The Republican suicide ballad: The party that can’t govern, and the country that hates its guts

The Republican suicide ballad: The party that can’t govern, and the country that hates its guts

by Andrew O'Hehir at Salon

http://www.salon.com/2015/10/10/the_republican_suicide_ballad_the_party_that_cant_govern_and_the_country_that_hates_its_guts/

"SNIP............

It’s always time for this question in the cracked crucible of 21st-century American politics, and when considered in full it reaches beyond the arena of Machiavellian power struggle into the abstract theological realm favored by Church scholastics of the Middle Ages. How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Whatever the number is, it’s infinitely larger than the number of Republicans who want to pick up John Boehner’s poisoned gavel. How large are Heaven and Hell, measured in cubits and ells? Not large enough, it appears, to encompass the pride and arrogance of the House Freedom Caucus, the group of 40-odd far-right Jacobins who first sabotaged Boehner’s speakership and then torpedoed the candidacy of his chosen replacement, Kevin McCarthy.

In the great tradition of doomed revolutionaries, the Freedom Caucus prefers death, or at least political annihilation – which will be theirs one day, and sooner than they think – to the dishonor of compromise. It’s easy to make fun of the vainglory and self-importance embodied in the group’s name, but it strikes me as accurate enough. They have declared themselves free of all the responsibilities of government, free from the need to discuss or negotiate or pass any legislation that has the slightest chance of being enacted. They represent freedom in precisely the same sense that death represents freedom from being alive. They could just as well be called the Suicide Caucus – or the Satanic Caucus, in the grandiose spirit of Milton’s fallen angel, who fights on with no hope of victory: “To do ought good never will be our task,/ But ever to do ill our sole delight.”

I imagine that when we all come back to work on Monday we will find that Paul Ryan has been arm-twisted into filling the role, at least for the next 14 months. But you can’t really blame Ryan, who is devious and intelligent and would like to be president someday, for feeling reluctant to commit political hara-kiri in this fashion. Even before the Republican Party constructed an alternate universe around itself and blotted out political reality, the speaker’s gavel was a final destination, not a pathway to anything larger. As numerous historical articles have now informed us, the last (and only) former House Speaker to move on to the White House was James K. Polk in 1844, and that happened after he had left Congress and served a term as governor of Tennessee. In any event, the fiscal whiz kid of Janesville, Wisconsin, is no better than a Band-Aid applied to the GOP’s gaping wound.



............SNIP"