House GOP Shows Its Fractiousness In the Minority

From the Washington Post courtesy of AlterNet:

House Republican leaders, who confidently predicted they would drive a wedge through the new Democratic majority, have found their own party splintering, with Republican lawmakers siding with Democrats in droves on the House's opening legislative blitz.

Freed from the pressures of being the majority and from the heavy hand of former leaders including retired representative Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), many back-bench Republicans are showing themselves to be more moderate than their conservative leadership and increasingly mindful of shifting voter sentiment. The closest vote last week -- Friday's push to require the federal government to negotiate lower drug prices for Medicare -- pulled 24 Republicans. The Democrats' homeland security bill attracted 68 Republicans, the minimum wage increase 82.

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As amusing as these GOP turncoats are, this report leads me to a couple of decidedly dark conclusions.

First, if these moderate Republicans now feel free to vote as they feel they should, it strongly suggests that what liberals have been saying for years is true: the country is simply not as conservative as Republican leaders and the mainstream media have insisted repeatedly. That's a good thing, but if that's the case, it seems pretty clear that it's fairly easy to create the perception that the nation tilts in a given political direction, which, for all practical purposes, is almost as beneficial to such illusion-makers as if it were actually true--I think it's a no-brainer that such a perception pushes politicians and corporate news organizations to behave as though the myth were reality, which only aids the people pushing the myth.

Second, what the fuck kind of people blow with the political winds? That is, it is frightening indeed that politicians, outside of hard nosed political compromise, without which no legislation would ever be passed, would ever vote for something in which they don't believe. Democrats are exactly the same as Republicans in this respect: they're far more into being reelected than into principle. In other words, I think it's safe to say that the vast majority of the political class is unprincipled.

But I guess we already knew that.

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