The Congressional standoff that shuttered the government for 16 days and cost the country $24 billion wasn't the Tea Party's last stand in its crusade against the Affordable Care Act, establishment Republicans and the many Americans taken hostage by such political brinkmanship; the fight rages on, and the extreme wing of the Republican party is only getting started, according to some of its most influential strategists and donors.
The battle lines have been drawn, notes the New York Times, and the "the time for an open feud over the Republican future had arrived."
More from the Times:
Far from being chastened by the failure to achieve any of the concessions they had sought from President Obama — primarily to roll back his signature health care law — the conservative activists who helped drive the confrontation in Congress and helped fuel support for the 144 House Republicans who voted against ending it are now intensifying their effort to rid the party of the sort of timorous Republicans who they said doomed their effort from the start.
“This was an inflection point because the gap between what people believe in their hearts and what they see in Washington is getting wider and wider,” said Jim DeMint, a former South Carolina senator and current Heritage Foundation president, who as a founder of the Senate Conservatives Fund is helping lead the insurgency.
Mr. DeMint, a sort of political godfather to the junior Republican representatives who engineered the health care fight and shutdown, said of his acolytes: “They represent the voices of a lot of Americans who really think it’s time to draw a line in the sand to stop this reckless spending and the growth of the federal government.”
But many members of the more "timorous" faction of the Republican party viewed the shutdown as an abject failure, and are already organizing to marginalize the Tea Party's influence in upcoming elections.
“The 20 or 30 members of the House who have been driving this aren’t a majority, and too often the strategy -- the tactic -- was ‘Let’s just lay down a marker and force people to be with us,’” senior Republican strategist Karl Rove told the Times. “Successful movements inside parties are movements that persuade people,” he added. “The question is, can they persuade? And thus far the jury’s out.”
Rove's American Crossroads super PAC has already started a new initiative that is "quietly working to head off Republican challengers whose victories in primaries, in its determination, would put party seats -- or potential party seats -- at risk of falling to Democrats in general elections."
Rove and other so-called moderate Republicans are going after the Tea Party, and the Tea Party knows it.
“We want to elect a majority of senators and the president,” said [Tennessee Sen. Lamar] Alexander, who is a former presidential candidate, secretary of education and governor. “And in order to do that, we’ve got to persuade the American people that they can trust us with the government. And you don’t do that by shutting down the government and defaulting on the debt.”
“It’s my generation’s time to enter this fight,” countered Chris McDaniel, the newly announced Senate candidate from Mississippi and a likely Tea Party favorite. “We’re excited. We love the idea of having this conversation about the future of the country, and the future of our party.”
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