Mission Viejo Patriots Stay the Course

The origin of the national Tea Party Movement can be traced to February 2009 when Keli Carender organized a grassroots rally in Seattle on Feb. 16 to protest the stimulus bill. News of Carender’s event spread quickly, and similar protests were held in other cities in February. By April 15, more than 750 Tea Parties were held nationwide to protest out-of-control spending and excessive taxation, and Mission Viejo was among the 750.

Protests are not new in Mission Viejo, where members of the Committee for Integrity for Government regularly rallied on the corners of La Paz and Marguerite. Although the CIG stopped meeting in 2003, Mission Viejo residents were accustomed to seeing the group picketing on the corners. When the Tea Party concept took off in 2009, many former CIG members were back out on the same corners.

While some segments of Tea Partiers around the country have become Third Party advocates, Mission Viejo Tea Party Patriots are staying with the original purpose. The following Mission Statement and core values can be found on the Website of Tea Party Patriots, a nationwide organization.

Mission Statement: The impetus for the Tea Party movement is excessive government spending and taxation. The mission is to attract, educate, organize, and mobilize fellow citizens to secure public policy consistent with three core values of Fiscal Responsibility, Constitutionally Limited Government and Free Markets.

Fiscal Responsibility by government honors and respects the freedom of individuals to spend money that is the fruit of their own labor. A constitutionally limited government, designed to protect the blessings of liberty, must be fiscally responsible or it must subject its citizenry to high levels of taxation that unjustly restrict the liberty our Constitution was designed to protect. The increasing national debt is a grave threat to national sovereignty and the personal and economic liberty of future generations.

Constitutionally Limited Government: Tea Party Patriots are inspired by our founding documents and regard the Constitution of the United States to be the supreme law of the land. We believe that it is possible to know the original intent of the government our founders set forth and stand in support of that intent. Like the founders, we support states' rights for those powers not expressly stated in the Constitution. As the government is of the people, by the people and for the people, in all other matters we support the personal liberty of the individual, within the rule of law.

A free market is the economic consequence of personal liberty. The founders believed that personal and economic freedom were indivisible, as do we. Our current government's interference distorts the free market and inhibits the pursuit of individual and economic liberty. Therefore, we support a return to the free market principles on which this nation was founded and oppose government intervention into the operations of private business.

Tea Party Patriots, Inc. is a non-partisan grassroots organization of individuals united by our core values derived from the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States of America, the Bill Of Rights as explained in the Federalist Papers. We recognize and support the strength of grassroots organization powered by activism and civic responsibility at a local level. We hold that the United States is a republic conceived by its architects as a nation whose people were granted "unalienable rights" by our Creator. Chiefly among these are the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The Tea Party Patriots stand with our founders, as heirs to the republic, to claim our rights and duties which preserve their legacy and our own. We hold, as did the founders, that there exists an inherent benefit to our country when private property and prosperity are secured by natural law and the rights of the individual.