GOP Anarchists of the House of Representatives

The 45 House Republicans most willing to grind government to a halt, based on an analysis of six votes this year by the Washington Post blog The Fix.   (Photo: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Newscom (Collins, Rothfus, Amash, Gohmert, Massie, Mulvaney, Schweikert); Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/Newscom (Sensenbrenner, Wenstrup, Desantis, Franks); Pete Marovich/ZumaPress/Newscom (Goodlatte); Chris Maddaloni/CQ Roll Call/Newscom (Salmon, Desjarlais, Labrador); Action Press/ZumaPress/Newscom (Bachmann); Newscom (Chabot); Richard Ellis/ZumaPress/Newscom (Sanford); The Augusta Chronicle/ZumaPress/Newscom (Broun); Michael Allen Jones/Sacramento Bee/ZumaPress/Newscom (McClintock); William B. Plowman/NBC/NBC NewsWire/Getty Images (Cotton); The Washington Times/ZumaPress/Newscom (Price); Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images (Lamborn); Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/Getty Images (Posey, Huelskamp))

I often lament what has become of the Republican Party which now is best defined by the open embrace of ignorance, extremism in general and religious based fanaticism.  And in the House of Representatives, the swamp fever is still intensifying as many GOP House members are saboteurs that can little about governing the nation and instead focus on destroying government completely.  I personally tie this development to the rise of the Christofascists in the GOP since objective reality - not to mention the rights of others - simply doesn't matter.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at the sabotage now taking place in the GOP controlled House.  It's not a pretty picture.  Here are some excerpts:

The party leadership draws up a bill that’s far too right-wing to ever become law, but it fails in the House because it isn’t right-wing enough. Sometimes, as with the attempts to repeal Obamacare, the failures don’t matter much, but in other instances the inability to pass legislation poses horrifying dangers. The chaos and dysfunction have set in so deeply that Washington now lurches from crisis to crisis, and once-dull, keep-the-lights-on rituals of government procedure are transformed into white-knuckle dramas that threaten national or even global catastrophe.

The Republican Party has spent 30 years careering ever more deeply into ideological extremism, but one of the novel developments of the Obama years is its embrace of procedural extremism. The Republican fringe has evolved from being politically shrewd proponents of radical policy changes to a gang of saboteurs who would rather stop government from functioning at all. In this sense, their historical precedents are not so much the Gingrich revolutionaries, or even their tea-party selves of a few years ago; the movement is more like the radical left of the sixties, had it occupied a position of power in Congress. And so the terms we traditionally use to scold bad Congresses—partisanship, obstruction, gridlock—don’t come close to describing this situation. The hard right’s extremism has bent back upon itself, leaving an inscrutable void of paranoia and formless rage and twisting the Republican Party into a band of anarchists.

And the worst is not behind us.

The rational way to view these events is that Republicans have marginalized themselves. But the hard-liners see it differently. In their minds, every bill that passes is a betrayal by their leaders. They know that letting Democrats carry bills through the House has been the leadership’s desperate recourse to avoid total chaos, and since chaos is their leverage, they are now working feverishly to seal off that escape route. This year, an increasing proportion of conservative media is given over to conservative activists’ extracting pledges from Republican leaders not to negotiate with Democrats.  . . . . this means no negotiation at all.

It’s not clear whether Republicans actually expect the president to succumb to their Bond-villain hostage scheme. But it is significant that Republicans are demanding even more from Obama than they demanded during previous debt-ceiling ransoms and will decry the inevitable failure to achieve it as yet another betrayal. 

In the actual world, the economy is recovering and the deficit, currently projected at half the level Obama inherited, is falling like a rock. Yet messianic Republican suicide threats in the face of an imagined debt crisis have not subsided at all. The swelling grievance within the party base may actually be giving the threats more fervor. The reign of the Republican House has not yet inflicted any deep or permanent disaster on the country, but it looks like it is just a matter of time.