Tea Party Group Unveils Political Arm

The organizers of the National Tea Party Convention on Friday unveiled plans for a July conference and a political group that they ambitiously predict will raise $10 million to help conservative candidates around the country dedicated to the small-government ideals of the tea party movement.

The group, Ensuring Liberty Corp., is a nonprofit that will do direct marketing and organizing and will eventually be accompanied by a political action committee arm of the same name that will contribute directly to candidates.

Its group’s president, Mark Skoda, presented it, during a news conference jam-packed with national and international press, as the next step in the grass-roots tea party movement.

“The idea is essentially to act as ferocious as we are about our government being fiscally responsible as we will about our political process,” said Skoda, a 55-year-old technology consultant from Memphis who helped organize the convention.

Reminding reporters that “this is a part-time movement, we all have day jobs,” Skoda said his group “will allow people from around the country, perhaps in districts that are not competitive, to be able to participate their skills, to contribute their time, figure out what’s going on in other locations and ultimately contribute money to be used to fund numerous races across the country.”

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