The House Republicans action last night of passing their self-titled “cut, cap, and balance” bill in a 234-190 vote speaks volumes to the complete indifference that the Republican Party has shown towards the economy. With word breaking late yesterday afternoon that nearly 60 percent of Republicans voters believe that their leaders “are not doing enough to strike a deal,” you would think that the Republican’s would get the message that some form of serious compromise would be necessary to prevent this trend from continuing. Instead, they double down on the obstructionism.
I fail to understand how this strategy will be beneficial to them in the 2012 elections. The Ryan budget plan has already proven to be disastrous for their poll numbers and has provoked voter backlash in places such as New York’s 26th district, where a Democrat defeated a Republican in an especially Republican district. The “cut, cap, and balance” bill goes miles beyond anything Paul Ryan would have wished to have been in his original bill.
The only explanation to this ostentatious insanity might be the failure of the house leadership to control their radical urges and give into the whims of the tea-party freshmen. This past weekend, The New York Times published an article by Robert Draper which follows Republican House majority whip Kevin McCarthy’s attempt to unite the loony tea-party bloc with the rest of the Republican Party. Draper writes,
And so to hold the caucus together, McCarthy’s delicate approach has been to acknowledge the independence of the hot-blooded new Charges while instilling in them a sense of team loyalty – and thereby moving them, ever so gently, to a victory that will be enduring rather than Pyrrhic.
I think it’s safe to say that promoting in-group cohesion by pleasing the tea-partiers will not lead to “enduring victory.” The objective of “team loyalty” might create to a feel-good atmosphere where republican congressmen can express their feelings, but it does nothing to effectively get a bill signed into law, much less fix the economy. The migration from the Ryan budget plan to the drastic “cut, cap, and balance” plan demonstrates just how right the Republicans will go in order to destroy this country.