The legislative log jam in Congress has been brutal.  Since the administration of President George W. Bush, the anti-immigrant establishment has stymied every attempt to enact comprehensive immigration reform. During the same period, nativists have conducted a drive in the states to re-write legislation and make Latino immigrant’s life exceedingly difficult.  In the words of the state legislation’s principal author, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, its goal was “attrition through enforcement.”  Translated it meant that if you made life miserable for immigrants they would “self-deport.”  The archetype of this state legislation was to be Arizona’s SB 1070, written to avoid the constitutional pitfalls that had sunk California’s Proposition 187 and Hazelton, Pennsylvania’s local ordinance before it.

On Tuesday, June 5, in a hotel meeting room two thousand miles away from a recall election that was being watched coast to coast, the Washington State coordinator for Tea Party Patriots, Woody Hertzog, regaled a small group of Tea Partiers assembled in the Puget Sound town of Silverdale with tales of his recent campaigning trip in the Wisconsin trenches. Hertzog told the group that he and other Tea Party activists from across the country poured into the state, becoming a door-to-door army in support of Governor Walker. The election was still taking place half way across the country, yet it was all these Puget Sound Tea Partiers wanted to talk about.  Midway through the meeting, the results from the Wisconsin special election came in. When it was announced that Governor Walker and other Tea Party supported candidates were victorious, the room erupted in cheers and applause. One older man in the back of the room commented aloud, “I guess we can put away our guns, for now.”

In January, IREHR warned of the growing symbiotic relationship between Tea Party groups and anti-immigrant vigilante outfits in the special report, Beyond FAIR: The Decline of the Established Anti-Immigrant Organizations and the Rise of Tea Party Nativism. Now comes more evidence of Tea Party efforts to recruit from the dregs of the Minutemen.

The resounding victory of Indiana State Treasurer Richard Mourdock over six-term Senator Richard Lugar in the Indiana Republican primary resurrected the Tea Party movement as a potent force in much of the public mind. Yet some regarded Mourdock's victory as a re-affirmation of their belief that "Big Money" determines all outcomes, and that the Tea Parties had little to do with it.

In IREHR's analysis of these recent events, by contrast, three factors were relevant: the Tea Parties' unanimous choice to support Mourdock; a decision by the Tea Party to begin campaigning more than twelve months before the election date; and the movement's choice of a ground game rather than an air war significantly impacted the low-turnout election. In short, a year of coordinated efforts between national and local Tea Party groups organizing around a set of Tea Party ideas led to a primary victory and put them back into the center of the national conversation.

After reading an IREHR story on anti-gay activist Scott Lively's scheduled appearance at the April 14 Mass Tea Party Coalition event in Boston, former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson has decided to pull out of the event.

Governor Johnson's communications director, Joe Hunter, emailed IREHR this afternoon, "Having seen your article re the upcoming 'Tea Party' event in Boston, I wanted to let you know that Governor Johnson will NOT be attending.  With all due respect to the organizers and their right to invite whomever they wish, he has decided that participating would not be consistent with his strong support for marriage equality and gay rights." 

As further evidence of the growing influence of Christian nationalism inside the Tea Party Patriots, several speakers are scheduled to bring the culture war to center stage at a big Massachusetts Tea Party rally later this month.

Consumed recently by primary politics and internal squabbles, the Tea Party Patriots (TPP) are going back to the beginning. Just when the vicious fight over health care seemed to be in the country's rear-view mirror, Tea Partiers are hoping to jumpstart their movement by returning to the battle they lost two years ago: the fight over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACT)—or what they've derisively labeled "Obamacare."

As the Supreme Court prepares to take up the issue next week, TPP will kick off a week of anti-health care protests in Washington DC with a rally on March 24. The "Road to Repeal" rally is billed as "the first stop on the road to repeal Obamacare," and is the first major event since co-founder Mark Meckler publically broke from the Tea Party Patriots.

While all eyes were focused on the Republican Party primary in South Carolina, and commentators were proclaiming the Tea Party movement finished because it had not yet picked a single presidential candidate to act as its standard-bearer, five hundred Tea Partiers gathered in Myrtle Beach on January 15 and 16, as if to prove its naysayers wrong. They came from 23 local Tea Party and "constitutionalist" organizations. The speakers' list was a who's who and what is what among the Tea Partiers and Republican politicians. And anti-immigrant fever ran high.

In this special report the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights (IREHR) delineates the intersection of two trends. One is a measureable drop in the number of local and national anti-immigrant organizations that were established prior to the presidency of Barack Obama. Along the same lines, those organizations which remained experienced a noticeable decrease in the size of their membership and financial support.

 This has led to a relative decline in what IREHR describes as the Nativist Establishment. It should be noted that IREHR is not arguing that these organizations have disappeared altogether. Neither does IREHR contend that such organizations have ceased to be a danger to human rights. Rather, the data suggests that their size and power have fallen relative to the strength they had achieved at their height during the period 2007-2008.

An Open Injunction Against Bigots & Conspiracy Mongers.