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Ezra Klein has an interview with budget guru Stan Collender that's worth reading to understand some of the dynamics at play within the Republican party in this debate over the debt ceiling. Collender describes how he was invited to speak to Tea Party Republicans after the 2010 election:
After me were the Tea Party state chairs from Virginia, Pennsylvania and Florida. And they spent the next 45 minutes screaming at these members, saying, plainly, we elected you and we can unelect you. And this was at longtime members like Joe Barton, who long predated the Tea Party. I never have seen members of Congress treated like that. Especially by their friends...Many Republican members of the House, it seems, think that their biggest problem in the budget battles of the mid-1990s was that they weren't intransigent enough. One of the things this illuminates is that naked political cynicism can, at times, have a salutary effect. Mitch McConnell may not have a discernable soul, but he understands politics. He knows when the risks of a particular action have outweighed the benefits, which is the best explanation for why this week he offered a plan to allow an increase in the debt ceiling, with nothing in return other than an opportunity for Republicans to engage in a little meaningless political theater. Some of the people that need to be convinced, particularly freshman House Republicans, don't agree. You can argue that this is because they're so principled, or that it's because they're fanatics who have almost no understanding of politics. Not only won't they admit when they've lost, they don't even understand when they've won. They seem to have convinced themselves that if the debt ceiling isn't raised, then all that will happen is that some pointy-headed government bureaucrat somewhere might have to stay home for a few days. It's their ignorance of both political and economic realities that gives them the ability to push forward.The problem in getting a deal isn't so much the votes of those Tea Party House Republicans, it's the impact they have on the comparatively sane members of their party. Even if every Democrat voted for a debt ceiling deal, you'd still need a couple of dozen Republican votes for it to pass. Meanwhile, the Tea Partiers are going on talk radio and television, telling people that there's no need to raise the debt ceiling, and that anyone who votes to do so under any circumstances is a traitor (Michele Bachmann has even made this position a centerpiece of her presidential campaign). So the pressure on the rest of the GOP not only doesn't dissipate, it increases. That Republican member is now saying to himself, "If we don't raise the ceiling, the economy melts down. But if I vote yes on any deal, no matter what it contains, I'll get primaried and probably lose my job."The marching orders were, first, you must not vote to extend the continuing resolution [that would keep the government open through 2011] unless it, in their words, "defunds Obamacare." Number two, you must not, under any circumstances, vote for an increase in the debt ceiling. Period. No conditions. Number three, and they said this explicitly, we don't trust John Boehner or Eric Cantor. And the state party chair from Virginia was from Cantor's district. And, finally, the members themselves told me afterwards that what they thought they did wrong in 1995 and 1996 was they gave in too early to Clinton.
