Rep. Thomas Massie Typifies the Ugliness of Today's Republicans

GOP Rep. Thomas Massie - a monster of the GOP's creation.

Anyone following the $2.2 trillion coronavirus stimulus package knows that Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) opposed the legislation and forced members of the House to physically travel to Washington, D.C. for a roll call vote.  The action was typical of the far right in the GOP that seeks to do nothing but obstruct bipartisan action and to revel in every lunatic conspiracy theory about the mythical "deep state" that purportedly opposes Donald Trump and the GOP's reverse Robin Hood agenda.   The GOP has become unrecognizable from the the party in which I once was an activist and City Committee member - while moving I came across the "Patrick Henry" award I had received from Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore for my support of principled and responsible government - and in which I had been raised. The party's transformation was allowed by party leaders and, in my view, tracks directly to the decision to allow Christofascists to gain seats in city and county committees across America, forcing out sane moderates in the process.  A column in the  Washington Post looks at how the GOP made extremists like Massie main stream in the GOP.  Here are column excerpts:

Republicans were aghast that one of their own had committed such a monstrously selfish act.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), in purely symbolic opposition to the $2.2 trillion emergency coronavirus legislation, forced hundreds of his colleagues to risk their lives — literally — by flying back to Washington. So what if many of the lawmakers are elderly and at high risk?

To thwart Massie’s pointless protest, an attempt to force a roll-call vote instead of a simple voice vote, leaders had to summon 216 members to fill the chamber, eerily separated on the floor and in the gallery above to limit infection. This fruitless, immoral gesture by the 49-year-old legislator was in service of another: to thwart a nearly unanimous Congress from dispensing aid to the sick and suffering in the middle of a pandemic.

But if Republicans are disturbed by Massie, they might pause for self-reflection. Massie is the epitome of the anti-government culture they have nurtured and encouraged. He embodies the drain-the-swamp political philosophy they have embraced.

Unanimous consent doesn’t kill the Republic. Unanimity, or at least consensus, is what we need in Washington, and what we have lost. Massie and scores like him in the congressional GOP exist to break up consensus, to throw sand in the gears, to hobble government. Maybe Massie’s antics in this moment of national crisis will help Republicans remember that the government they’ve been demonizing is the only thing they have to save a collapsing national economy and stop a deadly disease.

Massie, a believer in the “deep state” conspiracy, is a product of the tea party, a protege of Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and a collaborator with outgoing Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), who is becoming Trump’s chief of staff, when they tried to oust then-Speaker John Boehner. “I’m ready to be unpopular,” Massie said after his 2012 election, and he has opposed even anti-lynching and human rights legislation — and celebrated when he uses “the process” so that “things die.”

He is emblematic of the newer Republicans who congressional scholars Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann say have turned the GOP into an “insurgent outlier," rewarding bomb-throwers and making compromise with Democrats all but impossible.

Massie, he said, “is a monster created by their deliberate attempt to get people to have contempt for government and institutions that are part of government.” That contempt gave rise to Trump, but it also remade the Republican caucus in Congress.

Massie boasts that Trump named him a co-chair of his reelection campaign in Kentucky, and Trump has retweeted Massie and said that Massie is “doing a great job” and is “so good.”

No longer. Some on both sides complained about flaws in the legislation during Friday’s debate. And there’s much in the bill to dislike; particularly outrageous is the decision to give the District of Columbia only about $500 million, while less populous and less affected states each get $1.2 billion. But the alternative to the hard-fought compromise — doing nothing — was unthinkable. Massie’s protest served only to turn the House chamber into a petri dish.

Republicans may be spared the question of what to do with Massie, who has a serious primary challenger. But what about all the other Massies in their ranks?

With luck, Massie’s ugly spectacle, and the exploding public health and economic crises, will cause Republicans to see the limits of their corrosive message that government is the enemy.

Sadly, I doubt that Massie's stunt will cause any Republicans to rethink their toxic, obstructionist agenda.