Elephant Dung #23: The Tea Party threatens John Boehner

Tracking the GOP Civil War

By Michael J.W. Stickings

(For an explanation of this ongoing series, see here. For previous entries, see here.) 

Jon Chait had a post the other day arguing that John Boehner has no choice, if he knows what's good for him, but to shut down the government.

Basically, Boehner is in a tough spot. (No, don't feel sorry for him. It's what he gets for being where he is.) He has to try to appeal to independents and moderates if he wants to maintain/maximize the GOP's electoral prospects for 2012, which means compromising with Democrats on the budget, but he also has to try to appeal to the Tea Party wing of the GOP, a significant part of its right-wing base, if he wants to avoid a full-scale rebellion against his leadership (which could also harm the party's electoral prospects), which means refusing to compromise and allowing for a government shutdown:

What is the downside to a shutdown? Republicans get less popular, have a lower chance to win the presidency in 2012, and maybe a higher chance of losing the House as well. What is the downside to cutting a deal? GOP backbenchers revolt against Boehner and depose him as Speaker of the House.

If I'm Boehner, I'm more worried about the guns pointed at my back then the guns pointed at my face. A shutdown increases the small chance that he goes from Speaker to Minority Leader in 2013, but a deal increases the chance that he goes from Speaker to (R-OH) in 2011. The right-wingers do not trust Boehner, and he has very little slack. He also lived through a series of purges and attempted purges in the late 1990s, always taking the form of purists complaining that the leadership had gone soft.

Boehner's top priority is probably staving off internal revolt. That means shutting down the government.

In other words, if he puts his own personal/political self-interest first, he'll appease the Tea Party. That may be so, and he may well do that, but the question isn't just what Boehner will do but what the Tea Party will do to him. And it may not matter what he does -- or, at least, what he does just may not be good enough. The Tea Party already has a bull's-eye on his head:

The tea partyers who helped drive GOP gains in the last election are rallying in the city they love to hate Thursday, urging Republican House leaders – Speaker John Boehner above all – to resist the drive toward compromise in the protracted fight over the federal budget. Even, they say, if that means Congress fails to do its most important job: pay for the government.

And if Boehner opts instead to agree to a deal with President Barack Obama?

"You're going to see massive amounts of (GOP) primaries" in next year's election, said Mark Meckler of the Tea Party Patriots. If the Ohio Republican strikes a budget deal that doesn't cut spending enough, Meckler said Wednesday, "he is going to face a primary challenge."

Boehner, like the rest of the party leadership, has been appeasing the Tea Party all along. But he's also, to his credit, something of a realist in terms of what is and is not doable in Congress:

"We control one half of one third of the government here in Washington," Boehner told reporters at his weekly briefing. "We can't impose our will on the Senate. All we can do is to fight for all of the spending cuts that we can get an agreement to."

He's right, but that isn't going to cut it with the Tea Party. The threats may be enough to keep Boehner from compromising too easily, but compromise he must if he is to avoid a repeat of the Gingrich fiasco of the '90s, when Republicans shut down the government, took most of the blame, and paid for it at the polls. All of this proves once again that the purists in the Tea Party have no clue about governance and are holding the GOP, and its leaders, to impossible standards. And, ultimately, the party will pay for it.

What the Teabaggers think they can gain from this isn't clear, but it seems that they'd rather be "right" (in their own minds) than win. So far, since the emergence of the Tea Party as a major force, Republicans have been more than willing to kowtow to its demands. Indeed, the GOP has fully embraced the Tea Party, and the two have more or less merged into one (though, of course, the Tea Party has always been heavily Republican and decidedly right-wing in its ideology). But how long will that last? At what point will Republicans, who, after all, have elections to win if they actually want to accomplish anything significant, shed this albatross that is clearly bringing them down? 

It may not happen soon, not with all the mutual co-opting that has taken place so far and will the enormous enthusiasm the Teabaggers have brought to the GOP, stirring up a party that seemed catatonic after the '08 election. The Tea Party is just too influential a part of the GOP right now, and that isn't about to change. But I'm just not sure the relationship is tenable, not with the Tea Party threatening any Republican who deviates even slightly from its right-wing orthodoxy, even solid conservatives like Orrin Hatch and successful leaders like John Boehner.

It would probably take another massive defeat or two for Republicans to get the message and run the other way, but, with the party purging itself of insufficiently conservative members and the Tea Party leading primary challenges against those who deviate from its extremism, it is likely that the GOP will nominate more and more unelectable candidates, increasing the likelihood of just such a defeat.

Not that I object to the GOP nominating unelectable candidates. I'm all for it! So let's all enjoy this while we can.

The decline of the Tea Party and the return to sanity (let's hope)

By R.K. Barry

Well, this is interesting. It seems support for the Tea Party isn't what it used to be:

A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Wednesday indicates that 32 percent of the public has a favorable view of the two year old anti-tax movement, which also calls for less government spending and a more limited role for the federal government in our lives. The 32 percent favorable rating is down five points from December. 

