Darkness In Washington
Ryan Lizza’s excellent Daily Comment last week explained the lay of the American political landscape in the clearest possible terms, backed up by numbers: a faction of congressional Republicans, many, if not most, in the South, representing ideologically extreme, heavily white districts that were drawn by Republican-controlled state legislatures after the 2010 elections so as to keep those seats Republican in perpetuum, have their party in a chokehold—and with it, at the moment, the federal government. Eighty House members, Lizza wrote, barely a third of the Republican caucus, most of them new to Congress, forced Speaker John Boehner to reverse his public position and refuse to fund the government after September 30th unless Democrats agreed to gut the Affordable Care Act.
One question Lizza didn’t raise is why Boehner allowed himself to be pushed onto a course that’s so self-destructive—not just for the country but for his party—that a conservative pundit called the House rebels “the suicide caucus.”
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/georgepacker/2013/10/darkness-in-washington.html