A Quarter of Americans Want the GOP to Sabotage Obamacare

September 17, 2013Danny Vinik 1 Comment

I didn’t get a chance to comment on this yesterday, but a Pew poll found that nearly one in four Americans support the Republican Party’s efforts to defund and sabotage Obamacare. From Pew:

The 53% of the public who disapprove of the law are divided over what they would like elected officials who oppose the law to do now that the law has begun to take effect. About half of disapprovers (27% of the public overall) say these lawmakers “should do what they can to make the law work as well as possible,” but nearly as many (23% of the public) say these officials “should do what they can to make the law fail.”

There are two ways to look at this.

First, is the way that Greg Sargent sees it:

There you have it. Fewer than one in four Americans supports efforts to try to make the law fail. Fewer than half of Republicans back such efforts; support for them is largely driven by Tea Party Republicans.

Yet it is this small minority that is largely shaping the contours of the GOP posture heading into this fall’s fiscal fights.

This is entirely correct. Obamacare is the law of the land and GOP sabotage efforts are ridiculous. Most Americans either support the law or want to find a way to make it work. The Republican party is instead held captive by its small, but vocal and powerful Tea Party base.

The second way to look it is this is the following: although Obamacare survived a Supreme Court challenge and a presidential election, nearly a quarter of Americans still want the opposing party not just to repeal it but to actively “do what they can to make the law fail.” That seems like a very high percent to me. I could understand a large number of Republicans would like their elected officials to find a way to repeal it. But this question asked Republicans if those elected officials should try to make the law fail. To be fair, there wasn’t an answer that “Republicans should do everything they can to repeal it, but should not actively undermine it.” I would image some of the 23% would fall under that category. But still, a quarter of the country wants the GOP to actively attempt to make Obamacare fail by whatever means necessary. That’s incredible.

I would still like some more context for this. For instance, does a quarter of the country want Republicans to undermine Dodd-Frank? Did Democrats want their elected officials to undermine Medicare Part B during the Bush Administration? I don’t know if there’s much polling on this to provide context, but it wouldn’t surprise me if this “do whatever you can to make the law fail” opposition is new in American politics.

Now, Republicans still aren’t supporting the position of the majority of Americans, as Sargent notes. But if Republicans (the Tea Party) really do want their party to undermine the law like no constituents have wanted their party to do ever before, that would underscore how intense the opposition to Obamacare is. It doesn’t justify the GOP’s desperate attempts to defund the law, but it does help to explain them.

Boehner Can’t Betray The Tea Party

September 12, 2013Danny Vinik 3 Comments

Salon’s Brian Beutler is out with an article this morning advising House Speaker John Boehner to give up waging repeated fights over the government budget and debt ceiling and instead agree to fund both for a lengthy period of a time. These fights do nothing, but divide the Republican party and hurt its imagine nationally. So, Beutler’s logical advice to the Speaker is to no longer pass stopgap fixes and get them off his plate until at least the midterm elections.

This makes a lot of sense on political grounds for the Republican party. The GOP wouldn’t have to revisit every few months whether they’re going to bankrupt the government or allow it to default, both political losers for the party. As for the country, these nasty fights unnecessarily hold back the economy and crowd out other important Congressional legislation such as immigration and tax reform.

The problem with Beutler’s strategy is that it would probably cost Boehner his speakership. Beutler says that if Boehner is worried about this, he could make a deal with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi that Democrats will support him if he’s challenged by his conservative base.

Speaker Boehner has no good options.

But this doesn’t actually accomplish much for the Speaker. He keeps his title while losing all of his power.

If the Speaker faces a rebellion from within his ranks and turns to Pelosi for help, it effectively makes her de-facto Speaker. As we’ve seen repeatedly, Tea Party Republicans aren’t going to sit idly by while the Speaker betrays their most deeply held interests: cutting government spending and defunding Obamacare. In reality, the House doesn’t have a chance of accomplishing either of those, but House Republicans don’t live in reality. They will see Boehner’s betrayal not as a practical solution to improve the image of the party, but as a validation of their not-to-secret belief that the Speaker is a RINO. And they won’t accept that.

Whoever rises up to challenge Boehner for his speakership – whether it be the Majority Leader, Eric Cantor, or someone well outside Republican leadership such as Justin Amash – will have the support from Tea Party groups around the country and many members of the Republican caucus. If Democrats come to Boehner’s aid and save his speakership, the Tea Party will not simply give up the fight. The Tea Party doesn’t give up fights, even ones they’ve lost repeatedly (see, Obamacare). They will continue to fight against everything Boehner does, if just to send a message to future speakers that the Tea Party is not to be messed with.

If Boehner hopes to accomplish anything else in this Congress, it will require large Democratic support and it will be up to Pelosi to provide that support. Anything Boehner wants to pass, he’ll have to run by the Minority Leader to see if she can whip the votes for it. That gives Pelosi all the power. That’s great for Democrats, but horrible for Republicans and even worse for Boehner. He’ll have no power in Congress and a Republican base that will never forgive him. That’s not a strategy the Speaker should pursue.

Will the GOP let the Tea Party Break Away?

November 7, 2012Danny Vinik Leave a comment

As promised, I stayed off WordPress and Twitter yesterday and enjoyed watching the election without frantically typing up blog posts. But, now that it’s been a bit, I’m back.

There are a huge number of story lines from yesterday’s results. One main one has been about the state of the Republican party. This has come up with a couple of my conservative friends. The party right now is a mix of center-right moderates and extreme Tea Party members. They are held together by a dislike for President Obama, but the ties are tenuous.

Now comes this from the Tea Party Patriots:

The Tea Party Patriots declared war on the Republican establishment after moderate establishment Republican Mitt Romney’s loss to President Barack Obama on Tuesday.Jenny Beth Martin, National Coordinator of Tea Party Patriots, criticized the Republican Party for hand-picking a Beltway elite candidate who did not campaign forcefully on America’s founding principles and said the “presidential loss is unequivocally on them.”

“For those of us who believe that America, as founded, is the greatest country in the history of the world – a ‘Shining city upon a hill’ – we wanted someone who would fight for us,” Martin said. “We wanted a fighter like Ronald Reagan who boldly championed America’s founding principles, who inspired millions of independents and ‘Reagan Democrats’ to join us, and who fought his leftist opponents on the idea that America, as founded, was a ‘Shining city upon a hill.

Instead, Martin lamented, “what we got was a weak moderate candidate, hand-picked by the Beltway elites and country-club establishment wing of the Republican Party.”

Many of the commenters on the article want to form their own “Tea Party” or “Constitutional Party” to break off from the Republican establishment.

I’m wondering how Republican leaders will treat this. I hesitantly think they may jump for joy. Here’s a perfect way to move towards the center, to become more open to Hispanics and more liberal on social issues. The Tea Party is extreme on all those issues. Just by having them jump ship, the Republican party becomes a lot more appealing to minorities and women.

Of course, that leaves a hole in the GOP base. But if the Tea Party runs a candidate in the next election (or in a Senate race, House race, etc.), he won’t have a chance. The Tea Party does not have bipartisan support and America cannot sustain a third party.

In such a situation though, whoever the Republican candidate is will have a chance and the Tea Party members may switch their votes from their own guy to the Republican at the last second to prevent a Democrat victory. In addition, if the Republicans can pick up a decent percentage of minorities and women, the party won’t be as stuck to its base.

It’s certainly a risky strategy, but it’s also a great opportunity. In the end, Republicans may just say, “Bring on the war.”