GOP 'fiscal cliff' endgame: Let big government sting the middle class?

To be sure, the GOP’s intransigence, political experts say, is primarily rooted in a political reality where newly-redistricted voting maps have made Republican districts more deeply red, putting the party largely at the whim of gung-ho conservative primary voters, and putting anyone who sways from the “taxed enough already” tea party principles on notice for potential electoral backlash.

“For Republican members – many of whom were propelled into office by the tea party uprising of 2010 – the next two years could become a race to determine who has the sharpest rhetoric in opposition to the president’s policies,” Alex Isenstadt writes on Politico.

In that light, motivation to strike a fiscal cliff deal may be waning among tea party Republicans in the House, especially since some tea party activists have welcomed the idea of bringing back higher, Clinton era tax rates for everybody as long as they’re tied to deep spending cuts. That sanguine attitude from some in the tea party is only ratcheting up pressure on House Speaker John Boehner to quickly string together some kind of coalition to stave off a massive tax hike.

Senate action is likely to come Monday, and Boehner, in a bid for a bipartisan solution, has agreed to break with tradition and allow the entire House to immediately vote on what the Senate produces without meddling by the GOP caucus.

Meanwhile, while saying that “inaction is not an option,” Missouri Republican Senator Roy Blunt, in the GOP’s weekly address, continued to attack Obama and the Democrat-led Senate in a bid to deflect blame if the fiscal cliff is reached, sending fuming middle class voters looking for someone else to blame. 

“At a time when neither party is looking competent, Republicans appear to be inoculating themselves for taking heavy blame if no fiscal cliff deal is reached,” Bill Lambrecht writes in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch this morning.

But with so much money at stake for the middle class and so much political capital in the balance for America’s two major parties, the very principles of Constitutional government also hang in the balance as Republicans plan their next moves, writes conservative columnist George Will.

A willingness to let the Bush tax cuts expire along with imposing mandatory spending cuts could have less to do with Obama’s charge of dysfunction in the House ranks and more a push by some in the Republican party to fundamentally examine “the nature of the American regime” at a critical time in the nation’s history, he suggests.

“When the Republican House majority acts as though it has a mind – and a mandate – of its own, this is not Washington being ‘dysfunctional,’ it is the separation of powers functioning as the Founders intended,” Mr. Will noted recently. “Their system requires concurrent congressional majorities – one in the Senate, with its unique constituencies and electoral rhythms, another in the House, with its constituencies and rhythms. And at least 219 of the 234 House Republicans won in November by margins larger than Obama’s national margin.”

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