After a string of revelations in 2006 about the Bush Administration's violations of our civil liberties John Cole asked an off-hand, semi-rhetorical question:
At what point will these people have all the damned tools they need to fight terrorism?
It was never enough, and they needed a boogeyman. There was always some sort of impediment standing between republicans and victory in the war on terror. The longer this went on the more fundamental those impediments turned out to be to the nation's identity until eventually we started hearing rumblings like "the constitution is not a suicide pact". Once they started arguing they were doing everything the law would allow they had pretty much reached their boogeymen quota, so the law itself became the problem. Apparently the Bill of Rights was the one thing separating us from finding Osama. Who knew?
They didn't just limit this mentality to the war on terror however; they applied it to the entire realm of government, and it became their downfall. They ran out of boogeymen. They entered Washington on a platform of railing about Washington's ills from the outside and, the Florida 2000 fiasco aside, Washington was pretty evenly divided back then. But a funny thing happened after 9/11: the republicans were given complete control of Washington by Congress, the media, and far too many of the voters. They went from railing against Washington to being Washington and thus drained their pool of potential boogeymen almost instantly.
They had spent 30 years working on getting complete control of Washington. Surely now was the time to enact the conservative agenda they'd been working so hard to achieve? But no, and when asked why they jumped to the only boogeyman they had left: the law itself. Whereas failures in the war on terror and in Iraq were the fault of FISA and the New York Times, failure in governing in general was the fault of activist judges and the filibuster. Judges were threatened with retribution for standing in the way of the conservative agenda and the minority was threatened with the Nuclear option for daring to have a say in how their government runs. They were reduced to blackmail and extortion as means of governing.
There is literally no reason republicans can give the voters right now for sending them back to Washington that can't be met with:
"We just gave you complete control of country, and silenced dissenters with accusations of treason and you still couldn't pull it off. Hell, we even removed the law itself in some cases, you said it was such an impediment. We ceased being a Democracy for you and you couldn't even govern illegally. What else must we give up for you? You've already proven yourself unable to govern a nation of laws; how far from American ideals must we stray for you to finally be successful? At what point will you people have all the damned tools you need to be able to govern?"
I am not one for over-the-top sensationalism but the ramifications for this are huge. I can't think of anything - anything - that they didn't so completely foul up as to be unable to run on successfully for the next several elections. They wanted complete control of Washington and they got it, and all that came with it. Now they've got to live with the consequences. When the gods wish to punish us, the saying goes, they answer our prayers.