Waterloo Jim DeMint is a man of principle. In fact, he's so principled, he wants to shut down government, completely. BusinessWeek:
[DeMint] tells Bloomberg Businessweek his goal for the Senate is "complete gridlock" and that he wants to stop programs that violate his anti-Big Government ideology. "What happens in the Senate is the Republicans sink to the lowest common denominator," he says, taking a quick break between TV appearances. "People want an alternative to some kind of watered-down Republican philosophy."
Two things. First, "complete gridlock" isn't going to solve a single problem that this country faces, a point which is so obvious I need not dwell on it.
Second, when DeMint accuses Senate Republicans of sinking "to the lowest common denominator," he should keep in mind that that since he was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2004, he's voted with the GOP ninety-eight percent of the time.* Which I guess means -- in his own words -- that he's sunk "to the lowest common denominator."
(*According to his
party unity scores of 96.6 and 98.9 for the 109th and 110th congresses, which measure the percentage of time that he voted with his caucus on votes where half the GOP voted one way and half the Democratic Party voted the other.)