“We don’t need a lot of Jim DeMint disciples. As soon as they get here, we need to co-opt them.”

That was K Street lobbyist and former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott talking in 2010 about the Tea Party-backed Republican freshmen. This was a rare explicit statement of what the GOP establishment hoped to make out of the 2009 and 2010 grass-roots anti-deficit, anti-tax movement. In the end, there was some mutual co-opting: Tea Partiers pushed the GOP to the Right, and the GOP tamed some Tea Partiers.