I have to say, as a conservative who has gone round and round on the purity versus practicality dilemma over the years, and at different times has found himself on both sides of that insoluable divide, that the freshman TPers largely deserved this ass-chewing:
House Speaker John Boehner admonished Republicans and tea party conservatives alike to “fall in line” and back his plan for legislation that would at once ease the debt crisis and hopefully appease Democrats.
All his posturing might go unheeded, however, as up to twenty Republicans (including fresh tea party faces from the 2010 midterm elections) announced they would oppose his latest effort, the Washington Post reported.
See, now this is the first problem: how these things get reported. Was Boehner's debt ceiling bill an attempt to "appease Democrats"? I would argue no, it wasn't, especially after he re-worked it to deepen the spending cuts therein and add a vote on a balanced budget amendment before the second ceiling-raising vote in six or so months can be held as the TPers' price for supporting the legislation. And after this attempt at appeasing them, they're turning around and perfidiously reneging on that pledge to the Speaker. Can you blame the Cryin' Man for getting exasperated?
The other reason why it isn't an attempt at "appeasing Democrats" is that frankly, anybody with three brain cells to rub together understands that the Dems will NEVER compromise on this issue or any other. They cannot be appeased, because that would require total, unconditional surrender from the Republican House, and even if Boehner would do such a thing, he'd never get the votes from his majority caucus to pass it.
This is why I believe what I've always believed about Donk thinking since last November: To them, it's all a game. More specifically, it is what legendary North Carolina basketball coach Dean Smith used to call the "four corners" offense (an oxymoron if ever there was one). In the days before the NCAA (finally) instituted a shot clock, the strategy of most college coaches was to try to get a lead, and once they had it in hand, they would go into stall-ball mode. Literally just hold the ball and play keep-away with their opponents and pre-empt the rest of the game until the clock ran out. It was boring to fans, but it always struck me as being downright cowardly, unfair, and at war with the ideals of integrity and honest athletic competition. But to coaches, who employed it, it was basic pragmatism: their job was to finish the game with more points on the scoreboard than the other team, and they didn't care how they attained that goal, no matter how fecal their product became.
This is precisely how the White House and Senate Dems are looking at the whole issue of spending and debt and the size of government. In the strategic political sense (which is the ONLY sense in which they ever look at anything), they have public policy exactly where they want it: runaway spending and spiraling debt are the entrenched status quo. They don't have to do anything in order to bring about their endgame, the fiscal collapse of the United States government and the economic collapse of America itself as a precursor to its "wrench transformation" into something they'll like but the rest of us most assuredly will not. Just....play keep-away. Hold the ball to run out the clock until November 2012. Stall.
When you understand that, you realize that Red Barry and Dirty Harry have zero incentive to genuinely negotiate with House Republicans, much less agree to any bona fide compromises. Why should they? Indeed, why else has Senator Pencilneck not passed a budget of any kind in over two years? They've got the lead. It's Boehner and Cantor who are playing catch-up.
There are a couple of other factors at play, of course. One is that given the escalating likelihood of the Obamaconomy producing an electoral wipeout next year, The One needs that massive crisis in the next sixteen months, and sooner rather than later. Why else would he be so maniacally intent upon ginning one up with his default Chicken-Littleing?
The other is his ace-in-the-hole against that crisis not materializing in time: Tea Partiers. The Chicago Cherubim understands his Alinksy and his Sun Tzu: Know your enemy. The greatest vulnerability of tighty-righties is their paranoia about getting "sold out" by their own party leaders. So many on the Right seem to have imbibed that pre-emptive persecution complex with their political mother's milk that it's almost a kind of twisted, masochistic fetish, like they WANT to be betrayed so that they can wallow in solipsistic moral superiority as they're marched off to figurative camps or something. Kind of like how Michael Moore enjoys watching Farenheit 911 and fondling himself. (Try to sleep tonight with that mental image in your front lobe - I dare you).
