Boehner has been an unusually weak speaker, one who has little power to bend his own party’s rank-and-file to his will and little space to cut deals with the other party. That’s not about to change, as his handling of the fiscal cliff showdown demonstrated, which is why I wondered a few weeks ago why he’d want to sign up for two more years. But he evidently is willing to pay the price, and we saw on Tuesday night exactly what that means. As The Hill reported:

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) is signaling that at least one thing will change about his leadership during the 113th Congress: he’s telling Republicans he is done with private, one-on-one negotiations with President Obama.

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The reality, though, is that it’s probably in both parties’ interest for no deal to emerge from today’s session.

Look at this this way: President Obama has made raising tax rates on high-income Americans his bottom-line demand. He campaigned on it and he won, and the scheduled expiration of all of the Bush tax rates on January 1 gives him added leverage. He initially set the tax hike threshold at $250,000, but in his most recent offer to Republicans, he bumped it up to $400,000 -- in addition to surrendering on a payroll tax extension, accepting a form of chained-CPI for Social Security (essentially, a benefits reduction), reducing his overall demand for new revenue by $400 billion and agreeing to $400 billion in unspecified healthcare (read: Medicare and Medicaid) savings.

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The problem, of course, is that the Tea Party’s power resides in Republican primaries, where conservative purists wreaked considerable havoc in the past two election cycles. This included, famously, McConnell’s home state of Kentucky, where the minority leader’s protégé was crushed in a 2010 GOP Senate primary by Rand Paul. Now McConnell has to worry about suffering a similar fate in two years, especially if his handling of the current fiscal impasse evokes cries of treason from the base. How could this square with claims of fading clout for the Tea Party?

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That Boehner had devised and pursued Plan B in the first place seemed to speak to his weak grip on the GOP conference. Boehner and President Obama had negotiated their way to within spitting distance of each other, with the president giving significant ground on his revenue demands, agreeing to a reduction in Social Security benefits, and giving up on a payroll tax holiday extension. But when word of the looming deal leaked, House Republicans let their displeasure be known, and the speaker announced that he’d instead hold a vote on a bill to extend the Bush tax rates for all income under $1 million. That was Plan B.

Exactly where Plan B fit into Boehner’s overall strategy was a matter of some debate, but he pressed hard for it and confidently predicted he had the 218 votes needed to pass it. So now we know that not only does Boehner not have sufficient support among Republicans to pass a potential compromise with Obama, he also doesn’t have the support to pass his own plan.

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The first ran for 16 years, from early 1992, when her husband survived a wave of scandals and emerged as the Democratic nominee for president, and early 2008, when Hillary fell hopelessly behind Barack Obama in their delegate race. For all of that time, Hillary and Bill were the faces of their party and, consequently, faced a relentless, daily, over-the-top assault from the GOP. The precise nature of the attacks differed, but broadly speaking, the Clintons were treated by the right exactly how Barack Obama has been for the past four years.

Which is no coincidence, because the turning point in the right’s relationship with Bill and Hillary came at the precise moment when it became clear there’d be no Clinton restoration in ’08. Suddenly, there was no day-to-day incentive for conservatives to portray them as The Worst Thing Ever To Happen To American Politics. But there was real incentive for the right to begin giving Obama the Clinton treatment, which it's been doing ever since. In the revised right-wing narrative, Bill and Hillary became symbols of a bygone era of Democratic pragmatism and cooperation – “good” Democrats whose legacy Obama was routinely tarnishing with his radical partisan warfare.

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There was – and is – serious question over the left’s willingness to abide the framework Obama proposed. After demanding that tax rates be restored to their Clinton-era levels on income over $250,000, the president is now willing to accept a $400,000 threshold. He’s also willing to let the payroll tax holiday expire – at a cost of $1,000 a year to the average family – and to agree to a modified form of chained-CPI, a less generous method for calculating Social Security benefit payouts. Measured against what would happen if there’s no deal at all before January 1, there’s good reason for liberals to wonder if Obama is giving away too much in pursuit of a bipartisan accord. There are conflicting signals from leading Democrats about whether the party would go along with this plan.

