re: #147 wozzablog

Bingo.

There is no world in which a paid for tax cut for two months is not an easy vote when the vast majority of your senate colleagues has already voted for it.

Boehner went out on a limb and everybody apart from Allan West and the kind started sawing away at the branch.

It was clear he may not be able to carry his caucus but there were enough GOP + Dems still in town until late in the day to pass it on a free vote. My hunch is he was protecting the GOPs who’d have voted against so as to save them come election time.

That might have been part of it, but I think he was trying to avoid passing the extension with Democratic votes. Doing so would have made a challenge to his Speakership very likely and it would have gotten the Republicans who voted for the compromise in the House tagged as RINOs.

Under the scenario I just laid out, the Tea Party could have lost both the vote and respect from the rest of America but still have enhanced its position within the GOP by pushing for a “RINO Hunt!!1”. As it actually happened, they still lost respect with the public, but the Tea Party also crucially lost respect within the Republican party. They set out to take a defiant stand, and ended up sitting silently as the bill they tried to block passed anyways. They look like losers, not rebels.