This tea party activist isn't afraid to boil the kettle

Bob MacGuffie, one of the authors of the "Declaration of Tea Party Independence," is not new to taking controversial stands.

Last summer MacGuffie gained national attention with his "Rock the Town Hall" memo that urged conservatives to confront congressmen at Town Hall meetings who support the "socialist Democrat leadership in Washington."

"Watch for an opportunity to yell out and challenge the reps. statements early," MacGuffie wrote.

Critics saw the memo and its call for disruptive tactics as inviting hooliganism, while conservative supporters defended its aggressive posture as a fair use of free speech to challenge the scripted talking points of liberal congressmen.

The Fairfield businessman, co-founder of the group "Right Principles" with members in New York, Connecticut and New Jersey, said the "Declaration of Tea Party Independence" is a collaborative effort. MacGuffie said that several tea party advocates traded the document back and forth by e-mail, refining and amending it, before offering it to any local tea party group that might want to adopt it.

The Connecticut 2nd District Tea Party Patriots has done just that. When asked about the origins of the "declaration," the local organization referred questions to MacGuffie.

During a recent phone interview, MacGuffie said it would be a mistake to morph the tea party movement into a third party because "third parties are irrelevant in this country." Better to leverage the movement's electoral power to force Republicans to adopt strict fiscal conservative views, he said. Republicans in name only - RINOs - "will be exposed and defeated."

He dismissed the argument that tea partiers will move Republicans too far to the right, leading to defeats in general elections. Demanding fiscal conservatism, he said, will align candidates with mainstream voters and win elections.

"The myth of media is that the liberals are the middle. We're the middle."

Central to the tea party belief system is the contention that the Constitution's 10th Amendment - "Powers not delegated to the U.S. by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people" - has not been followed. The result is massive federal programs and spending, MacGuffie said.

"Much of what comes out of Washington is unconstitutional," he said. "We'd like to see states push back at federal government."

This is not new. The John Birch Society has been making the same argument for more than 50 years, without gaining broad political support.

Asked what federal programs a strict 10th Amendment interpretation would eliminate - Medicare, Social Security, environmental laws, civil rights protections, student loans, farm subsidies? - MacGuffie did not answer directly.

"How about if we start by not adding more, by defeating a national take over of health care, by stopping this out of control federal spending that is bankrupting our country. We can go from there," MacGuffie said.

He rejected suggestions that Republicans are trying to co-opt the movement: "Our issues are too vast to be co-opted. They can't. We're not a single-issue movement - we are a philosophy. We're the ones calling the shots."

MacGuffie added that the movement's strength is its diffuse nature and that rallying around a single leader - "Who could potentially be attacked and discredited by the liberal media" - could weaken it.