The Congressional GOP: The Face of Unreason and Hypocrisy

As a former Republican I continue to be dismayed by how low the GOP has sunk and how a party that once valued reason and logic has become a sectarian insane asylum.  Even once rational people within the party act as if they had undergone either a lobotomy or a "Stepford Wife" transformation - yes, Karen,I do mean you - that has them parroting the most idiotic catch phrases of the Tea Party.  Moreover, the party acts as if it suffers from a massive case of bi-polar disorder.  How else to explain the House GOP which wants to sue Barack Obama for use of executive orders yet now wants to throw the "border crisis" into Obama's lap to deal with via executive order.  A column in the Washington Post looks at this batshitery and hypocrisy.  Here are excerpts:

After conservatives on Thursday brought down House Speaker John Boehner’s bill to address the border crisis, the new House Republican leadership team issued a joint statement declaring that President Obama should fix the problem himself.

“There are numerous steps the president can and should be taking right now, without the need for congressional action,” the leadership quartet proclaimed, “to secure our borders and ensure these children are returned swiftly and safely to their countries.”

Just the day before, House Republicans had voted to sue Obama for using his executive authority. They called him lawless, a usurper, a monarch, a tyrant — all for postponing deadlines in the implementation of Obamacare. Now they were begging him to take executive action to compensate for their own inability to act — even though, in this case, accelerating the deportation of thousands of unaccompanied children coming from Central America would likely require Obama to ignore a 2008 law. 

This was not a momentary lapse but a wholesale upending of reason.

Apparently, if Obama is using his executive authority to advance a policy House Republicans support, it’s a meritorious exercise of presidential authority; if he uses that same authority to aid a policy they oppose, it’s time to write up articles of impeachment.

In another action this week, Republicans acknowledged, at least tacitly, that Obama has the executive authority to postpone deportations. The House majority drafted, and scheduled a vote on, legislation that would forbid the executive branch from anything that would “expand the number of aliens eligible for deferred action.”

But in proposing such legislation (which was pulled from the floor along with the border bill), Republicans implicitly acknowledged that Obama has such power now. Therefore, until both chambers of Congress can pass such a law by veto-proof margins, Obama retains the power. This is probably why House Republicans, just two weeks earlier, scoffed at the suggestion that they pass this sort of legislation when the idea came up before the Rules Committee.

If the GOP position sounds contradictory, that’s because it’s less about the Constitution than cleavages within the party.   . . . . . The planned lawsuit was a bone thrown to conservatives to quiet their impeachment talk. The legislation restricting Obama’s executive authority on immigration was a similar effort to buy off conservatives who had been encouraged to rebel by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.).

But the efforts to placate conservatives aren’t working. 

Until the Christofascists and Tea Party are driven from the GOP we can only expect more insanity and lots of hypocrisy.