House Republicans, Terrible Before the Midterms, Are Now Much Worse [View all]

[dajoki]

House Republicans, Terrible Before the Midterms, Are Now Much Worse
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/node/82137

<<snip>>

If you’re going to pick the year everything really began to go sideways for the Republican Party, 1964 will do nicely. That was the year Strom Thurmond and the other segregationist Southern Democrats became Republicans because of the Civil Rights Act. It was also the year Barry Goldwater, another ardent foe of the Civil Rights Act, became the Republican nominee for president. “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice!” he bellowed from the convention podium, and the crowd went wild.

Twelve years later, that same crowd met Ronald Reagan at yet another Republican convention, nominated him for president the next chance they got, and we were off to the races. Reagan’s toxic amalgam of Nixon-style campaign racism in the deep South, his embrace of far-right evangelical Christianity and his regulation-crushing trickle-down economic plans built the bridge that carried the Republican Party from Abraham Lincoln and Schuyler Colfax to Donald Trump and Kevin McCarthy.

The ball of angry authoritarian hate that is today’s Republican Party is on the verge of becoming even more desperately furious. Deprived of majority power, House Republicans will watch as their president is investigated by every major committee in the building simultaneously. The Freedom Caucus will become more vocal and disruptive, painting the party even further into an extremist corner that will make the 2020 presidential election truly one for the books.

<<snip>>

The rot at the core of the Republican Party reaches outward even as its influence continues to shrink, and soon enough that rot will become more visible than ever. Kevin McCarthy does not have enough political talent or power to control the worst instincts of the worst people in the House chamber, a fact that will become evident each time all the Republican presidential candidates are asked to comment on the latest brute nonsense foisted on the public by the Freedom Caucus.

<<snip>>