With Fear of Being Sidelined, Tea Party Sees the Republican Rise as New Threat

[applegrove]

With Fear of Being Sidelined, Tea Party Sees the Republican Rise as New Threat

By JEREMY W. PETERS at the NY Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/09/us/politics/before-battling-democrats-gop-is-fighting-itself-.html?smid=re-share

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As Republicans on Capitol Hill transition from being the opposition party to being one that has to show it can govern, a powerful tension is emerging: how to move forward with an agenda that challenges the president without self-destructing.

Some conservatives believe that the threat of another shutdown is their strongest leverage to demand concessions on the health care law and to stop the president from carrying out immigration reform through executive order. Yet their leadership has dismissed the idea as a suicide mission that could squander the recent gains.

One thing that will prove popular among the base is a commitment by Senator Mitch McConnell, the presumptive new majority leader, to bring up a bill that would ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, which he is expected to do next year.

Whether the party can reconcile more demands of its base with the will of its leadership could determine how enduring the Republican Senate majority will be. The crop of senators up for re-election in 2016 includes those elected in the first Tea Party wave of 2010. And in a sign of what is at stake, even some of them are sounding notes of compromise and caution that would have been unthinkable at the height of the right’s resurgence.




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[CaliforniaPeggy]

1. May the issues that divide them only grow deeper and more ferocious.

[Kalidurga]

3. If only there was a way to bring out that divide

like ballot initiatives that would bring out authoritarian types against the libertarian types.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

4. I suspect they'll manage that just fine by themselves.

The Tea partiers are very suspicious of the main-stream Republicans.

[Takket]

2. The tea party sees EVERYTHING as a threat

That's the byproduct of being a paranoid coward.