Tea Party over

Not quite yet though.  With the resolution of the debt crisis and federal shutdown a humiliation for the Republican Party, achieving only the most tokenistic of compromises, it will be the moderate GOP members who will be punished at the ballot box – the Tea Party doctrinaires are secure in their gerrymandered strongholds for now.  Barack Obama proposes immigration reform should soon be tabled but really an independent, politically unaffiliated commission should be created to fix district boundaries far more fairly than they are now.  Expect fierce resistance to another piece of commonsense principle were it to be enacted as the current arrangements favour the GOP far more than the Democrats.

But overall, the Tea Party have shown themselves to be incompetent and arrogant in equal measure.  I remember freshman Texan senator Ted Cruz in the early hours of 7^th November proclaiming his determination to take the fight to Capitol Hill, despite the overall endorsement of the president and his party (retention of the presidency and Senate majority, gains in the House).  He jumped the gun in forcing the federal shutdown instead of making the Democrats break more likely over the debt ceiling (although holding the country hostage is another reprehensible low for the Republican Party in general).  One right-winger called Cruz a Democratic sleeper agent, who gave the Democrats the whip hand and essentially all that the latter wanted.  In some ways, Cruz is an old-time Democrat, before LBJ committed the party to endorsing civil right and, allegedly, signing away the South for a generation.  Cruz would find being called a Democrat highly offensive but in the long-run, being a Tea Party favourite and thus poised to receive massive financial endorsements from crackpot SuperPACS (high-rolling political action committees) like the Heritage Foundation, he won’t suffer come 2018.

This morning, a Tea Party House member was quizzed by the BBC about holding a gun to the head of the American economy and he said that kind of language was just scare-mongering and all that mattered was getting the debt down, proving that these far-right Republicans have simply no grasp of economics (much less history, given that the USA has never defaulted on its debts).  Maybe for the same reason they can’t countenance the Earth being more than 5,000 years old, big numbers are mind-boggling, but the USA is far from being on the edge of a precipice, unless the Tea Party dragged the country over it.  There may be a current account deficit but there is no alternative for those holding US debt but to buy more of it which depreciates with inflation and so benefits the USA.  Conceivably the USA could run up twice the debt mountain it has before it might topple over – an arbitrary number to be sure but debt is not drowning the US – political deadlock is.  Moreover, the deficit is coming down – you can’t turn around, two wars, an egregious tax cut that added £1tn to the debt for basic political expedience and a banking crash and near-Depression in just four years.  Medical expenditure is running out of control and arguably Obamacare isn’t radical enough.  But when Tea Partiers talk about getting the debt down, it is code for removing all regulatory barriers that are so inconvenient to their super-rich friends (hence the insouciance about the federal shutdown) and slashing social safety nets down to their last vestiges so taxes can be cut for their rich buddies.  Combined with right-wing religious nationalism and you have a willing cohort of useful idiots who don’t understand their being manipulated to put you into Congress.  Their only conception of democracy is getting elected and Joseph Schumpeter would have been purring, but compromise is an essential part of getting things done in a democracy – it is one of the reasons why Russia’s post-1991 fledgling exercise in this foundered.  Tea Partiers though say it is their way or the highway and it they don’t get their way, they scweam and scweam til they are sick and then scweam some more, stamping their feet like the children they are (one unnamed centrist GOP politician said they weren’t just lemmings going over the cliff, they were lemmings with suicide vests, taking everyone else with them).

The GOP tried to tap into Tea Party fervour whilst –ineffectually- taming it and at the heart of this is a ten point manifesto in which you need to sign up to 8 of the 10 points, even though their saint, Ronald Reagan would have only qualified for seven of the points.  The non-negotiable point is no new taxes, even though Reagan and his successor George H W Bush both did so.  Invited to criticise the Tea Party loonies, ‘moderate’ Republican (a very loose term) John McCain said he followed Reagan, who said one should never criticise one’s fellow Republicans.  When it was pointed out that the Tea Party has been tearing lumps out of the rest of the GOP for weeks, he blandly replied that he couldn’t answer for them.  Claiming to be heirs of Reagan, yet the policies of the Tea Party are as distorted from Reagan as their history is of the American Revolution.

It is commendable of Obama to maintain the power of the executive and stand firm.  Conventional wisdom is that Democrats always buckle, bolstering the view that America is an inherently right-wing country.  This though wasn’t merely a battle over Obama’s signature health policy or even budget negotiations but a battle about who calls the shots in government and the hostage-takers were defeated.  Not negotiating with terrorists is a controversial and dangerous game but here saner GOP compatriots prevailed, albeit gulping hard.   The power of the presidency is therefore not diminished but that is the GOP is.  Republican senator Lindsey Graham said it has been a catastrophic fortnight for the GOP, their numbers going down faster than for the Dems or the Pres, while approval for Obamacare has “mysteriously risen.”  This another reason why the Republicans are numbskulls – so convinced they are of being in the right, they can’t admit that something might be popular for the correct reasons.  By focusing the spotlight on it, more Americans have realised that Obamacare and the Affordable Care Act (ACA) are one and the same thing and as most support most of the provisions of the ACA, support for Obamacare has risen.  Not so mysterious after all – it is symptomatic of why the Republicans lose general elections and fail to learn the lessons.  They will never be a majority in both branches of the legislature unless they embrace the new normal.