Republican U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann served as an opening act as the Tea Party Patriots hosted a fifth anniversary party in Washington, D.C. on Thursday.
In a speech filled with digs at President Obama and other Democratic leaders, Bachmann drew laughter and applause from a less-than-packed ballroom at a Capitol Hill hotel this morning.
"The tea party movement at its core is an intellectual movement," Bachmann said. "These are ideas that I would put up against any ideas in the world."
The group hosted its first mass protest on Feb. 27, 2009, when supporters in 30 cities rallied for reductions in government spending.
Bachmann helped usher the movement onto the national stage. She founded the House Tea Party Caucus in 2010 and she gave the first tea party response to the State of the Union address in 2011. Her speech focused on the Affordable Care Act and criticism of Obama --issues that dominate the tea party's agenda to this day.
When the Republicans took over the House of Representatives in 2010, ending two years of full Democratic control of Congress and the White House, the movement's influence was unleashed.
With budgets facing heightened scrutiny in Congress, threats of a government shutdown over spending bills finally gave way to an actual shutdown last October, spurred on by opposition to the Affordable Care Act, President Obama's health care law.
Facing several campaign finance probes, Bachmann plans to leave Congress at the end of the year. But she urged the Tea Party rank-and-file to marshal its resources in to 2014 and 2016 to help conservatives capture control of the U.S. Senate and the White House. She pledged to join them.
