And despite all the talk about the vast ideological struggle raging in Washington, the simple truth is that on the three issues these aides and their bosses are most likely to find themselves negotiating—immigration, some restructuring of the tax code and maybe even entitlement reform again—the policy differences really aren’t very hard to bridge, if both sides are willing to move even a little from where they’ve been in the past. The real chasm has to do with trust.
More specifically, neither Obama nor Boehner—nor their aides—trust the other side to follow through with any concession that might infuriate their most ideological allies. Boehner sees Obama as unwilling to confront his party’s congressional leaders and interest groups, and he suspects that the president won’t follow through on enforcing key provisions of any deal. Obama doubts that Boehner will risk his speakership to make any deal for which the tea partiers in his caucus will excoriate him, and even if he will, the White House has been given ample reason to doubt that he can deliver the votes needed to pass it…
This might suggest a new reality in the House. Obama’s team is skeptical, and perhaps reasonably so, that the strategy Boehner employed to pass the debt-ceiling increase will have larger implications. The feeling at the White House is that it was a desperate gambit to avoid political catastrophe, rather than a new way of doing business.
But if Boehner has now lost the most radical members of his party for good, as seems likely, then he has little impetus to negotiate other deals with their support in mind. And there’s no good reason, then, not to pass the legislation he wants with largely or even mostly Democratic votes, while at the same time retaining as much of a Republican bloc as he can.
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