Nick Carey reports that Wall Street wants the debt ceiling raised but the tea party movement doesn’t:
That leaves [John] Boehner stuck between the Tea Party and a hard place. If he pushes too hard on cuts, that will rattle the Republican Party’s powerful Wall Street wing, potentially roiling the markets and unsettling the broader electorate.
But backing down will also hurt him. “After accusations he didn’t do enough in the budget battle, Boehner has to have something real to take back to conservatives or he’s in trouble,” said James McCormick, a professor of political science at Iowa State University. “He’s boxed in between two components of the Republican Party. Obama knows that and is not under the same pressure.”
If the Republicans falter, the search for establishment targets will kick into a higher gear — with freshmen, or those elected in 2010 seen as the easiest to unseat as they are new. “The Tea Party will almost certainly primary those they want to get rid of,” said Larry Sabato, a politics professor at the University of
Virginia. “They are not out to rebuild the Republican Party. They are out to take over the Republican Party and make it more like the Tea Party.”
“If it takes some Republican defeats along the way to make that happen, then that is what they’ll do,” he added.
This scares Jon Chait, but frankly, I’m going to need more than the opinion of a couple of university professors to get my blood pressure up. They’re not saying anything here that a thousand bloggers haven’t already said before.
In any case, I actually see this as a bigger problem for the tea party than it is for Boehner. Don’t get me wrong: it’s a huge pain in the ass for Boehner because, in the end, he’ll have to defy the tea partiers and do what Wall Street wants — which, on the bright side, also happens to be the right thing to do. In the longer term, though, this is just another sign of the tea party wearing out its welcome. It was a handy force for rousing the voters in the 2010 election, but there’s only so much idiocy that even Republicans can put up with. Talk radio is one thing. Fox News is one thing. For the most part, they talk big but don’t actually demand that politicians commit suicide. Tea partiers, conversely, do want them to commit suicide, and if they get their way the only real result is going to be more Democrats in Congress and the reelection of Barack Obama. The adults in the party understand this perfectly well, and they’re going to throw the tea partiers under the bus if it looks like they’re seriously screwing things up for GOP hopes next year.
So, yeah, Boehner is going to take this down to the wire. He’s going to try to extort some spending cuts out of the White House. He might as well do what he can to appease the tea partiers, after all. But in the end, he’ll vote to raise the debt ceiling, he’ll get enough Republican votes to make it stick, and the Republican establishment is going to finally decide it’s tired of the tea party if they make too much trouble about it. They already (arguably) lost a chance to take control of the Senate in 2010 because of the tea party, and they’re not going to take that chance again in 2012. Either the tea partiers start playing ball with the millionaires or they’re history. The history of the Republican Party is crystal clear on this point.
