A quick glance at a list of the worst Republican House members is likely to send anyone into depression, but the sort of people that the conservative base most value and most want to keep in power is, ahem, nothing if not instructive.
Top o' the bottom, of course, are The Indicted Ones. Rep. Chris Collins was caught doing insider trading—"caught" as in we have actual press photos of one of the phone calls he made to do it, taken on the White House lawn. And California Rep. Duncan Hunter is under indictment, along with his wife, for brazenly swiping campaign money. They're both still running, and they both will be receiving widespread support from their Republican bases—all while under indictment for being crooked.
If anything, the Fox News-addled base is more likely to demand their candidates be allowed to cast House votes from their prison cells than dump them. The outcome of their races will be determined by how many non-insane, non-base voters show up to thwart the Republican base's shrugging endorsement of crookery.
California's pro-Russia contingent, Reps. Dana Rohrabacher and Devin Nunes, are both in some trouble back home. Devin Nunes has been the primary House saboteur of the investigation into Russian election hacking, to the point where Nunes' astonishing eagerness to get the thing buried in a shallow grave has become a national joke. Again, though, the Republican base does not care. At all. Even a little. They're going to vote for both of these transparently crooked Trump-fluffers in droves, and if there's to be any return to decency in this nation it won't be on their watch. It's left in the hands of everyone else in their districts to overcome that base via raw turnout.
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Nunes has been sweatily insistent in his efforts to discredit FBI investigators so that even if they do discover Russian election hackers had insider campaign help to do what they did, the Fox News base will condemn the FBI for finding it out rather than condemning the Americans who Did The Treason. Whether or not that happens rests to a large extent on the non-base voters of Nunes' California district. If they find Nunes' actions odious enough to drive to a polling place and vote, Nunes' efforts come to a quick end. If they still do not consider even this urgent enough to spend that hour of their day, his approach to burying the Russia investigation will remain the House Republican default, whether the House changes hands or not.
There's Rep. Jim Jordan. He's the guy who still stands credibly accused of ignoring charges of sexual molestation when he was a college wrestling coach. The accusers: Members of his team. Jordan is not just staying in office, and not just expected to win re-election, but remains a frontrunner to replace Paul Ryan as House Speaker—that's just how indifferent his fellow Republicans are to the charges against him. They don't care. If anything, it might boost him for the job; former House Speaker Dennis Hastert was eventually discovered to have molested multiple young boys in his days as high school wrestling coach, suggesting that there's something about child molesters and their enablers that the Republican Party finds particularly appealing for that job. If Republicans lose the House, however, Jordan’s dream will be at least temporarily put on hold.
That's completely unfair, sniffs the punditry! You can't tar the entire Republican Congress just because they absolutely refuse to hold one enabler of sexual abuse to account (after a history of doing the same) or make mean intonations about how this seems to keep coming up (even though it seems to keep coming up). On the contrary: refusing to hold one enabler of sexual abuse to account is exactly why, from Roy Moore to Jim Jordan, this keeps coming up. Refusing to hold Collins or Hunter or Nunes to account, ibid.
Then there's the overt racists, and there are so damn many these days. There is Iowa-based stain on the nation Rep. Steve King, who regularly promotes white supremacists and who jets off to Europe to meet with and support white nationalists abroad. He's joined in this distinction by Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar, who mirrors King's white nationalist promotion but adds his own layer of batshit crazy conspiracy-peddling. Matt Gaetz is now notorious for pushing a conspiracy theory suggesting that George Soros was somehow funding a Central American migrant caravan—a conspiracy that may have led to a pipe bomb being mailed to Soros, and which was conspicuously similar to the theory that an anti-Semitic domestic terrorist used to justify the mass murder of Jewish Americans in their synagogue.
All of these people continue to be supported by the Republican base. Every one of them. There is no act of corruption or violence-provoking conspiracy that will get you booted from the Republican club; if it results in conservative power it is Good; if it does not, it is Bad.
That is, or should be, deeply, deeply weird. But the result is that it falls on every other American to do the actual work of governing, and to do so over the objections of the racists and the rank partisans who consider laws themselves to be nothing more than a construct for punishing the not-them. Good God, the work it has taken, and will take, to pry even a small number of these nasty little twerps out of office. We can only hope we make a dent, but it is absolutely necessary that we do all we can.
