"The problem with modern Republicans is not fanaticism in the few but cowardice in the many" (Garry Wills)

Why isn't this man crying?

"Republicans say, 'Remember one thing. We are standing up for an important principle. And as soon as we figure out what it is, you will be the first to know.' "

-- Bill Maher

"John Boehner holds the nation hostage because the Tea Party holds him hostage. The problem with modern Republicans is not fanaticism in the few but cowardice in the many, who let their fellows live in virtual secession from laws they disagree with."

-- Garry Wills (see below)

by Ken

By the time you read this, it's possible that somehow the deal agreed to by Senate Majority and Minority Leaders Harry Reid and "Miss Mitch" McConnell will somehow have slithered through the Republican-"controlled" House, thereby triumphantly punting the CR and debt-limit crises down the field all the way to . . . February! When we can pencil in a crisis do-over, to play out in the new Congress. [No, of course not! As a commenter pointed out, I've jumped the gun a year here.]

Or then again, maybe not.

Amid all the chatter about what House Speaker "Sunny John" Boehner should or shouldn't have done in the present crisis, and what he can and can't do, and whether his speakership can survive his party conference's current woes, it's well to remember that it's not as if he ever had any credentials for the job, or any larger ambitions for it, beyond his political lifetime of doggedly loyal service to his party and the moneyed interests it represents.

I had to laugh -- what are you going to do, laugh or cry? -- when I read the Washington Post's political Mr. Fix-It, Chris Cillizza, in a post called "How John Boehner couldn't win," purporting to challenge the conventional wisdom about Sunny John: which is to say that he "gambled and lost," that he "picked a strategy and he picked wrong." The challenge to the CW came in the form of an e-mail from an unidentified "Republican consultant loyal to Boehner," who wrote him:

Had Boehner not pursued his course of action the past two weeks, the conference would have fractured and the entire leadership would have faced some sort of challenge. Even some of the more rational members of the conference needed this confrontation over the debt and Obamacare. He did what he had to do to keep his conference intact.

The only thing is, in the end our Chris doesn't buy it, arguing: "Boehner’s error was in realizing far too late that consensus [among House Republicans] was a pipe dream." He thinks Sunny John should have "force[d] people to pick sides way back when," to choose between being "either on the team or off the team," though he realizes that quite possibly "saying something like that would have meant that Boehner would never have become Speaker in the first place."

Well, I think it's hard to disagree that the idea of a "mission as speaker as, well, speaking for the entirety of the Republican conference" was an error. But it passes over what seems to me a more glaring error, maybe even "the" error -- the one expressed in the highlighted sentence.

It shows up in harshly spotlighted form in a post filed last night by the Post's Rosalind S. Helderman and Jackie Kucinich, "Boehner sees his control of House Republicans slip away." Therein, Helderman and Kucinich note that "as evening fell over the Capitol, it was increasingly clear who had control over the House GOP: no one." They go on (boldface emphasis added):

Boehner struggled to accommodate his most vocal and hard-line members, adjusting his plan to address their concerns only hours after laying it out in a morning meeting with his caucus.

But even after the rewrite, even after cajoling lawmakers in small groups -- attempting to convince them that passing a Republican plan in the House would give the party more power to win concessions from Democrats than if they allowed the Senate to take the lead -- there were still not enough votes to pass it.

Before the defeat, some of Boehner's friends, particularly former House members now in the Senate, fretted about the impact of another failure.

"Of all the damage to be done politically here, one of the greatest concerns I have is that, somehow, John Boehner gets compromised," said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who entered the House in 1995 and was involved in several coup attempts at the time against Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.). "You know, I was involved in taking one speaker down; I'd like to be involved in keeping this speaker, because, quite frankly, I think he deserves it."

