Tea Party movement of what the Tea Party is, and if there is an attempt to put structure and formality around it, or to co-opt it by Washington, D.C., it's going to take away from the free-flowing nature of the true Tea Party movement. The name "Tea Party" is a reference to the Boston Tea Party, a protest in 1773 by colonists who objected to British taxation without representation, and demonstrated by dumping British tea taken from docked ships into the harbor. The event was one of the first in a series that led to the United States Declaration of Independence and the
No taxation without representation with Great Britain, or a federally representative British Parliament with powers of taxation that was to consist of American, West Indian, Irish and British Members of Parliament. Despite the fact that these ideas were considered and discussed seriously on both sides of the Atlantic, it appears that neither the American Congress, nor the colonial Assemblies, nor the British Government in Westminster, at least prior to the Carlisle Peace Commission of 1778, officially proposed such constitutional developments. It must be noted, however, that Governor Thomas Hutchinson apparently referred to a colonial representational proposal when he wrote that, The Assembly of Massachusetts