Who's In Charge of the Tea Party Movement?

(July 19) -- Over the weekend, the National Tea Party Federation officially severed ties with the Tea Party Express over a war of words between Mark Williams, a spokesman for the latter group, and the NAACP.

At issue was a letter Williams had posted on his website that mocked the NAACP in terms that many readers found to be racist. On its website, the National Tea Party Federation issued a warning to the Tea Party Express on Saturday, demanding that it take the following actions:

1. Mark Williams must be officially removed from the ranks of the Tea Party Express.
2. Notice of Mark Williams' removal must be placed prominently on the official Tea Party Express website.
3. Tea Party Express must issue a press release articulating points 1 and 2 above.

The Tea Party Express did not comply with the demands of the National Tea Party Federation, so the latter group officially "expelled" the former.

All this begs the question: How can you be expelled from a group that has no formal membership requirements or procedures? Indeed, Williams is wondering the same thing.

"There is no tea party leadership," Williams said on "Face the Nation" on Sunday. "Every tea partier is a tea party leader."

The National Tea Party Federation describes itself as "a broad coalition of local and regional tea party groups" that has been "established to create a unified message" for those who would self-identify as tea party activists.

But the Tea Party Express claims it is the organization of choice for those Americans wishing to express a distrust of big government and an objection to paying taxes.

"The Tea Party Express, with over 400,000 members, is by far larger than the Tea Party Federation's entire membership," Tea Party Express coordinator Joe Wierzbicki wrote in a statement released over the weekend. "Most rank-and-file tea party activists think we're talking about Star Trek when we try to explain who the 'Federation' is."

The Tea Party Express is something of a conservative road show, using its website to raise money to organize rallies for a host of Republican candidates, like Nevada's Sharron Angle, who advocates cuts in federal spending.

But because of the decentralized nature of the movement, just about anyone with a website and a love of the tea party moniker can claim affiliation with the cause. As a result, several overlapping groups can be found on the Web, including Tea Party Patriots, which boasts of being the "Official Grassroots American Movement," and FreedomWorks, whose website claims to be "Tea Party HQ."

Indeed, in states like Georgia, rival tea party groups compete for supremacy, often in a less-than-civil fashion. For instance, as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported, the State of Georgia Tea Party, LLC, was founded by a former member of the Georgia Tea Party Patriots after the latter group was accused of being co-opted by the GOP.

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