from staff
Billie Tucker is executive director of the First Coast Tea Party. She met with Daily Record reporters last week.
The fall elections are over. What’s next on the agenda for the First Coast Tea Party?
We’re restructuring. People want to continue with the tea party, which is great. I think the tea party’s going to be in our country for a long time. Our country’s upside down financially. That’s really what started this whole movement, fiscal responsibility.
Every tea party across this country is their own entity. There’s no big organization. There are a couple of them running around trying to act as if they’re in charge of everybody, but you cannot put together all these tea parties and try to tell them what to do. They’re all very stubborn, they’re all local. It all came through a real grass-roots movement.
People like me all over this country just sort of woke up when this whole bailout thing happened. That was on (President George W.) Bush’s watch, and we all thought, what the heck is going on here?
I have worked in the business world for 25-plus years in an organization called TEC (The Executive Committee, now called Vistage) and we put together roundtables of CEOs. I was the chief operating officer for the state of Florida. Fell in love with CEOs. The majority of people that run companies in this country are small business owners, mid-size business owners.
The day that I came home from a meeting with one of my clients who was really hurting because of the economy was the same day that Bush said, ‘We’ve got to bail out banks.’ I was blown away by that, because I had just come from a client who had started a business with a credit card, and mortgaged his home about 20 years ago. He’d built up this really nice organization, and didn’t know what he was going to do. Nobody was going to bail him out.
In September of 2008, (Arizona Senator and presidential candidate) John McCain came on (TV) and said he was suspending his campaign to go back to Washington. That was the most unbelievable statement I’d ever heard in my life because leaders don’t quit.
Then that night, Bush came on and said we’ve got to bail out banks, and I said what? What’s going on here? And I woke up. You will hear this story all over the country from people like me that woke up.
I was so mad, because while I had been raising my kids and doing all the things that you do, they were screwing up my country. They were bankrupting us, they were corrupting us, they were making shady deals.
But I didn’t know what to do with the information then. And on Feb. 19, (CNBC analyst) Rick Santelli ranted on the floor of the (Chicago Board of Trade) stock exchange and basically said everything that I had been thinking.
All of a sudden, on Facebook and Twitter, people started talking about it. And on Feb. 27, a decision was made to have the very first tea parties. We found people all over the country that felt like we did. That’s how the tea party started.
We decided that we were going to have one ‘tea party’ on April 15 across this country. Millions of people showed up.
We thought we might get 500 people, and 5,000 people showed up. And that’s when we knew.
What’s your next step?
People kept saying, ‘we’ve got to organize.’ Trying to organize is really difficult, so each group’s doing their thing.
It seems like you’ve got a long way to go. Supervisor of Elections Jerry Holland’s website said the Tea Party has 30 registered voters. There are more people registered in Duval County for the Surfers Party of America.
We don’t want to be registered. We want to put pressure on the two parties that are out there. We don’t want a third party.
Why not?
We plan to take over the party that’s closest to us. People say it’s the Republican Party, that we’ve given them the chance to go in and make this right. They’re going to Washington in January. If they do a good job, good for them. We did our job. If they don’t, then we’ll decide what we’re going to do.
Do you think the two-party system is obsolete?
They made it obsolete because they didn’t stay true to their principles. Neither party. I mean, because both parties were taken over by the extremists, you know, whatever their ‘extremist’ is. And if they sat down and really looked at themselves, they would say that. The Democrats know it. They were taken over by the progressives. The Republican party was taken over by the moderates. Stay true to your principles. That’s what we want them to do. We will be watching and we will hold them accountable.
Some people are going up to Washington, like (U.S. Sen.-elect) Marco Rubio. I feel like we elected Marco because we believed what Marco said. We believed that Marco said he was a true GOP guy and a true-principled guy. We believe that. Every time Marco goes to make a vote, we’re going to let him know what we think, we’re going to watch the bills as they come through, and we’re going to say, ‘Marco, this is what we want. We hope you make that choice.’ If he doesn’t, then he will be held accountable. It’s the only way to do it.
Do you have any interest in running for office?
I really don’t have it in my heart to do that, and I believe that people should follow their heart. I actually took last week off to consider a lot of different opportunities. One was my consulting practice. One was running against (Democratic U.S. Sen.) Bill Nelson. Lots of people wanted me to consider doing that. And I looked at that, and I probably would have a good chance, because I’m not even sure he’ll run. He’s going to have a hard race, whoever it is.
I looked at maybe working in Tallahassee, and working for the (Gov.-elect Rick) Scott administration if I could get in with him, but that didn’t seem like what I wanted to do either. I’ve even had people say, ‘Why don’t you run for mayor?’ I think there are some people out there that’ll do a good job. So I’m like OK, what am I going to do here?
I’m really going to focus on the Tea Party at the local level, and spend some time in Washington with a new organization that’s forming. If I can go to D.C. a couple of times a month and walk the Hill, and talk to people, and bring information back to our local Tea Party, that’s really important.
