tea party

I've been saying for a while that House Speaker John Boehner (OH) has to be worried about a challenge from the right wing of his own party for speaker in the next Congress.

As the story below from Roll Call (subscription needed) shows, he's already running hard.

John Boehner: A Republican House Means No Tax Rate Hikes

The day after Election Day is never a good time to do substantive analysis. The win seems bigger to those who won and those who lost usually are more despondent than the situation warrants.

That's the situation this morning: Democrats are crowing about permanent new demographic shifts in the electorate while the GOP is doing the standard soul searching by those who didn't accomplish what they had hoped.

As far as the federal budget is concerned, this will all change tomorrow when the caffeine induced highs and lows of the election are replaced with the realization that some very big fiscal cliff deadlines are now just seven weeks away.

Here's the situation:

1. At some point very soon -- probably around noon today eastern time -- the mood will change as the House GOP realizes that it is the last bastion when it comes to taxes and spending.

I've come to the conclusion that House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) is going to have a very difficult time making any deal with the Democrats during the lame duck session on taxes and spending – that is, on preventing the fiscal cliff – and still remain as speaker in the next Congress. That means that avoiding the fiscal cliff will be far harder than any analysis of the situation has dared to conclude.

Yes, this assumes that Republicans will keep the majority in the House next year and, therefore, that the GOP will be picking one of its own as speaker. But just consider what would happen if the following occurs.

Although we didn't realize it at the time, the seeds of the tea party were sown 22 years ago this week when George H.W. Bush decided that revenue increases should be part of a budget deal.

One of the most interesting things about this moment is that Republicans want to have it both ways. First, they insist that this deal means that Bush 41 and the GOP deserve much of the credit for the reduced deficit that occurred during the Clinton administration. Second, they also insist that, because it included a tax increase, the deal was an abomination.

Here's what I said about this "momentous" moment in U.S. political and history on NPR.

My column from today's Roll Call explains why "ridiculous' and "infuriating" are two of the milder words you might want to use when you think about the latest House GOP plans to abandon the deal it agreed to in August and try to use the fiscal 2013 budget resolution to cut appropriations even more.

In case you're wondering, This and they are not going to come even close to being successful.

Tea Party Budget Plans Don’t Make Political Sense

The big federal budget news from last week was that, pushed by their tea party wing, House Republicans were seriously considering a fiscal 2013 budget resolution that proposed to cut appropriations below the levels agreed to last August in the Budget Control Act.