47 percent of people questioned say they have an unfavorable view of the tea party, up four points from December and an increase of 21 points from January 2010.

So the Tea Party movement may be losing steam, or, what is more likely, as Nate Silver cautions:

It’s not clear, on the other hand, that favorable views are decreasing; they’ve never been much higher than the low 30s, and that’s roughly where they remain today. Instead, this is almost certainly a case of Americans who had ambivalent views about the tea party before now coming to a more negative impression.

But what I find most interesting is the profile of those who may be going from an ambivalent to a more critical view. As CNN reports:

The tea party movement's unfavorable rating rose 15 points since October among lower-income Americans, compared to only five points among those making more than $50,000.

As the pollster postulates:

It's possible the drop among lower income Americans is a reaction to the tea party's push for large cuts in government programs that help lower-income Americans, although there are certainly other factors at work.

I’m afraid this is one of the oldest political dynamics in the book. If you ask people a general question about whether government should be smaller or taxes should be lowered, a large number will certainly agree.

If you start to put content into that abstract concept, a surprising number will start to reconsider, reasoning that they didn’t mean that programs that directly benefit them should be cut or that taxes should be lowered if it adversely impacts delivery of programs on which they depend.

Republican candidates in the last campaign knew this would happen which is why they almost comically refused to provide details about what they would cut to make government smaller. They knew their support was based on keeping the concept of reducing the size of the public sector as abstract as possible.

It’s a common sleight of hand by conservatives and too many voters fall for it. Convince them you can get it done by cutting unnecessary spending and creating efficiencies and punishing fat cat public employees. Convince them that you can cut government programs that only benefit “other people,” people not as deserving. And then when they realize that the only way to cut budgets to promised levels is to gut important public services that they rely on, many unsuspecting folks may come to understand that they have been duped.

They seem to be figuring this out in Wisconsin and Ohio and Michigan and Florida if a tad too late.

As I infer from Nate Silver’s comments, much of the support for Republicans in 2010 may have come from those who were ambivalent but decided to give them a shot. 

Let’s hope these latest numbers suggest that many are indeed waking up and that the metaphorical coffee is in fact being smelled. 

(Cross-posted from Lippmann's Ghost.)

Boener blinks

By Carl 

Well, well, well... suddenly the Teabag has lost its flavor...

House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) told a convention of religious broadcasters in Nashville on Sunday evening that a federal government shutdown was not appropriate and not what the electorate wanted.
His remarks were the latest sign that congressional leaders were backing away from the brink of a shutdown.

"Americans want the government to stay open, and they want it to spend less money," Boehner said. "We don't need to shut down the government to accomplish that. We just need to do what the American people are asking of us."

In other words, it's business as usual. That's going to piss off the Teabaggers mightily, many of whom believe the only way to restore sanity to the budget process is to shut the thing down.

The Republicans are in a tough spot, to be sure. This is a giant game of Steal The Bacon, and Obama and the Democrats know all they have to do is prevent the Republicans from bringing the pork back to their side and the game is won. In other words, the Republicans will have to make a proposal that truly makes the necessary cuts to the budget to bring some form of fiscal stability back. Obama's budget proposal was nothing but a gauntlet thrown down.

In order to truly reduce the size of government, three things have to happen. Unfortunately, all three of those things are guaranteed...well, two are. One is unproven... to stifle any economic recovery:

1. Defense spending has to be cut. Unfortunately, defense spending is the one guaranteed job creating program for the district in which the contract is awarded, including the contract for the F-35 engine, the biggest boondoggle in the current developing Pentagon arsenal, and oh by the way, built in Boener's home state of Ohio!
2. Social Security and Medicare have to be reined in somehow. Now, you can't cut current spending. Remember all those elderly Teabaggers with their "keep your government hands off my Medicare" signs? You can cap the cost of living adjustments (COLAs) by faking a zero inflation number, which is accomplished by using core inflation, which excludes food and energy costs, which are "too volatile" to be useful. Are you kidding me? In a day and age when stock traders have software that can suss out microscopic inefficiencies and exploit them for millions in profits, we can't find someone to write a fractal-based program that can include the two biggests costs to an American family?
3. Taxes must be raised. Now, no one is going to propose this without a healthy dose of political cover, because the Teabaggers will flip out, and you know what that means: no more GOP.

Of those three items, only taxes has been unproven to have much direct impact on economic growth. Indeed, one can make the case, as I often have, that the Clinton tax hike on the rich, while lowering taxes on the working and middle classes, actually created robust and exuberant economic growth that was struggling to even begin to break thru when he took office.

Defense spending and social programs that funnel money directly to taxpayers are vital cogs in the economic activity of this nation. Some defense spending clearly can be cut. The F-35 is an example of a program that no one, not even the Pentagon, really wants and is make-work to bolster the bottom lines of the Carlyle Group and Pratt & Whitney. Still, even these are minimal compared to what would happen to deficits should the economy make a startling comeback in the next few years.

It's hard to believe that, just ten years ago, we were running budget surpluses that would pay down the national debt eventually, only to have Republicans decide that deficits don't matter and that matter belongs in the pockets of Americans.