There’s absolutely no money in it, which is really crazy because there’s money in every one of those other entities I described. I’ve worked for two years at no pay in the movement, but when you do what you’re supposed to do, that’s what you’re supposed to do. You don’t look at it from the money issue.
I’m the executive director, unpaid. We’re setting up teams. We have a local city team of governmental affairs. We have people very interested in that, and they’re going to be watchdogs. They’re going to hold our City Council and our mayor accountable to what is going on in this city.
We have a statewide governmental affairs team as well. They’ll go to Tallahassee. They’ll be working with the James Madison Institute, we’re aligning with them.
I’ll be the one leading the federal affairs team. We already have a great relationship with (the) Heritage (Foundation), and with Liberty Central and some other organizations.
The fourth team is the school board team. We are going to get involved in our schools. It’s time for somebody to start holding their feet to the fire and looking at textbooks, looking at what they are not educating our children on, and looking at what they educating our children on.
What is the involvement locally with the First Coast Tea Party?
We have a database for our newsletter and then we have one that’s a social networking area. Between the two we have about 10,000 members. We don’t charge membership fees. It’s free. We ask for donations.
We’re trying to create a structure and processes and procedures. I’ve built businesses before, so I can do that, but it is different, because we don’t have money, so everything we’re doing is volunteer-based.
The tea party movement has been criticized for being extremist or including extremist members. How do you respond?
We just walk through it. They’ve called us all kinds of things. ‘Extremists’ is the best one. You go through the fire to get refined, and we’re fine with that. I think we’ve proved ourselves, that we’re not the extremists. We are the normal ones.
Do you see the tea party going through an evolution?
I see it being refined. Absolutely. And the radicals are not allowed in. You don’t give them a platform. You don’t give them the opportunity to speak. We’re in charge.
We have a leadership council. We have bylaws. Our leadership team is all just normal average citizens, and if any of them starts to show those behaviors, they’re gone.
I can’t do anything about someone who shows up at the Landing. What we do before we have our events is we set the rules in place. We tell people, ‘This is how we’re going to behave, and if anybody doesn’t want to do that, you need to leave now.’
There have been criticisms in terms of racial inclusion. Your response?
That really irritates us. Absolutely. That is so wrong. We are a melting pot of America.
What involvement will the Tea Party take in the spring elections?
That’s going to be fun. There will be a questionnaire. It’s going to every (candidate) that’s running for office, any seat here locally. The questionnaire’s quite long and it’s very deep. We’re going to ask them to fill this out, and we’re going to post their answers on our website. Every mayoral candidate will have a spot where they will post their stuff, and City Council candidates as well. We’re going to give them each a place where they can post other things if they want. That way, people can visit the website and read up on who’s running for any office. We don’t tell them who to vote for.
Do you do endorsements?
We did, after the primary. We chose the governor’s seat, and the senate seat and the attorney general’s seat because those are the ones that’ll help us repeal the health care bill. That’s why we chose to endorse. We made that decision based upon the fact that we knew Rick Scott, we worked with him through that whole process. We knew (Attorney General-elect) Pam Bondi would be great.
(For the local elections) we are going to wait and see. We’re going to get extremely close to all of them. We want the candidates to tell us what they’re going to do. Once January comes and we know who’s really going to be on the ballot, we’ll bring them in and interview them.
When we get closer (to the election), if we feel that it’s important, we’ll endorse. And then it doesn’t mean that the Tea Party’s members will agree with us.
What about your contract with the JEA? What was our response to that?
It was a nonstory. I earned my keep. I had a great contract, I did great work there. Just because you work for the utility doesn’t mean that you are a bad person. I had a great opportunity to work with the board and set up their board governance policy. Do you realize that JEA had been working all these years without a governance policy for their board? I’m not embarrassed about the work I did. It was a $90,000 contract that lasted three years, so figure that out. It wasn’t that big of a contract. So I’m very proud of the work that we did there.
If you could look ahead 50 years and write what history is going to remember about this tea party movement, what would you like to see written about it?
We saved our country. We saved it from what’s happening in other parts of the world. I think the next couple of years are going to be really rough.
I don’t want my country to be poor, because people hurt, and if we don’t have the resources for our citizens, it’s going to be tough. We’ve got a lot of work to do.
It’s weird to think about my name associated with a movement, because really, I’m just a normal person like you. But you go back and you look through history, all these people who did things were just normal people. George Washington was a normal guy, you know? And he was called to leadership.
You have some friends in high places. Virginia Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is a friend. How did you become friends?
Actually, through the movement. I was on the board of an organization called Tea Party Patriots. We had a retreat and two people that knew her had invited her to this retreat, and Ginni and I became very fast friends at that moment, because we think alike.
I’ve met her husband, I’ve stayed in their home. The first time I stayed there was, wow, Justice Thomas (on) the Supreme Court is in the next room sleeping.
And that was a big moment in my life, to realize what the hell am I doing here, you know? But you know what? They’re normal people too.
My life’s changed. I know people all over this country that I didn’t know a year ago. I have friends all over this place. Life is very different in the last year.