Boehner vs. Tea Party

Sahil Kapur reports on Speaker John Boehner finally standing up to his Tea Party caucus on Talking Points Memo.

This week, John Boehner took on the tea party and steamrolled it. It was a cathartic experience for the Republican House Speaker, who finally stood up to the movement that has been pushing him around for three years, recently coercing him into shutting down the government for 16 days in a fanciful quest to defund Obamacare. Wealthy conservative outside groups such as Heritage Action, Club For Growth and FreedomWorks were united in pushing lawmakers to scuttle a two-year bipartisan budget deal. Boehner responded by publicly excoriating them as having "lost all credibility." Then he delivered 169 Republicans for the bill. Just 62 voted against it. The final tally was 332-94. 

Norm Ornstein, a centrist scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, said Boehner's decision to show his spine against the right "tapped into a broader zeitgeist" of House GOP anger at the conservative groups, but posited that it wasn't going to last. "Does this mean Club For Growth, Heritage Action and FreedomWorks are going to be cowed and melt away and fade into the background? Come on. Of course not," he said. "The way this stuff usually works is that you do one thing that defies the power centers on the right and you end up compensating on other stuff instead of pushing them into the wilderness."
Ornstein argued that Republicans were somewhat friendlier to the budget deal because it would avoid another painful shutdown and let them keep the focus on Obamacare, which they are convinced will collapse under its own weight. He said they'll continue to pay a heavy price for embracing the tea party's maximalist agenda against President Barack Obama. 

"I think their initial view," he said, "was that it was better to have them inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in. But now the feeling from a lot of these guys is, 'we brought them inside the tent and they started to piss on us.'"