Why the Republican Intransigence?

As several commentators have pointed out in the past few days, at root this debt ceiling crisis is being caused by the newly-elected freshman Tea Party House members, who are intransigent in the face of all the negotiations. And they are being stubbornly intransigent because they know that historically, under both parties, Congressional deals that involved increased spending coupled with cuts elsewhere have always resulted in the spending increasing, but the cuts never materializing.

The Democratic Senate's current proposed bill is more of the same - an increase in the debt ceiling (which will occur) balanced by vague and/or illusionary promises of cuts that are unlikely to ever materialize. Note that a huge part of Reid's "savings" in his bill are cuts in military spending that are already planned as we withdraw troops from the Middle East. So he is claiming as "cuts' money that wasn't going to be appropriated or spent anyway. This is typical of the tricks Congress has played over the years, Republicans as well as Democrats.

For example, recall that to make the ObamaCare bill appear to be revenue neutral, Democrats in Congress assumed a 30% cut in Medicare payments to doctors. Yet only a few months later, Congress voted to delay that cut once again (as they have each year for years). This has happened repeatedly over the years, under both parties. So one can understand why the Tea Party freshmen are holding out for some real teeth in any proposal to cut spending.

It is too bad we have to be driven to such a crisis to get this done, but at root I think the Tea Party freshmen are right. If whatever spending cuts that emerge from the final bill don't have real teeth, the odds are the cuts won't really happen.