Some politicians just hate politics. They get into the game in order to disrupt it. They have such a visceral hatred of governance that, like suicide bombers, they’ve smuggled themselves into government in order to blow it up from within.
Much of the coverage of the multiple attempts to elect Kevin McCarthy as House speaker treated the uprising of the “radical wing” of the Freedom Caucus as a political tactic. The 20 Republicans who opposed McCarthy on more than a dozen votes extracted a series of important concessions before they relented to voting along party lines. In other words, these politicians were playing the time-honored political game of horse trading.
But there’s another way of looking at how these far-right politicians held Congress hostage to their demands.
Back in 2001, the anti-tax activist Grover Norquist mused that he and his cohort wanted to scale back government until it was small enough “to drown in a bathtub.” The struggle between McCarthy, himself a MAGA toady, and the likes of firebrands Lauren Boebert (R-CO) and Andy Biggs (R-AZ), was no mere political game. Rather, Americans were glued to their newsfeeds in the new year watching a new generation of self-hating politicians in their attempts to …read more
Source:: Institute for Policy Studies
