Last week Ryan Lizza writing at the New Yorker took a close look at who's in the 80 member Suicide Caucus as he calls the block of Republican fanatics desperately trying to destroy health care reforms in the US.
WHERE THE G.O.P.'S SUICIDE CAUCUS LIVES
By Ryan Lizza
As the above map, detailing the geography of the suicide caucus, shows, half of these districts are concentrated in the South, and a quarter of them are in the Midwest, while there’s a smattering of thirteen in the rural West and four in rural Pennsylvania (outside the population centers of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh). Naturally, there are no members from New England, the megalopolis corridor from Washington to Boston, or along the Pacific coastline.
These eighty members represent just eighteen per cent of the House and just a third of the two hundred and thirty-three House Republicans. They were elected with fourteen and a half million of the hundred and eighteen million votes cast in House elections last November, or twelve per cent of the total. In all, they represent fifty-eight million constituents. That may sound like a lot, but it’s just eighteen per cent of the population.
While the most salient demographic fact about America is that it is becoming more diverse, Republican districts actually became less diverse in 2012. According to figures compiled by he Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman, a leading expert on House demographics who provided me with most of the raw data I’ve used here, the average House Republican district became two percentage points more white in 2012.
We have the spectacle of a block of fanatical House Republicans that representing only 12% of American voters and 18% of American citizens, that is capable (along with the craven connivance of John Boehner) to tie the US government up in knots, and make the American economy into their hostage. The rest of the world must be looking at the manor the US is now being governed with a mixture of pity and horror, as out dysfunctional government remains locked in the grip of paralysis caused by this Constipated Congress.