I’ve been writing about the Tea Party’s lunacies on here since the spring of 2009 (Here is my first substantive post about it). As I’ve tracked the trajectory of this experiment in political unrest, I think it’s safe to say the party is all but toast at this point, and here’s why.
Tea Party members have essentially corroded the GOP from the inside out, and in a sign that more moderate, “establishment” Republicans are pulling back the reins on these folks, House Speaker John Boehner and GOP leaders announced recently that they were going to support a “clean,” no-attachments increase to the debt-ceiling, despite some leaders in the party insisting on a list of demands. Attaching demands to the legislation did not have enough support, it died and the actual “clean” bill passed the House on Tuesday.
The Atlantic’s Molly Ball has an excellent article up about the Tea Party’s evolution these last few years, and its eventual acceptance of typical machinations in Washington. As she traces the changes in the party, which as we know is the ultra-conservative, borderline libertarian fringe of the Republican Party, members swept into Washington riding Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber’s popularity and were ready to pounce on and destroy every single one of Barack Obama’s goals, with some conservatives talking heads even wishing that Obama fails at everything he tries to accomplish in the White House. In short, Ball said, the Tea Party came into Congress in 2011 on a “wave of denial and anger.”
The nation came close to disaster in 2011 when Tea Partiers nearly destroyed the concessions Boehner was planning to make with Obama to keep the U.S. from defaulting on its loans. This would be one of the first in a series of numerous showdowns between more moderate House Republicans, like Boehner, who at their core understand that in some cases, compromise is a necessity and tough decisions have to be made for the betterment of the nation — even if they won’t say this publicly — and the lunatic wing of the GOP.
As Ball put it:
The 2011 showdown was revealing. Previously, the idea of default was so unthinkable that observers and markets didn’t consider it a possibility. But the confrontation showed how far the new House majority was willing to go. They weren’t looking for compromise; they wanted the whole loaf. They weren’t just mad. They were convinced—erroneously—that they had the power to undo Obama’s agenda entirely from their perch controlling one-half of one-third of the federal government. They were in denial.
And in late 2013, the conservative camp forced the nation into a government shutdown, causing undue hardship on the Americans they claimed to care about back in election season. They then proceeded to eat a shit sandwich by subsequently accepting a deal to reopen the government, as Ball points out, that was actually worse than the one they were going to get previously. Now, as the GOP bullheadedly forced the government’s hand, took a sizable ideological step against the grain and managed to somehow make the public even less trustworthy of government with their asinine denials of reality, the only thing left for the Tea Party is acceptance, and well, dissolution.
Ball concludes:
This is how Washington works: Certain things have to get done, and you try to get the best deal you can, and then move on to the next thing. This is basically what Boehner has been trying to tell his caucus for the last three years, but they had to figure it out for themselves. Now that they’ve achieved acceptance, will Boehner’s job get easier? Or will a new wave of mad-as-hell representatives rise up in protest?
If Tea Partiers would have had the brains to realize all this from the start, they could have saved us all, and the nation, a lot of heartburn. They played a dangerous game that took the nation to the brink, and now, with absolutely nothing to gain from it except more angry constituents and some dusty lapel pins, they will more than likely be forced henceforth to ride the bench.