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John Dean speaks the truth, just as this Republican did, as you'll see below:
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Welcome to another edition of "Republicans Eating Their Own" courtesy of The Hill:
Freshman Republican Rep. Richard Hanna (N.Y.) compared the parties in Congress to sports teams only interested in “winning,” and this week credited Democrats in Congress with having “less anger” than Republicans toward the other side.
“If all people do is go down there and join a team, and the team is invested in winning and you have something that looks very similar to the shirts and the skins, there’s not a lot of value there,” he told The Syracuse Post-Standard editorial board on Monday, according to the paper. He called his Democratic friends “much more congenial” than Republican ones.
He then went on to warn that House Republicans are becoming “incapable of governing” by habitually deferring to “extremes.”
This is reminiscent of the book It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With The New Politics of Extremism and subsequent TV appearances by Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein:
Their principal conclusion is unequivocal: Today’s Republicans in Congress behave like a parliamentary party in a British-style parliament, a winner-take-all system. But a parliamentary party — “ideologically polarized, internally unified, vehemently oppositional” — doesn’t work in a “separation-of-powers system that makes it extremely difficult for majorities to work their will.” [...]
[I]t has become “an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition . . . all but declaring war on the government.”
John Boehner has been deferring for some time now, because he (and others) is more concerned about being booted out of office by those who favor tea party extremists than about the health and welfare of the American people. Politics matter more than we do. His job matters more than we do. Power and profits take precedence. So do scare tactics.
In this case, Hannah was referring to Michele Bachmann's McCarthyesque warnings and allegations about the Muslim Brotherhood who she claims are magically infiltrating and influencing the State Department, even though they can't seem to do the same to their own government.
“We render ourselves incapable of governing when all we do is take severe sides,” he said. “I have to say that I’m frustrated by how much we — I mean the Republican Party — are willing to give deferential treatment to our extremes in this moment in history.”
As John Dean said, poor Richard Hannah is sure to suffer the consequences for speaking the truth. Honesty may be the best policy, but it's not often the best politics. And that's a shame.
The post Freshman Republican: House GOP "angry... incapable of governing... defer to extremes"; Dems “much more congenial” appeared first on The Political Carnival.