TeaPublicans: Give Us What We Want, or We'll Pick Up Our Ball and Go Home !

We live in an admittedly politically polarized society.  However, I would submit that the Left (note capital ‘L’) has remained where it always has been, at least since the Roosevelt administration, while the Right (capital ‘R’) has moved toward an ever-increasing conservative position on the political continuum.   This has resulted in an unfortunate set of situations that I believe have become quite obvious.  However, there are other, significantly less obvious, unfortunate situations that have resulted.

The unfortunate situation is the requirement for split loyalties within the Republican Party.  It goes like this.  The Republican Party has been taken over, in part, by the ultra-Conservative, neo-fascist, Right Wing of the Party.  I refer to them as TeaPublicans.  However, this takeover is not country-wide.  The TeaPublicans are very important to Republicans when it comes to primary elections.  A Republican cannot get re-elected without the support of TeaPublicans, so he or she is beholden to them to keep his job.  If he does not toe the line, he ends up with competition in the primary where the TeaPublicans can defeat the less conservative and, I think, more reasonable and rational of the two.  So TeaPublicans can control the vote of any individual Senator or Representative at the local level.

However, the interests of the Republican Party, as a whole, may be more country-wide.  Yet if an individual elected official votes with these National Interests of the Party, they vote against the demands of the TeaPublicans.  To do what is good for the Republican Party in general, but they have to vote in a way that the local interests perceive as wrong and, in some cases, as literally traitorous.  The TeaPublicans hold the individual members hostage.  You get to choose whether to do what’s good for the whole Party or what’s good for you to get re-elected.

Let us examine the debt ceiling issue.  TeaPublicans demand that the debt ceiling be held hostage to an effort to defund ObamaCare.  Most legitimate polls indicate the Republican Party will suffer incredible losses in poll numbers, as high as 79%, if the Party forces a government shutdown.  However, individual Senators and Representatives will suffer horribly at the polls in their individual districts, if they do what is in the best interest of the Republican Party as a whole and vote not to shut down the government.  This would require the unfunding of ObamaCare provision to be dropped from the Continuing Funding Resolution as it is currently proposed.

Current estimates are that almost 80% of the electorate will hold the Republican Party directly responsible for a government shutdown.  This will translate into a near inability to win the Presidential election in 2016.  It is possible the TeaPublicans may maintain control of the House of Representatives based on this semi-suicidal tactic, but it brands the Republican Party as weak and helpless against this neo-fascist, ultra-conservative Right Wing of the Party. 

A shutdown of the Federal Government is certainly not an unheard of event, but the shutdowns of 1995-96 and 2011, as a result of extreme partisan bickering caused the credit rating of the United States to be taken now a notch; leaving us in about the same place as Belgium, but below Great Britain and Australia, known as the “AAA Club.”  The political bickering and enduring partisanship caused Standard and Poor’s to doubt the stability of the U.S. Economy and took away a valuable asset, that AAA-rating.  This has had an enduring effect on both the Economy and financial markets, and is likely to have a deleterious effect on the fragile economic recovery currently underway.

Unfortunately, the TeaPublicans, like bullies playing ball on a schoolyard, will pick up their ball and go home if they don’t get exactly what they want, the consequences be damned. Then they will try to blame the Democratic Party (yes, that’s Democratic, not Democrat…use the language correctly morons), but very few people are going to buy into it and it just may guarantee a Democratic President in 2016.  Naaahhhhh, it still ain’t worth it.