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According to multiple reports, the main features of the emerging compromise include a tax rate hike on income over $400,000 and new rules for deductions, a jump from 15 to 20 percent in the capital gains rate, an extension of unemployment benefits, the end of the payroll tax holiday, and a change to the cost-of-living formula for Social Security benefits. Further cuts to Medicaid or Medicare, needed to meet Boehner’s demand for more than $1 trillion in spending cuts, would be sorted out by Congress, and both parties would agree to pursue tax reform in the new year. The debt ceiling would also be raised, although the parties remain apart on the duration of the increase. Overall, there’d be about $1.2 trillion in new revenue, with spending cuts of a roughly equal amount.

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To understand what Feinstein and other gun control advocates are up against, it’s worth recapping the history of the assault weapons ban, which was first enacted in 1994 and expired without congressional action in 2004. Since then, there has been intermittent talk of trying to bring it back, generally in the wake of mass shootings like the one in Connecticut last Friday. But in the eight years since it lapsed, neither the House nor the Senate has ever voted on restoring the ban, and even though President Obama says he supports doing so, he’s not made it a legislative priority.

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That dynamic – Republicans enjoying complete governing control of blue states, or Democrats enjoying the same in red states – isn’t very common, with the ideological contours of both parties clearly defined and split-ticket voting on the decline. But where it exists, there is the potential for the party in power to pass legislation that radically changes the state’s political culture – like with right-to-work in Michigan.

Right now, there are more blue states run by Republicans than red states run by Democrats. This is the product of two factors: 1) At the state legislative level in big blue states, Democratic voters tend to be packed into a relative handful of districts, often in and around cities, while Republican-friendly populations are more widely dispersed in suburbs, exurbs and rural areas; and 2) the monster Republican year of 2010, in which the electorate was so pro-GOP that the party was able to win governorships in states like Michigan and to exploit the above-described possibilities in state legislative races.

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Start with Obama’s tax hike demand. The president has now waged two national campaigns in which he’s vowed to eliminate the Bush tax cuts for high-income Americans – and he made it a particular point of emphasis on the trail this year. Two years ago, after his party suffered a midterm drubbing, Obama was coaxed into extending the Bush rates in exchange for some modest economic stimulus, and since then his resolve to let them expire (for the rich) at the end of 2012 has been apparent. What’s more, he has real leverage – whatever moral authority his electoral victory produced, plus the fact that all of the Bush tax cuts will vanish on Jan. 1 if no deal is reached.

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Klein wrote that a deal seemed to be taking shape quietly, and that “the headline Democratic concession is likely to be that the Medicare eligibility age rises from 65 to 67.” This would be in exchange for Republicans giving in partially on Obama’s call for the restoration of the Clinton-era tax rates on income over $250,000; whereas the top marginal rate was 39.6 percent in the ‘90s, Klein suggested the deal would set it at 37 percent. Alternately, there's talk that the White House will instead settle for chained CPI -- that is, using a new, less generous cost-of-living measure to compute Social Security benefits.

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“I believe this will lead to a recession next year,” Newt Gingrich said. “This is the Democrat machine’s recession. And each one of them will be held personally accountable.”

He still hasn’t come to terms with how wrong he was, and neither has his party. Nearly 20 years after Gingrich uttered those words, the debate in Washington carries echoes of that ’93 fight, with Barack Obama and congressional Democrats demanding a return to the Clinton rates for the top two percent of income-earners and with Republicans, who have not provided a single vote for a tax increase in all of the intervening years, doing their best to resist.

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To be sure, there was a time a few years back when DeMint’s stature and visibility was dependent on his Senate service. His initial victory in 2004 lifted him from the obscurity of the House to a perch from which he could attract attention from the conservative movement and the national press corps. And he exploited that opportunity for all it was worth, positioning himself as an ideological purist and playing the role of conscientious objector when his fellow Republicans sold out conservative principles (as he understands them). Active involvement in Republican primary races around the country grew out of this, with DeMint launching the Senate Conservatives Fund to provide political and financial support to fellow true believers, even – or especially – if they were up against candidates with substantial establishment support.

