How the GOP boxed itself in on a budget deal

Republican lawmakers have steadfastly refused to compromise with their Democratic counterparts on multiple spending bills since reclaiming the House in 2010.

That's how we ended up with the so-called sequester — the automatic, across-the-board budget cuts triggered when Congress failed to reach a budget deal — in the first place.

Lately, however, cracks have begun to emerge in the GOP's "no negotiations, period" tactic. And with another round of sequester cuts looming — including deep cuts to defense spending that the Pentagon has warned could be problematic for national security — Republicans may finally be feeling enough pressure to cave.

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On Wednesday, the House pulled a housing and transportation spending bill from the floor for lack of votes, the latest in a string of legislative setbacks that is widely seen as a rolling embarrassment for the House Republican leadership, particularly Speaker John Boehner (Ohio). While seemingly minor, the failure underscored how difficult a time Republicans have had passing their own bills — which are designed to replace the sequester cuts with handpicked savings from elsewhere in the budget.

The GOP's failure to reach an intraparty consensus on Wednesday, on just one slice of the overall budget, spelled the "potential ruin of its entire posture toward Obama," wrote New York's Jonathan Chait.

Following the bill's failure, House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) declared in a statement that "sequestration — and its unrealistic and ill-conceived discretionary cuts — must be brought to an end."

"The House, Senate, and White House must come together as soon as possible on a comprehensive compromise that repeals sequestration, takes the nation off this lurching path from fiscal crisis to fiscal crisis, reduces our deficits and debt, and provides a realistic top-line discretionary spending level to fund the government in a responsible — and attainable — way," he added.

The vote also has implications beyond the sequester, touching the very core of the Republican Party's platform when it comes to fiscal issues: The budget championed by Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. Republicans have essentially been holding votes that would theoretically implement the painful cuts contained in Ryan's budget, but as Wednesday's failed vote showed, Republicans couldn't stomach passing them.

Here's Talking Points Memo's Brian Beutler on that point:

That leaves Republicans with two options: Work with Democrats, or let the sequester bite deeper and hope the political fallout isn't too bad.

For Republican leaders to whip the rank and file into accepting a deal — and perhaps a highly unfavorable one, from their perspective — will be no easy task given how deeply divided the party has become. A Pew survey this week showed that vocal chunks of the party actually wanted the GOP to move further to the right on a host of issues, and that the Tea Party, for all the stories about its imminent death, still held an outsize influence on the party's politics. Further, it found that 67 percent of GOP voters thought the party had already compromised enough or too much with Democrats.

Still, as the latest failure in the House showed, Republicans are at the very least warming to the idea of compromise. Whether Congress can actually hammer one out is another story entirely.