House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, in a statement:
It is clear that because Senator Reid refuses to make any spending cuts, he instead plans to force a massive future tax hike on families and small business people. In the scope of our debt crisis, if Senator Reid and Sen. Schumer force the government to partially shut down over these sensible spending cuts, Americans will hold them accountable.
In that one sentence I count seven factual errors. That, however, is the least of Cantor's problems. Because an eighth and far more serious error lies in the intro: Mr. Cantor is no longer the House majority leader, he's merely a leader (along with Speaker Boehner) of one ultraconservative faction. His may be the majority faction of the Republican caucus, but the House Republican Party itself is now but an internally warring hybrid, or fragile coalition, of the GOP and, distinctly, the Tea Party.
Sen. Chuck Schumer smartly sees the wedge:
The problem is a large percentage of those in his party think compromise is a dirty word. So the Speaker’s going to have to make a choice. He can cater to the Tea Party element ... that will inevitably cause a shutdown on April 8. Or he can abandon the Tea Party and these negotiations and forge a consensus among more moderate Republicans and a group of Democrats.
Forget the old divisions between social conservatives and (socially liberal) neoconservatives, or earlier, Republican isolationists versus Republican internationalists. This is instead the stuff of good old 19th-century Mugwumpism (the act of reformist GOPers aligning with Democrat Grover Cleveland), except in this go-around, the Mugwumps -- roughly, the comparative moderates -- won't be bolting their party, just solidifying it by either jettisoning the tea partiers or watching the tea partiers self-jettison into the obscurity of third-party status.
That, anyway, is the transcendent hope.