The Republicans have a choice as to how they plan to operate in Congress. But it's not this choice that's being presented in the press:

But [Michele Bachmann's] candidacy vividly illustrates the central tension facing Mr. Boehner and his team: balancing the demands of new lawmakers, some of whom ran against the Republican establishment and advocate a no-compromise stance toward the Obama administration and Democratic policies, against the need to deliver some accomplishments at a time of economic distress.

Republicans don't have an incentive to alleviate economic stress, as doing so would only improve President Obama's chances of winning re-election. There is a constituency in the GOP for cutting deals with Obama, perhaps on reducing the deficit, but that constituency is tiny, notably silent, and highly unlikely to prevail.

The choice has been framed between cooperation and McConnell-style pre-campaign obstruction, which is explicated in more detail in Kimberly Strassel's column today. The reality is that McConnell is the moderate in this intra-party debate. The more radical wing expects Republicans to push their agenda as if Obama is not there:

In a draft of a confidential memo to be distributed to all incoming House Republican lawmakers, Dick Armey, a former Republican majority leader who is chairman of the conservative group FreedomWorks, and Matt Kibbe, its president, told lawmakers that a repeal of the Democrats’ health care law was “nonnegotiable” and warned that they would face a severe backlash from voters if they did not succeed in reversing the law.

“Politically speaking, your only choice is to get on offense and start moving boldly ahead to repeal, replace and defund Obamacare in 2011, or risk rejection by the voters in 2012,” Mr. Armey and Mr. Kibbe wrote.

Trying to repeal health care is one venue for this fight. A bigger venue is the budget. Republicans and Tea Party activists have spent the last two years describing Obama's budget and the deficit (in their mind the two are synonymous) as literally a threat to the future of the Republic. Most Republican members of Congress understand that there's a degree of hyperbole at work here, but the base is not in on the joke. You can't just say to them, "we're going to keep letting Obama destroy the foundations of freedom for two years and then try to replace him." And if they're not willing to sign a budget that Obama finds acceptable, Republicans' only other option is to shut down the government.

Indeed, as Stan Collender argues, it's going to be very tempting for Republicans to shut down the government next month: