Tea party groups to target skeptical GOP senators on defunding Obamacare

A pair of tea party groups is teaming up to pressure key Republicans to support an effort to defund Obamacare.

Tea Party Patriots and the grassroots group For America are launching online ads against a dozen GOP senators who either oppose the effort or haven’t announced a position.

Along with the ads, leaders of the groups will embark on a six-state, five-day “Exempt America” tour (the idea being that the American people should be exempt from Obamacare) that will bring them to the home states of several of these senators.


Update 12:01 p.m.: The conservative group Heritage Action is also launching an online ad campaign pushing the Defund Obamacare effort. Heritage will spend $550,000 on online ads targeting 100 House Republicans.

The effort comes as Defund Obamacare – whose supporters pledge not to fund the government if it includes money for the president’s health-care law — struggles to gain the traction it would need to actually force the issue. Several GOP senators have opposed the strategy in no uncertain terms.

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Tea Party pushing midterm challenges to Democrats and Republicans

The Tea Party is getting back on more solid ground -- midterm elections where in 2010 the fledgling, grassroots movement unseated so-called “Washington insiders” and helped Republicans win control of the House.

The loosely knit coalition of groups has already targeted some of the Republican Party’s most established candidates, accusing them of compromising their conservative principles in negotiating with Democrats.

The Tea Party Express even boasted this winter that promising to mount a primary challenge against Georgia Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss forced him to retire instead of seeking a third term.

“Lest anyone think this decision is about a primary challenge, I have no doubt that had I decided to be a candidate, I would have won re-election,” responded Chambliss, who was part of a bipartisan Senate group that tried to reduce the national debt.

One of the most recent, high-profile Tea Party challenges is in South Carolina, where Nancy Mace, the first female graduate of The Citadel, is trying to unseat two-term Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, whose efforts to pass immigration-reform legislation appears most upsetting to the movement.

Graham also frustrated conservatives so much this spring when criticizing fellow Republican and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul for filibustering over the Obama administration’s drone strikes that FreedomWorks President Matt Kibbe said Graham was “begging for a primary.”

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Sen. John McCain: Fox News is ‘schizophrenic,’ and tea party is negative

Sen. John McCain in a sit-down interview with The New Republic earlier this week called Fox News “schizophrenic” on immigration and suggested that tea party members were damaging to the Republican Party, touting negative messages that ran counter to Americans’ political will.

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