Cillizza ponders Boehner’s dressing down of Tea Party PACs:
While many within the Republican establishment will applaud Boehner, McConnell and Ryan for their willingness to take on the tea party, the fight is not without potential negative consequences for them. While the tea party is not as popular — even among Republicans — as it once was, in low turnout GOP primaries it remains a force to be reckoned with. And, with seven of the 12 Republican incumbents in the Senate set to face a primary challenge from their right, there will ample opportunity for groups like the Club For Growth, Heritage, Americans for Prosperity and the Senate Conservatives Fund to prove that crossing them is a very bad idea.
Look to the May 20 primary fight between McConnell and businessman Matt Bevin and the June 3 race between Mississippi Sen. Thad Cochran and state Sen. Chris McDaniel to see whether the new confront-the-conservative-groups strategy can work.
Sargent’s perspective:
There are all kinds of reasons why this has happened. As Danny Vinink points out, Boehner now has incentives for refusing to bow to the Tea Party, from the fact that Paul Ryan is now on his side, to the need to prevent chaos governing from taking the focus off Obamacare. (Here’s a case where absolute GOP certainty that the health law will fail over time and shower the GOP with nonstop riches has produced positive results.) Meanwhile, Brian Beutler argues persuasively that, by refusing to budge in the last shutdown and forcing a GOP cave, Obama finally drove home to House Republicans the limits of what sabotage governing can accomplish, leaving Boehner with little choice but to tell the sabotage governing brigade to take a hike.
Allahpundit is somewhat surprised:
I did not expect that this lame budget deal would be Boehner’s red line for tea-party criticism. But maybe it had to be that way. If he’d slammed them in October, when Cruz and Lee had galvanized the base against the bete noire of O-Care, it might have cost him his gavel. The stakes are lower now — he proved he was willing to shut down the government for a conservative cause, everyone understands that any budget deal with Democrats will vary only in shades of badness, and enough people have tuned out of the news in December that there won’t be any grand revolt against him. If he wants to throw down the gauntlet to groups like the Club for Growth and FreedomWorks, now’s as good a time as any.
Weigel joins the conversation:
The only question is whether Boehner is running a wonderful distraction or whether this really does represent a move to make the Professional Right less relevant. The reason Paul Ryan had to flog this deal, and Boehner couldn’t, was that the right stopped respecting Boehner years ago. In the summer of 2011, in December 2012, when he tried to save his party some face and pass big spending bills without Democratic votes, a rump of his members refused to get him across the 217-vote line. Over time this emboldened more members, who philosophically agreed with the easily lampooned right-wingers, and Boehner was denied dozens of Republican votes on his measures.
First Read’s take on Boehner’s comments:
This is the aspect that frustrates so many non-Tea Party Republicans. They have the Democrats agreeing to the premise of “what should we cut,” not “what should we spend.” Sure, conservatives think Democrats aren’t as fervent about cutting spending as they are, duh! But the fact they have Democrats agreeing to look for spending cuts is a fundamental philosophical chance right now. The conservative movement just doesn’t know how to declare victory; it’s akin to caring more about the margin of victory in a football game than simply the victory itself.
The Dish 