A coalition of Tea Party groups will gather in a Chinese restaurant on Capitol Hill tonight to announce plans for one final Washington showdown over health-care reform.
The event, dubbed “Take the Town Halls to Washington,” is designed to bring Tea Party activists to Capitol Hill during the month of March, in order to target 50 House Democrats who have not yet announced their vote on health-care reform, according to a press release. It’s being put together by Mark Skoda, a prime organizer of last month’s controversial National Tea Party Convention, where Sarah Palin was the keynote speaker, and by Michael Patrick Leahy, a Tea Party leader and GOP consultant.
Asked how many Tea Partiers he expected to show up, Leahy told TPMmuckraker: “I am very confident that the number of activists is going to increase dramatically each day as we approach the White House deadline of March 18 for the vote.”
Said Skoda in the release:
Our first goal is to stop this bill from passing by March 18, the most recent White House deadline. Towards that end, tea party activists will be meeting every day with members of Congress here on Capitol Hill.
Skoda, a Memphis Tea Party activist who worked closely with Judson Phillips of Tea Party Nation on the recent convention, added that the group, an informal coalition of 30 Tea Party groups, had set up a “war room” on Capitol Hill, which he invited activists to use as a base of operations.
Leahy warned that the administration plans to “ram down the Health Care takeover through a corrupt Congress by the end of this month, in direct defiance of the clearly expressed will of the American people.” He called for every Tea Party activist to “consider dropping everything he or she is doing and join us in the most important battle of our life time.”
Leahy, a founder of Top Conservatives on Twitter, has admitted to having court judgments against him for $145,000 worth of unpaid taxes, and has been derided as self-interested and inauthentic by many grassroots Tea Partiers.
