Popular Originalism? The Tea Party Movement and Constitutional Theory

The Tea Party Movement and the Geography of Collective Action

We examine the geography of the Tea Party movement by drawing upon a unique data source that harvested thousands of events from the Meetup.org and Tea Party Patriots websites during the latter half of 2010. The spatial distribution of events strongly suggests that Tea Party activism was borne out of economic grievance, as it corresponds quite closely to the incidence of home foreclosures. The f...

Constitutional Interpretation and History: New Originalism or Eclecticism?

The goal of originalism has always been purity. Originalists claim that their methods cleanse constitutional interpretation of politics, discretion, and indeterminacy. The key to attaining purity is history. Originalist methods supposedly discern in history a fixed constitutional meaning. Many originalists now claim that the most advanced method-the approach that reveals the purest constitution...

Constitutional Theory, Constitutional Culture

Constitutional theorists and other constitutional commentators make heavy use of a paradigm that mistakes certain aspects of our current constitutional decisionmaking process for inherent parts of our constitutional structure and ignores other important aspects of that process entirely. These distortions and elisions raise concerns about the accuracy of much descriptive constitutional commentar...

The People's Constitution vs. The Lawyer's Constitution: Popular Constitutionalism and the Original Debate over Originalism

A West European Style Populist Radical Right Movement in America? The Case of the Tea Party

The Tea Party (TP), whose candidates made significant gains in the 2010-midterm elections, lacks a place in the comparative party literature and also defies ready classification. Is it solely a movement to reduce the size of government and cut taxes as its name – some refer to it as the Taxed Enough Already party – implies? Or do its supporters share a broader set of conservative positions on s...