AND THE WINNER IS . . . THE TEA PARTY (SO FAR, MAYBE)

Before and after last November's elections, attention has been given to the question: Will the Tea Party (TP) be a force that drives GOP policy making in Congress, or will the establishment GOP absorb the newcomers? While TP candidates were elected to both the House and Senate, the primary search for the answer has focused on the House which was taken over by the Republicans, led by Speaker John Boehner. (See post "The Tea Party vs. The GOP: And The Winner Is . . . ")

In seeking to answer the question, much of the analysis has focused on the House passage before going on recess of a budget that would cut $61 billion from the current fiscal year which ends September 30. Based on this outcome, it could be said that Boehner's establishment GOP lost that intra-party fight since it initially proposed a cut of only $40 billion. After protests by TP members and other spending hawks, the establishment GOP, in this case meaning the GOP leadership and the chairman and top Republicans on the Appropriations Committee, were forced to go back to the drawing board and come up with an additional $21 billion in cuts. (See post, "Egypt and Boehner's Budget: Works in Progress".)

One problem with calling the TP the clear winner of this intra-party tug of war is that the outcome was really driven by the anti-spending pressures of the 87 new GOP House members, which included those identified with the TP, but also new members not linked to the TP but who shared the view that major cuts in federal spending are imperative, now. Then, of course, there are the approximately 150 GOP returnees who also backed the $61 billion cut. So just on these numbers, the TP showed itself a force to be reckoned with but the bulk of the needed votes came from non-TP House members.

But what does matter is that the TP, even before the elections, had staked out a position on spending cuts and big government and forced Republicans as a whole to move further to the right ideologically on this and other issues, including opposition to President Obama's health care reform which Republicans see as cutting across both the spending and big government issues. In forcing that ideological shift, the TP changed the national dialogue and that change was certified by the current and continuing war with the Democrats over federal spending, deficits, and debt. In political science terms, this would be called issue displacement. That is, having successfully beaten the Democrats over the head during the election about the state of the national economy and the failure of Obama and congressional Democrats to produce new jobs, now it's time to change the subject to deficit spending and debt.

Here is where a recent column by Washington Post writer E.J. Dionne, Jr., keys in on the essential point about the winner between the TP and the GOP establishment, and between the Republicans and Democrats. As Dionne put it, "No matter how much liberals may poke fun at them, tea party partisans can claim a victory in fundamentally altering the country's dialogue."

What this means is that the GOP doesn't have to raise hell about "Where are the jobs you promised?" and it doesn't even have to come forth with its own job-creation program. The issues of getting federal spending and the national debt under control have come to so completely dominate the national agenda to this point that it is a hard sell for the Democrats to even make the point that the GOP spending cuts will actually mean the loss of many jobs. That's the devastating political effect of issue displacement. Within that context, this posting declares the TP the winner against Boehner's establishment GOP -- so far, maybe.

Having changed the subject, the next test for the TP may come this week. That involves the March 4 deadline for continuing federal spending or shutting down the government. Over the past week the issue has focused on House-Senate efforts to work out a two-week, $4 billion cut in federal spending, to be followed by still another effort to provide funding/cuts for the remainder of the fiscal year. For the TP any deal-making talk may be less a matter of how many dollars in spending cuts may be in the compromise, but rather the word "compromise" itself which means the TP would fall short of what it demanded.

As stated in another previous post, the TP has taken on the character of a "puritanical movement". It is a movement that wants to define in its own terms what is meant by giving the country "back to the people, return to the Constitution, and restore old values. . . ." With fellow Republicans in mind, the TP means you either accept what we say this undefined rhetoric means and vote accordingly, or else we will fight you in the next election. And the warning is retroactive. Thus, in the 2012 elections, the TP is already out for the scalps of Republican Senators Orrin Hatch (Utah), Richard Lugar (Indiana), and Olympia Snowe (Maine) for their past votes and willingness to go along with Democrats.

What this means is that Boehner has his work cut out for him to get the TP and fellow traveling spending hawks to support a very short term compromise spending plan to void shutting down the government. Given the way Congress uses "smoke and mirrors" to obscure spending issues and decisions, one can be moderately optimistic that some way will be found to pretend that $1 in actual cuts can be made to appear like $2 to satisfy the TP/hawks while at the same time allowing the establishment GOP to avoid any possible negative political effects of a government shutdown.