Last week, Speaker Boehner described the Senate deal for extending middle-class tax cuts and unemployment benefits as acceptable. No sooner did the Tea Party House Republicans begin to fear that this good faith compromise just might succeed than they stepped forward and smashed the deal. What happened? The anti-government ideologues happened.
The Tea Partiers rejected the deal their leader blessed—knowing full well the Senate would not capitulate to their demand—and thereby risking the livelihood of 160 million Americans who depend on the extension of unemployment benefits and payroll tax cuts. These are the Grover Norquist disciples who want to “drown government in the bathtub."
When your entire philosophy is that government is the problem, you make government the problem. Even conservative economists agree that unemployment benefits create jobs by allowing consumers to spend more money. Yet this conflicts with the Republicans’ predetermined ideology that no government action can help.
The Republican philosophy goes something like this: if you take your car to the mechanic and instead of fixing it, they take out the engine and charge you an arm and a leg, you should conclude that mechanics can’t fix cars and you should probably just take yours to the junkyard and sell it for scrap metal.
But the truth is—you probably just hired a bad mechanic.
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