Andrew:

It [the tax deal] could also lead to a spectacular black eye for the GOP establishment. Does anyone believe that the Tea Party campaigned so hard in order to have the Congress pass a second stimulus – as pricey as the first, and borrowed entirely from the Chinese [bold mine-DL]? Think what happens after the deal is passed, and the truth of it sinks in with the base. The GOP civil war will begin in earnest – especially if Obama outflanks the GOP on long-term debt reduction in the SOTU.

One thing that Tea Partiers definitely did campaign for was tax cuts. Once you add up the extension of all the Bush-era rates, the temporary payroll tax cut, the AMT provision, the estate tax provision, and the various tax credits included in the deal, there isn’t much left that really qualifies as stimulus spending. What I have seen so far from members of Congress associated with the Tea Party movement is hostility to the deal because it does not make all of the tax cuts permanent and fails to abolish the estate tax. Assuming that the deal is passed, what will “sink in” with the Republican rank and file is that approximately 93% of the deal took the form of tax breaks, tax credits or tax holidays. Looked at this way, the deal was designed almost perfectly to avoid making any difficult, fiscally responsible decisions and to indulge the fantasy that there is no economic or fiscal problem that cannot be solved by reducing taxes.

Inasmuch as these Tea Party-aligned politicians primarily care about lowering taxes, the huge deficit expansion that the deal represents will not trouble them, because they are openly calling for expanded deficits for years to come. One reason that there is no strong resistance to the deal among House and Senate Republicans is that almost all of them see the deal as a significant win for their side and for their policy preferences. Even most of the parts of the deal that can be described as new stimulus do not seem to be objectionable to Tea Partiers in Congress.

Maybe the newly-elected Republican members take a different view, but I have a hard time seeing a Republican civil war erupting over the concession on unemployment benefits. Democratic supporters of the deal have been emphasizing what little spending there is to make the best of what they see as a lopsided deal whose stimulative effects will be very inefficient. This is an exercise in positive spin more than it is a fair description of the entire deal. As many others have pointed out already, the Democrats’ “almost epic attempt at political suicide” was before the election when the Democratic leadership chose to do nothing on taxes, which is part of what put them in their current predicament. Some of them are not yet resigned to oblivion and have started struggling against the inevitable, but it is probably too late for them.

P.S. Bearing all this in mind, things are not completely hopeless on the Republican side. As Ross points out in his column today, Sen. Tom Coburn has objected to the deal for the right reasons.