Liberal pundits have watched the Republican party’s ongoing move to the right over the past several years with a mixture of fascination and (mostly) disgust. In a Monday post, Talking Points Memo editor and publisher Josh Marshall noted another possible distasteful breakthrough for the Obama-era GOP: the “good chance” that a “fringers militia type,” Joni Ernst of Iowa, will win a seat in the U.S. Senate.
Marshall wrote that even though senators represent their own states, “we all have a national interest in the kind of people who [serve in] the Senate, whether they have extremist beliefs or are simply dangerous in a general sense.” He argued that Ernst’s endorsement of “allowing [local law enforcement] to arrest federal officials who are involved in implementing the Affordable Care Act...is thinking right off the Bundy Ranch and the militia compounds up in the inland Northwest -- preposterous in terms of US law and insane in general terms…We've had fringers militia types of this variety in the House before. But it's been a very long time since one has slipped into the Senate.”
Another lefty blogger, the Washington Monthly’s Ed Kilgore, discussed on Monday the annoyance he and other liberals have felt as the Tea Party-driven “conservative wrecking crew” has largely gotten away with its Obama-obstructing “irresponsibility” (emphasis added):
I think it’s safe to say that the single greatest source of frustration to progressives today is the relatively small price the Republican Party appears to be paying for the extremism that has gripped its ranks since (at least) 2009 (the second greatest source of frustration may be how Democrats have dealt with that phenomenon, but that’s a subject for another post). It seems that no matter what havoc the GOP has inflicted on the country before and during the administration of Barack Obama, the bulk of the blame will be assigned to the president and his party, rewarding the conservative wrecking crew for its irresponsibility.
