Exclusive: Tea Party Leadership Fund to Recruit Boehner Primary Challenger

The Tea Party Leadership Fund will announce on Friday an effort it plans to undertake to search for a candidate to primary House Speaker John Boehner, Breitbart News has learned exclusively.

The group is funding a $25,000 ad campaign against Boehner and a petition drive at PrimaryBoehner.com with a goal of collecting 1 million signatures by Jan. 31. Radio’s Rusty Humphries, a spokesman for the Tea Party Leadership Fund, is leading the group’s effort to find a candidate.

“John Boehner has declared war on conservatives demanding lower taxes and limited government,” Humphries said in a statement provided exclusively to Breitbart News. “Today we declare war on him. We intend to send a message to his fellow ‘Republicans In Name Only’ that such ideologically bankrupt leadership must come to an end.”

The group’s release states it has polling that shows at least half of Republicans in Boehner’s Ohio district are willing to support a GOP candidate who is more conservative than the Speaker.

If the effort hopes to be successful, the group will have to move fast. The filing deadline for a candidate to enter the race to run against Boehner in the Ohio GOP primary is 4 p.m. on Feb. 5. The primary is on May 6.

In the release provided to Breitbart News, Humphries provides a list of things that the Tea Party Leadership Fund is prepared to do in its search for a Boehner primary candidate. He said the group will be “interviewing and vetting potential candidates to assure that we endorse the most qualified, most conservative and most viable candidate that will truly make John Boehner ‘feel the heat.'”

In addition, the group is planning a “district-wide phone outreach” to educate constituents about Boehner’s record in the House and a “massive online and social media campaign” to reach out to voters in the district and around the country about the effort. The group will also be running ads in print, on television, on radio, on billboards, and online throughout Boehner’s district.

Assuming a candidate is found and endorsed, Humphries stated his group will engage in a “historic get-out-the-vote effort” during the primary to ensure enough conservatives in his district vote against him.

“When we reach 1 million petition signers, we will show John Boehner, the liberal media, and every other congressional sell out that the Tea Party is serious about returning America to greatness,” Humphries said.

The specific issues the Tea Party Leadership Fund lists as the reason for its efforts against Boehner cite how he continued “the funding of Obamacare” by “defeating Ted Cruz’s efforts to defeat Obama’s signature legislation” and “doing Barack Obama’s bidding by raising taxes.”

The group also references how Boehner helped House Budget Committee chairman Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) facilitate cuts to pensions for “veterans and disabled vets, while protecting his own bloated pension” during the budget deal Ryan cut with Senate Budget Committee chairwoman Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA). They say Boehner also engaged in “further bankrupting America by raising the debt ceiling without any meaningful concessions” and that Boehner is now trying to go pass amnesty legislation. 

Concerning immigration reform, the Tea Party Leadership Fund writes that Boehner has agreed “to pass amnesty for those illegal immigrants who have broken our laws.” The group further cites how Boehner, after the 2012 election, purged conservatives like Reps. Tim Huelskamp (R-KS), Justin Amash (R-MI), Walter Jones (R-NC), and David Schweikert (R-AZ) from key committees so as Boehner could “remove conservative objections to his liberal policies.”