Tea party split from traditional GOP now seems like real possibility

"It's Strangelovian."

 

A Gallup poll last week, released before the shutdown was over, showed strong and growing support among average voters for the formation of a third political party, with most wishing for a political place that would welcome independents and moderates.

But it appears we’re now heading toward the tea party essentially splitting from the traditional Republicans and taking a stand as a third party entity. Tea party strategists are sticking pins in the map that identify Republican senators and House members they want to knock off in the 2014 primary elections. Sen. Ted Cruz has put the federal government on Cruz Control for the next few months but it sounds like he wants to defy the GOP establishment in a more disruptive way by staging another shutdown in January.

His comments over the weekend about Senate Republicans bombing friendly troops (the House GOP) into submission will surely antagonize the party faithful.

At the same time, some mainstream Republican commentators are openly hoping for a Democratic Party takeover of the House in 2014 that would oust or disarm most of the tea partiers in Congress. That wish will undoubtedly fire up the tea party team.

In Michigan, we’ve seen a reversal of the recent trend, with GOP tea party allies Rep. Justin Amash and Rep. Kerry Bentivolio facing 2014 primary opponents who represent an intra-party movement to push the Republicans away from the far-right ideas and tactics of the tea party folks.

A respected conservative voice, Rod Dreher, senior editor at The American Conservative magazine, said that he now views tea party Republicans on Capitol Hill as the equivalent of Dr. Strangelove, the deranged movie character of the early 1960s who sought a suicidal nuclear weapons confrontation with the Soviet Unior.

Commenting on the tea party pull in Republican circles, Dreher wrote ruefully:

“It’s Strangelovian. Maybe there won’t be a long-term fallout from this, but I tell you, it’s very hard to see entrusting power to a party that behaves this way, that manufactures crises like this for its own short-term political gain. The Republicans, having lost their mind, have destroyed their brand.

“… I cannot believe I’m saying this, but I hope the House flips to the Democrats in 2014, so we can be rid of these nuts. Let Ted Cruz sit in the Senate stewing in his precious bodily fluids, and let Washington get back to the business of governing.

None other than Matt Drudge, author of the online Drudge Report, is now predicting a Democratic win in the 2014 House elections and the re-emergence of Rep. Nancy Pelosi as House Speaker in 2015. Another conservative writer who believes the Cruzaders must be stopped, at any cost, is Josh Barro of Business Insider.

He warned:

“Can you imagine the situation this country would be in if Republicans controlled both houses of Congress right now? Or if we had a president whose administration gets jerked around by Heritage Action in the same way that House Republicans do? It would be a train wreck, and ‘reasonable’ Republicans … would still be on television saying they understand it's a train wreck, but by golly, operationally, they had no way to stop it.

“There is no serious argument for Republican governance right now, even if you prefer conservative policies over liberal ones. These people are just too dangerously incompetent to be trusted with power.”