Power Games, Strategy and Patriotism

California Republican Devin Nunes called his tea party colleagues “lemmings with suicide vests” and their strategy of linking the U.S. budget to abandoning the Affordable Care Act stupid, insane and mathematically impossible. He referred to Senator Ted Cruz as a “con man who knew this was going nowhere and sold a false bill of goods.”

Nevertheless, in the House of Representatives he voted with his tea party colleagues and was thus complicit in shutting large portions of the government down on Oct. 1 and putting millions of U.S. households in financial jeopardy. Plus, he financially threatened the rest of the world if the country with the global reserve currency defaults due to insolvency as of Oct. 17. In a CNN interview, he summed up the situation by saying if they didn’t have 218 votes, they had nothing.

Party discipline has driven almost the entire Republican faction into a political trap. The tea party faction of the Republican Party isn’t even 50 members strong. Prior to the so-called shutdown, they circulated a letter signed by 80 representatives. Simultaneously, Senator Ted Cruz put on a 21-hour one-man show in the Senate where Democrats have the majority. But then John Boehner jumped on the bandwagon, linking a new budget with defunding Obamacare. As speaker of the House, he controls what gets introduced onto the House floor. Only what he approves will come up for a vote. Out of 235 Republican representatives, only two voted against a government shutdown. A few more asked for an end to the shutdown and a clean budget bill without actually doing anything to achieve that goal.

Republican critics of the shutdown are the exception rather than the rule. Most of them are under pressure from their constituents to be even more radical. They come from electoral districts that are far more homogeneous and that votes differently from the rest of the nation. Following the 2010 census, many Republican states also redrew their electoral district boundaries as well.

Great Party Discipline

With great party discipline, those who caused the shutdown have also pinned the blame for it on the Democrats. With some obscure reasoning, dozens of Republicans have said in interviews that they consider Harry Reid and Barack Obama responsible for the shutdown. Their reasoning: Neither one will agree to negotiate with them.

The reform for “affordable health care,” as it is officially called, was passed by a majority Democratic Congress in 2010. Since then, the Republicans in Congress have tried more than 40 times to reverse that decision, always unsuccessfully. The Supreme Court declared it to be constitutional, and the voters confirmed that outcome be reelecting Obama by a wide margin in 2012. Republicans in the House were stuck between a Democratic Senate and a Democratic president. In November 2012, Boehner declared that opposition to Obamacare was being abandoned because it was “the law of the land.”

But that didn’t convince some factions within the party. A dozen tea party Republicans refused to vote for him to continue as speaker of the House. Meanwhile, tea party think tanks and financial backers continue to call for opposition to Obamacare. Among the conservative base, there is no more emotional a subject. The notion of mandatory insurance for tens of millions of uninsured people symbolizes for them a government grown too powerful and heading toward socialism. These represent concepts the tea partiers consider “un-American,” a category that also includes social welfare for vulnerable and minority groups.

While the tea party was planning the shutdown, Boehner was negotiating the 2014 budget with Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid. They reached a compromise that summer offering Boehner tens of billions of dollars in reductions. As far as the Senate and the White House, a 2014 budget had been worked out.

Radical Challengers

Republicans in the House, on the other hand, didn’t like Boehner’s compromise. In the coming months, the battles over who will run in the midterm elections will be fought. The tea party is threatening compromise-ready candidates that they will face radical challengers unless they comply with their ideology. The other side of that coin is that moderate Republicans intend to run against tea party candidates in four electoral districts.

The disastrous — for Republicans — opinion polls and pleas from chambers of commerce as well as Wall Street to end the government shutdown, along with the importance of avoiding bankruptcy, are driving traditional Republicans and their advisers toward an overdue course correction.

Boehner, meanwhile, is adopting tea party strategy. In the first days following the shutdown, tea party communiques referred to “the man of the establishment” as a “patriot.” But by the 10th day of the shutdown when he went to the White House with his first tiny offer of compromise, that same grassroots organization loudly protested against him. Now when they refer to his leadership, that word is in quotation marks.