[MormefWrarebe]

This is awesome. For all their pandering to the Tea Party minority, House Dems forced Republicans to put up or shut up today, and as anyone might expect, they shut up very quickly.

For House Republicans, the priority is staying in office. You can't do that when extremists are holding the purse strings, so you have to do this dance where you tell them what they want to hear and then you actually vote for more moderate proposals, ideally blaming Democrats for forcing the conversation more toward the center. The beauty is that most Tea Party folks will believe whatever Fox News tells them, so Republicans can push their cover story there without being asked any real questions.

But if the Democrats refuse to play spoiler, you end up with this.

TPM: http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2...et.php?ref=fpb

The vote was on the Republican Study Committee's alternative budget -- a radical plan that annihilates the social contract in America by putting the GOP budget on steroids. Deeper tax cuts for the wealthy, more severe entitlement rollbacks.

Normally something like that would fail by a large bipartisan margin in either the House or the Senate. Conservative Republicans would vote for it, but it would be defeated by a coalition of Democrats and more moderate Republicans. But today that formula didn't hold. In an attempt to highlight deep divides in the Republican caucus. Dems switched their votes -- from "no" to "present."

Panic ensued. In the House, legislation passes by a simple majority of members voting. The Dems took themselves out of the equation, leaving Republicans to decide whether the House should adopt the more-conservative RSC budget instead of the one authored by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan. As Dems flipped to present, Republicans realized that a majority of their members had indeed gone on the record in support of the RSC plan -- and if the vote closed, it would pass. That would be a slap in the face to Ryan, and a politically toxic outcome for the Republican party.

So they started flipping their votes from "yes" to "no."

In the end, the plan went down by a small margin, 119-136. A full 172 Democrats voted "present."

[epPtsDno]

I have no idea if this is true, or just rumblings among the far right, but here it is: if the Tea Party now in Washington doesn't get with the program they'll be primaried by even further right Tea Partiers. That's actually good news for Democrats. The further out there these folks get, the more they'll turn off the electorate.