Oh how the flighty have fallen. Those once-rowdy House Republicans, backed by seething mobs of real Americans eager to battle the nation's socialist titans, have settled, it seems, on the safety of institutional inertia and group invisibility.
Today's their third cloistered day at a Maryland resort, where they're engaged in that most problematic of all intellectual exercises: mindless circumspection. What should they do, what should they do, whatever should they do in 2014? The answers are emerging. Duck, and nothing.
The most pressing issue is immigration reform. Damn, on this, they'd sure like to do something. And they would do something, they say, if it weren't for the difficulties imposed on their authoritarian personalities by a bicameral legislature and separate chief executive. "Members took turns expressing their distrust of President Obama and Senate Democrats as negotiating partners," reports the NY Times. This mentality in part reflects conservatives' belief that negotiations should be held only with those who agree with them entirely; mostly, though, it's an excuse to do nothing.
Want proof? Five paragraphs later in the Times story, there's this: On the matter of the debt ceiling, "House Republicans urged the president and the Senate"--the intolerable, distrusted ones--"to move first."
On Obamacare, House Republicans have been sworn to our salvation for five years now. Well, you can make that six, for once again they've decided to pass on proposing any alternative, since that, they fear, would only "open a line of Democratic attack that would deflect from what they see as the failings of the president’s health care law." Yet that passage's predicate deflects from Republicans' underlying concern: they simply lack an attackable alternative. Constructive legislation ain't their department. Fuck it.
And then there's tax reform, something else they demagogically hail but ponderously evade. "House leaders [are] worried about the political cost of taking on popular tax breaks." You do recall, I presume, when the stouthearted class of 2010 laughed in the face of political costs.
You know what? I liked them better when they were unhinged anarchists--and dying to prove it, double entendre intended.