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After all, Virginia and New Jersey are the only two governorships up next year, and the Garden State race is losing suspense by the day; Chris Christie is about as well-positioned for reelection as a Republican can be in his state. And the only other major election, for mayor of New York City, lacks the partisan edge of a typical statewide race and figures to be populated by a collection of low-wattage candidates. At least the outcome in Virginia, a swing state in presidential politics, could have national implications.

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It was Republican votes – 38 of them – that derailed the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which needed a two-thirds supermajority for ratification. Only seven Republicans voted for the treaty and not a single Democrat voted against it. This came despite the presence of a GOP luminary, former Senate Majority Bob Dole, now 89 and frail, who was wheeled into the chamber in a last-minute effort to rally support.

Dole’s passion stems from his own disabled status (a World War II injury shattered his right arm, which hasn’t been functional since) and from the leading role he played in what remains the enduring civil rights achievement for the disabled in this country: the enactment of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990.

The ADA extended protections included under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to the more than 40 million disabled Americans. Employers were banned from discriminating against mentally or physically handicapped applicants who could perform the “essential” functions of a job and required to make “reasonable” efforts to make their workspaces friendly to those with disabilities. There was also a public accommodations provision.

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Yes, it’s true, negotiations are unlikely to be resolved anytime soon, and the possibility that December 31 will come and go without a deal is real. But it’s not generic Washington gridlock that’s causing this: It’s the almost impossible balancing act that the leader of one of the parties faces.

Consider the events of the past few days. Late last week, the White House outlined its opening offer to Republicans: $1.6 trillion in new revenue, a commitment to extract $400 billion in savings from Medicare, an extension of the payroll tax cut and federal unemployment insurance, and an end to debt ceiling brinkmanship. House Speaker John Boehner responded by saying the blueprint wasn’t “serious” and pronouncing himself “flabbergasted.” Then on Monday Boehner outlined his counteroffer, a less detailed call for $800 billion in new revenue through “tax reform” and over a $1 trillion in cuts in entitlement and discretionary spending. The White House, which has said raising rates on high-income earners is a bottom-line demand, declared that Boehner’s plan “does not meet the test of balance.”

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Her point is that Norquist’s visibility and reputation dramatically exceeds his actual political clout. It’s understandable how this has happened. Republicans have evolved over the past three decades into a staunchly anti-tax party, and Norquist is a colorful and endlessly quotable symbol of this absolutism – one who happens to live and work in close proximity to much of the national political press corps. So he gets an awful lot of face time on television and it can sometimes seem as if he and his anti-tax pledge are the reason no Republican member of Congress has voted for a tax hike in over two decades.

But, as Tim Noah wrote last week, Norquist’s actual power in Washington and within the GOP is illusory. In terms of stature and public prominence, he’s been a major beneficiary of the party’s opposition to tax increases – but he hasn’t been the driving force behind it. The real story of the GOP’s modern evolution on taxes played out in several stages, from the late 1970s to the early 1990s.

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Well, not quite nothing. Majority Leader Harry Reid hasn’t detailed his precise reform proposal yet, but it’s likely to feature two main components: 1) Eliminating filibusters on the motion to proceed – meaning that it would take a simple majority vote to bring a bill to the floor for debate; and 2) forcing senators who want to block legislation to engage in actual talking filibusters.

But in an exchange on the Senate floor with an exercised Mitch McConnell Monday afternoon, Reid went out of his way to stress that “we’re not trying to get rid of the filibuster.” Which is why life in the Senate as we’ve come to know it isn’t going to suddenly change in January when Democrats use the “constitutional option” to change the filibuster rules with a simple majority vote.

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As Jonathan Bernstein pointed out recently, jockeying by would-be Democratic candidates actually began well before Election Day, and party leaders, activists and interest groups are already seeking to define the terms of the 2016 debate within the party. And now that Mitt Romney has gone down to defeat, thereby assuring that the GOP’s ’16 nomination will be open too, a similar process is playing out on the Republican side. These early days of a presidential election cycle are generally known as the “invisible primary,” although in today’s media landscape, it’s easier than ever to see who’s up to what.

In the modern era of presidential politics – that is, since the power to nominate candidates was taken away from convention power-brokers and given to primary voters – this process has tended to be more predictable on the Republican side, with a “next in line” candidate emerging from one election as the clear favorite for the next nomination and then going on to win it.

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