As I wrote about a few days ago, Rand Paul told the National Review that (if elected) he intends to join a Tea Party caucus with Jim DeMint and Tom Coburn. He’s hopeful that Sharron Angle of Nevada and Mike Lee of Utah will be joining them to make up a little rump caucus for obstructing anything the federal government might hope to do. This prospect isn’t appalling to Democrats alone. Here’s what Trent Lott has to say about it.
Former Senate majority leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.), now a D.C. lobbyist, warned that a robust bloc of rabble-rousers spells further Senate dysfunction. “We don’t need a lot of Jim DeMint disciples,” Lott said in an interview. “As soon as they get here, we need to co-opt them.”
But Lott said he’s not expecting a tea-party sweep. “I still have faith in the visceral judgment of the American people,” he said.
I love that quote. It works for me on several levels. You have to love the optics. First you have a guy who lost his leadership post for celebrating Strom Thurmond’s 1948 segregationist run for president (after palling around with the Council of Conservative Citizens) telling us that Jim DeMint and his merry band of wingnuts are too extreme. Then you have Lott’s idea of co-opting them immediately upon their arrival in Washington DC. Finally, you have him dismissing their chances of winning. The former Republican Senate Majority Leader trusts that the American people will viscerally reject these nut-jobs.
You know what, though? I don’t trust the American people when it comes to who they elect. They have too much misinformation thrown in their eyes. And the Republican leadership may be wary of this new breed of politician, but they fed and watered them, and they will continue to do so.
Republicans such as Paul and Sharron Angle in Nevada may hold provocative views, but “they’re our nominees and I think we ought to get behind them 100 percent,” said Sen. John Cornyn (Tex.).
“The candidates are not ours to choose,” said Cornyn, chairman of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee. “They’re the choice of the primary voters in the states, and I think we should respect their choices.”
The bottom line is that you can’t promote extremism and hope to control it when it comes to power. That’s why it’s wrong for Mississippi politicians to go to CCC rallies and that’s why it’s wrong to play footsie with the Tea Party. The mainstream Republican Party has been atrociously bad for a long time, but the party that shut down the government and impeached Clinton morphed into the party that knew no fiscal discipline and couldn’t call torture by its true name. As bad as those versions of the party were, they were child’s play compared to what’s emerging out of the Republican base today. The party is getting Palinized and if we’re not good at combating them, the whole country is going to get Palinized. At least Trent Lott agrees with me that that won’t be good for anyone.
