Tea Party Groups Praise Boehner

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Leaders of the small-government, tea-party movement are generally giving House Speaker John Boehner high marks for his leadership in the spending showdown, even though the agreement eventually reached Friday night fell short of the cuts the tea party once demanded.

The relationship between the Republican leadership and these activists is one of the most important determinants of how this Congress will manage the fiscal fights to come.

Tea-party backers have been leery of Mr. Boehner for months, questioning his zeal and driving him toward a tougher line on spending.

As negotiations inched close to a deal late Friday, much of the movement's institutional leadership resisted raising the temperature and were willing to cut Mr. Boehner some slack, in hope that he will extract more dramatic concessions in the budget showdowns to come.

Within weeks, the House will press forward on a blueprint to dramatically change Medicare and Medicaid, lower tax rates, simplify the tax code, and cut nonsecurity spending by $1.6 trillion over the next decade.

By mid-May, another showdown will come as the federal government reaches its statutory limit on borrowing. And this summer, Congress must go to work on spending bills for fiscal 2012.

Conservative activists will rely on the leadership of Mr. Boehner, a man who re-emerged into Republican leadership on a platform of fiscal rectitude. His management of his restive caucus and the unpredictable tea-party movement has proved more successful than even some of his colleagues thought possible when the new Congress convened earlier this year.

"They're doing pretty well so far," said Matt Kibbe, president and chief executive of FreedomWorks, a conservative organization that has helped fund the tea-party movement.

"If the Republicans back down from the fight just because the Democrats are itching for a government shutdown, that'll be disappointing to us, but we understand they only control a third of the policy-making here."

Chris Chocolla, president of Club for Growth, a political action committee that has financed conservative primary challengers to Republican incumbents, offered a similar perspective.

"This isn't the most important battle. We have to get this 2011 business behind us and focus on the FY2012 budget and the debt-limit vote," he said.

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