January 14, 2013 08:41 AM UTC

House Republicans Mull Burning Washington To The Ground, Again

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• by: Colorado Pols

Politico reports, the next round of manufactured drama is upon us:

House Republicans are seriously entertaining dramatic steps, including default or shutting down the government, to force President Barack Obama to finally cut spending by the end of March.

The idea of allowing the country to default by refusing to increase the debt limit is getting more widespread and serious traction among House Republicans than people realize, though GOP leaders think shutting down the government is the much more likely outcome of the spending fights this winter.

“I think it is possible that we would shut down the government to make sure President Obama understands that we’re serious,” House Republican Conference Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington state told us. “We always talk about whether or not we’re going to kick the can down the road. I think the mood is that we’ve come to the end of the road.”

…GOP officials said more than half of their members are prepared to allow default unless Obama agrees to dramatic cuts he has repeatedly said he opposes. Many more members, including some party leaders, are prepared to shut down the government to make their point. House Speaker John Boehner “may need a shutdown just to get it out of their system,” said a top GOP leadership adviser. “We might need to do that for member-management purposes – so they have an endgame and can show their constituents they’re fighting.”

After what is broadly considered a major political defeat for the GOP–even though it was just a two-month placeholder measure that happened to resolve on the side of Democrats–there is a strong feeling that the GOP House majority is going to become significantly more intransigent as that deal nears expiration. The “debt ceiling” controversy, as it was in 2011 when the Budget Control Act set up the “sequester” cuts just temporarily avoided, is of much greater consequence if it isn’t resolved by a somewhat malleable but very much extant deadline.

President Barack Obama and Democrats respond the GOP’s willingness to engage in still more brinksmanship, with all the attendant problems that ongoing drama creates for the U.S. economy, is grossly irresponsible. Democrats point to major spending cuts already enacted since 2011 as evidence of good faith, and say that Republican threats regarding the debt ceiling are tantamount to threatening to not pay bills we’ve already incurred. And we’ve seen nothing to suggest the Republican demand for even more cuts to popular programs like Medicare and Social Security has become less toxic than it was last month, or for that matter in 2011.

As always, we can’t say where this will end, but the fundamentals haven’t changed. Without a major shift in public opinion that has not occurred despite millions spent trying, the right wing’s broken-record demand for tax breaks and cuts to popular programs, backed by threats to do tangible economic harm to the entire country, is politically disastrous as well.

It’s been said that Republican success with redistricting (nationally, Colorado being a noted exception to this rule) has created a GOP House majority impervious to public opinion–even overwhelming public support as the protection of Medicare and Social Security enjoy.

It’s hard to imagine a more demanding test of that, you know, imperviousness.