Letter 2 America for December 20, 2013

Dear America,

I heard a news account of Ted Cruz blaming the Democrats for the recent government shutdown that pushed Republican popular support to all time lows.  His rationale was that the Democrats refused to defund "Obamacare," otherwise known as the Affordable Care Act, and if they had done so, the shutdown--a function solely of the refusal of the Republican controlled House of Representatives to approve a "continuing resolution" to fund day-to-day operation of the government--would not have been necessary.  To put his position in candid terms, the conservative wing of the Republican Party...the Tea Party...of which Cruz is the poster boy didn't get what they wanted in the passage in congress of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, in the decision of The Supreme Court in 2011 or in the popular election of 2012, so they used political procedure to get what the majority of the American people and the legitimate political process refused to give their small minority of rabid fiscal conservatives who do not believe in the social safety net, preferring social Darwinism to humanism.  And now comes the budget compromise that reverses the "sequester"--that was the last deal born of the recalcitrance of the Republican, conservative minority's intransigence--and thus results in reductions in the federal budget deficit of only about $2.25 billion per year for the next ten years instead of the $65 billion per year the sequester required.  And once again, the Republican right is bellowing that their ox has been gored, but this time, they are bellowing at their fellow Republicans.  It's a sign that sanity is returning to Washington.

Last week, John Boehner made it official.  The Tea Party's procrustean adherence to austerity principles at a time when they are inimical to both Republican ascendancy and the welfare of the nation is going to be called what it is from now on: political suicide.  So now, the outliers in the Republican Party, who have been controlling the direction of the party as well as the fates of all of the rational, moderate pragmatists in the party, are no longer de rigueur.   And once Boehner had shrugged off the yoke of Robespierrean repression locked onto him since 2010, the Tea Party grasp on the throat of reasoned bipartisanship began to slip.  With the elections of 2014 looming, Republicans are looking their fate in the eye, and they haven't liked what they were seeing, so they are tacking against the conservative wind in hoping of gaining some ground with the American people.  You haven't heard much from Raul Labrador lately, and he was a virtual speaker for the Tea Party in The House until the past week or two.  But he stepped way out of bounds when the Democrats ended the filibuster of political appointments in The Senate.  The tepid reception and eye-rolling sighs that his and his fellow conservatives' feigned innocence and obviously contrived claims of impaired rights received outside the party conservative elite was a shot across the bow that still-conservative-but-rational Republicans like John McCain not only heard, but publicly acknowledged.

The proof that the rout of Tea Party conservatism is under way will come in late January when the next debt ceiling increase will be required.  For the past three years...ever since the Tea Party- inspired Republican victory in 2010...fear has motivated Republican policy, and the Tea Party's surrogates have been trumpeting every policy victory, even those that were failures for the party, as if they had brought a new gospel to Washington.  They claimed--both implicitly, and explicitly in the most flagrant cases--that a new tide was rising in the American electorate, and they were it.  They gloated over each impediment to the progressive ideal that they managed to throw in front of political progress and convinced many that such obstruction was a validation of their ideals, or perhaps more aptly put, their dogma.  In six weeks or so, we will find out if they were right, and it won't be because of any election.  In six weeks, the Republican Party will be deciding its own fate when it determines whether to quietly, under protest or not, increase the debt ceiling and eschew the tactic of extortion that it has afforded them over the last few years, or fight the bad fight one more time and squander the victory, albeit an ephemeral one as I see it, that the technical failure of healthcare.com has handed them in lieu of the residual shame they were glistening with as a function of the last government shutdown.  This debt ceiling fight, and there are already hints that the die-hards in the Republican Party...the Tea Party fifth column if that isn't too dramatic...will insist on staging one, will tell the tale.  And if they succeed in goading their parent party into joining their battle, the result will be the election that could inflict the coup de grace on the Republicans once and for all, and at the hands of their own in the bargain.

So watch people like Mitch McConnell, minority leader of The Senate.  When the budget passed, he took to the floor and bemoaned it, marshaling his party's fellow conservatives to vote against it, but he knew that there were enough sane Republicans in The Senate that the budget would pass without much real resistance, and it did, 64-36, meaning that nine Republicans voted with the univocal Democratic Party to pass it.  The risk of another saber-rattling debacle for his party was averted, and he surely breathed a sigh of relief while, like the political poltroon he is, he sat safely in the weeds claiming conservative purity in service of his contested, 2014 re-election campaign in Kentucky.  There will be more like him, but most Republicans seem to be opting for a return to the civility that has prevailed from time to time in congress as a whole.  The Obama presidency may yet be saved from the ignominy of historical irrelevancy and mediocrity.  Immigration and tax reform, here we come.

Your friend,

Mike