The latest from Capitol Hill is that there is an agreement in principle on a budget that would cut $33 billion from domestic spending.
It must be noted that the agreement so far is only on the target figure, not the actual cuts. But assuming they get there, that's an amount of money that a few weeks ago Democrats like Harry Reid were saying was utterly unacceptable. But now it's the deal. That sounds like a Republican win to me.
The tea-party element, naturally, does not look at it that way at all. from Dana Milbank's WashPost column today:
A band of the first-term members of Congress demonstrated their legislative maturity Wednesday by announcing, in a news conference outside the Capitol, that they wished to deliver a message to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. But rather than merely send him an e-mail or hire a courier, the lawmakers instead marched up the East Front steps and presented themselves at a seldom-used ceremonial door.
Being a ceremonial door, it was locked and alarmed ? and so the freshmen used two strips of their blue tape to affix the letter, enclosed in a large manila envelope with the words "MR. REID" handwritten in four-inch letters.
"We're doing our job in the House of Representatives," announced Rep. Vicky Hartzler (R-Mo.), a member of the blue-tape brigade. "We put forth a proposal that would cut $61 billion .?.?. and yet Senator Reid won't even, uh, consider that. That is dereliction of duty."
As Milbank notes, in fact, Reid brought that very figure to the Senate floor, where it failed by a vote of 56-44.
From Politico, we receive the intelligence that the tea-party sympathetic members of the GOP House caucus plan on holding a rally today featuring "perhaps hundreds" (horrors!) of participants. These include the usual suspects: Michele Bachmann, Steve King, Mike Pence. And how many others?
That's the question: can the tea-party-ish members block a deal?
We can't know the answer yet because it depends in part on how many Democrats back the deal. My guess would be that most Democrats in the House would vote for it in the end, because that will be the White House position, and members don't want the uncertainty of a shutdown (which side will be blamed, what its effects might be on the economy).
If I'm right about that, then it would need a very large bloc of right-wing members to nix a deal, and I don't think they quite have those numbers. So let's say they lose this one. What next?
Then comes the debt-ceiling vote. But the way things look right now (and this could change), it looks like they'd lose that one, too. So then the interesting question will become, where does the tea party go. This will have an impact on the GOP presidential primaries, in all likelihood, and probably not a good one from the point of view of Republican electability.
Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself here. But this kind of politics is about votes and leverage, and the simple truth appears to be that they don't have quite enough of either. They'll become angrier and angrier. I don't feel like the Democrats have played this particularly well; substantively, remember, they are giving ground they said they'd never give. But politically, the bigger headache in the long run will be the GOP's.
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