Tea Party Summit: A 40-Year Plan to Take America Back

Nearly 2,400 delegates from across the U.S. attended the Tea Party Patriot American Policy Summit to hear ideas about restoring America’s greatness.

Supporters stand and cheer on Texas Republican Rep. Ron Paul as he addresses supporters during the Tea Party Summit at the Phoenix Convention Center on Saturday Feb. 26, 2011, in Phoenix.

From OneNewsNow

By Ed Vitagliano

It will take a while to accomplish that goal, according to Jenny Beth Martin, the national coordinator and a co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, the group hosting the summit. Martin was named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World.

In an interview with One News Now, Martin said it took a generation to produce the “cultural shift” that has led us to this point, and it will “take a full generation to instill Constitutional principles again.”

That’s why the Tea Party Patriots organization, home to 3,000 local Tea Party groups representing millions of Americans, has embarked on an ambitious 40-year plan to rebuild the constitutional foundations of our Republic.

In the areas of education, the legislative process, the judiciary, the electoral process, economics and culture, Tea Party Patriots aims to equip an entire generation with the tools to reverse the devastation of the 1960s and ’70s.

Social issues, however, are absent from that list. While Martin said the culture was important, for Tea Party Patriots “culture” meant a conservative renaissance in the arts and entertainment to bring love of country back to prominence.

As for the culture war battlegrounds, Martin said, “We don’t take on social issues one way or another. There are plenty of very good organizations on either side of any social issue you care about. [Those groups] already exist and serve those social issues well, so we just stay away from the social issues altogether.”

Nevertheless, Martin outlined a strategy that was impressive, and she insisted the Tea Party movement as a whole was not a temporary phenomenon.

“It’s not something that’s going to dwindle and fade away over the next two years or right after the next election,” she said. “This is about much more than who occupies Congress or who occupies the White House. It’s about restoring our Constitution to our country.”