Cruz, allies ready for next battle with ‘Surrender Caucus’

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

The rowdy, stubborn species of conservatives who forced the 16-day shutdown of the federal government and brought the nation to the brink of default see only victory in their loss in the debt-ceiling battle.

They’ve got a new rallying cry and a new moniker for their archenemy of establishment politicians and status quo government: the “Surrender Caucus.”

And anyone who dares think the latest crisis averted will end the cycle of budget battles, debt default threats and assaults on Obamacare should think again.

This renegade band of unconventional politicians already lives for the next fight — which has been kicked beyond the holidays to early 2014. And none of Washington’s traditional levers of influence seem able to divert them from the goal of fighting again.

The threat of being stripped of committee assignments, losing party support for re-election or being blamed in the polls for the shutdown has little effect on the likes of Republican Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Mike Lee of Utah and their allies in the House.

“We are getting zero fiscal discipline,” a frustrated Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin said when explaining why he voted against the budget deal despite hailing from a state that voted for President Obama twice.

There is also a misunderstanding in the mainstream media about what really motivated these boat-rockers. It wasn’t about actually stopping Democrats from taking the Affordable Care Act across the goal line, nor was it about raising the debt ceiling before Mr. Obama and the Democrats offered any significant spending cuts.

Rather, it was about showing that there were Republicans in Congress who understood that standing and fighting was itself the goal — the endgame that disparaging critics on the left, right and center said was glaringly absent from Mr. Cruz’s crusade.

“He’s done a good job drawing attention to Obamacare and that Obamacare is something that is going to be damaging to people,” Mr. Paul said of Mr. Cruz in a television interview Sunday. “And, for that, I think he’s done a great service in bringing attention to, I think, something that’s really going to be bad for a lot of Americans.”

The goal-line stand would, in the minds of many conservatives, show dispirited GOP rank-and-filers that their party still had hopes and aspirations for reclaiming a relevance lost since the Reagan era.

“Our leaders in Congress have been bent and broken so many times by the Democrats and President Obama that this became a must-do line in the sand for them,” said Bruce Ash, chairman of the Republican National Committee’s Standing Rules Committee and of its Conservative Caucus. “The GOP leadership had its back up against the wall — a bad place to be.”

“It was entirely proper to condition an increase in the debt limit on some measures of fiscal restraint,” Chicago lawyer and Reagan administration official Joe Morris said. “Mr. Obama’s demand that Congress raise the debt limit unconditionally and automatically was to treat the debt limit as a meaningless abstraction and to treat Congress as robots which conservatives in Congress could not let stand.”

The fallout from Wednesday’s budget vote was not long in coming, as a trio of conservative groups rushed to endorse the primary challenge announced by GOP state Sen. Chris McDaniel, a tea party favorite against longtime Mississippi Sen. Thad Cochran, one of 27 GOP senators to vote in favor of the deal ending the government shutdown.

Rejecting bipartisanship

Liberal and most center-right commentators labeled the Cruz crusaders as hopelessly naive and destructive of their own party. But conservatives beyond the Beltway (and a few inside) saw the Cruz obstinacy as a necessary public rejection of bipartisanship as practiced since the days of President George H.W. Bush’s 1990 budget compromise with Congress’ Democratic leaders, when he broke his “no new taxes” pledge and accepted the Democrats’ demand to cut spending by $2 for every $1 in tax increases. The GOP kept its part of the bargain; the Democrats didn’t, but they still got $137 billion in tax increases from 1991 through 1995 that they originally had wanted.

Government grew faster under the elder Mr. Bush than it had at any time since President Johnson’s War on Poverty years.

The GOP rebels in Congress have been doing a slow burn over the failure of their party to block or even slow government growth, which has been faster under Mr. Obama than under President George W. Bush, who increased spending more than any of his six predecessors, including Johnson. And it wasn’t just entitlements. In his eight years in the White House, the younger Mr. Bush increased discretionary spending by an eye-popping 49 percent.

Some conservative Republican strategists around the country, including some surprisingly prominent ones, have been saying privately that things came to a head in the past few weeks because the GOP had shown itself to be so weak that it was bordering on irrelevance, even while controlling one house of Congress.

True, Republicans staged a mini-showdown over the debt ceiling two years ago, today’s GOP House and Senate rebels acknowledge. They wanted the Democrats to agree to a “cut, cap and balance” agenda on spending and the federal deficit. The Republican got some cuts and caps. It was not what they considered enough, but certainly it was more than if they had not used their leverage.

Since that modest accomplishment, they had done nothing to block what they see as the Democrats’ ongoing drive to socialize the economy and increase dependency on the government.

The boat-rockers among the House GOP’s majority and the Cruz-Lee-Paul faction among the Senate GOP’s minority decided that with Obamacare about to be implemented, they had better at least try to do something. They knew they could not win, but it would at least show they understood the nation was about to pass the point of no return in another major advance toward what they call European-style socialism by funding the Affordable Care Act.

The problem from these GOP rebels’ viewpoint was that the majority of the Washington GOP establishment had no fight in them. Moderate GOP leaders were warriors in the cause of limited government no more — if they ever were.

That left some rebels torn over strategy, inclined, as one put it privately, “to cruise with Ted” but at the same time thinking, “It would be nice to walk out on a limb and not have the Surrender Caucus behind you sawing it off before you even get started.”

Political fallout

Act 5 of the shutdown drama this week leaves unclear just what was accomplished. Do enough GOP voters see the party as having reasserted its relevance, at least somewhat, to win in 2014 and in 2016?

However worthy Mr. Cruz’s goals, Republicans close to the action on Capitol Hill say the freshman Texan’s tactics have annoyed beyond redemption almost all of his GOP colleagues with what they see as his grandstanding in preparation for a 2016 presidential campaign.

Many of these same Republicans say Mr. Paul, also a probable 2016 nomination contender, did not desert Mr. Cruz in holding out for significant concessions from Democrats. At the same time, the Kentucky Republican made it clear that he thought a government shutdown was bad for his party and his country. He also refrained from attacks on the leadership. How that plays with donors in 2016 is unknown at this point, partisans of both men say.

A surprisingly number of prominent Republicans are saying that if the GOP loses the 2016 presidential election, the party will go the way of the Whigs — or formally split into a moderate party and a conservative party.

“Those Republican rebels in Congress may have demonstrated, at least until the shutdown ended, that there are some GOP leaders still standing for principles and understanding spending and Obamacare are moral issues of the day,” said Solomon Yue, a founder of the RNC’s Conservative Caucus. “If we are not willing to fight on those issues, Republicans could become Whigs. Therefore, the shutdown drama not only re-energized our demoralized base but also preserved our GOP army for the fight in 2014 and beyond as far as our grass roots are concerned.”

Reality, however, may be what the masters of perception in the GOP and Democratic leadership and in the Fourth Estate say it is — a debacle for Mr. Cruz and his party’s image. That wasn’t the case with Ronald Reagan, depicted by the political and press establishments as a trigger-happy cowboy and intellectually handicapped B movie actor, or George W. Bush, also depicted as intellectually wanting.

That was then. Today, polls show the GOP took the biggest hit among the public in the spending and debt showdown. Some conservatives insist, however, on putting principles over polls, in part because doing so can lead to eventual victory rising out of apparent defeat.

“If the Founders made their decisions based on poll numbers: 33 percent for revolution, 33 percent for King George and 33 percent in the middle, we would not have America,” Mr. Yue said.