Even as the Republican Party descends into chaos, revealing itself as incapable of selecting a leader, let alone governing, the rest of the country still has to deal with the consequences of a dysfunctional, largely incompetent group of fanatics in control of an entire branch of the U.S. Government. The House of Representatives is, for better or (in this case) for worse, tasked by the Constitution with maintaining the country's financial stability as a going concern. The way this is accomplished is to periodically raise the debt ceiling to ensure that the country's debts are guaranteed in the eyes of the rest of the world. If the House cannot or will not perform that function, the country literally risks economic collapse and depression.
The House of Representatives is now wholly in the control of persons who, for ideological reasons, will not perform that critical function. If that situation is not corrected, the consequences for the rest of us --all of us--in that event are likely to be profoundly distressing and even life-altering.
Greg Sargent, writing for the Washington Post, believes that the collapse of GOP leadership we witnessed this week may have at long last convinced the Beltway media that something is seriously, disastrously wrong with the Republican Party:
It has taken the spectacle of a full blown meltdown — complete with Republicans openly weeping inside the Capitol and GOP leaders openly admitting their party is sinking to “rock bottom” — to get Washington to admit that the Congressional GOP may be fundamentally, disastrously broken.
Karen Tumulty captures the current state of play with one pithy phrase: “Less than a year after a sweeping electoral triumph, Republicans are on the verge of ceasing to function as a national political party.” The New York Times adds: “they appear unable to govern themselves.”
Let’s hope people remember this diagnosis when the next debt ceiling crisis hits.
Sargent hopes this sudden new "awareness" will be translated in the way the media reports the looming showdown over the debt ceiling. His central point is that the American people are not served when an issue this critical to their lives is treated by the news media as a "lack of cooperation" or "failure to negotiate" between Republicans and Democrats. That is
not at all what is occurring and to report it this way fundamentally distorts the truth:
As we have been dragged through one debt ceiling and government shutdown crisis after another, it has been painfully obvious what is causing the impasse: A sizable bloc of House Republicans wants to use the threat of damage to the country as leverage to extract unilateral concessions from Democrats, no matter what harm is done in the process. That is their openly held position: they view this as justifiable, because the urgency of stopping the harm President Obama is doing to the country justifies such extraordinary measures. House GOP leaders have dragged us to the brink again and again, in hopes of placating the die-hards and making their demands magically disappear, only to throw up their hands, admit they can’t be placated, and end the crisis with the help of Democrats.
In a normal negotiation between opposing sides, the "negotiators" adopt the respective positions of their constituents. That is not the relationship between the controlling caucus of the Republican House and its leaders. Rather (now former) Speaker John Boehner acknowledged the critical necessity of raising the debt ceiling but took the position that drastic concessions in programs such as Medicare and Social Security and slashing budget cuts in other programs would be necessary in order to bring the rest of his caucus along. That is not a "negotiation." It is a demand that Democrats capitulate to extortion as the price for Republicans performing their job function, and the news media tasked with informing the American people should report it for what it is:
[T]he basic problem has long been that observers refuse to accurately describe what [The Republicans] actual position is in demanding these terms. The resulting standoffs have for years been described as a failure to compromise, as if these have been conventional negotiations, in which each side is asking for what it wants, and the two fail to meet in the middle.
But that isn’t what has been happening. GOP leaders have publicly said they, too, want the debt limit raised (as Democrats do) to avoid default — and then have gone along with the base’s demand for unilateral concessions from Democrats in exchange for what they themselves say they want in order to avoid hurting the country. That isn’t a conventional negotiation. Rather, it’s GOP leaders playing along with the charade that the opposition is supposed to give Republicans what they want in exchange for bringing about the outcome they themselves know must happen.
This breakdown of the Republican Party is not a flaw of our government or even of government in general. Our government is designed with the assumption that the actual living, breathing people who work in it will operate in good faith to ensure the public good. It also assumes that the American people who elect people to work in their government will choose individuals based on their actual merits and talents rather than for some other reason. It did not assume that corporations would collaborate to create a cadre of ideological fanatics, massively funding them through opaque SuperPACS and think-tanks and churning out self-serving legislation through front organizations like ALEC. It did not anticipate complete corporate control of one branch of government, skewed by gerrymandering and sanctified by a corrupt Supreme Court.
But in the Republican House that is exactly what we have. The problem is that in gaining office in the first place the so-called "Tea Party" committed themselves to ideology so extreme that any accommodation is now seen as as a fatal weakness, one which will virtually guarantee a a primary challenge. As Sargent notes, Boehner himself acknowledged that the typical Tea Party House member survives solely by "whipping people into a frenzy" by promising things they "know are never going to happen." One of those promises is using the debt limit to extort concessions from the Democrats, and in particular, President Obama.
The corporate interests who manipulated voters' racial and social fears to put these abysmal people into office have lost control of their creation. The chaos in the House is just the most recent visible example of that. We can also see its consequences playing themselves out in the GOP Presidential contest, with each candidate trying to "out-extreme" the other, dumbing down the public discourse in an ever-increasing death spiral. Fortunately, none of the GOP's leading Presidential candidates wields any actual power. Unfortunately for the country that is not the case in the House. Sargent's point is that the American people have a right to know that what the Republicans are demanding is not "negotiation." They have a right to know who is responsible for bringing the country to the brink of an unparalleled economic disaster, that it is not caused by some "failure to cooperate" between the parties. And the media have a responsibility to tell them.