The fiscal year is about to end, so the annual awakening of Tea Party Republicans in the House and Senate is about to begin. Most of the time they sit around and do virtually nothing but gripe (they have made the current Congress the least productive ever), but a new fiscal year finally gives them a chance to govern the only way they know how: by creating a false crisis in order to tear down a piece of the government.
This year, as has been the case so often in the past, their target is President Obama's health care reform law. If it is not repealed or defunded or delayed or otherwise left bleeding in the public square, they will not pass a spending bill needed to keep the government open past Sept. 30. And if that doesn't cripple the health law (which it won't), they will resort to the far more serious threat of default, refusing to raise the nation's debt ceiling, no matter the catastrophe that would cause.
It has been clear for months that House Republicans are not going to agree to the Senate's reasonable spending plan for 2014, one that replaces the damage of the sequester with a mix of revenue increases and less-harmful cuts. The House budget, in fact, calls for cuts to below the sequester level. The best that can be hoped for is a stopgap measure, known as a continuing resolution, to keep the government running through mid-December at this year's inadequate level.
But on Wednesday, with time running out, House leaders announced they couldn't manage even something as simple as that. Speaker John Boehner and Eric Cantor, the majority leader, had come up with a far-fetched scheme to placate the radicals in their coalition by attaching a provision to the spending resolution that would force the Senate to vote on defunding health reform. The Senate would, of course, instantly reject the health care language, but it could then approve the spending measure to prevent a shutdown.
The Republican extremists killed the idea, leaving the scheme without enough votes. They are no longer interested in symbolic blows against the health law; there have already been scores of those votes. They actually think they can get the Senate, and ultimately the president, to approve the defunding of the health law — Mr. Obama's most important achievement — by threatening to harm the nation and the economy.
This is pure delusion. Democrats are never going to undo the law, especially knowing the size of the self-inflicted wound Republicans would suffer if they really did force a shutdown or, far worse, a default. But the powerful forces on the right don't care about reality. The Club for Growth, a conservative group, announced it would use its dreaded ratings system against any Republican who supported a continuing resolution that did not "defund Obamacare."
According to the Senate Conservatives Fund, an activist group, "House Republican leaders have chickened out and decided to fund a program that will destroy our country." The group, founded by former Senator Jim DeMint, promised to run primary challengers against those who don't vote to destroy the law.
Mr. Boehner, too, bears responsibility for the chaos that engulfs him. On Thursday, he demanded health-law concessions from Democrats, even as he announced that "we'll continue to do everything we can to repeal, dismantle and defund Obamacare." This only raises expectations on the right that the impossible might be achieved, as Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, put it, "in an alternative universe."
What the speaker should be doing is the only thing that will spare the economy this unnecessary trauma: putting a clean spending bill and debt-ceiling increase before the full House for a vote, making it clear that the shrill voices of extremists have been silenced.
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Editorial: The Annual Republican Crisis
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