Tea Party to GOP: Our Way or the Highway

Tea Party Republicans cannot deem mainstream Republicans the supreme enemy – and then demand that they salute the flag of party unity.

My latest column for The Week examines the unequal relationship between mainstream Republicans and Tea Party Republicans:

Christine O’Donnell had barely finished making a meal of Rep. Mike Castle when she appeared on Good Morning America to deplore Republican “cannibalism.”

Tuesday’s message: “Get out of our party, you disgusting RINO moderates.”

Wednesday’s message: “Don’t forget to send me $2,400 on your way out the door.”

Tea Party Republicans have made it very clear: They’d rather deliver Delaware’s Senate seat to the Democrats than accept a moderate like Mike Castle as their Republican nominee. Yet they are shocked and offended that any mainstream Republican might harbor equivalent misgivings about Rand Paul, the Tea Party-backed GOP senate candidate in Kentucky.

Tea Party Republicans say in effect, “I’m not working to make Mitch McConnell the GOP’s Senate leader. I care about advancing my agenda. But I’m calling on you to sacrifice your agenda in order to make Mitch McConnell the GOP Senate leader.”

The game cannot be played this way. It cannot be that Tea Party Republicans deem mainstream Republicans the supreme enemy – and then demand that mainstream Republicans salute the flag of party unity.

Tea Party Republicans vilify Republicans who voted for TARP. Indeed, TARP is as much a litmus test for them as the Obama healthcare plan. But what about those Republicans who believe that this difficult vote saved the global economy from a second great depression? Republican candidates who honored the request of a Republican president and did the right thing are one by one facing defeat in primaries. After which Republicans who care about things like preventing the collapse of the nation’s banking system are asked to open our checkbooks and give generously to those who would have voted to wreck the world? What kind of deal is that?

The Tea Party is not a party. It’s a faction within a party. Factions have to learn to work together, accept compromises. But sometimes a faction imagines it has the strength to go it alone. It cannibalizes its own coalition, rewrites rules. In that case, the faction had better assess its strength very precisely, because it will find itself getting just what it wanted: it will be left to its own devices.

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