Anarchists Of The House: How Radical Republicans Are A Threat To The World

[cali]

A few months ago, Eric Cantor was ready to bring his latest brainchild, the “Helping Sick Americans Now” bill, to the House floor. The move was pure Cantor—a smarmy, ultrapartisan ploy. The bill proposed to eliminate funds the Obama administration needs to set up and run the health-care exchanges that are the central mechanism in the health-care law, but then Cantor’s bill would use those funds to help a handful of sick people get health insurance. There was no chance this, or anything like it, would be signed into law, as Obama obviously would not agree to tear down a program to insure millions of Americans in return for insuring a tiny fraction of that number. It was a message vote whose purpose was “embarrassing Obamacare,” as one conservative activist gloated, by forcing Obama to deny immediate aide for the uninsured. As a soulless exercise in disingenuous spin, it was well conceived.

It failed, however, because a crucial faction of ultraconservative House Republicans threatened to vote against it. The trouble was that Cantor’s bill purported to “fix” Obamacare rather than eliminate it. “Why the hell do we want to fix it?” complained conservative pundit Erick Erickson. “We should want to repeal it.” Since they have already voted 37 times to repeal Obama­care, one might think that the House Republicans’ appraisal of the law’s general merits had been made sufficiently clear. But just the pretense of working to improve the law, even while actually crippling it, offended the right. In the face of unmoved conservative opposition, Cantor had to pull his pet bill from the floor. It wound up embarrassing the House Republicans, not Obama­care.

Spectacles like this have turned into a regular feature of life in the Republican House. 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.


And the worst is not behind us.



<big snip>

(this is a long piece)

http://nymag.com/news/features/republican-congress-2013-7/

[NutmegYankee]

1. Kick.

[Skidmore]

2. It's about time someone remembered and paid attention

to the snakepit of a Congress we have. Now if we could all get on the same page and bring some pressure to bear on the actual legislation put out by that body.

[cali]

3. there's no way to pressure these insane fuckwads

that I can imagine. There are a couple of good articles out now about them. This is one and then there's this one:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/07/30/jon-favreau-on-the-destructive-rise-of-the-no-government-conservatives.html

[DirkGently]

4. Same thing happens when Obama proposes

a Republican policy from a few years ago, which now is simply not radically anti-middle class enough.

Like, for example, Obamacare.

[kentuck]

5. Definitely a threat to America...

It is terrible that the American people cannot see what is being done by the so-called Republicans.

[onlyadream]

6. This is good news

Their inability to even get along with themselves will buy time for the ACA to go into full affect, and when that happens, Americans will see that this is a good thing and should not be repealed. Hopefully this will make people question their republican leadership and vote them out.