Tea Party, GOP Facing Square-Off On Budget, ObamaCare
Health care fight shows tea party tension brewing with Oklahoma Republicans
By Chris Casteel
WASHINGTON — Ronda Vuillemont-Smith is a familiar face at town hall meetings in Oklahoma, so Rep. Markwayne Mullin probably wasn’t too surprised to see her last month in Henryetta.
Mullin, the freshman congressman, and Vuillemont-Smith, the head of a Tulsa tea party group, see eye-to-eye on many things. They’re both eastern Oklahoma Republicans and get-the-government-out-of-my-life conservatives.
But their faceoff at the town hall meeting seemed like a clash of different ideologies. And it was emblematic of the tension between tea party conservatives and many Republican lawmakers that has fractured the GOP in Congress as critical deadlines approach to fund the government and raise the debt limit.
Vuillemont-Smith confronted Mullin over a conservative group’s rating of his votes in the U.S. House — the group gave Mullin an “F” — and Mullin wound up teeing off on the tea party.