at any time, and by any method available.

I also agree that having your emails and phone banks inundated with calls and mails could be a bit of a distraction, but hey, this is the *BIG LEAGUES*, these things happen all the time, get used to it and stop your whining.

Tea Party Patriots coordinators sent out a message to followers late Saturday night with the subject line “FRESHMEN ORIENTATION CLARIFICATION�? after it was apparent that they needed to repair the damage done as a result of poor scheduling.

Poor scheduling? That seems to be a problem the TEA Party suffers quite often, even on a local basis. We’ve have had that ‘poor scheduling‘ thing happen to our local group on occasion as well.

Our biggest event ever, a candidates forum, coincided with the local high school Home Coming and Dance. Also, our event took place on opening day of the Texas State Fair. Many local citizens attended the school function and state fair.

A recent TEA Party meeting was scheduled to happen on the same night that the Texas Rangers were in a game of the world series. Several members that normally attend meetings didn’t, and several that were in attendance were making it plain that this meeting needed to be ended soon so they could go home to watch the game.

Got your priorities in order?

Though they said they did not intend for Tea Partiers to “flood�? new members’ personal phones and emails with messages, they justified the decision as “this was our only way to communicate with them since they do not have an ‘official’ line of communication at the present time.�?

As I said, this is *THE BIG LEAGUES*, these FLOOD THEIR EMAIL AND PHONE BANK things happen all the time, both parties are notorious for it, and regularly use it to gridlock the opposition on certain topics.

Do I agree with what TEA Party Patriots did to contact the incoming Representatives? Actually, yes, I do.

Do I think TEA Party Patriots scheduled their event at the best possible time? No, I do not. But it may have been the only time that worked for all concerned within the TEA Party Patriots group. That was what we were up against with our BIG EVENT. It just happened to coincided with the Texas State Fair and local Home Coming.

We had to live with it and do what we could do.

Do I agree with every decision that the TEA Party Patriots or TEA Party Express make? Not by any stretch of the imagination. And I don’t agree with their support of some particular candidates, or perceived candidates. But, I trudge along anyway.

We are ALL looking for new faces, America 1st PATRIOTS, good people that want to save this nation from the evils we are facing. We are always looking for new ideas about projects to take on and promote. You never know where the next great idea may come from.

Next thing you know, someone will want the TEA Party to take up the issue of getting the U.S. out of the U.N.