Well Done Speaker Boehner
Small but significant signs of progress.  Speaker Boehner is preparing to get serious about working with the president as the president similarly prepares to work with the speaker.  Today we see that the president has whittled his position down to one priority that must be in any agreement:  it will be a balanced approach that includes increased tax rates on the top 2 percent.  Other than that, let’s talk. 

This is progress, because we know from their earlier dance that the president was willing to put serious spending cuts, entitlement reforms, tax code reforms and more on the table…if the whole package is balanced.  One priority, otherwise let's figure it out.  Good sign.

The Speaker also signaled that he is ready to get serious.  He used his power as Speaker to remove four tea party members from two critically important committees. 

“The GOP leadership might think they have silenced conservatives, but removing me and others from key committees only confirms our conservative convictions,” Huelskamp said in a statement Tuesday as quoted in a Salon article. “This is clearly a vindictive move, and a sure sign that the GOP establishment cannot handle disagreement.”

While these members might now try to martyr themselves and turn this serious blow to their own power into a badge of honor, there is no doubt that this move weakens these members and signals a willingness (as other individual Republicans have also recently done) to repudiate Grover Norquist and reign in tea party extremism.  It also reconfirms that tea party legislators just do not understand how politics works.

These moves also signal that should the Speaker and President hammer out a deal, the House Republican leadership expects Republicans to support the deal their own leadership negotiates.  As Salon describes it…

“All four lawmakers had voted against the summer 2011 deal negotiated between Republican leaders and President Barack Obama for extending the government’s ability to borrow money in exchange for $1 trillion in spending cuts and the promise of another $1 trillion in reduced deficits. Three of the four, the exception being Schweikert, voted against the Ryan-written GOP budget blueprint that the House passed last March.

Their removal from key committees with jurisdiction over the two issues was viewed a strong signal to other Republican lawmakers to look favorably on whatever final deal Boehner and Obama put together to avert a “fiscal cliff” combination of automatic tax increases and spending cuts in January.

The changes in committee assignments could bring about more discipline from the GOP on high-priority issues next Congress, but conservatives were taking the news as an attack on their priorities.”

These committee re-assignments attack only one priority: obstructionism. 

These re-assignments signal that House Republican leadership will no longer tolerate members prioritizing a stubborn insistence that the 'principled' thing to do is to prevent our democratically elected government from even addressing the challenges we face.  That is not leadership, not democracy, and the Speaker is clearly signaling he will no longer allow luddites to drag down his party or our country.  Well done Speaker Beohner.