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Nancy Garcia, then-President of the Nevada County Tea Party in Northern California, wore a white sweater, a red Tea Party shirt, big glasses, and a plastic name tag as she introduced me as the evening’s guest speaker.  She was standing in front of homemade signs featuring the Statue of Liberty and inspirational quotes as she introduced me to the mostly-senior crowd.  It was 2013 and when Garcia — my mother’s seventy-something year old best friend –invited me to say a few words in a meeting hall at the fairgrounds, I didn’t hesitate.

“We’re so blessed to have one of the original co-founders of the Tea Party Patriots,” she smiled.  “He’s always so ‘up,’ you’ll feel better after you hear him.”  The crowd welcomed me warmly as I strode to the front in my black cowboy hat and a western-style shirt, my nod to Ronald Reagan’s influence on our state and nation.  During the speech, I talked about how the Internal Revenue Service had unfairly targeted tea party, pro-Israel, pro-Constitution, and other patriotic groups.

Thankfully, the lawsuit funded by my organization Citizens for Self-Governance brought the truth to light. In October, the federal government admitted they targeted these patriotic Americans and agreed to settle the class-action lawsuit in Ohio and a tea party challenge in the District of Columbia. If the court approves the class settlement, the government will have to fork over $3.5 million, including compensation to the tea party groups, merely the first step in showing the public how the IRS was turned into a political weapon against Americans.  Thankfully, recordings and transcripts of the depositions of former IRS executive Lois G. Lerner could give the public a really great glimpse into their targeting.

Me.

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Image Credit: Wikimedia

About The Author

Mark was a co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, and served as the national coordinator. He left the organization to work more broadly on expanding the self-governance movement beyond the partisan divide. Mark appears regularly on television in outlets as diverse as MSNBC, ABC, NBC, Fox News, CNN, Bloomberg, Fox Business and the BBC. He’s highly sought after for the tea party perspective from print and electronic media outlets, from the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, L.A. Times, Washington Examiner, Politico and the The Hill. Mark blogs at MarkMeckler.com, and his opinion editorials regularly run in many of the leading political newspapers both on and offline. Mark has a BA in English from San Diego State University and graduated with honors from University of the Pacific, McGeorge School of Law in 1988. He practiced real estate and business law for almost a decade. For the last eleven years of his legal career he specialized in Internet advertising law. When not fighting for the future of our nation, Mark is an avid horseman, and lives in rural northern California with his wife Patty and two children.

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