I've let the quote run on to include the business about Lindsey Graham and Newt Gingrich mostly 'cause I think it's hilarious. By the time we're reduced to talking about whether Sunny John is more worthy of keeping his job than Newt was, with Lindsey Graham as arbiter, we've entered the realm of pure farce. No, what I really wanted to quote is that first sentence, and in particular the first part: "Boehner struggled to accommodate his most vocal and hard-line members, adjusting his plan to address their concerns . . . ."

Probably this hit me so forcefully because I was coming off a new New York Review of Books blogpost by Garry Wills, "Back Door Secession," in which Wills writes: "It is not much noticed that parts of the country act as if they had already seceded from the union."

They do not recognize laws and Supreme Court decisions, or constitutional guarantees of free speech. For instance seventeen states have violated the First Amendment by preventing or hindering the work of "navigators" -- organizations and businesses funded by the federal government to educate people on ways to follow the rules of the Affordable Care Act. Some groups routinely attempt to block health centers from advising women on the legal right to contraception. Eight state legislatures this year have passed voter restrictions that may violate the Fourteenth Amendment, and similar measures are pending in other states.

"The people behind these efforts," Wills argues, "are imitating what the Confederate States did even before they formally seceded in 1861. Already they ran a parallel government, in which the laws of the national government were blatantly disregarded."

Just as the Old South compelled the national party to shelter its extremism, today’s Tea Party leaders make Republicans toe their line. Most Republicans do not think laws invalid because the president is a foreign-born Muslim with a socialist agenda. But they do not renounce, or even criticize, their partners who think that. The rare Republican who dares criticize a Rush Limbaugh is quickly made to repent and apologize. John Boehner holds the nation hostage because the Tea Party holds him hostage. The problem with modern Republicans is not fanaticism in the few but cowardice in the many, who let their fellows live in virtual secession from laws they disagree with.

Republican leaders in Congress are too cowardly to say that the voting restrictions being enacted by Republican-controlled state legislatures are racially motivated. They accept the blatant lie that they are aimed only at non-existent "fraud." They will not crack the open code by which their partners claim to object to Obama because he is a "foreign-born Muslim" when they really mean "a black man." They will not admit that the many procedural laws adopted to prevent abortion are in violation of the law as defined by the Supreme Court. They go along with the pretence that all the new rules are "for women’s health." De facto acts of secession are given a pseudo-legal cover.

Thus we get people who say they do not want the government in control of women’s health under Obamacare -- just after they order doctors to give women vaginal probes the doctors do not consider medically necessary. Or that they do not want the government telling Americans what they should do about their health -- just before they prohibit "navigators" from even discussing choices about their health. The same people who oppose background checks for gun purchases now want background checks for anyone the government authorizes to explain the law to people. This is a gag rule to rank with antebellum bans on the discussion of slavery.

Wills argues that we already have two basic conditions that "resemble the pre-Civil War virtual secessionism: "the holding of a whole party hostage to its most extreme members," and "the disproportionate representation of the extreme faction" -- "thanks to carefully planned gerrymandering of districts by Republican state legislatures," an advantage that "will be set in stone if all the voter restriction laws now being advanced block voters who might upset the disproportion."

"The presiding spirit of this neo-secessionism," Wills says, "is a resistance to majority rule."

The Old South went from virtual to actual secession only when the addition of non-slave Western states threatened their disproportionate hold on the Congress and the Court (which had been Southern in makeup when ruling on Dred Scott). It is difficult to conjecture what will happen if the modern virtual seceders do not get their way. Their anti-government rhetoric is reaching new intensity. Some would clearly rather ruin than be ruled by a "foreign-born Muslim." What will the Republicans who are not fanatics, only cowards, do in that case?

Viewed from this angle, Sunny John's "error" set in when he "struggled to accommodate his most vocal and hard-line members." And "the Republicans who are not fanatics, only cowards," sat by and watched. I mean, it's not as if the non-crackpot members of Sunny John's caucus are reasonable or even necessarily sane people, except by comparison with the Total Loon Faction. So perhaps it's not so surprising that they can't or won't see the line that has been crossed.

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