Tea Party making Boehner abridge his power just a step.

When Speaker of the House John Boehner gave up and quit talking with the President on the fiscal cliff, he did much more than that. In many ways, Speaker Boehner said that he and the House of Representatives can't negotiate a compromise. In saying that, why would anyone now ask him to sit in a room and try to negotiate a way out of this problem?

President Obama has gotten the Speaker, House minority leader Pelosi, Senate Leader Reid, and Senate minority leader McConnell to agree to come to the White House tomorrow to talk about the upcoming fiscal cliff. But what can Speaker Boehner say in that meeting? "Remember last week when I threw out my hands and said I was out of the loop, that it was up to the President and the Senate to make a deal? Well, I really didn't mean that, and here's what I think we should do." What do you think would happen? Say something like that at any meeting, and you'd be laughed out of the room. And although decorum will ensure that laughter won't ring through the room, I'd love to be a fly in that wall.

After last week's House vote on the Boehner's plan B was squashed by the Tea Party, they did more than just stop a vote from being taken. They made sure that Speaker Boehner's powers were abridged, and in at least during the fiscal cliff talks, made the Speaker completely useless. And I wonder, since the Tea Party believes in as little government as possible, if they haven't taken a step toward making the government so dysfunctional that people won't want it in their lives anymore. If so, they took a step to their own aim: Government so small it can be drowned in a bathtub.