Wonkbook: John Boehner’s tough math

By Ezra Klein
WashPost

The math of a possible budget deal isn’t particularly hard. If John Boehner can’t get enough Republicans, he can always move to the left and get some Democrats. As my colleague Paul Kane reports, there’ve been some preliminary feelers from GOP leadership looking into doing just that. Plenty of Blue Dogs would be happy to help out, and the Republican leadership could get a spending bill with cuts equal to their initial $30 billion proposal. By any normal accounting, that’d be a win. It’d be as if House Democrats had managed to send their first health-care bill, complete with public option, sailing through the Senate in order to head off a singe-payer proposal favored by the party’s liberal wing. What the arithmetic leaves out, however, is Eric Cantor.

Whether you call it the Tea Party or not, the hardline of the modern Republican Party has demonstrated its willingness and skill at deposing incumbent Republicans who are too willing to compromise with the other side. Deposing the Speaker of the House, however, is hard. But it’s a bit less hard if you have another option waiting in the wings. An option like Eric Cantor. As David Rogers and Jake Sherman note, Cantor has been separating himself from Boehner’s “I’m not going to put any options on the table or take any options off the table” and making it clear that he both opposes a short-term CR and hasn’t been informed about a range of compromise discussions. It’s an odd public stance for the Majority Leader to take. But it’s right in line with a Republican Party where the conservative caucus has promised to counter Paul Ryan’s budget with an even-more conservative document -- even though no one has yet seen Ryan’s budget!

To a degree that freshman Republicans may not realize, however, Boehner’s allergy to a shutdown is in their best interests. If you buy the Mitch McConnell line that the GOP’s top priority should be denying President Obama reelection, then you want the government to stay open. Evidence that political scientists collected from almost 170 instances of late budgets or shutdowns on the state level showed that fiscal chaos hurts incumbent legislators from both parties win reelection but helps the executive when he runs. They theorized that this is because it makes Congress look small and the executive big. And sure enough, Obama has stayed out of the fray, and is set to announce a major new initiative on green energy today -- the exact sort of forward-looking, let’s-get-on-with-the-people’s-problems initiative that will contrast badly with a Congress unable to come to a reasonable compromise on 2011 funding.

(More here.)

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