American Enterprise Institute resident scholar Norm Ornstein writes in The Atlantic about the forces that led to John "Mr. Tangerine Man" Boehner's ouster as Speaker:
... Since 1994, when Newt Gingrich led his party tribe from 40 years of wandering in the desert of the minority to the promised land of House majority, Republicans have become more stridently anti-government and anti-Washington. They have also, when in the majority, become less interested in trying to find policy solutions across party lines. Their desire to act like a parliamentary majority, maintaining rigid discipline and working only internally, became known as the “Hastert Rule” under Gingrich’s successor.
Perfect party discipline continued when Republicans, in the minority, faced Barack Obama in his first two years—unity that translated into reflexive opposition to everything Obama wanted to do. It was part of a broader strategy to delegitimize Obama and Democrats; to cultivate anger and unhappiness as Gingrich had done in 1994 in the midterm elections in 2010; and to seize back majority status, undo the Obama program, and cut government dramatically.Ornstein goes on to describe the predictable frustrations of this bunch of radical ideologues, and the prospects for Boehner's successor (spoiler alert: bad to worse). Continuing to be spurred on by a base that gets its civics lessons from numbnut AM hate radio and Fox "News," and protected in safely gerrymandered seats, the nihilist Republicans' fever isn't likely to break in the foreseeable future. Good read, though.
BONUS: Paul Krugman on a party gone mad.
