CSM - "Government shutdown: Why Boehner doesn't overrule tea party faction"

[TomCADem]

In short, thanks to redistricting and hate media, many House Republicans live in an alternate reality where shutting down the government is cheered by their constituents, default is not a bad thing, and the ACA is worse than slavery.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-and-democrats-united-by-shutdown-looking-for-gains-beyond-it/2013/10/12/143f1954-32be-11e3-89ae-16e186e117d8_story_2.html

To understand why House Speaker John Boehner has not just ended the government shutdown, now in its fourth day, by standing up to the tea party faction in his caucus, look no further than the highly skewed congressional districts those members represent.

The districts, and their representatives in Congress, are the product of one of the great Republican electoral successes of recent years, the midterm elections of 2010, when the tea party rose to prominence on a wave of antigovernment sentiment, especially opposition to President Obama’s signature health-care law.

Americans reelected President Obama in 2012 and trimmed Republican representation in both houses of Congress – an outcome that he and Democrats took as a national referendum on health-care reform. But the elections also solidified the hold of GOP conservatives on districts whose boundaries were redrawn by victorious Republicans after 2010.

Call it an alternate political universe. The new, bullet-proof GOP districts created voting blocs significantly at variance with the rest of the country, according to data released by David Wasserman, House editor of the Cook Political Report.

[Benton D Struckcheon]

1. Mine is a Tea Partier,

but he's hardly bulletproof. Won 55% in 2012. Swing 6% of the voters here because of the shutdown? Hard, but not impossible.