Republican John Boehner Bows to the Tea Party

Two weeks from now, the White House and Congress have to approve a new debt limit or the world’s largest economy will be threatened with a shutdown.

According to the Treasury Department, the U.S. already reached the statutory limit several days ago when it exceeded the $14.29 trillion ceiling. In the remaining three weeks, the White House and Congress must not only find a compromise on raising the debt ceiling, they have to get it through the legislature. But despite the enormous pressure of the deadline, the two political parties can find no common ground. Republicans in particular have maneuvered themselves into a corner.

Just before the weekend, it briefly looked as if President Barack Obama and Speaker of the House John Boehner were about to agree on a large and comprehensive solution. Reductions in U.S. expenditures totaling $4 trillion over 10 years were within sight. That would not only have defused the debt problem because it would have permitted a rise in the debt limit, it would have paved the way for a fundamental reorganization of the U.S. budget. Part of the proposal would have reformed the Social Security system, including cuts to Medicare, which sees itself financially threatened in the future by an aging population. Then just one day prior to the Sunday White House negotiations, John Boehner suddenly backtracked.

Sixty-one-year-old Boehner’s official explanation for his about face was that Obama’s $4 trillion package also included some tax increases, and increases are simply not acceptable to the Republican Party. But Boehner must have known that fact beforehand. The real reason the speaker of the House retreated is that he feared the wrath of the tea party movement within his own party. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor blocked his own boss and whistled him back to the scrimmage line.

What has been playing out on the Washington stage over the past few days is nothing less than the dismantling of John Boehner. The man from Ohio is seen as representing the “old” Republican Party, a party that is fiscally conservative but also open to reasonable compromises. What Boehner apparently underestimated, however, is the strength of that group of around 70 newly elected representatives who came to Washington promising radical opposition to the status quo. They find a concession on tax increases — which in fact consist of allowing previous tax reductions to expire — unreasonable despite the fact that many Republican demands had already been met. Tea party followers are out for victory all across the board and they consider compromise to be an insult.

But Obama has another problem: He must deal with an opponent who really has no mandate. Successful negotiations with Boehner now depend on the approval of the tea party movement. The best that can now be expected from the negotiations is a series of short-term solutions that may defuse the acute financial crisis, but will only put the day of reckoning off temporarily.

Even more serious is the political lesson learned from these Washington talks. The Republicans’ all-or-nothing approach foreshadows what America’s politics will look like, at least until the presidential election in 2012: A never-ending series of escalations that began last April when the dispute over financing government operations broke out.

That’s truly bad news for America’s foreign partners.