One of the key factors pushing Republicans to extremes, according to Greenberg’s report, is the intensity of animosity toward Obama. This animosity among participants in all six focus groups is reflected in Figure 2, which represents a “word cloud” of focus group references to the president, with the size of each word in the cloud proportional to the frequency with which it was used.
Figure 3 represents a second word cloud generated by Greenberg’s data showing which words came up most often in all six focus groups:
Two days after Obama’s re-election, when Republicans lost eight seats but retained their House majority (232 to 200, with three vacancies), Boehner was asked by Diane Sawyer on ABC, “You have said next year that you would repeal the health care vote. That’s still your mission?” Boehner replied: “Well, I think the election changes that. It’s pretty clear that the president was re-elected, Obamacare is the law of the land.”
That same day, Michael O’Brien of NBC News suggested that
The speaker’s pronouncement, if nothing else, signifies a pivot away from Republicans’ efforts to showcase for conservatives their doggedness in looking to repeal Obamacare.
Nearly a year later, on Oct. 6, Boehner admitted that he had been forced to capitulate by constituent pressures on Republican members of the House.
The other states and their rank are: 10, Hawaii; 9, Idaho; 8, Colorado; 6, Maryland; 5, Maine; 4, District of Columbia; 3, Alabama; 2, Alaska; 1, Virginia.
A new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found that Americans, by 53 percent to 31 percent, blame the Republican Party for the shutdown more than they do President Obama — worse even than Republicans fared during the 1995-96 shutdown that also proved ruinous to their party.
The poll, confirming earlier results, found the Republican Party and the tea party had both reached all-time lows. Americans now favor a Democratic Congress to a Republican Congress by eight percentage points. And the percentage of Americans who think Obamacare is a good idea is up seven points from last month. Seventy percent say Republicans are putting politics ahead of the good of the country.
The small-but-vocal tea party had been seeking just such a confrontation since the 2010 election, and they opposed compromises by Republican leaders that postponed the showdown until now. Conservative groups that advocated for a standoff spoke openly about their motives. At a breakfast with reporters Wednesday, Michael Needham, chief executive of the conservative group Heritage Action, freely admitted that he was “pretty optimistic” that we will soon see a crackup of the old Republican order.
The lure of martyrdom has always been part of the tea party’s creed.
“It’s not that we’re stopping people from spending big money on politics,” Justice Antonin Scalia argued. “When you add all that up, I don’t think $3.5?million is a heck of a lot of money.”
Actually, Nino, $3.5 million is a lot of money. As Solicitor General Donald Verrilli tried to point out, that means a party can get everything it needs to run all congressional races around the country from just 450 people. “Less than 500 people can fund the whole shooting match,” Verrilli said, adding: “There is a very real risk both that the government will be run of, by and for those 500 people and that the public will perceive that the government is being run of, by and for those 500 people.”
By Wednesday, conservative powerhouses Heritage Foundation and Koch Industries made room for a new plan when both urged Republicans to approve a debt ceiling increase with no strings attached. In a striking change in tone, House GOP leadership have presented a clean six-week debt ceiling extension that does not include a plan to fund the government.
“[T]his direct assault on our democracy is entirely the Republicans’ handiwork. Never before has one party insisted that a law of the land be altered or repealed or it shuts the government and refuses to honor the nation’s full faith and credit. The assault is being led by an extremist faction of Republicans that hates the United States government. It is being fueled by Fox News and right-wing yell radio, exploiting the anger and economic insecurities of many Americans. And bankrolling it are a handful of billionaires, led by Charles and David Koch, who have made most of their fortune in hydrocarbons, and who will do whatever it takes to reduce the power of the federal government to tax and regulate.
“Obama and the Democrats cannot back down. We must stand up to this extremism and extortion.” — Robert Reich
Today (Tuesday, Oct. 1), my wife and I went to the Sandoval County Bureau of Elections office to change our voter registration affiliation from independent — our status since we first became eligible to vote more than a half-century ago — to Democrat.
We did so because the Republican Party has ceded all power to the most radical element within its ranks — a noisy, anarchic clique of political yahoos whose “my way or the highway” attitudes have reduced Congress to a state of impotency, as well as making considerable mischief in state and local governments. (Rio Rancho is a prime example of the latter.)
Hence, our new political affiliation. We are determined to be part of the effort to save the U.S. from feckless, irresponsible zealotry. Unless a viable alternative one day arises, we will maintain that affiliation, as we await the day when Republicans complete their party’s self-destruction.
It cannot come soon enough. It’s a sad end for a once-grand old party, but we see no hope for a turnabout.
Unbelievable. A small cabal has shut down the most powerful country in the world.
A handful of fanatics has forced a vote 44 times, spending about 100 million dollars to do so, to repeal a law that will save the lives of tens of thousands of Americans suffering from easily treated medical issues.
