How does one neuter, what was never there to be cut?
I think that, when later history is written, it will be remembered that the Rushpubliscum Party elevated two men to the top leadership positions of Congress who never should have been there.
“Junket John” Boehner is a hapless drunk, not particularly intelligent, and one of the most corrupt men to ever be elected to the House. He got the Speaker’s position entirely because of his umbilical cord to lobbyist dollars. He is despised, reviled, disrespected by most of his colleagues-but he holds on, because if you want campaign cash, he’s the go-to guy. Just make sure that one of his aides is nearby when you make your request, since he’s unable to remember what he might have done from one day to the next.
And, of course, in the Senate, there is “Mooch” McConnell. Never had an original idea in his life. Does whatever he’s told to do-either by the bagmen who own him, or increasingly, by the bullies of the Klanservative Klanbagging Kochsuckers. He’s not only no leader, he’s not worth much as a lawmaker, since any laws he endorses have to be written for him by his owners. He keeps his position by keeping Federal dollars flowing to Kentucky, a third-world place rendered just about irreparable by politicians like Mooch.
It is rumored, as we read in this story, that Mooch might be given the heave-ho by the Klanbaggers come the next Senate session. In reality, they can leave him right where he is, and simply badger him into doing whatever they want. After all, he is an idiot, and he has the spine of a jellyfish.
The possibility that Mitch McConnell might be ousted when Senate Republicans pick their leader after the November elections was raised by a Sunday New York Times story, which found several Tea Party-aligned GOP candidates refusing to commit to backing him. McConnell, though, still has plenty of allies and remains the prohibitive favorite to retain his post.
But there’s a more interesting question at work here than whether he can hang on: Why would he even want to?
The impetus for the Times piece was the landslide victory of Richard Mourdock over Richard Lugar in an Indiana Republican primary last week, which refocused attention on the rising influence of Tea Party-style conservatism in the upper chamber. Mourdock, if he’s elected, will join a bloc of Republican senators whose governing approach mirrors that of South Carolina’s Jim DeMint, the Tea Party’s de facto leader on Capitol Hill.
To promote unity within his ranks and to secure his grip on power, it’s important for McConnell to respond to his party’s evolution toward the DeMint/Tea Party style, something he’s been doing lately. The problem, though, is that this style severely constrains his ability to exercise the traditional prerogatives of a Senate leader and threatens to render him the upper chamber’s equivalent of John Boehner, who lives with the knowledge that any deal-making with the other side could spur an intraparty coup.
This reflects an important point about Tea Party Republicanism: It isn’t really about ideology; it’s about governing tactics.
After all, the battle for the Republican Party’s ideological soul was fought and settled decades ago. In the late 1970s, a movement somewhat similar to the Tea Party gave rise to a number of primary challenges to sitting GOP senators. The targeted incumbents, though, were genuine liberals – New Jersey’s Clifford Case, Ed Brooke of Massachusetts, and New York’s Jacob Javits. The Republican Party of that era was in the midst of a sweeping geographic and demographic evolution, one that established it as the home for white Southerners and newly mobilized evangelical Christians and left the old Rockefeller wing extinct. When Ronald Reagan triumphed in 1980, it certified the GOP as the conservative party it remains today.
The primary challenges of the current Tea Party era are not defined by similarly vast ideological gulfs. Lugar, for instance, was generally a party man in his Senate votes, racking up a fairly conservative record and voting against President Obama’s major domestic initiatives. But he did leave some room for independence and compromise, particularly in his specialty area of foreign policy. His opponent, Mourdock, was to Lugar’s right on some issues, but what really distinguished him is his belief that the Senate is a venue for partisan warfare.
“Bipartisanship,” Mourdock declared last week, “ought to consist of Democrats coming to the Republican point of view.”
Mooch is the opposite of Lyndon Johnson-he twists no arms. Rather, he twists himself into whatever shape the bullies want him in. His failure as a leader is partially responsible for the Klanbagger rise in the Senate, since a leader would have made it clear to the Klanbaggers that there were prices to be paid for constant intransigence. Mooch didn’t do that, because he’s incapable of doing that, and the Senate is broken as a result. It’s gotten so bad that even milquetoast wimp “Stepnfetchit” Harry Reid has had it with the filibuster rules as they now exist.
Replacing Mooch with a Klanbagger would be cosmetic at this point, since Mooch is a sockpuppet. For that reason, I think he’ll stay.
And because he’ll stay, along with his drunken buddy in the House, the Rushpubliscum Party will continue to devolve into a regional, Fascistic organization, doomed to less and less influence as the country browns and closes its Bibles.
