Tea Party Luminaries Angle for Influence in New GOP Order

WASHINGTON, Nov. 9, 2010— -- The Tea Party movement prides itself on being a leader-less amalgam of grassroots groups, fervently supportive of the Constitution, smaller government, lower taxes and spending cuts. Organizers say it's the ideals, not individual luminaries that give the movement its name.

But as a slew of newly-elected Tea Party favorites and political rookies join the ranks of the Washington elite, two incumbent champions of conservative principles are stepping up -- and out -- to claim the mantle of liaison between the movement and the new Congress.

Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, founder of the House Tea Party Caucus, says her "energetic national constituency" of Tea Party loyalists makes her fittest to lead the House Republican Conference.

"I have fought continually (and at some cost) for the principals of constitutional conservatism," she said in a letter to colleagues ahead of the GOP leadership elections next week.

"It is important that our Conference demonstrate to the people who sent us here that their concerns will be tirelessly advanced at the table of leadership," she said.

Bachmann, 54, a former tax attorney and state senator, and a favorite of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, raised and spent more money than any other U.S. House candidate this year, collecting $11 million, mostly in the form of of small-scale donations from Tea Party supporters across the country.

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Meanwhile, Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina, who has said he "can't claim to be the leader of the Tea Party" but has attained folk hero status, appears as close to the movement's leader in the Senate as one could get.

The man who famously issued a rallying call to Tea Party members in the summer of 2009 to make the health care reform fight President Obama's "Waterloo" -- "It will break him," he said at the time -- waged a hard-line war against moderates within his own party during the campaign.

DeMint played kingmaker, always with the support of the Tea Party, endorsing and funding conservative candidates who across the board were political-outsiders.

Senators-elect Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Mike Lee, Pat Toomey and Ron Johnson all received support from DeMint's Senate Conservatives Fund PAC. And now the group could represent a powerful counterweight to the party's more traditional, moderate leadership.

"Jim DeMint is going to be one of the most influential persons in the Senate," Dick Armey, chairman of the Tea Party-associated group FreedomWorks, recently predicted in The Greenville News.