Hard Line Conservatives Learn Wrong Lesson

Dylan Scott predicts that the Tea Party conservatives in the House will take away to wrong lesson from the government shut-down that most see as disastrous for Republicans on Talking Points Memo.

For a certain block of House conservatives, the ones who drove Speaker John Boehner toward a government shutdown and near-default against his will, the lesson of the last few weeks isn't that they overreached. Not that they made unachievable demands, put their leadership in an impossible position, damaged their party's position with the public and left a deep uncertainty about whether the GOP conference can recover and legislate. No, what they're taking away from the 2013 crisis is: They didn't go far enough.

"I think we're going to see a drumbeat out there that our spineless leaders caved," Norm Ornstein, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, told TPM. "If we had held on, we would have defaulted, but it wouldn't have made any difference. Obama would have caved, and we would have gotten what we wanted." Ornstein had one specific piece of evidence to back that point. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), a favorite of the conservative wing who fell out of favor with his support for immigration reform but still harbors 2016 presidential aspirations, quickly said that he wouldn't be supporting the bipartisan deal to re-open the government and avoid default.

Frank Rich agrees in New York Magazine citing a strain of far-right insurgents dating back to John C. Calhoun and his theory of nullification of duly enacted laws with which the reactionary right disagrees.

At the heart of the current rebels’ ideology is the anti-Washington credo of nullification, codified by the South Carolina politician John C. Calhoun in the 1830s and rarely lacking for avid followers ever since. Our inability to accept the anti-government right’s persistence is in part an astonishing case of denial. The Gingrich revolution, the Ur-text for this fall’s events, took place less than twenty years ago and yet was at best foggily remembered as the current calamity unfolded. There’s also a certain liberal snobbery at play: We don’t know any of these radicals, do we?