November 13, 2010 04:15 AM UTC

Tea Party Worried that Republicans Will Abandon Them

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• by: Colorado Pols

Tea Party folks have been freaked out lately over concerns that newly-elected Republican members of congress are going to ignore them and disavow their, um, Tea Party-ness once they get to Washington D.C. As the conservative blog Redstate reports, Tea Party leaders are trying to convince newly-elected Republicans to avoid any freshman orientation sessions that are not being overseen by the Tea Party. You know, because the Tea Party people know everything there is to know about Congress:

This handwringing about “Washington Insiders” is verging on paranoid.

One tea party group is giving out the private cell phone numbers of freshmen congressmen to pressure them to avoid competing orientation programs, etc.

Certainly there are legitimate concerns and there must be caution, but Good Lord people, by the time all the cards are on the table we’re going to have all the tea party groups labeling their competitors as Washington Insiders.

This is nuts.

As we’ve written before, Republicans who used any help from the Tea Party during the 2010 election cycle are in a really tough position now. Tea Party supporters are going to demand that they remain completely true to the “cause,” but all of those things that some GOP candidates said on the stump — like Scott Tipton’s pledge to cut government in half — aren’t actually doable.

Can Republicans keep the support of the Tea Party while not completely turning off every other group of voters in the process? That’s not a tightrope we’d want to be standing on. Good luck with all that, John Boehner.