Paying the Price of the Bush Years

Federal employees return to work this morning. The deal that Obama signed into law after midnight was put together in the Senate. It is the same as outlined on this blog a few days ago, minus the one-year delay in the reinsurance tax on health plans. (CNN provides the text of the actual bill.)

What does it accomplish? Basically nothing. The splinter of a bone tossed to the GOP in the form of an income verification requirement for individuals who receive a subsidy to purchase health insurance has been dismissed as meaningless by the White House. The House-Senate budget conference to be concluded by December 13 that the new law mandates will likely be a failure due to the Republican's ban on raising new revenue.

The last two-and-a-half weeks accomplished nothing and resolved very little. The New York Times editorial board said "The only things Republicans achieved were billions of dollars in damage to the economy, harm to the nation’s reputation and a rock-bottom public approval rating." This standoff was about the internal politics of the Grand Old Party. Speaker Boehner played a game where he gave the Tea Party enough rope to hang itself hoping that it would sate the fire eaters in his caucus for the next go-round. As Jonathan Weisman and Ashley Parker describe it in this morning's story, "Republicans Back Down, Ending Crisis Over Shutdown and Debt Limit":

Two weeks of relative cohesion broke down into near chaos on Tuesday when Republican leaders failed twice to unite their troops behind a last-gasp effort to prevent a default on their own terms. By Wednesday, House conservatives were accusing more moderate Republicans of undercutting their position. Representative Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania, a leading Republican voice for ending the fight, said Congress should have passed a bill to fund the government without policy strings attached weeks ago. 

“That’s essentially what we’re doing now,” Mr. Dent said. “People can blame me all they want, but I was correct in my analysis and I’d say a lot of those folks were not correct in theirs.”

Good analysis in today's paper is provided by Jeremy Peters' "Losing a Lot to Get Little." Peters is skeptical that the Tea Party has learned anything:

“We managed to divide ourselves on something we were unified on, over a goal that wasn’t achievable,” said Senator Roy Blunt, Republican of Missouri. “The president probably had the worst August and early September any president could have had. And we managed to change the topic.” 

The question so crucial to the Republican Party’s viability now, heading into the 2014 Congressional elections and beyond, is whether it has been so stung by the fallout that the conservatives who insisted on leading this fight will shy away in the months ahead when the government runs out of money and exhausts its borrowing authority yet again. 

It is not an abstract question. The deal reached Wednesday would finance the government only through Jan. 15 and lift the debt ceiling through Feb. 7. Some top Republicans suggest that this confrontation, one some of the most conservative Tea Party-aligned Republicans have been itching for since they arrived, ended so badly for them that it would curb the appetite for another in just a few short months. 

*** 

Speaker John A. Boehner’s strategy always involved a gamble that his members would come away from this clash chastened. He intentionally allowed his most conservative members to sit in the driver’s seat as they tried in vain to get the Senate to accept one failed measure after another — first to defund the health care law, then to delay it, then to chip away at it. His hope was that they would realize the fight was not worth having again.

The worry among many Republicans is that the Tea Party flank will not get the message, mainly because their gerrymandered districts are so conservative they do not have to listen. 

Some fear that history is repeating itself. After Mitt Romney’s defeat in which the Republicans lost the popular presidential vote for the fifth time in six elections, the party tried to regroup. Its establishment warned that it had to stop being so shrill, so exclusionary and so narrowly focused on issues that alienate large chunks of voters who might otherwise think about being Republicans. 

Certainly, the budget fight showed that Congressional Republicans have divergent ideas about how to heed that advice.

Like a cradle-bound baby fondling his excrement, we're doomed early next year to some form of a repeat of this October's nauseating, self-indulgent Republican identity crisis. We're paying the price of the Bush years. So frightened by the rise of Obama and the discrediting of the GOP brand after the brazen lies that led to the Iraq War and the collapse of Wall Street, Republican sachems felt the need to lie down with the kooks and the Birchers. At this point there is no indication that there will be any change of direction in 2014.