The coming Republican civil war

I honestly have never seen so much coverage of an issue as we saw about the debt ceiling over the last three months.  The funny thing is that the coverage was all filtered through a lens of partisan bickering, rather than the more honest assessment:

1. Tea Party Republicans didn’t want to rubberstamp the deal
2. Mainstream Republicans saw the opportunity to make a deal out of a rubberstamp issue
3. Democrats tried to get enough votes to pay bills for money already spent for something that previous Republican presidents (including the beloved Reagan) got rubberstamped

But most of the media is obsessed with this as “partisanship” and “bickering” when it wasn’t, and is dishonest if presented as such.

A few journalists have been speaking out about how bad the journalism has been throughout this conversation, but they are in the minority.  And now that it is finalized, maybe we can turn our attention to what the House Speaker was actually doing.  He was stuck between a debt default and splitting his political force in half.  Unlike the Senate Minority Leader, who seemed eager to play the role of spoiler, Speaker Boehner was put into a position to actually reject a dream bill offered up to him by the president.  Much attention has gone to Grover Norquist’s role in getting no-new-taxes pledges from all of the Republicans in Congress, but little is being made of that fractured constituency in light of any inevitable compromise.

Of course the smart money should have been on pushing through something solid in the Senate, knowing enough Republicans would buckle and getting every Democrat to go along with it.  This would have caused some stress on Boehner and the Congresspersons that would vote for it.  But in dividing the House, Boehner won’t be able to go back and say, they made us eat this to stave off default while aiding the people he had fall on the sword.  He is left trying to unify a traditional half that sees this as a big win and a Tea Party half that no doubt still thinks he caved anyway and should be removed. 

The politically bloody primary season has only just begun and the battle between Bachmann and Romney seems already set as a proxy for the Tea Party vs. Traditional GOP.  I can’t help but imagine that this is about to get interesting during the August vacation.