5 Professional Tea Partiers: Who's Sucking the Most Money From the Movement?

It was supposed to be the most low-to-the-ground of grassroots movements, a spontaneous uprising, the story goes, of ordinary, fed-up Americans who, on their own time and with nothing more than a Google Groups listserv put together a national political juggernaut. Whatever the grassroots bona fides of local Tea Party groups, the national movement is in many ways the creation of well-compensated Republican political operatives and consultants. This week, they added one more to their ranks, when Judson Phillips, who founded Tea Party Nation, announced he would leave his law practice and draw a salary instead from his Tea Party group, as Roll Call reported.

When we looked at leaders of the best-known Tea Party groups, we found most making a rather handsome living off the ostensibly salt-of-the-earth movement. And despite the Tea Party mantra that women run the movement, we found that two of the best-known female faces of the movement -- Amy Kremer of Tea Party Express and Jenny Beth Martin of Tea Party Patriots -- earn rather modest salaries in comparison with their male colleagues. While Sal Russo, principal of Tea Party Express, raked in more than $800,000 during the 2010 election cycle from Tea Party Express for his public relations and media companies, Amy Kremer, the Express' director of grassroots and coalitions, earned a mere $49,000 during the same period, despite the fact that she often represents Tea Party Express at rallies and in the media. Meanwhile, Jenny Beth Martin, national coordinator of Tea Party Patriots, the successful organization founded by FreedomWorks, takes in $72,000 a year, a middling level of compensation when compared with the six-figure salaries reaped by FreedomWorks' male leaders.

Below, a look at the leaders of some of the best-known Tea Party-branded organizations, and the slick political backgrounds of the men who lead them -- guys more likely to be donning finely tailored suits than tricorn hats.

Dick Armey, chairman, FreedomWorks and FreedomWorks Foundation. Thanks in part to his status as former House Majority Leader, Armey is living the good life at the helm of these two Tea Party-rallying non-profits. According to the FreedomWorks Foundation's IRS filings for 2009 (the most recent year available), Armey earns a total of $500,000 per year for his work on behalf of both organizations, which, for the most part, share the same staff. (When I attended a FreedomWorks event last September, Armey arrived in a chauffered limousine.)

FreedomWorks, together with Americans for Prosperity (see Tim Phillips, below), was instrumental in ginning up opposition to President Barack Obama's health-care legislation, including the orchestration of disruptive attendees at congressional town-hall meetings. Both FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity stem from a single, now defunct, organization, Citizens for a Sound Economy, which was founded by the billionaire David Koch.

During the 2010 midterm elections, FreedomWorks allied closely with the picks of the Senate Conservatives Fund, spearheaded by Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., seeking to create a "power center" of Tea Party-allied senators around DeMint, according to FreedomWorks spokesman Adam Brandon. FreedomWorks is now conducting a campaign to make Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Tenn., appoint DeMint to the powerful Senate Finance Committee, now that the disgraced Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., has left the body in an effort to avoid further scrutiny by the Ethics Committee for an affair he had with a staffer, and his role in an apparent pay-off to the staffer's family.

In the Tennessee Republican primary for U.S. Senate, Armey backed Rand Paul -- who opposes some of the desegregation provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act -- against McConnell's pick, Trey Grayson, leaving McConnell significantly weakened in the face of DeMint's growing power by the time Paul won the seat.