Wednesday, October 26, 2016

Maybe Crazy, Racist And Obstructionist Is The GOP's Best Option

The big thing today is right wingers doubling down on obstructionism and partisan witch hunts.  For example:

Ilya Shapiro: The Senate Should Refuse To Confirm All Of Hillary Clinton’s Judicial Nominees 
Jason Chaffetz, the Utah congressman wrapping up his first term atop the powerful House Oversight Committee, unendorsed Donald Trump weeks ago. That freed him up to prepare for something else: spending years, come January, probing the record of a President Hillary Clinton.
“It’s a target-rich environment,” the Republican said in an interview in Salt Lake City’s suburbs. “Even before we get to Day One, we’ve got two years’ worth of material already lined up. She has four years of history at the State Department, and it ain’t good.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/house-republicans-are-already-preparing-for-years-of-investigations-of-clinton/2016/10/26/e153a714-9ac3-11e6-9980-50913d68eacb_story.html
And the big thing for liberals is laughing about how stupid this tactic is because it kills them with moderates.

It's been pretty clear for years this mindless obstructionism is in the interest of many individual house members and of various winger pundits.  It' also been framed as a collective action problem, with individual politicians more interested in pandering to the base to avoid a primary defeat at the hands of a tea party, freedom caucus or trump type extremist, rather than help the party as a whole by moderating their rhetoric and policies.

However, maybe this continued extremist stance is actually the best course for the GOP as a whole.  I've spend a lot of time wondering how the party could pivot to appeal to moderates while maintaining it's core base coalition of racists, bigots, religious extremists and general idiots and never come up with a plausible scenario.  So perhaps doubling down on the crazy and pandering to the base is the best option Republicans have to maintain any semblance of political power for the longest time.  Sure, it may destroy them completely over the next 25 years or so, but fracturing their base by moderating might do that much more quickly.

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