Falling in line with House Speaker John Boehner’s anti-Tea Party press conference earlier this week, Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin continued the assault in a column Friday, claiming  that the conservative grass roots movement had “fizzled out”:

We shouldn’t be surprised at this result. Insurgencies have two possibilities: They fizzle, or they get absorbed. To a large extent, a focus on fiscal discipline and aversion to taxes was absorbed into mainstream GOP politics (these positions, after all, were nothing new). What was left — the non-stop temper tantrums and refusal to deal with political opponents — is the residue and, from all appearances, a political strategy with declining appeal.

Rubin is correct in stating that, according to national polls, the tea party is declining in popularity. But she then engages in some revisionist history, denying that the tea party ever really accomplished anything:

The tea party essentially flunked out time and time again, whether it was on high-profile Senate races, the GOP 2012 nomination, stopping immigration reform in the Senate, the fiscal cliff and then the shutdown. It never got what it wanted, in large part, because what it wanted was unattainable in these contests. Christine O’Donnell was not going to win in Delaware. And Obamacare was not going to be defunded.

Rubin would be wise to recognize that the tea party is largely responsible for the fact that Republicans currently control the House, which has been the biggest legislative block to the continued enactment of President Obama’s agenda. As for high-profile Senate victories, Marco Rubio might beg to differ. After all, he was the prohibitive underdog to then Republican Gov. Charlie Crist in Florida before riding the tea party wave to a seat in the Senate, and forcing Crist to become a Democrat.

But, for the Post’s version of a conservative, that constitutes flunking out. So while the relevance and effectiveness of the tea party can be debated, one thing seems certain: Boehner probably wishes he had fewer of them in the class.