After spending most of the last two years helping the GOP reclaim the House by telling the tea party to get fired up, now Dick Armey is telling them to chill out so that the GOP can maintain its grip on power:
Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey urged freshman Republicans and the new House GOP leadership to temper themselves so as not to make the mistakes he and others made following their historic takeover of the chamber in 1994.
“We didn’t manage our enthusiasms and the fact of the matter is it ended up getting us in trouble,” said Armey in an interview as part of Advice for the 112th Congress: A POLITICO video series with former members of Congress.
He cited specifically the budget stand-offs in 1995 and 1996 which prompted the temporary closures of some federal government offices – and did serious political damage to the congressional Republicans that took the blame for it.
“[W]e ended up with that horrible nightmare called ‘the Government shutdown,’ which didn’t need to have happened and would not have happened if we had had a better management of our—oh, of our appreciation for the fact that we were the first majority in 40 years,” said Armey.
Instead of holding the debt limit vote hostage to the adoption of a massive austerity program, Armey said new members should settle for "a clear standard of a new direction in spending." Basically, Armey is saying that members should agree to raise the debt limit in exchange for a promise to pursue fiscal responsibility. They shouldn't hold out for demands that are impossible to achieve.
If Armey is unable to talk his fellow teapartiers off the ledge on the debt limit vote, the result would be unprecedented -- for the first time in American history, we would go into default on our debt, shutting down the Federal government (including things like Social Security and Medicare plus much of our military) and setting off a financial crisis.
There's always a bit of a political dance surrounding the debt limit vote, but the question is never whether the limit will be increased -- instead, it's who will vote to increase it. Over the past decade, with single party rule, the party in power (whether Democratic or Republican) has been responsible for delivering the votes and in situations with split party rule (such as exists today with the House and White House or existed in 2002 and 2007 with the Senate and White House), the responsibility has been equally divided. The bottom-line is that nobody ever likes to be the one who raised the debt limit, but there's no other option, and turning it into a point of political leverage would be a terrible precedent.