I urge everyone to spend every bit of capital and energy you have to stop this health care reform. The Democrats have accused us of trying to delay, stall, slow down, and stop this bill. They are right. We do want to delay, stall, slow down, and ultimately stop them from experimenting on our nation’s health care. And guess what, so do a majority of Americans.

Steele's often off message, but not this time. With polls trending away from President Obama, and having seen the anger on display at the town halls this summer, the GOP's content to let everyone know their plan.

That doesn't mean Democrats won't try to make them pay for it. In a statement, Democratic National Committee Press Secretary Hari Sevugan said:

With this memo and Senator Judd Gregg's obstruction manual, Republicans have laid their cards on the table and made explicit that their intention, their singular goal, is obstructing the President's agenda for the sake of politics no matter how high the price for the American people. They've made the choice crystal clear for voters -- while Democrats are working to get things done for the benefit of the American people, Republicans are obstructing progress for the benefit of themselves and their special interest allies. If they think that's a winning proposition, they are in for a world of hurt.

That's what the senator said in a recent interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network's David Brody. He added, "I’m trying to pull the party back to the mainstream of where America really is.”

DeMint also told Brody that one of the reasons he's gotten involved in endorsing conservative candidates this year is, "I need some new Republicans, people who believe in constitutional government, a balanced budget and liberty and so I’m out across the country recruiting new Republicans who I think if they get here will not only challenge the institutions of government but be willing to even challenge the Republican Party and our leadership if they feel like we’re going in the wrong direction."

One of those signs is contained in a poll out Monday from Rasmussen. The pollster asked respondents to imagine that "the Tea party organized itself as a political party," then had them choose between generic Democratic, Republican and Tea Party candidates in their district. Not too surprisingly, the Democratic candidate ended up benefitting from the split, with 36 percent of respondents -- a plurality -- saying they'd vote that way. But in a somewhat shocking result, 23 percent said they'd vote for the Tea Party candidate compared to 18 percent who chose the Republican and 22 percent who said they weren't sure.

When just unaffiliated voters are counted, things are worse for the Republicans: 33 percent chose the Tea Party candidate, 25 percent opted for the Democrat and only 12 percent picked the Republican.

Still, things probably aren't nearly as bad for the Republican Party as this poll would indicate. For one thing, it's hard -- impossible, really -- to imagine the Tea Parties organizing into a single political party in time for next year's midterms. (They can't even keep the protest movement from fracturing.) And polls that ask about third parties always find more support for the third party candidate than he or she ends up with come Election Day.

This is, however, another demonstration of how powerful the Tea Party movement could be in a situation where a moderate Republican's running in a swing district. Call it the Doug Hoffman effect, after the conservative candidate who ended up forcing out the GOP's choice in a Congressional special election held in upstate New York earlier this year.

All that is sort of in the nature of the tea parties, though. The Republican establishment knows it likes what it sees in the movement, yet GOP operatives admit they aren't really sure where it's all going. Big conservative interest groups like FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity lend financial and organizational support to tea party rallies. But walking through the crowd at any gathering, it's easy to find people who are clearly just so stirred up by what they hear on Fox News Channel and read on right-wing blogs that they decided to show up and yell about it for a while.

And it was mostly that spirit -- "Doggone it, let's yell about what's going on in our country for a while" -- that animated the movie. A lengthy look at six activists from Georgia (near where the filmmakers live) who came to the Sept. 12 anti-government march on Washington, the documentary swings between their stories and why they got involved and red-meat rhetoric, mostly shot at the rally. There are plenty of ominous fades and scary music thrown in, as well. It mostly looks very professional. A video producer from outside Atlanta, Luke Livingston, put it together, working with a young crew of politically like-minded types, on a budget of about $30,000 that he told me he's hoping to recoup by selling DVDs online. He attended an April 15 Tax Day protest, then got caught up in the whole thing when his neighbor, Jenny Beth Martin (who is also profiled in the movie), founded Tea Party Patriots

