Fifty-nine House Republicans voted against the budget to fund the government from April through September of this year. But many more of them, including some members of their leadership, know that the deal Speaker John Boehner’s office struck was a poor one. They voted for it for two main reasons: to avoid a government shutdown and to avoid weakening Boehner. Most of them like him personally. They consider him a fellow conservative who is doing the best he can, rather than a sell-out. Even among those 59 Republicans there were few critical remarks about the speaker — on or off the record.
But that affection goes only so far. As House Republicans enter their next budget battle, over raising the debt ceiling, a lesson an increasing number of them are drawing is that Boehner cannot negotiate for the whole conference. The debt-ceiling debate was always going to pose a challenge to the leaders of the House Republicans. They favor raising the debt ceiling because they do not want to impair the government’s credit and roil credit markets, because they know that their backers in the business and financial worlds strongly favor it, and because they know that almost nobody in America wants the kind of sudden, sharp changes that eliminating the deficit immediately would require. But the public does not favor an increase, and many conservatives are dead-set against it.
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