Last November, after the elections, the House Republicans chose their committee chairmen for the 113th Congress. All nineteen of them were white men. This followed stunning events in the last Congress, like holding a hearing on the availability of contraceptives without inviting any female witnesses. As far as I know, there are no professed Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, agnostics, or atheists in the Republican House caucus, and Eric Cantor is the only Jew. There are no openly gay House Republicans. There is a stunning lack of diversity in background and belief systems, and the leadership is almost entirely male. Despite this, the House Republicans have broken out in factions. One reason that they have voted to repeal ObamaCare 37 times is that it helps keeps these factions from getting out of control. Whenever the natives get restless, Eric Cantor has another repeal vote to get everyone back on the same page for five minutes. These votes are the equivalent of a zookeeper’s tranquilizer gun.
The House keeps somewhat busy voting for things that will never in a million Sundays become law. Cantor has been moving bills that are intended to “frame” the party as policy-minded and family-friendly, but it’s nothing but a charade meant to feed some lower reptilian part of the electorate’s brain. You’re reading this; you must be a political junkie. Do you know what is in any of Cantor’s bills?
Of course not. Ninety-percent of what the House is doing is nothing more than a colossal waste of time. Even Fox News doesn’t cover it. No one but Cantor even cares about it. Speaker Boehner has totally checked out. Do you know how he plans to act if the Senate passes immigration reform? Does he?
It’s almost as if the House Republicans have had their central nervous system removed. There is no brain activity. Even the think tanks have stopped trying to be even remotely serious. The Heritage Foundation made Jim DeMint their director and promptly put a guy in charge of their immigration reform analysis who posted at racist websites and did his college thesis on how stupid Latinos are. Plus, their data was laughed out of town by Republicans. It’s gotten to the point that Democratic wonks are lamenting that they no longer have anyone honest to debate.
What the GOP is doing makes no sense. They behave as if they can get 100% of what their most radical and deluded members want even though they only technically control one half of Congress and there is a relatively popular and freshly-reelected Democrat in the White House. It doesn’t matter how many times the Speaker points those facts out, he has no ability to get those facts to sink in. They act like President Obama is more intransigent than President Clinton, but the Gingrich-led Congress actively worked to find areas where they could work with Clinton. When Boehner tried to do that, he almost lost his speakership. And Gingrich had a lot more leverage because Bob Dole and Trent Lott were in control of the Senate.
I believe the root problem here is that Republicans told lies for so long that they finally produced a generation of officeholders who actually confuse lies with the truth. They got high on their own supply. No wonder Bob Dole thinks they need to go to a collective rehab.