So the Speaker, who has this crazy idea that his electoral mandate wasn't just to stop rampaging Obamunism (which he has) but also to try and govern when his party's power base is still uncomfortably narrow, has come up with a bill that is (naturally) far from the conservative ideal, much less what is necessary to rescue the nation from bankruptcy (i.e. does nothing about reining in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, or repealing ObamaCare), does nevertheless significantly curtail discretionary spending and fights off the Dems' tax increases. And TPers' visceral response is to angrily condemn Boehner as a "sell-out". Now all of a sudden he's "one of them" who has "the cesspool in Washington" running through his veins.
Now you know why I'm glad I'm not John Boehner. He's got the most thankless job on the planet: dealing with lying, smirking economic terrorists in front of him while having to keep one eye behind him to dodge ignorant, fratricidal knife thrusts aimed at his lumbar region by ideologically admirable naifs who don't seem to want to acknowledge that the means to attaining their constitutionalist ends require engaging in the very give & take of meat & potatoes politics that they endlessly, smugly deride.
Bottom line: You can't do anything positive, much less stop the other side's negatives, unless you first win elections, and then hold on to the power so gained. And in order to do that, you have to realize that in politics, virtue is NOT its own reward, and that, believe it or not, most voters are NOT as informed as, or generally much agree with, what we believe. Most Americans are not, in other words, ideologues. They want to see politicians "get along" with each other, and "put partisan differences aside" to "do what's best for the country" - never mind that the very reason for partisan differences is that there isn't any consensus on what's good for the country. Welcome to the wonderful world of the notoriously fickle "independent" voter, for whom policy specifics matter far less than "playing nice" being the centerpiece of the process at which they're arrived.
John Boehner knows this, and he knows that Barack Obama and Harry Reid know this, and he knows that they know he knows this. Just as he knows that they know that most Tea Partiers do not. They're not counting on TPers not "getting their asses in line" to defeat Boehner's compromise bill, which Dirty Harry will gleefully throttle if/when it arrives on the other side of the Capitol in any case; they're counting on turning TPers against their own party's leadership to spark the Republican "civil war" that is one of their fondest wet dreams. Or, IOW, killing their own philosophy (and the country) in the name of upholding it.
Here's the question recalcitrant Tea Partiers, both in and out of Congress, should be asking themselves: Didn't Speaker Boehner preside over the passage of ObamaCare's repeal back in January? Or Paul Ryan's "Path to Prosperity" budget back in April? Or the FY 2011 continuing resolution that brought discretionary spending much closer to the GOP position than the White House's? Or Cap, Cut & Balance just last month? Why, yes he did. So now, when he offers up a compromise, final, "take it or leave it" debt ceiling bill that is far more for the political purpose of demonstrating Donk recalcitrance to the independent voters that, like it or not, determine who wins elections in this country than it is a platform for any reasonable expectation of an actual policy deal, he's all of a sudden a RINO squish who's going to be primaried into retirement next year? Really?
You know who else is behind the Boehner bill with his eyes wide open? The aforementioned Chairman Ryan:
The Budget Control Act takes an important step in the right direction by cutting $1.2 trillion in government spending over the next decade. Critically, it does this without resorting to Senator Reid’s gimmicks and without imposing the president’s preferred tax increases on American families and the struggling economy.
This bill is far from perfect. We still have a long way to go toward getting the key drivers of our debt — especially federal health-care spending — under control. But considering that House Republicans control only one-half of one-third of the federal government, I support this reasonable, responsible effort to cut government spending, avoid a default, and help create a better environment for job creation.
So are TPers going to dismiss Ryan as a Rockefeller bluenose for doing nothing more than recognizing the political reality that herculean tasks require more than one bite at the Chrysler Building-sized apple? How about Quin Hillyer's ever expanding list of conservative stallwarts who also haven't lost their minds? Is Mike Pence now a "sellout"? Thomas Sowell? Alan West? Ann Coulter? Rotsa ruck putting over that collective canard.
Otto Von Bismarck once said, "Politics is the art of the possible". The truth is, it took decades to bring America down to the edge of this fiscal/economic abyss, and while digging out need not take nearly as long, it will still be the work of several electoral cycles at least. And right now, the top priority for conservatives has to be to win the next election in as smashing a fashion as the last one. That can't happen if Tea Partiers are more consumed with tearing their own party apart than sending the Li'l President back to Chicago, or Hawaii, or Jakarta, or Nairobi, or wherever.
John Boehner knows this, even if his fair weather base does not.
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