A Cure For The Common Tea Party?
The Article: The Cure For The Tea Party? by Steve Kornacki in Salon.
The Text: The “top two” primary system California debuted yesterday takes some getting used to, but it could be a helpful tool for combating the biggest single problem in Washington: Republican extremism.
In the Tea Party-era, the congressional GOP has pursued a legislative strategy that rejects any compromise and exploits every available legislative tool and loophole to obstruct the other party’s agenda and engage in partisan warfare. As Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann argue in their new book, “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks,” this conduct might be acceptable in a parliamentary system, but in Congress it inevitably leads to disaster – like last summer’s debt ceiling standoff, which led to the first-ever credit downgrade for the United States.
The GOP’s embrace of extremism is fueled by the far-right absolutists who make it to Congress by winning primaries in safely Republican districts (where there’s no general election penalty for extremism) and by the survival instincts of other Republican lawmakers, who choose to conceal their pragmatic urges for fear of becoming the right’s next primary victim. Those dynamics have only been reinforced by this year’s primary season, which has featured several high-profile upsets of Republican “establishment” politicians.
