A Resetting Between Neo-cons & Conservatives of Yore
The House Speaker, Republican John Bonner offered to support a debt ceiling raise for the federal budget in return for a Senate budget. This would have been political suicide just 3 months ago before the last election trumped the Republicans by wide margins nationwide. To suggest supporting any policy that raised taxes for any reason was the cardinal sin of the Tea Party wing running the conservative movement for much of the last 2 years since the Republican take over of the House in the mid-term elections. This was done in the name that the Republicans would than retrench behind the new line in the sand of no raised debt ceiling unless social programs were cut. This back-up attack has now also been discarded.
This policy shift represents the old brand of Republican politically based policy rather than the ideological posturing of the last 4 years. The old Republican guard is reasserting itself against the neo-con take over building over the last 20 years. Two decades of work is being unhinged by a single election just at the hour that was to be their final victory. Mitt Romney’s loss represented the ending of the Tea Party era as the dominate force of the conservative movement. Boehner’s policy shift in agreeing to tax hikes and debt ceiling raises is the retaking of the party by the traditional Republican political leadership of the Reagan era. This policy shift is the official beginning to the struggle between the Tea Party of the Neo-cons and the Reagan Republicans of moderate conservatives.
We will have to see how it plays out. Democrats are likely to over reach much as Republicans did once they gained the political high ground. This would sideline these new moderate Republicans thereby handing the party back to the Neo-cons. Democrats negotiating with this newly moderated leadership could very well seal the fate of the Republican party back to its original roots of the moderate mold of the Reagan years.
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