A second tea party movement?

President Joe Biden is charting a spend-and-elect course for the Democrats.

That points toward a sleeper political question: Will Biden’s spending binge provoke a second tea party movement?

The first tea party movement was triggered by sticker shock over President Barack Obama’s spending spree, when Biden was VP.

Obama inherited the bank bailouts. But he also bailed out the auto industry. And got enacted a nearly trillion dollar stimulus spending package, also under the infrastructure camouflage.

Coverage at the time and since has focused on the tea party activists, a fringe element of the Republican Party. But tea party sentiment — sticker shock and a feeling that there needed to be some brakes applied — was broad and had a huge influence on the 2010 election.

During that election, Republicans picked up 63 seats in the U.S. House and took over control. That year, they also picked up seven Senate seats, although Democrats remained in charge.

The reverberations were profound here in Arizona. The GOP, already a strong majority, picked up additional seats in both chambers of the Legislature. For the first and only time since one-man, one-vote in the 1960s, a single political party controlled both chambers with a two-thirds majority.

The effect of tea party sentiment was most clearly illustrated in Arizona’s 5th Congressional District. Although the district was heavily Republican, Harry Mitchell, a moderate Democrat and former mayor of Tempe, ousted J.D. Hayworth in 2006. That was part of a Democratic national wave generated by fatigue with both the Iraq war and George W. Bush’s presidency in general.

Mitchell retained the seat against a challenge by David Schweikert in 2008, with 27,000 more votes. Even though the party registration split hadn’t changed materially, Schweikert, riding the tea party wave, took the seat in 2010, with 19,000 more votes than Mitchell. That’s a powerful swing.

Biden is proposing even more of a spending blowout than Obama, even though the economy is in considerably better shape. And his infrastructure camouflage is even thinner.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget pegs the cost of Biden’s American Jobs Plan at $2.6 trillion over 10 years. Of that, only $157 billion is earmarked for what is traditionally regarded as infrastructure: highways, roads, bridges, airports and ports. That’s just 6% of the total.

The number can be run up to $522 billion if the definition of infrastructure is expanded to include the internet, public transit, Amtrak and grid improvements to accommodate more wind and solar. That’s still less than a fifth of the total.

Biden proposes spending more than twice as much on long-term care under Medicaid as on traditional infrastructure: highways, roads, bridges, airports and ports.

Biden also proposes taking trillions of investment capital out of the private sector economy through higher taxes. Substituting public investment for private investment isn’t the way to expand economic opportunity, particularly when the spending is mostly on social equity projects rather than anything that could remotely be characterized as infrastructure improvements that boost private sector productivity.

All that said, if Biden’s spending binge provokes a second tea party movement, the Republican Party is far less positioned to benefit from it than in 2010.

The GOP is suffering from a Trump hangover, and can’t decide whether to take another swig from the bottle or try to sober up.

When governing, Republicans never practice the fiscal rectitude they profess while in the minority. But Trump never even went through the motions. Deficits didn’t concern him a whit. He liked debt. He left office bitterly complaining that congressional Republicans wouldn’t join him in a bidding war with Democrats over how much money to give in tax rebates to people who hadn’t suffered any income loss during the pandemic.

If there is a second tea party movement, and Republicans remain mired in Trump loyalty tests, it may pass them by.

It used to be that the only thing that saved Republicans from their ineptitude was the Democrats.

It may be that Biden’s big spending spree is well timed to benefit from a reversal of that equation.