The narratives about the characters are sympathetic, even if they're a little quirky. One, an ex-graphic designer for the Secret Service, spends most of the movie dressed up in 18th century garb from his Revolutionary War reenactment hobby and speaking in a British-esque accent that slips off occasionally. Another man, Nate, is a young African-American conservative, who voted for President Obama but realized, not long afterward, the error of his ways. "They're taking your money right out your pocket," he tells a friend at a barbecue in the movie. The movie tries to paint the tea party people as just regular folks who got angry. It downplays any racial element to the backlash against Obama, most plainly with Nate. "I don't see racism" at the rallies, Livingston told me. "Is everybody white? Yeah, but you know, there are a lot of black people, too." A whole disc of outtakes focusing on black conservatives is in the works, he said.

But the tone of the movie is also bombastic and paranoid, much like the tea parties themselves. "They are scared," one character says of his fellow marchers, and after watching the film, it wasn't hard to see why. The country, in the filmmaker's hands, appears to be lurching out of control, careening wildly away from decent American values and toward a corporate/socialist hybrid that you don't have to understand politically to know you don't like it. Healthcare reform is only the next step in the conspiracy. Take a look at the film's trailer here, and you get a good sense of what the long version is like:

All that scary stuff is happening even though most people didn't want it to, the movie argues. "The silent majority is going to be heard loud and clear," a woman at the Sept. 12 march says in the film. Considering Obama got more votes than any other presidential candidate in history, won the widest majority in years and helped spark the highest voter turnout in decades, it's hard to imagine she's anywhere near right.

Then again, the tea party crowd often has a problem with math. On Wednesday night, there were about 300 people at the screening. And all of them cheered wildly when the movie showed time-lapse video of the Sept. 12 march, in an attempt to buttress the right-wing myth that more than 1 million people showed up there. (Most sane people say the rally drew about 70,000.) So let's round up a bit from that 300 estimate and say, oh, 4,000 hardy patriots crammed themselves into the auditorium. (Never mind that it only seats about 500.)

The audience was a mix of young conservatives in suits and pearls and, well, old conservatives in suits and pearls. There was a cash bar at the reception after the screening, doing brisk business in whiskey and lite beer. Almost as soon as the movie was over, I was cornered by two of its fans, who began interrogating me about who I wrote for and whether I share their zeal for limited government, low taxes and all things decent -- and their terror at what they saw happening in Washington. "It's one thing coming down the pike after another," one of them, Gail Volm, from Falls Church, Va., said. "You can only take a fire hose in the face for so long and then you have to say, 'Stop, it is enough.'"

The mood at the screening, like in the movie, alternated between festive and feisty. Livingston, the man behind the movie, said his mission was partly to tell the story of some of the activists who headed to Washington for that 9/12 march, and partly to have fun. "Make it entertaining," was one of his guiding principles in making the film. (Another? "Honor God.") But reminders that the business of tea parties is quite serious were never far away. "This is not a movement that's trying to pull the Republican Party to the right," DeMint said before the movie started. "It's a movement that's trying to pull the Republican Party back to where America is today." Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., said she didn't understand why taxes had to be so high: "If 10 percent is good enough for God on Sunday, it's for damn sure good enough for the government on Monday." The newest conservative hero, Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., showed up to pander a bit, too.

But it was the movie, not the elected officials, that really roused the crowd. As the film ended, the cameras focused on a speech from the Sept. 12 rally by one of the few black speakers there. "Patriots, stand up!" he exhorts the audience, both at the march and in the theater. An American flag waves, and rock guitar riffs start getting louder. "Stand up! Stand up!" As the credits rolled, everyone in the auditorium was on their feet, cheering wildly, ready to go take back the country.

This was the substance of a hearing that eight Republican members of Congress -- or, as they styled themselves, the “Joint Forum on ACORN ” -- held Tuesday. Over the course of the hearing, representatives and witnesses actually leveled all the above charges at ACORN, declaring the issue to be one “of importance to the American people,” as Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Tex., put it. (If he restricts the definition of "the American people" to members of his own party, he's probably right.)

