Are you at the Tea Party (without knowing it)?

We’re now less than a year out from 2014 mid-term elections. Candidates are gearing up. Fundraising is at full steam. Like a Thanksgiving sale, Charlie Crist’s recent announcement that he will run for governor, this time as a Democrat, made the season official.

Crist’s race to unseat incumbent Republican Rick Scott, Skeletor, but with less charisma, will be fascinating and consequential. After all, Florida has a half million more Democrats than Republicans but hasn’t elected a Democrat as governor in twenty years.

But my fight is elsewhere. The insanity of the recent government shutdown and threatened default remains seared on my political psyche. Our nation has been hijacked by right wing conservatives willing to test Armageddon rather than compromise on their extremist anti-government agenda. This contingent of the U.S. House of Representatives is thwarting the economic recovery, standing in the way of much-needed healthcare and other reforms, and doing us all a great deal of damage.

Throughout the shutdown I took solace in the naive belief that these were representatives from some “other” America; a less enlightened place. I was outraged when I learned that my congressman, Republican John Mica, was in bed with the Tea Party and ultimately voted for default. He was one of 144 Republican House members who voted to deny the Treasury the ability to borrow the money it needs to pay expenses that Congress has already authorized, unless their unspecified demands to delay Obamacare and cut government spending were met, in advance.

If you live along the I-4 corridor, chances are your congressman was also among them. It infuriates me, and it should infuriate you. How can they think this is we want?

Traveling west to east, the I-4 corridor runs through U.S. House districts 13, 14, 15, 10, 9, 5, 7 and 6. Included in these districts are urban centers like Clearwater, St. Petersburg, Tampa, Orlando and Daytona Beach. This is hardly a conservative swath of the state: Pinellas, Hillsborough, Osceola and Orange Counties voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012.

In fact, I-4’s eight congressional districts include 1.5 million registered Democrats, compared to 1.2 million Republicans and 900,000 voters with no party affiliation. Yet five districts are represented by Republicans, compared to just three Democrats.

How is this possible? Despite a 2010 constitutional amendment requiring fair district maps, Florida’s Republican legislature has drawn I-4 districts so that Democrats are corralled into three house seats with huge Democratic majorities. They are currently represented by Corrine Brown, Alan Grayson and Kathy Castor.

Brown’s serpentine District 5 extends from south Orlando through Gainesville and then over to Jacksonville. This kind of gerrymandering allowed the remaining five districts, including mine and possibly yours, to be drawn with smaller but still significant Republican pluralities of anywhere from 5,000 to 40,000 votes.

I was deluded because I live in Winter Park, a nice suburb north of Orlando that is home to Rollins College and a well-educated populace, including Mica. The district is gerrymandered to expand north and east to create a Republican majority, but it is by no means overwhelming or extremist. Mica, currently serving his 11th term, defeated Tea Party candidate Sandy Adams in the 2012 Republican primary by pitching himself as the pragmatic alternative.

But during the shutdown, and using the threat of catastrophic default as blackmail, Mica was in lock step with his Tea Party comrades. “What [other] leverage do you have?” Mica told the Orlando Sentinel. When asked what they hoped to achieve, he was unable to articulate any specific goals.

All five I-4 Republicans supported the shutdown, and only Daniel Webster in District 10 voted against default.

Does Mica really believe that holding the nation’s economic well-being hostage is a valid way to legislate? Doubtful. He has clearly done a cost-benefit analysis and decided he has more to fear from the rich bullies on the right than the unengaged middle. In so doing, he aligned my hometown with the Tea Party.

Now we have to show him that he did the math wrong.

A year from now, or three years from now, however long it takes, the 175,000 Republicans, 155,000 Democrats and 125,000 unaffiliated voters in District 7 must register our strong disapproval by ousting Mica from his seat. The same is true in I-4 Districts 6, 10, 13 and 15, where Republican majorities are slim and Republican moderates are growing disenchanted with arrogant, unproductive obstructionism.

Another example of this Tea Party-driven legislative hubris is currently playing out in Congress. The Senate just voted 61-30 to advance the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which would prohibit most employers from discriminating against employees based on sexual orientation or gender identity. Speaker John Boehner has said the House will not take it up, thus defying opinion polls showing that 73 percent of Americans support ENDA, including 66 percent of Republicans!

To unseat destructive Republicans, Democrats will have to put up strong candidates and mount effective campaigns that speak to the electorate’s frustrations. Local politicos tell me that’s a tall order in a mid-term election, with no presidential coattails driving young and irregular voters to the polls.

But Democrat Alex Sink has thrown her hat into the ring to replace District 13’s Bill Young, who died last month. She has to be considered a frontrunner to replace the venerable Republican in the balanced mostly Pinellas County district.

A year from now, if we have a Democrat in the governor’s mansion, Sink representing District 13 and a few more Democrats chipping away at the Republican majority in the state legislature, important progress will have been made.

Then in 2016, we hang onto the White House – and take I-4.