Cruz
himself has a different timetable. Secure in a Senate seat for six years, he
can aim his efforts at 2016, which have already borne fruit in early polling of
GOP zealots.
Boehner,
weirdly tan as ever, is not visibly blanching at the prospect, but his two-year
struggle to straddle the Tea Party and sane GOP horses riding off in different directions
has been upset by an interloper from the other House.
“The
Republican Party right now,” says New
York Magazine, “most closely resembles a Weatherman gathering from about
1969, with various factions debating the feasibility of immediate Communist
revolution versus building a working-class movement as a prelude to smashing
the state...
“The
agenda has largely been driven by the ‘Defund Obamacare’ faction, led by Ted
Cruz, which proposes to shut down the federal government until such time as
President Obama agrees to abolish his health-care plan, which would of course
be never.”
The
irony is that his own chamber has rebuffed Cruz with a vote in which 23
Republicans joined all the Democrat by opting for reality, a commodity in short
supply in the House of Representatives.
As
Boehner’s buffoons respond with a ransom note demanding a one-year delay in
funding Obamacare, the standoff continues. Even after this skirmish is resolved,
the unprecedented crisis of American self-governing will go on.
“We’ve
had enough of the disunity in our party,” Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Boehner’s
Iago and panting-to-be successor, tells colleagues. “The headlines are
Republicans fighting Republicans.”
As
usual, Cantor has it wrong. What we are seeing is Republicans fighting over two
centuries of American history. They had better take a second look at that span
as they try to extricate themselves from the conflicts in the Cruz-Boehner
timetables.
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