It looks like the Tea Party is hoping the lightning of the Republican Revolution in 1994 can strike twice.

After conducting online voting, the Tea Party Patriots, an umbrella group working with local Tea Party groups and about a dozen ostensibly grassroots organizations has announced the three major platforms that will make up its statement of purpose.

The document will be unveiled on April 15 — tax day — and has been dubbed the "Contract From America." Borrowing heavily from Newt Gingrich's and the Republicans' 1994 "Contract With America" (which, in turn was lifted almost in its entirety from Ronald Reagan's 1985 State of the Union speech), the Tea Party seems to have replaced the preposition "With" with the "From" to emphasize that they aren't politicians making promises to people, they are just regular people demanding political change.

In their minds, they are America.

And yet the wording of the "Contract From America" continues to seem weird to me. I keep reading "contract" as a verb, imagining that the Tea Parties are contracting from America the way that amoebae contract from bacteria near them and vampires contract from the light.

The planks, as decided by America (or at least the 360,000 who voted) are to protect the Constitution by requiring each bill to identify the specific provision of the Constitution that gives Congress the power to do what the bill does: To stop cap and trade legislation; and to demand a balanced budget by starting the Constitutional amendment process to require a balanced budget with a two-thirds majority needed for any tax hike.

Compared to the Contract With America, which promised legislation on 10 specific government reforms, these platforms are hardly an agenda. Of the three planks, one is to maintain the status quo, one is merely opposition to Democratic legislation, and one is a recipe for disaster — if you like the California budget crisis, you'll love the balanced budget amendment.

Of course, even for Americans who like what they see in the Tea Party's platform, tying themselves so closely to the 1994 movement might be a mistake. Republicans won a landslide victory, securing 54 seats and both houses of Congress, but the Contract remained unfulfilled. While Republicans brought forth upwards of 16 bills based on the contract, almost none made it into law, and after six years in charge of the legislature, the spending the "revolutionaries" had sworn to eliminate had actually increased.