It's certainly true that the TEA party nominees screwed the GOP out of the possibility of taking the Senate. It looks like they lost more races than they won in the House, but they did win a pretty impressive number of races for their first time out (a fact I take no comfort in).
I'm really curious to see how the GOP deals with TEA party reps and senators in Congress. I wonder if they will actually be the thorn in the party's side they promise to be, like the Blue Dogs are for Democrats, or whether they'll just go along. The GOP claims that its big concerns are tax cuts and reducing the deficit, but we all know they only care about the first of these. The TEA party is, as its name suggests, primarily concerned with taxes, so I suspect they'll shrug off the deficit concerns when it comes time to pull out their voting cards too. But we'll see, it'll be interesting.
Yes, most of the newly elected members were there when the Repubics went nuts with the deficit.
