They've finally done it; they've driven Norm Ornstein mad

Go ahead, read it. But you'll likely feel compelled to read it again, and yet again, for Norman Ornstein's "Huntsman for speaker!" op-ed not only resists comprehension, it batters and bloodies it.

They've driven poor Ornstein mad, these dastardly Republicans--so mad, he's reduced to proposing a remedial "action" that is "out-of-the-box," as he puts it, which means he's surrendered all hope and originality to conventionally styled desperation.

The action? "The Constitution does not say that the speaker of the House has to be a member of the House," observes Ornstein, thus the House should "find someone from outside ... to transcend the differences and alter the dysfunctional dynamic we are all enduring."

Dysfunctional dynamic to AEI congressional scholars, perhaps. It's FUBAR to others.

But that's the thing. The speaker isn't the problem. The problem is a prodigiously dysfunctional House majority, from whose internal rot another squalid speakership shall arise.

I can just barely envision one possible but improbable escape: Boehner is reelected; he somehow scraps the Hastert Rule (which requires GOP unity on floor votes); and then he cobbles together a functional coalition of the House's two minorities--Democrats and that surviving breed of despairingly sane Republicans, before they vanish altogether. 

Comments

[japa21]

The only way the House can be enough close to functional is to scrap the unwritten Hastert rule. Boehner is now in a situation where he needs to determine which is more important to him, his "power" and title or his legacy.

Perhaps he should look to Roberts for guidance when deciding which way to go.

[Robert Lipscomb]

I have a similar take on congress and the senate in general. The politicians are not the problem. The problem is the people who elect them. The problem with the electorate is 30-plus years of propaganda.

First, I concede I have a biased perspective.

During the first half of my life, political opinion on issues were a continuim of opinions - both within parties and between parties. Since the Age of Gingrich, there has been a distinct break between "conservatives" and Democrats and now between "conservatives" and "establishment Republicans".

Further, that disconnected group whom we often call nihlists are not nihlists as much as meglomaniacs. How does any politician function in negotiations while representing meglomaniacs?

[Peter G]

Yes sir. You are correct. That too is my assessment and of course you must be right or I am a silly ass. Now the Obama administration must know this too. Which is why I think their strategy must be and can only be to drive the wedge between those megalomaniacal tea partiers and the slightly more rational establishment Republicans who might like to be re-elected. To this end one potential tool is that very megalomania so very evident in politicians. I do believe Mr Boehner might like to continue in his present occupation and if not him some other masochistic megalomaniac who will have exactly the same problem and the one identical solution.