Well, it never made it there, did it?

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

Brilliant plan or petty scam? Republicans repackage Democratic budget ideas

By Nicholas Wilbur

Taking credit for someone else's work is called plagiarism – unless you're in politics, in which case it's called bipartisanship.

With Republicans vehement in their opposition to the Democratic Party's plans to merely shear the sheep, and with Democrats equally obstinate in their disregard for the Republican Party's plans to behead the beast, a Congressional showdown over federal spending quickly evolved into a seemingly imminent government shutdown. Even a short-term fix appeared impossible as Republicans proved unwilling to entertain any temporary plans that didn't include spending cuts while Democrats proved unwilling to accept any such budget Band-Aids that did include cuts.

From ToonRefugee.com

But then, as if by magic or some divine intervention, the stars suddenly aligned, the Potomac parted, lions began hiring lambs as anger management counselors, and the two parties put aside their budget differences and began working as one body dedicated not to corporate or ideological interests but to the people who hired them.

With a week remaining before the government ran out of money, and with no agreement in sight, Republicans proposed a plan to fund the government another two weeks as negotiations over a more permanent fix continued.

Fearful of reliving the bare-knuckle beat-down they suffered over similar budget woes in 1995, Republicans decided to avoid the backlash of another government shutdown by proposing what The New York Times described as "a carefully calibrated stopgap measure" that would fund the government for two weeks while the two parties negotiate a more long-term budget resolution.

As promised, Republicans included significant spending cuts to the short-term stopgap measure. But, as the Times noted, "[t]o make it harder for Democrats to object to the temporary plan, Republican architects of the proposal tried to make the cuts relatively painless."

As it turns out, the cuts, totaling $4 billion, weren't so much "relatively painless" as they were pleasurable. Reversing course on their insistence earlier in the week that they would not support a proposal that included any cuts, "Senate Democrats indicated they would be willing to go along with the proposal," the Times reported. Looking at the source of the proposed cuts, it isn't terribly difficult to ascertain why they had a sudden change of heart. From the Times:

(Republicans) came up with the $4 billion by ending eight education, transportation and other programs that President Obama had previously sought to close down, a savings of almost $1.2 billion. They also reclaimed nearly $2.8 billion set aside for earmarks in the current budget; both the House and Senate have agreed to ban such pet projects.

I can't decide if this is utterly brilliant or completely retarded.

It seems as if Republicans have killed three birds with one stone.

First and foremost, they quelled a potential revolt of House Tea Party members by giving them a nice, big, round number which they can throw out to their anti-government constituents as evidence of their hardline stance against excessive federal spending. It was the Tea Party, after all, that accused senior Republicans in the House of going soft on their campaign pledge to slash government spending. Four billion dollars in a two-week funding package more than does the job.

Second, Republicans needed to propose something that Democrats would support. What better way to entice Democrats to back a Republican bill than to use ideas Democrats themselves proposed? As the Times noted, the $1.2 billion in cuts originated from the president's own proposal.

Knowing that the Tea Party could squabble about a puny $1.2 billion, they cut another $2.8 billion slated for earmarks even though both parties already agreed to end the use of earmarks, and even though the president already promised to veto any legislation that landed on his desk with earmarks attached.

Republicans essentially repackaged the president's own ideas and inflated the spending cuts with earmarks that nobody was allowed to include in a budget package anyway.

If it sounds similar to mining for gold in your neighbor's backyard and selling him bullion coins at a discounted rate, it is. Stargazing is free – like breathing oxygen, blinking, and flipping off the IRS building when you drive by – but that doesn't take away from its bipartisan popularity.

This is either the masterpiece of a genius or the scheming plot of an amateur scam artist.

(Cross-posted at Muddy Politics.)

If you lose your job, John Boehner might just tell you to go fuck yourself

By Michael J.W. Stickings

You may lose your job, but John Boehner doesn't give a shit:

If House Republicans succeed in cutting tens of billions of dollars in discretionary spending over the next six months, some of the most immediate victims will be federal employees, many of whose jobs will be slashed as their agencies pare back.

At a press conference in the lobby of RNC headquarters Tuesday morning, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) shrugged this off as collateral damage.

"In the last two years, under President Obama, the federal government has added 200,000 new federal jobs," Boehner said. "If some of those jobs are lost so be it. We're broke." 

As Brian Beutler notes, "Boehner didn't cite a source for the claim that Obama had added 200,000 employees to the federal payroll. And he said he didn't have an estimate of how many jobs would be lost as a result of the GOP cuts." In other words, he doesn't really know anything, he was just talking out of his ass.

But there's nothing funny about people losing their jobs, and Boehner's lack of concern, his utter disregard for real people dealing with real problems, is appalling.

As Steve Benen notes, even with all the talk right now about jobs and unemployment, Boehner "by his own admission, prefers a budget plan that would make unemployment worse, on purpose." He "intends to force thousands of teachers, police officers, medical professionals, and food inspectors from their jobs, and... said he doesn't much care." 

Ladies and gentlemen, your 2011 Republican Party!