There are times when anyone involved in politics should be more concerned with governance than crass political advantage. After all there is always the peoples work to for any Congress or other political body to be about. Still there are times when it is worthwhile to make sure that you opponents are in such disarray that they can’t function and thus can not hold on to power in the future. This seems like one of those times to me.
As fractious a the Democratic Party can be with its liberals, moderates, and FSM help us all, conservative members right now we are not the party with the most fissures in our coalition. The Republican Party has multiple clear divides within itself right now. There are the Establishment Republicans like Senate Minority Leader McConnell and soon to be Majority Leader Boehner (Hey John! Where are all those jobs?) then you have the Tea Party fueled whack jobs like Rep. Michele Bachmann and Rand Paul. There are folks who even try to straddle the divide, purely for reasons of power, like Sen. DeMint.
"Originally posted at Squarestate.net"
This is just in Washington of course. Out in the wider nation there are some number (I think it might be Pi) of small Tea Party groups , and the old guard Religious Right are all out there thinking they are suddenly going get all the items on their wish list and a pony as well. The fact that some of their core goals are contradictory to each other has not quite penetrated and this is where we and crass political considerations come in.
There is already a leadership fight brewing in the House. Michele Bachman and her minions are going to be quite upset when no Tea Party supported candidate gets a leadership position. They have a reasonable argument that without them there would not be a Speaker Boehner (why do I get a chill every time I type that?) so they should have some representation on in the leadership. The fact that the senior Republicans in the House recognize Bachmann is a paragon of flash over substance makes no difference to the Tea Party elected officials and rank and file.
What we need to do as Democrats and Liberals is take every chance to encourages the "Let’s you and him fight" mentality in the Republican caucus. When there are fissures in a coalition it is time to pull out the wedges. The voters on the Right this time were energized by "take our country back" well they didn’t quite make it but the very protean nature of the Tea Party "movement" is such that they are not going to be good a long term planning or recruitment and they sure as hell won’t be patient with the kinds of compromises that Republicans will have to make.
With the instinct and practice of purging being so rampant in the Republican Party these days this is a weakness we can exploit. They already have become comfortable with the idea of eating their own if they are not sufficiently conservative, Dems should merely help them see how many of their rank really fail that test. It does not even require saying they fail, just a pointing out of how they say one thing then do another and let the little cannibals of the Tea Party do their munchy-crunchy work.
The ideas of no more debt and repealing the ACA are ones that they have no compromise on. This means that anything other than total victory will be viewed as a failure by the various factions of their base. What Democrats need to do is keep them in this mode as long and as much as possible. It is time to start talking about Republicans "staying true to themselves". This is a really pernicious little meme. It does not define what "true" is and every time there a Republican compromises on one of their supposed core values Dems should be there to point it out.
Is it good for governance? Hell no, but is anything on the Republican agenda in any way good for the nation right now? The point here is to get their base to be so demoralized by 2012 that they don’t show the energy of this cycle and are roundly crushed at the ballot box. This opens a chance for the Democrats to elect more liberal members and push the agenda to the left where it desperately needs to be.
There is one fight in particular that is going to be perfect for this, the raising of the federal debt ceiling. Without raising that the United States will in fairly short order (6 months or so) default on its debt. The reason being that if we reach the statutory limit for debt (right now at 14.7 trillion) the nation can’t barrow anymore money, by law. There are some accounting things the Treasury can do but they will run out after about six months and then the fat will be in the fire.
Tea Partiers have been talking about voting no on this issue. Senator Elect Paul has been flopping back and forth like a trout on this issue, first he would not vote to raise it, then someone (Mitch McConnell most likely) explained the world wide catastrophe it would cause and he back tracked, then he decided that there were enough adults in the Senate and he could be a petulant child about it and vote no.
This is likely to be the case for a lot of the new Tea Party Representatives too. They will find that their know nothing attitudes about debt and finance of the nation have real world consequences and will either have to vote yes or face the results. In any case the whole Republican Party is on the hook for this. It is going to be a major promise they are going to break to their votes who will not take the time to understand why it has to be done. They will just see it a betrayal of the ideas they voted for.
On the repeal of the ACA there an even better chance to divide and conquer. No single issue has been more lied about in my lifetime than health care reform. The level of misinformation, especially on the Right, is higher than Everest (okay, Mt. McKinley, but still tall). Anything short of a full repeal is going to be unacceptable to the Right and the fact is they don’t have any chance of getting it. Sure they can vote all they like on the issue but they don’t have the votes in the Senate for a repeal and in neither House of Congress is there the two thirds majority it would take to over-ride the guaranteed presidential veto.
All this is not to say Dems have an easy row to hoe. The Republicans are going to try to totally vilify the President through hearing after hearing after hearing. While that had some traction in the mid-90’s when the economy was growing and we could afford that kind of thing, it is a very different time. If the Republicans spend all their time in the House trying to slap dirt on the president, and can’t even come through on their promises to the base while the nation struggles in a very weak recovery there is a good chance that Democrats can regroup and retake the House and retain the White House.
All it takes is sowing a little dissension and conflict in the Republican ranks. The public statement that the Republicans are not listening to their base is what we need now and going forward. If Democrats can keep the establishment Republicans from consolidating their caucus, if they can keep the Rand Paul’s and Michele Bachmann’s unhappy and vocal then there is a good chance that 2012 will see a third party on the Right with all the confusion and split vote that implies. All of which is good for the nation, good for liberals and good for Democrats electorally.
The floor is yours.