Imagine in 2006 if Democrats had campaigned for the midterms not just against the war in Iraq, but on a leadership-backed pledge to end it -- presumably with whatever hardball procedural tactics were required to do that. Or, take another example and recall progressives' genuine anger in 2009 and 2010 when Democrats slowly bled the public option when a bit more procedural aggressiveness could in theory have put it into the law.
Either will give you a vague sense of the disappointment conservatives feel that after three years of being told Obamacare is an existential threat to the country, Republican leaders are unwilling to test the limits of their power in order to end the law.
As it happens, Republican leaders are making the correct calculation by eschewing extreme tactics. And senators like Mike Lee, R-Utah, and Ted Cruz, R-Texas, are being dishonest when they tell the right this is a fight Republicans can win. But the leaders bear most of the blame for fomenting this level of animosity toward the law, and thus themselves, in the first place. If Obamacare were really as bad as the party claims, trying to extort Democrats into defunding it would be the right move, even if it ultimately failed. And so we're poised in the coming months to watch Republicans suffer predictable reprisals for misleading the base about their intentions and capabilities, but also their core convictions, on multiple fronts.
As the Washington Post's Greg Sargent explains, "At a certain point they will have to level with the base, and acknowledge that the law is not going to be stopped through tactics outside normal electoral channels."
But this isn't isolated to healthcare.
Days before the August recess, we saw a harbinger of the looming comeuppances when Republicans demonstrated that for all their talk about locking in sequestration-level spending by cutting domestic programs even further and plussing up spending on defense, they can't actually execute. Some members aren't actually all that interested in cutting programs that benefit their constituents, or are worried about the political blowback if they do. Others demand more radical cuts. Add it all up and the votes they need to do what they pledged to do just aren't there.
And now that Cruz, Lee, et al. have opportunistically twinned Obamacare and the budget process in the minds of conservative voters, and GOP leaders are showing no interest in joining the fight, those voters are coming correctly to the conclusion that they've been lied to.
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