The verdict is in: conservatives and tea partiers are incensed by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s plan to end the debt limit dispute.
McConnell now faces the same kind of angry base President Obama did when he suggested putting entitlements on the table to strike his grand bargain.
The rhetoric on the right opposing McConnell’s scheme couldn’t be more heated.
“It’s Time to Burn Mitch McConnell in Effigy,” read the headline on a post by Red State’s Erick Erickson. He later changed it, writing “I decided to make the title less incendiary.”
The new version? “Mitch McConnell Just Proposed the ‘Pontius Pilate Pass the Buck Act of 2011.'” A sample:
So fearful of being blamed for a default, McConnell is proposing a compromise that lets Barack Obama raise the debt ceiling without making any spending cuts at all. Consider sending McConnell a weasel as testament to his treachery.
The generally more polite Heritage Foundation took aim at McConnell’s plan as well.
“The plan that we are reading reports about today is a serious walk back,” Heritage blogger Ashe Schow wrote, “and would seemingly trade the leverage needed to achieve reforms in return for political gains.”
Others on the right are saying similar things. See Michelle Malkin’s “Another mortifying McConnell head-banging-against-the-wall moment,” for example.
But not all conservatives are turning on the GOP following the announcement of McConnell’s plan. Grover Norquist, among the top fiscal conservatives in the country, says he’s for it, saying it creates a window for Republicans to win the political struggle over the debt.
Update: Norquist walked back that National Review report on his support for the plan, just a bit.
