GOP’s internal hate-fest: How a low-profile budget dispute is tearing the party apart

GOP’s internal hate-fest: How a low-profile budget dispute is tearing the party apart

by Elias Isquith at Salon

http://www.salon.com/2015/03/16/gops_internal_hate_fest_how_a_low_profile_budget_dispute_is_tearing_the_party_apart/

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Now, the sequester’s effects on the economy have not been as dire as some have predicted. Even with the sequester’s self-destructive limitations, the overall economy has continued to grow and the labor market is finally starting to catch up. Because its Cassandras have been seemingly refuted, many members of the GOP’s Tea Party wing have decided that the sequester is either not such a big deal, or is instead a crucial first step toward dismantling big government. And while many of them are no doubt sympathetic to GOP hawks, like Sen. John McCain and Sen. Lindsey Graham, who think the sequester’s defense cuts harm U.S. national security, they’re not willing to throw away what remains the biggest legislative feather in the Tea Party’s cap.

For most of the past four years, this internal disagreement existed largely in the abstract. The GOP did not hold full control over the Congress, and was therefore able to focus its attention on less divisive topics — like the many ways in which Democrats and President Obama are bad. But with Republicans now working hard to prove their competence by unveiling a budget, this point of disagreement can no longer be swept under the Capitol building’s rug. And with the state of the economy no longer dominating Americans’ attention, it’s increasingly become conventional wisdom among GOP hawks that the 2016 election will be about national security and foreign affairs. (Which, of course, is music to your ears if you work within the military industrial complex.)

So if you’re wondering why Graham, in the Times piece, describes the fight over the sequester’s defense cuts as “a war within the Republican Party”; or why McCain chides his fellow GOPers not to “complain about the president of the United States if we are going to stick to the sequestration numbers,” think of these two factors as the chief explanations. One, they’re the leading spokesmen for the bloc of the GOP that the Tea Party most tends to hate, and they’re eager to reassert their power now that it looks like American politics is moving beyond the austerity fetish that held sway during the Great Recession. Two, the 2016 election is right around the corner, and lobbyists for the defense industry (who will no doubt be hearing from Graham if he decides to run for president) are taking calls. Just ask Tom Cotton.

What we’re about to witness, then, is the GOP civil war we’ve long been promised. If the Tea Party has any real pull left, they’ll defeat or brush-back the push from McCain, Graham and God only knows how many lobbyists to increase defense spending in the Republican Party’s forthcoming budget. And if they don’t and they can’t, they’ll be revealed — at least on the federal level — to be little more than useful idiots for a power-hungry GOP establishment, as some Tea Party critics have long suspected. Only time will tell, of course; but if I were a gambler, I know how I’d bet.




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