Day: April 26, 2013

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), the founding chair of the Tea Party Caucus in Congress, is facing investigations into multiple charges of corruption related to what the Daily Beast called her “faceplant” presidential run in 2012. Nonetheless, Bachmann chose to prove this week that she is not a pariah among her extreme right-wing colleagues by relaunching the Caucus, which had been inactive for nearly a year.

The Caucus went dark last summer, in part because Bachmann was preoccupied by her presidential run. After the election, there may have been meager enthusiasm for getting the group together because 10 of its original 60 members lost their seats. As recently as last month, the membership page of the Caucus website was defunct. The movement is also in bad odor with the public. A poll in January from Rasmussen, the GOP pollster, found that just 8 percent of those surveyed would cop to being tea baggers.

And yet the Caucus met this week for the first time since the 113th Congress was sworn in, and Chairwoman Bachmann — who had received the endorsement of just one member of the caucus, Rep. Trent Franks of Arizona, during the Republican primaries — was on hand:

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