Since its employees were caught on tape in the prostitution-tax evasion sting, ACORN hasn’t had a lot of defenders. But if you thought the subsequent halt of federal funding for the group was the end of the story as a political issue, then you don’t know the modern GOP. Despite the grievous damage to the group’s reputation, Republican officials aren’t content just to damn ACORN with evidence of its clear failings. Instead, at the hearing they insisted on citing an array of unconvincing, vastly overblown allegations -- with a bit of racial panic thrown in -- as evidence that ACORN is destroying America and must be prosecuted.

Probably the top charge against ACORN is that it tampers with elections. The rhetoric surrounding this argument continues to be out of line with the substance. Said Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., “Our forefathers fought for, I don’t know, what, eight years to defeat the British because they didn’t want taxation without representation. And now we’re watching all these things being taken away, just frittered away, because we won’t enforce the law? It’s just criminal.”

As ever, there have been no instances cited of actual fraudulent voting, despite the implication that the entire electoral apparatus of the country is tainted. Nobody thinks voter registration fraud is a good thing, but the kind of fraud in which ACORN employees have been involved is extremely unlikely to affect the outcome of an election. The fraudulent registrations aren't intended to be used -- they're a way for the employee to squeeze some additional money out of the group by serving as proof they worked more than they actually did. 

At the hearing, there was a new wrinkle to the argument about registration fraud, an idea that by dumping a stack of inaccurate registrations on local election boards shortly before the deadline, ACORN somehow disenfranchises legitimate voters because the boards can't handle the workload. Again, however, there was no evidence provided for the claim. 

Still, there's no stopping these guys. Iowa Rep. Steve King took the crusade to bizarre new heights, saying he carries an acorn and a copy of the Constitution around all the time, to remind himself of the threat the one poses to the other. Then there was witness Hans von Spakovsky, a conservative election lawyer, who thinks that the failure to prosecute ACORN implicates the entire law enforcement apparatus of the federal government. Said Spakovsky:

Congress should not only hold direct hearings on ACORN and its activities, but also oversight hearings of the FBI, the Justice Department, and the Internal Revenue Service to obtain information on any investigations they are conducting into ACORN. If those agencies are not conducting any investigations, they should be required to explain why they are not carrying out their enforcement duties.

That would be, of course, almost exactly the argument that spurred some of the Bush administration's infamous firings of U.S. attorneys. The judgment of the fired prosecutors that there was no criminal case against ACORN for election fraud, in this line of thinking, didn’t exonerate ACORN -- it showed that the U.S. attorneys were incompetent at best.

And who could disagree, considering the almost superhuman way in which ACORN can apparently throw its weight around? After all, as several speakers at the hearing suggested, the group is just one huge criminal front. And, as Rep. Smith pointed out, ACORN’s got a guy in government. “President Obama previously served as ACORN’s lawyer, participated in ACORN training sessions in Chicago, presided on the board of two organizations that funded ACORN’s Chicago chapter.”

There are two separate points that need clearing up here. First, the president was never an employee of ACORN. He worked for Project Vote, which is now affiliated with ACORN but was not at the time, though the two groups were close. He also represented ACORN, alongside two other lawyers, in one case. Also on ACORN’s side in that case was the Department of Justice. Second, it could be literally true that Obama was an employee of the group back in the early ‘90s, and it wouldn’t really be that damning a charge. That’s because, despite Glenn Beck's fantasies, ACORN is not a vast criminal conspiracy. What it is, instead, is an often horrifically incompetent and sometimes corrupt but frequently helpful organization.

It’s easy to focus on the horror stories about ACORN (and important to condemn its various bad acts), but accounts of its role in bringing political power and useful advice to poor people go largely unheard. It should be possible, in other words, to work on a vast, successful and widely lauded voter registration drive without being smeared as a big-city gangster. Granted, ACORN isn't helping itself when it fails, many years running, to clean up its act. But it's also clear that at this point, that doesn't really even matter -- for many on the right, including members of Congress, the myth of the omnipotent, evil group is all that matters now.