I stopped by the Audit the IRS rally today at the Capitol Building in D.C. Here's part of what I saw.
I left before most of the speakers began, so I can't comment on that, but a lot of the crowd and signage seemed to be as geared toward questions about immigration reform as it was about reducing spending and the intrusion of government bureaucracy into the daily life of Americans.
That broadening in focus is unfortunate. As the website of rally organizer Tea Party Patriot attests, the group seems as exercised by pending immigration reform as by spending (the issue that actually sparked the tea party movement). As Matt Welch and I wrote in The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong With America, the power of rapid- and intense-response coalitions is directly related to their ability to target a specific issue and stick to it. As with the old rainbow coalitions of the left (where a rally about, say, the minimum wage would devolve into a general gripe session about vaccination, El Salvador, and the Christic Institute), the broader the set of issues engaged at any one time, the less impact you're going to have.
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