An ugly, but liberating, intolerance

The LA Times' Doyle McManus takes stock of the nation's gerrymandered bugHouse:

[The] Republican caucus [is] more conservative, more Southern, more rural and seemingly less inclined than ever to compromise with a Democratic president and a Democratic-run Senate....

There will be fewer Republicans in the House next year, but they look even less likely to bend than the current crop.

The impasse could reach intolerable proportions. Over the next two years there'll be budgets to be passed, debt ceilings to be raised, appropriations to be authorized and thousands of other rudimentary tasks of basic governance to be executed. Yet foremost in the minds of Republican House members will be plumbing whatever reckless depths are necessary to avoid being primaried by even wackier right-wing fanatics.

If we've learned anything about this "current crop" as well as the next it's that they're profoundly undemocratic, indifferent to empirical reality and monstrously smug. Neither President Obama's first popular election nor second means anything but a target to these pseudoconservative thugs, while an enlarged Democratic Senate and superior national turnout for House Democratic candidates mean even less. Because state legislatures' tortuously gerrymandered districts have entrenched these House GOPers, their constitutional right, or so they believe, to wrench political gain from self-induced crisis after self-induced crisis is as inalienable as it is compelled.    

It's not yet possible to sketch what the nation's final intolerance of the GOP will look like, but it's likely to be ugly. Very ugly.

Comments

[Robert Lipscomb]

Your post assumes a solidified GOP that is subservient to the so-called conservative Republicans. Neither part of that assumption is a certainty, but it might be true. The so-called establishment Republicans have two other alternatives. They can simply leave the party, or they can remain in the party but vote with Democrats when they see fit.

I remain hopeful for a GOP civil war.

[Susan Zoon]

So who will be the Moses to lead the Republican party away from the Norquist golden calf? What will the new commandments look like? Oh yeah... and how many plagues will we have to endure before they go?