The Gamble

The Congressional Republicans, clearly, have drunk the venomous Kool-Aid that has poured forth in an ever-increasing torrent from the likes of Limbaugh and Beck. [Q: why are the most listened-to voices on the radio not, somehow, part of the "mainstream media?"] They have accepted anger and denial as their governing philosophy. Having done so, they now must substitute symbol for substance, spectacle for plot (although "character," in the personae of some of the wing-nuttier new members of the House, looks promising as well).


Among the first items in the order of business:

• Read the Constitution on the House floor. The Constitution has become, for the Tea Party, what Mao's little Red Book was to the Cultural Revolution. It is Holy Writ, inerrant, universal, timeless. It's every word is sacrosanct. Well, okay, not every word: they skipped the part about slaves counting for 3/5 of an actual human being in determining population for purposes of Congressional apportionment. [It occurs to me to wonder: if a slave was the bastard child of his owner and an unfortunate slave-girl, would that child be counted as 1/2 x (1 + 3/5)?] Only the parts we like (or must pretend to like, such as the 13th Amendment) are holy.
• Pass "The Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act." And whatever we do, let's not record any votes on the specific provisions of the Law, which everyone likes.  We'll just repeal the whole thing. And the CBO's analysis that such repeal will add to the deficit? The CBO is wrong, because its conclusion is inconvenient. So we don't have to find the cuts we promised to find to match any and all increases in the deficit.

These are just two of the growing list of things the Republicans in the House will spend their time on. There are others, and they fall into two categories: Symbolic gestures, and reformulating their own campaign promises, including the Pledge to America, so that they can be excised from the public mind like gangrenous tissue.

The symbolic gestures won't hurt anyone. Sure, some of them will make some people look ridiculous; but that's in keeping with what has become the Republican style of late. No, the symbols are fine, and it's hard to avoid the suspicion that they are getting so much play just now, in part, out of a fervent hope that symbols will be enough.

And here is where the gamble comes in. Having cynically used the most extreme of the excesses of an ignorant, jingoistic, hopelessly confused minority as their rallying cry, the Republicans must now hope that they won't actually have to deliver. They'd like to; but they can't. They can't lower taxes and balance the budget. They can't cut  spending, win in Afghanistan, and bring back full employment. They cannot remove the regulations (whatever poor shades those might be) that are "killing jobs" and stifling entrepreneurship while helping the middle class return to prosperity. They can't turn back the clock.

Unfortunately, this is what they have promised to do. The risk is that those who voted them in will expect them actually to deliver. The gamble is that, as voters often do, these voters will forget what they asked for, and accept instead the clever naming of bills that will go nowhere, the subtle but persistent disrespect for, and de-legitimizing of, a president who won 53% of the popular vote, and the fulminating against socialism in the form of government regulation.

The gamble is the Republican hope that Republican voters don't really care about substance.