MOST PEOPLE who saw House Speaker John Boehner’s fiery speech to the nation on Monday night assumed he had capitulated to his party’s far-right fringe. But not even that sufficed; Boehner spent much of yesterday scrambling to convince ultra-conservative House Republicans that his debt-reduction proposal goes far enough. It turns out many Tea Party adherents can’t even bring themselves to accept the speaker’s plan for $1.2 billion in cuts to discretionary spending alone, a gutting of the programs that constitute the ordinary business of government - education, transportation, energy, environmental protection - without any tax increase at all. It would also force another debt-ceiling vote in six months, in the midst of the 2012 campaign, which would give the Tea Party a whole new chance to make its demands.
Boehner can’t please Tea Party, but bipartisan deal could work
EDITORIAL | Globe Editorial
Boehner’s plan would be bad for the country, but the fact that he had to delay the vote in an 11th-hour attempt to win over extremists who insist on even steeper cuts illustrates the extent to which a small faction of House members are holding the nation hostage. Whatever the outcome of the current debate - and the best to hope for now is a House-Senate compromise that at least extends the debt ceiling for two years - this Tea Party-led putsch cannot again be allowed to thwart the more balanced agenda favored by most Americans.
The far right is seeking to dominate the nation’s agenda by controlling the GOP caucus in the House. Though newly elected Tea Party supporters do not even constitute a majority of Republican House members, they can recruit enough other conservatives - some naturally aligned with the Tea Party, others fearful of right-wing primary challenges - to force Boehner to adhere to their wishes. But allowing the most extreme faction of one party in one branch of government to call the shots for the rest of the nation is not democracy in action; it’s not what was envisioned by the framers of the Constitution. Someone should alert Michele Bachmann and others who worship the Founding Fathers that those wise old souls envisioned the House as a real debating society, in which representatives worked together to find common ground, and not as a place where a minority could manipulate the rules to impose its will.