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The NY Times has noticed Republican extremists in Congress - but they're "misguided outliers" [1]

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Date: 2023-09-24

Right-wing Republicans who represent a minority in their party and in Congress have succeeded in sowing mass dysfunction, spoiling for a shutdown, an impeachment and a House coup.

This news analysis by The NY Times Carl Hulse reporting from the Capitol is a rare look by the mainstream media at the nihilism raging in the House under Republican ‘control’ that doesn’t sugarcoat how radical these people are. (The link should pass through the paywall.)

…With a disruptive government shutdown just days away, Washington is in the grip of an ultraconservative minority that sees the federal government as a threat to the republic, a dangerous monolith to be broken apart with little regard for the consequences. They have styled themselves as a wrecking crew aimed at the nation’s institutions on a variety of fronts. They are eager to impeach the president and even oust their own speaker if he doesn’t accede to their every demand. They have refused to allow their own party to debate a Pentagon spending bill or approve routine military promotions — a striking posture given that unflinching support for the armed forces has long been a bedrock of Republican orthodoxy. Defying the G.O.P.’s longstanding reputation as the party of law and order, they have pledged to handcuff the F.B.I. and throttle the Justice Department. Members of the party of Ronald Reagan refused to meet with a wartime ally, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, this week when he visited the Capitol and want to eliminate assistance to his country, a democratic nation under siege from an autocratic aggressor. And they are unbowed by guardrails that in past decades forced consensus even in the most extreme of conflicts; this is the same bloc that balked at raising the debt ceiling in the spring to avert a federal debt default.

emphasis added

Bob Good with members of the Freedom Caucus. No that’s not a “Sieg heil” salute — at least not here, not yet…

Hulse traces this all to a group of 20 Republicans who are taking advantage of the narrow majority they have in the House to demand their views take priority. Representative Bob Good of Virginia is the poster boy for this score of scoundrels in the article, but truly there’s little to pick and choose between them.

And of course the Times has to both-sides this, noting that these conservatives “see themselves as courageously doing the people’s work” — at least that’s their story.

How do Democrats see them? “Democrats consider them dangerous, out-of-control radicals, and even some of their Republican colleagues regard them as misguided outliers determined to impose their views on their party and the nation.”



Right. People who are making everyone else dance to their tune are “outliers”.

For those keeping score at home, it would be convenient if Hulse would provide a tally of just who the Terrible Twenty are. Hulse waffles a bit by saying it varies from vote to vote, but he names a few:

Matt Gaetz of Florida

Ralph Norman of South Carolina

Bob Good of Virginia

Matt Rosendale of Montana

Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia

Dan Bishop of North Carolina

Lauren Boebert of Colorado

Andy Biggs of Arizona

Eli Crane of Arizona

That’s only 9 out of 20; it would be helpful if Hulse dared give us some idea of who the other 11 are. Tim Burchett, Republican of Tennessee could reasonably make the list with the statement Hulse quotes.

It’s probably not a coincidence that this article ran in the weekend news void — can’t draw too much attention to this, right?

Hulse is able to gather quotes from the House and Senate condemning the wrecking ball caucus, but no one on the Republican side will do anything beyond hand-wringing. Senator Lindsey Graham goes only so far as to denounce this as “populism gone awry.” Right wing populism is just a kinder gentler label for Fascism when push comes to shove.

The elephant in the room is (of course) criminal defendant Trump. None of the GOP coward caucus will repudiate him, and Trump sees wrecking the government as his ticket back to the White House and a get out of jail card. The wreckers have his blessing — as long as it doesn’t blow back on him.

The Republican REDMAP also has much to do with this. The wrecking ball caucus has many of its members coming from districts so heavily gerrymandered that getting through the primary is all they need. Their victory in the general election is a given. Primaries are where hard right voters dominate, so they keep driving candidates farther to the extreme right. It’s also why elected Republicans are unwilling to compromise or back down — because they know they will be primaried if they do. It’s not just at the national level either. The problem shows up everywhere they have ‘safe’ seats. (See Wisconsin.)

If you have a Republican majority in which 20 members are ‘misguided outliers’, but the rest of the majority does nothing to rein them in or repudiate them, ALL of them are effectively ‘misguided outliers’. Some may complain in private, but if they won’t dare vote against this extremist agenda, they’re enabling it.

What Hulse carefully fails to understand is that the wrecking crew are not outliers. They are the culmination of where the Republican Party has been heading for decades. (See David Corn - scroll down to the part about his book American Psychosis.) They are acting out Ronald Reagan’s own anti-government nihilism that said government is not the solution to our problems — government IS the problem.

They are the Fox News wing of the Republican Party. They are the people of right wing talk radio. They are the carefully nurtured tools of the 1%. They are the end stage of, as Charlie Pierce puts it, the prion disease that millions have fallen prey to.

They are beyond anyone’s reach. They are beyond logic and reason. They left democratic norms and customs far behind decades ago. They are beyond political compromise. They are beyond checks and balances, and they have drifted off into the void of a space far beyond the Constitution.

This is the party that is doing everything it can to lock down permanent control at every level where it has the power to do so. This is the party trying to bring about a national abortion ban. This is the party banning books. This is the party tearing down the wall between Church and State. This is the party of white nationalism. This is the party of tax cuts for the rich and safety net cuts for everyone else. This is the party that gave the Supreme Court a majority openly owned by the rich. This is the party that wants to impeach Biden the same way their spiritual forebears liked to throw lynching parties.

This is the party where Trump still has a lock on the nomination despite multiple criminal indictments, the party that nearly pulled off January 6, the party that hasn’t stopped trying to pull it off by other means.

It is a particular blind spot that Hulse and others in the mainstream media only seem able to see this in the context of handful of nihilists shutting down the government, and not the larger context of the entire party working to overturn democracy.

At least Hulse did not equate them to AOC or Bernie Sanders… Small progress.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/9/24/2195074/-The-NY-Times-has-noticed-Republican-extremists-in-Congress-but-they-re-misguided-outliers

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