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>I think you meant the Repubs were hijacked by the Tea Party. Fortunately they have been reduced to noise in the storm.

Nope. The Repubs are beyond hijacking.
The Tea Party as it began was a protest against corrupt institutions that were serving themselves and not the public.
Institutions like the government, corporations, political parties, labor unions, universities and churches.
TARP was a poster child for that corruption. Corporate executives were given bonuses funded by taxpayers for bankrupting the companies they managed.
That hasn't changed. Tim Geithner showed us that.
If anything the corruption has increased. Virtually none of the "reforms" enacted by Dodd-Frank have been put into practice.
Chris Dodd, one of the authors, has a cushy job in Hollywood now as a highly paid lobbyist. Barney Frank tried to weasel his way into John Kerry's job but fortunately it was denied to him and he might have to get a real job for the first time in his life.
In fact, according a recent story in the NY Times, Too Big to Fail is even bigger.
Because of mergers, etc., there are actually fewer banks controlling the majority of the nations financial assets now than there were before the crisis.
So much for reforms.

What has changed is that by siding with the repubs, the Tea Party has gotten itself entangled in partisan issues like the ACA, government shutdown, etc that derailed it from its mission of making the government responsive to the people, not the financiers who fund campaigns and the lobbyists who represent them.

As John Ryan said though- a tipping point will come- and it will be fun to watch.