The Party of No Flirts With Yes as Mitch McConnell’s Grip on the GOP Slips

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/07/19/the-party-of-no-flirts-with-yes-as-mitch-mcconnell-s-grip-on-the-gop-slips.html


The Party of No Flirts With Yes as Mitch McConnell’s Grip on the GOP Slips
by Michael Tomasky
Jul 19, 2013 4:45 AM EDT

After calling ‘bullshit’ on McConnell, Bob Corker said he was ‘glad that that occurred.’ Michael Tomasky on the minority leader’s restless caucus.


This has been a really important week in the United States Senate, as important a week as we’ve seen there in a long, long time. No, not because Harry Reid out-pokered Mitch McConnell on the filibuster fight. No, not because President Obama finally got some long-scuttled nominees approved on bipartisan votes. No, not because John McCain decided to become, for a while at least, the Mavericky McCain of the 1990s and early 2000s. And no, not even because of the bipartisan (did I really use that word twice, to describe the Senate?) deal to keep student loan rates low, on which they’ll vote next week. Rather, it was a really important week because of the upshot of all those things, or the reason they all happened: this is the week that Mitch McConnell lost his iron grip on the Senate Republican caucus.

snip//

I don’t want to make too much of all this. McConnell’s leadership isn’t threatened. He faces reelection next year—he may yet get a primary opponent from the right, and he already has a strong-on-paper Democrat challenging him in the general election, so his colleagues will give him leeway. McCain’s Maverick posture will return, it seems, but probably only occasionally. And they’re still a bunch of hard-shell conservatives, so it’s not as if they’re going to start passing carbon-tax bills.

But even so, this is big and potentially seismic stuff. Remember when Tea Party GOPer Richard Mourdock beat old bull Dick Lugar in a primary in Indiana? That was just last year. At that point, all the Republicans (who weren’t Tea Partiers) were terrified of “being Mourdocked.” Now, a mere year later, they—some of them; enough of them—are concerned about being tagged as too Tea Partyish. Some of them actually want to govern a little—Corker, Lamar Alexander, Mark Kirk, Susan Collins, Jeff Flake, a few others—and are sick, maybe, of blocking everything. And finally, this week, they saw that they can be something other than totally obstructionist, and the world will still spin.

So, again, I hope the Democrats in the Senate take note of the dominoes that are tumbling here because they stood together. And I hope Obama is learning the right lesson here. It wasn’t conciliation and pleas to reason together that forced this change. It was muscle.