Tea Party Patriots Action (TPPA), an antigovernment group, hit the road in mid-August for a bus tour promoting anti-voter legislation in Congress.
The TPPA “Only Citizens Vote Bus Tour” kicked off Aug. 18 in Garden Grove, California, with 20 people in attendance. It is scheduled to stop in about 20 communities before concluding with a rally at the U.S. Capitol on Sept. 10. The tour promotes the anti-voter legislation known as the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act.
TPPA often acts as a cheerleader for whatever President Donald Trump is emphasizing. Trump has spoken at Tea Party Patriots events in the past, and the group showers him with praise. The current bus tour supporting the SAVE Act follows this pattern. Before the 2024 presidential election, Trump encouraged Republican lawmakers to shut down the government if they couldn’t pass the SAVE Act. The SAVE Act most recently passed the House in April. It has yet to pass the Senate. Now, TPPA is ramping up distrust of immigrants and elections to try to get this anti-voter, anti-democracy legislation across the finish line.
TPPA touts the SAVE Act — a draconian anti-democracy bill that would make it harder for millions of eligible Americans to vote — as “must-pass” legislation. It’s calling on Congress to attach the policy to either a budget resolution, an omnibus spending bill or the annual National Defense Authorization Act. During the bus tour, the antigovernment group is asking people to sign a petition urging lawmakers to use this strategy when they reconvene in September. TPPA claims the SAVE Act is integral for so-called “election integrity,” while repeating unsubstantiated rhetoric that noncitizen voting in elections is a major problem.
Hard-right supporters of the SAVE Act want to use it to disenfranchise communities of color and spread disinformation about noncitizen voting. The policy has served as a vehicle for right-wing lawmakers to espouse the white nationalist “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which falsely asserts there is an ongoing and covert effort to replace white populations in current white-majority countries, and other bigoted ideas about immigrants.
In reality, the SAVE Act makes it harder for eligible people to vote, especially married women, rural residents, people with low incomes and people of color. The SAVE Act would require voters to provide proof of citizenship in person before registering to vote in federal elections — such as a passport, birth certificate or naturalization papers, documents to which tens of millions of Americans do not have easy access. However, voters are already required to attest to their citizenship before registering to vote. Further, federal law already addresses this issue by imposing fines, prison time, inadmissibility for naturalization, and deportation if a noncitizen votes. States — the primary government entities responsible for voter registration — also have strong protections against noncitizen voting.
The TPPA bus tour builds on the group’s history of promoting so-called “election integrity” and anti-immigrant conspiracies. TPPA avidly promoted the false ideas that elections were not secure, that the presidential election was stolen in 2020, and that it would be stolen from Trump again in 2024. It organized “Protect the Vote” rallies in several states during 2020 and encouraged local supporters to join “Stop the Steal” events in their areas. The group also sponsored a rally in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021. Going into the 2024 general election, Tea Party Patriots worked with the Election Integrity Network, one of the main election-denial groups pushing conspiracy theories.
Anti-immigrant sentiment has also been a longtime TPPA focus. The group released a film in 2014 called The Border States of America, which claimed to document the “unprecedented wave of illegal immigration [that] is washing over America, threatening the fabric of our nation.” It asserted there were “human smugglers and drug cartels who profit from [former President Barack] Obama’s policies.” It also warned that the immigrant invasion threatened all Americans, stating: “This isn’t just a crisis for citizens who live in southern border states. Today, we all live in a border state.”
Antigovernment from the start
Based in Woodstock, Georgia, TPPA was one of the major national organizations that helped spur the Tea Party movement of the 2010s. It was one of the few national groups that prioritized building real grassroots chapters. The overall Tea Party’s antigovernment doctrine attracted hard-right ideologues, and many local chapters of Tea Party Patriots promoted militia and other antigovernment ideas. “These local chapters are its greatest strength,” the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights noted in 2010. “The militia members, racists and sympathizers in its ranks, however, present it with its greatest political vulnerability.” The Institute also noted, “Several Tea Party Patriot groups officially call themselves militia groups or actively promoted militia formation.”
In its early years, Tea Party Patriot chapters collaborated with Oath Keepers on events. The Oath Keepers are an antigovernment militia that helped plan the events of Jan. 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol. Many chapters also hosted presentations by militia icon Richard Mack where he spoke about the supposed powers of constitutional sheriffs. An Idaho chapter featured then-Washington state Rep. Matt Shea at an event in 2011. He encouraged states to set up processes to nullify federal law, an idea that is unconstitutional. The leader of a chapter in Wood County, Texas, even had a history with the Ku Klux Klan.
In more recent years, along with election denial, TPPA has engaged around hot-button topics of the antigovernment movement. It actively organized against measures to slow the spread of COVID-19 at the height of the pandemic, holding rallies in multiple states called “Just Say No: Stop UnAmerican Mandates.” It has also fought against inclusive curricula, publishing a toolkit to help parents oppose “critical race theory” (CRT) in schools. The hard right has used opposing CRT as a vehicle to oppose the teaching of accurate history. TPPA stated that teaching CRT, which isn’t really taught in K-12 schools, is “the exact opposite of everything the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence represent, and everything the Civil Rights Movement fought to achieve.”
Image at top: Jenny Beth Martin, president and co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, speaks during a rally organized by the group on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., Sept. 9, 2015. (Photo illustration by the SPLC; source image via AP/Carolyn Kaster)