From Day One of the 114th Congress, the House GOP has been an unruly hot mess yet the Beltway media seemed somehow stunned Thursday by the GOP meltdown that ensued after John Boehner announced his resignation and his presumptive successor, Kevin McCarthy, couldn't build enough consensus among the caucus to actually lead it.
"Shock! McCarthy drops Speaker bid," screamed a headline from The Hill, as GOP lawmakers cried in the cloakroom and reporters seemed dumbstruck to find that not a single House Republican had an answer for the question, "What's next?"
But the ineptitude of the GOP and their total inability to govern should have been obvious from a trifecta of failures right out of the gate for the GOP caucus, despite its historic majorities. It started with the 25 Republicans at the core of the House crazy caucus who defected on John Boehner's speakership vote. Then Boehner bowed to the crazies, agreeing to include provisions defunding President Obama's immigration orders in the bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security. (He was ultimately forced to rely on Democrats to keep his caucus from forcing another government shutdown.) Finally, GOP leadership had to pull an extreme anti-abortion bill from the floor after nearly two dozen slightly saner Republicans voiced concerns that the bill might alienate women and younger voters.
That all happened within the first three weeks of the session. Let's be clear: the GOP caucus nearly shut down the government so that it could deport undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as minors and then immediately prioritized a vote on an anti-abortion bill that would have exempted most rape victims from getting abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy. When's the last time you saw either one of those two things on a top five priority list for American voters?
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The GOP hasn't just gerrymandered its way out of the presidency, it's gerrymandered its way out of governance and the Beltway media has continually missed the story of just how extreme Republicans have become. Think about this, there's 435 seats in the House and some 30-40 GOP members of the secretive GOP "Freedom Caucus" (i.e. the crazy caucus) are demanding absolutism on their agenda. At best, that means lawmakers representing approximately nine percent of the population are demanding that lawmakers representing the other 90-plus percent of Americans bend to their will—on immigration, on abortion, on government funding priorities.
On this very day, the crazies are already sharpening their knives for GOP golden boy, Paul Ryan, whom many Republicans are begging to swoop in and save the caucus from itself. But not the crazies:
But from the Beltway media, what we've mainly seen reported is a series of false equivalencies about Democrats and Republicans being "polarized" and "unable to compromise" instead of calling the GOP what it is: A party that has tipped past the point of sanity, where compromise is an unutterable word and obstruction is waved around like a prized scalp.
Even good reporters fall into the false equivalency trap. Here's Dan Balz writing about 2016 presidential candidates courting their respective bases.
The gathering will highlight the quadrennial challenge confronting all those who seek their party’s presidential nomination: How far can candidates go in catering to the most conservative or liberal wing of their parties without compromising their chances of winning a general election?
The problem with that statement, is that the positions of Democratic base voters hew pretty closely to the majority opinion of the American public in most cases. So when Democratic candidates oppose cutting Social Security or banning abortion in cases of rape and incest, and they support funding Planned Parenthood, or fully funding the government, or raising the debt ceiling, or finding a way for undocumented immigrants to stay in the country legally, or raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans and closing loopholes, or even universal background checks on guns—those are majority-support positions.
Meanwhile, the Republican base—or in some cases, powerful donors—holds a minority view on nearly every one of those issues. Therefore, when GOP candidates court the base, they are taking themselves considerably further outside of the mainstream.
It's long past time for the media to start calling out the Republican Party for what it has become—the party of radical obstructionism. And if establishment Republicans don't like that moniker, than they should abandon the most extreme elements of the GOP coalition and work on rebuilding from the bottom up.