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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsGOP’s internal hate-fest: How a low-profile budget dispute is tearing the party apart
GOPs internal hate-fest: How a low-profile budget dispute is tearing the party apartby Elias Isquith at Salon
http://www.salon.com/2015/03/16/gops_internal_hate_fest_how_a_low_profile_budget_dispute_is_tearing_the_party_apart/
"SNIP..................
Now, the sequesters effects on the economy have not been as dire as some have predicted. Even with the sequesters self-destructive limitations, the overall economy has continued to grow and the labor market is finally starting to catch up. Because its Cassandras have been seemingly refuted, many members of the GOPs Tea Party wing have decided that the sequester is either not such a big deal, or is instead a crucial first step toward dismantling big government. And while many of them are no doubt sympathetic to GOP hawks, like Sen. John McCain and Sen. Lindsey Graham, who think the sequesters defense cuts harm U.S. national security, theyre not willing to throw away what remains the biggest legislative feather in the Tea Partys cap.
For most of the past four years, this internal disagreement existed largely in the abstract. The GOP did not hold full control over the Congress, and was therefore able to focus its attention on less divisive topics like the many ways in which Democrats and President Obama are bad. But with Republicans now working hard to prove their competence by unveiling a budget, this point of disagreement can no longer be swept under the Capitol buildings rug. And with the state of the economy no longer dominating Americans attention, its increasingly become conventional wisdom among GOP hawks that the 2016 election will be about national security and foreign affairs. (Which, of course, is music to your ears if you work within the military industrial complex.)
So if youre wondering why Graham, in the Times piece, describes the fight over the sequesters defense cuts as a war within the Republican Party; or why McCain chides his fellow GOPers not to complain about the president of the United States if we are going to stick to the sequestration numbers, think of these two factors as the chief explanations. One, theyre the leading spokesmen for the bloc of the GOP that the Tea Party most tends to hate, and theyre eager to reassert their power now that it looks like American politics is moving beyond the austerity fetish that held sway during the Great Recession. Two, the 2016 election is right around the corner, and lobbyists for the defense industry (who will no doubt be hearing from Graham if he decides to run for president) are taking calls. Just ask Tom Cotton.
What were about to witness, then, is the GOP civil war weve long been promised. If the Tea Party has any real pull left, theyll defeat or brush-back the push from McCain, Graham and God only knows how many lobbyists to increase defense spending in the Republican Partys forthcoming budget. And if they dont and they cant, theyll be revealed at least on the federal level to be little more than useful idiots for a power-hungry GOP establishment, as some Tea Party critics have long suspected. Only time will tell, of course; but if I were a gambler, I know how Id bet.
................SNIP"
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GOP’s internal hate-fest: How a low-profile budget dispute is tearing the party apart (Original Post)
applegrove
Mar 2015
OP
appal_jack
(3,813 posts)1. Every teabagger I know will relent in the face of war spending.
They may talk about the need to curb bloated 'defense' budgets, but one 'boo!' from the bogeyman of the moment, and they all are screaming for funding the military maximally.
The Tea Party was always about cutting social programs. Well, that and trying as hard as it could to neuter the election of a Black Democrat to the Presidency.
-app